"The Excluded Middle"

Between the scientific/rationalistic West and the 2/3 world, there is a great gulf. Anyone who has lived in a developing country has probably encountered it to some degree. I lived in such a developing Arab country for 8 years. Aside from their customs that were polite to them and offensive to me, and my customs that were polite to me and offensive to them, there was another culture gap: they were powerfully influenced by folk Islam.

Folk Islam is the practice of going to the tombs of long-departed Muslim saints and praying or making sacrifices in hopes of healing, getting a job or some other assistance. It also entails the curses against one's enemies, the evil eye that might despoil one of a prized possession and other - what we'd call - superstitions. Along with this are regional "saints" that are witnessed at times roaming around.

Science dismisses this as superstition and having no basis in reality. Anything that might have a real effect has a "rational" explanation. As a result, even Christian missionaries are rather quick to dismiss all of this as utter nonsense, though it's usually put more politely to the locals.

This is what Paul Hiebert, a Christian anthropologists, calls the "Excluded Middle," a middle world of spirits, demons and angels that 2/3 of the world's population claims to experience on a near daily basis. It is excluded from Christian missions because it is excluded from the Western scientific worldview.

Is there any reality to this? An acquaintance recounted to me that, when he was young, his aunt was paralyzed from the waist down and doctors couldn't help her. She went to a woman with special healing powers for help. They brought a sheep, slit its throat and the woman dove on the spurting blood and began to drink it. At that moment, he saw his aunt leap to her feet and begin dancing. She retained her healing for the rest of her life, but to do so she had to return every year on the anniversary of her healing to sacrifice a chicken. If she failed to do this, she would once again be paralyzed. What might the rational explanation be for this?

Apparently, this is not an uncommon occurrence, according to friends of our who live in Africa. There is not mechanical efficacy to this any more than there is to modern medicine, but there is enough that even many Christians living in these countries return to these pagan practices when Western science and technology fail them. My son, who spent some time in Africa said that witchcraft devastates local Christians through their involvement.

Some American friends of ours lived in a remote village. On several occasions, after they put their toddler to bed, he would wake up crying, claiming that a dog had been in his room. They later found out that the “saint” that supposedly roamed that region sometimes manifested himself as a dog. Perhaps that’s just a coincidence of the imaginations of an infant and those of the locals. Perhaps there is a spiritual reality that Westerners are blind to.

As Hiebert said, citing Leslie Newbigin, this poses a problem for modern missions in that "Western Christian missions have been one of the greatest secularizing forces in history." The problem is that we are not setting them free from their superstitions, but we escort them into our worldview where, in practice, God may as well be an "absentee landlord." This is the deistic worldview which Western Christianity is dangerously close to, if not deeply immersed in.

There is yet another problem that is even more subtle. In denying the "Excluded Middle," Western Christianity has given the okay, starting in the Middle Ages, to delve around in the occult in search of methods of manipulating our environment and gaining mastery over it. Since we have considered the occult to have no power or validity - it's not rational - we picked out of it whatever we pleased and continue to do so.

I claim that this has been a dangerous error that has led Western Christianity into a mindset of which Paul has this to say: "Having a form of godliness, but denying the power thereof: from such turn away." (2 Timothy 3:5) I believe Western science has been a major contributor to this, and it has neutered the Western Church and made Western missions a great secularizing force of history.

Rob