Coconut Theology: Contextual Theology?

The above image is “Diaspora Cultures: This is Not a Coconut” (2012), by Saumolia Puapuaga. H/T to Jason Goroncy for the reference. It expresses well the commodification of a coconut, its reduction to its parts and encased in a can of efficient production.

Coconut Theology (the original text of which is cited in full below) was a development of Rev. Dr. Sione ʻAmanaki Havea of the Free Wesleyan Church of Tonga. A significant ecumenical leader through the Pacifik, Havea advocated for and pioneered indigenous leadership and associated forms of infrastructure necessary for theological work.

In shifting from a simple reception of “missionary theology,” Havea argued for

…a theology in its Pacificness, that speaks clearly in our quest for the revelation and redemption of God in his hiddenness…Before the gospel was foreign and western. Now it is relevant and meaningful. Before our Christ had blue eyes and spoke English or French. Now we see him brown-eyed; he speaks our language, and is one of us. Before it was wheat and grapes, bread and wine. But they are foreign to us. Today it is the coconut.
Sione ‘Amanaki Havea, “Remarks, 6th Assembly, World Council of Churches, Vancouver, 1983,” International Review of Mission 72 (1983): 578–80, here 579-80.

Coconut theology, in other words, is deliberately local, and is interested in history and culture as the means for localising theology.

Pacific Theology should not be either a duplication of or transfer from Western thinking, but should be one grown and nurtured in the local soil.
Sione ‘Amanaki Havea, “The Quest For a ‘Pacific’ Church,” The Pacific Journal of Theology, Series 2 6 (1991): 9–10, here 9.

Given this local interest, however, Coconut Theology is often identified as a “contextual theology.” But what is occurring when one labels a theology “contextual?” Sione ʻAmanaki Havea’s son, Jione Havea, makes the following observation:

Our church leaders responded with a host of contextual theologies and so Pacific theologians joined the ranks of leaders in contextual theology. But what they did was to put brown masks over white theologies, and so they were like coconuts: brown on the outside but white in the inside.
Jione Havea, “Kautaha in Island Hermeneutics, Governance and Leadership,” The Pacific Journal of Theology 47 (2012): 3–13, here 5.

One potential problem, in other words, lies in simply giving an imported structure a new coat of paint. Nothing of the substance has changed. It is simply that the exterior is marked by familiar cultural motifs. Such an observation corresponds to a wider set of concerns that Jione Havea has regarding the processes of contextualisation more generally. In an article which plays on a tension between “context-uality” and “con-textuality” (p. 42), he highlights how being “conned” is also part of the politics of reading and interpreting texts. He exams multiple cons, but one

…has to do with the way in which contextual theologies do not encourage us to deal with differences. When the drive is toward transporting and constructing meanings that are relevant in different locations, there is a tendency to omit the differentiating and excess stuff. In this regard, contextual theologies, in subtle ways, resurrect the drive to harmonize, at the expense of diversity and complexity. This should not be the case, because differences are also meaningful.
Jione Havea, “The Cons of Contextuality…Kontextuality,” in Contextual Theology for the Twenty-First Century, eds. Stephen B. Bevans, and Katalina Tahaafe-Williams (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock Pub, 2011), 38–52, here 47.

The processes of contextual theology, understood as the translating of given theological positions into different languages [texts], smooths out rough edges of context, the points of contest which might reshape the structure of the theology itself. It becomes less about the context, in other words, and more about maintaining the set forms of received theological positions.

Jione Havea in relation to “Coconut Theology,” and despite his own suspicions regarding potential brown facades covering white [textual] structures, points to a further issue of theological posture and end.

A lot of people have spoken of Coconut Theology as an indigenous or contextual theology of whatever. But i don’t think that was what he meant. He spoke of it as Coconut Theology, of course, but in his heart it was more of a practice. What was more important for him was that people can eat coconut if they don’t have bread and say, ‘This is the body of Christ’. That practical element was more important.
Jione Havea, and Matt Tomlinson, “The Divine Happens When the Circle Is Disbanded: A Conversation Between a Biblical Scholar and an Anthropologist,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 28, no. 1 (2022): 298–303, here 301-2. [Lower case usage is in the original]

There is something about the livingness of the community and the resources available within that location which, even as they look different, nonetheless constitute full membership in the body. In this regard, when Sione ʻAmanaki Havea develops “Coconut Theology,” he first sets it within a posture, a way of relating to one another that itself gives meaning to the theology. Coconut theology lives only with the posture of celebration.

Most of the recognized European theologians such as Bonhoeffer, Tillich, Barth and Brunner were victims of war, and their theological perspectives were based on crisis backgrounds. Compare their perspectives with ours in the Pacific: ours are deeply involved in celebrations.
Sione ʻAmanaki Havea, “Christianity in the Pacific Context,” in South Pacific Theology: Papers from the Consultation on Pacific Theology, Papa New Guinea, January 1986, ed. R. Boyd Johnson (Oxford: Regnum Books, 1987): 11–15, here 11.

