Because I Belong, I Exist
You might have heard the Latin phrase “cogito ergo sum” in college classrooms in the West. It translates “I think, therefore I am.” But in most other parts of the world, you’d be inundated with the philosophy “cognatus ergo sum” - “Kinsman, therefore I am.” Translated more freely it would read, “Because I belong, I exist.”¹
Think about that for a moment. What makes me the most human is not that I think, but that I belong to something.
Animistic cultures believe all of life is a holistic cycle. The unborn become the living, the living become ancestor spirits and the ancestor spirits enter the womb and become the living again. People don’t simply die. They exit the land of the living to a new realm and then wait for their spirit to re-enter the physical world.
Some tribes believe that when young women cross over rocks in ponds, ancestor spirits jump into their wombs to be born again.
In some tribes, a child is not named until two or three years of age when he starts exhibiting personalities and character qualities that remind the parents of a previous ancestor.
When groups like this - who define themselves by the very fact that they belong - define sin as anything that harms relationships with the family, how do you teach the Bible’s message on forsaking father, brother, sister and mother? How do you talk about ancestors dead and in hell and never coming back? What about identity truths?
When I get to that point, God will do the revelation, but in the meantime, I’ll do my part to prepare diligently to be able to give answers for these earth-shattering questions. And I’ll pray that one day I can look a smiling, born-again local in the eyes and say, cognatus ergo sum, my brother. Cognatus ergo sum.
1Understanding Folk Religions by Paul Hiebert, Daniel Shaw and Tite Tienou (1999).