Te Pihopa o Aotearoa, Archbishop Don Tamihere has laid out his understanding of ‘First Light’ indigenous theology in a video message for Trinity Wall Street in New York. He explains how First Light theology acknowledges God's revelation through cultures and environments unknown to European missionaries, and names Jesus' identity as an indigenous man preaching against empire.

 The full transcript of Archbishop Don’s video message follows below.

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My name is Don Tamihere, I’m from Aotearoa New Zealand, born and raised on the East Coast of the North Island of New Zealand. I’m Māori, so part of the indigenous people of Aotearoa New Zealand, down here in the South Pacific and we are a Polynesian people.

And when you grow up in these nations in this ocean you are surrounded by your own knowledge, Christology, the cultural assets of your people that have been built up over the many centuries here. 

Indigenous theology though, generally speaking is what I call a “First Light Theology.”

It’s a theology that’s interested in first things, first places, first peoples, first encounters with the divine. An alternative to the idea that the first light of the Gospel and the first light of the Christ did not exist among us until Western missionaries came ot our shore.

We understand the beauty and the power and the potential of our own culture, of our own centuries-long journey in the Pacific. We also understood – my ancestors understood – very quickly the beauty and the power of the Gospel.

Christianity is not necessarily Western. 

Jesus was an indigenous child, born and raised by an indigenous family, raised in the lands of his ancestors, and raised in the culture of his ancestors.

I also understand the fact that Jesus never spoke a word of English, never set foot in a Christian church a single day of his life and never read a word of the New Testament.

We can separate the message of the Gospel – and we should – from the work of empire.

And so Christianity in the hands of the coloniser became a tool for brutal oppression.

And that’s inconsistent and irreconcilable. 

But, in the hands of the indigenous in our case, it becomes a great tool for liberation. 

Which really was the message of the Christ, who was brought up under a time of brutal Roman colonisation and so a lot of his messaging pushes back against that reality. 

It kind of gives us a path to be as subversive as the Christ towards those things, while building a space where we can learn to love one another, to see the light in each other, and to see God in each other.

Which is ultimately what it means to love in the way that Christ first loved us.

The Anglican Communion for us is a very important global relationship and global dialogue.

We want to be talking about things that are lifegiving, things that bring us together, things that enable us to deal with the challenges of the world and to flourish more fully into our own potential.

The idea of human flourishing is very important for us and that’s why we are interested in following the pathways that lead us to like-minded people.

So I want to rekindle a friendship with your rector with Philip Jackson whom I met some years ago. 

There’s a lot of shared interests there, things like leadership development, which particularly in relation to young people is very important to us. 

We’re interested in racial justice and that means equity and protection for us as well. 

And we’re interested in the way that you’re addressing homelessness in your city, which is also a work that we are deeply invested in as well. 

We understand brutal colonisation, we understand the imposition of empire, we understand the affect that it has. The way that it can marginalise you.

And at the heart of the Gospel message of Jesus is a push back against empire, by offering us a new reality in which love is the purpose.