This is a significant observation concerning the posture of 20th western theologies. Often when the idea of “crisis” theology is raised, it is identified with a particular form of theologising developed in Germany in the first half of the twentieth century. This approach was a reaction to a local “domestication” of the gospel, its reduction to a cultural form which proved not simply incapable of opposing/decrying/halting the First World War, but supported that cause. The response of “crisis” stressed the binary irruption of God over-against the human: God is God, and the human the human. The gospel is not something the Christian or the Christian community “possesses.” Rather, the human properly corresponds to the acting of God by witnessing to God’s prior act. Karl Barth put it this way:

…the activity of the community is related to the Gospel only in so far as it is no more than a crater formed by the explosion of a shell and seeks to be no more than a void in which the Gospel reveals itself.
Karl Barth, The Epistle to the Romans, 6th ed. (New York: Oxford, 1968), 35.

Two points should be made here. First, the question of the nearness/distance of God is identified foremost as a problem of cultural compromise. The stated form of opposition to this cultural problem is that the gospel establishes a void — an emptiness which witnesses to the explosive force of God’s acting. In other words, culture appears as a negative against which no clear positive account exists, no account of the embodied form of the gospel.

Second, the image of the “bomb” corresponds to the experience of war. Havea’s observation applies not to a particular formal theology; he is not interested in “crisis” theology as a bounded theological position–it applies to the experience of trauma and they way trauma set the conditions and ends of the theology itself. Major western theologies developed through the 20th century are theologies of trauma in method and conclusion.

The posture Havea enlists, the posture within which Coconut Theology operates, is that of celebration. In the same way that the experience of war is real and immediate, so celebration is about the sharing of local gifts, one of which is the coconut.

The below extended citation is from:

Sione ʻAmanaki Havea, “Christianity in the Pacific Context,” in South Pacific Theology: Papers from the Consultation on Pacific Theology, Papa New Guinea, January 1986, ed. R. Boyd Johnson (Oxford: Regnum Books, 1987): 11–15, here 14-15.

The coconut theology is another theology that can be identified in the Pacific. Everyone in the Pacific knows and literally lives on coconut. It is a tree of many uses, and a tree of life for Pacific islanders. If Jesus had grown up and lived in the Pacific, He could have added another identification of himself—I am the Coconut of Life.

The tree itself has many uses, as drink, food, housing, shelter, fuel, mats, etc. Once it bears fruit it continues to bear fruit every year. The fruit is round and it has a tendency to roll down to the lowest possible level. When the coconut rolls down it rolls down with its many lifegiving possibilities. It rolls down with food, drink, husks, shells, money and industry. Sometimes it falls into the ocean and it floats to another island to take food etc., to the people there. It floats as long as there is life in the coconut. It has a protective shell and a soft kernel. It has eyes, a mouth and features like those of a human head. When one drinks from it one draws nourishment by ‘kissing’ it. In the coconut there are so many Biblical concepts. The fullness of time (kairos) is there. No one can push back the time when it will ripen, nor make it ripen any earlier: only at the fullness of time will it fall.

Many people when they are late talk about Fijian time or Tongan time, but the best suggestion is to call it the Coconut time, for it does not matter whether one is early or late. The important thing is that the task is done and the mission fulfilled.

The full Christology can be seen in the coconut. The Incarnation and the Virgin Birth is in the coconut. The full potential of new life is in the coconut and when it is ready (fullness) the new life breaks through in sprouts and, rooted in the soil, it grows towards heaven. There are glimpses of death and resurrection: “a seed must die in order to live.” At the end, the authorities forced Christ to the earth’s womb, intending to keep Him there with the Roman seal (power), and to say the end had come. But instead of the end they had expected, the shell cracked and resurrection took place. A new full-grown coconut came to its own.

The concept of one Spirit could be illustrated by what we use in building houses. The whole structure is tied up with the sennet. We may use artistic designs, but the fact is that they are held together by only one string. The churches are held by only one string: the Holy Spirit.

When we think of the Eucharist, the coconut is more relevant than the bread and wine. In the Hebrew context, the pilgrims had to use the unleavened bread and wine, because they were simple to make and within their means to use. But, for the people of the Pacific, bread and wine are foreign and very expensive to import. The wheat and the grapes are two separate elements. The coconut has both the drink and the food from the same fruit, like the blood and flesh from the one and the same body of Christ.

I am convinced that if Christ had grown up and lived in the Pacific, He would have used the coconut to represent the body which was bruised and crushed, and the juice for the blood as elements of the Holy Eucharist.

Coconut Theology: Contextual Theology?

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