Seeking Christian enculturation among Vietnamese Evangelicals

This thesis seeks enculturated traits which show potential for Christian enculturation in the larger Vietnamese culture through the voices of primary sources (through qualitative research) of Evangelical Christian Vietnamese and the voices of those adhering to indigenous ancestral worship practice. Schreiter’s contextual model, through cultural listening, attempts to create overt inculturation keys amenable to the Christian message, but such models have not been an aid to the problems surrounding ancestral veneration rites, which have existed in East Asia societies from antiquity, including Southern Vietnam. The approach in this research modifies his inculturation approach (which is forced to bring in foreign elements of acculturation) to a model of enculturation which seeks out extant traits within the culture by which to bridge to an historically mediated message of Jesus the Christ. To date, no research has been done among Vietnamese evangelicalism within anthropological disciplines (versus theological ones) in seeking answers to the conundrum of Evangelicalism and ancestral worship. A key ancestral worship ritual is examined through ethnographic description as embodied ritual among a representative sampling of Southern Vietnamese in the Mekong Delta regions. This model exposes evidence of enculturated dispositions of filial piety, that is, a filial habitus among non-Evangelicals and Vietnamese Evangelicals alike. This enculturated trait may be seen in the Evangelical ritual of the Lord’s Supper and aids in bridging the cultural gaps between Evangelical beliefs and indigenous pre-Christian practices. The filial habitus and the inculcated dispositions associated with it show potential for Christian Vietnamese communities to develop local theologies as a means of seeing Christian enculturation penetrate into the wider Vietnamese society.