John Allen Chau was killed on North Sentinel Island.
Posted on 11/28/2018 11:27:12 AM PST by SeekAndFind
It's impossible to look at a photograph of John Allen Chau, the young American killed by tribespeople on North Sentinel Island, without sadness. He is in the full glow of youth, with decades of life ahead of him. His friends and family have paid tribute to his gifts and his character: 'He was a beloved son, brother, uncle and best friend to us. To others he was a Christian missionary, a wilderness EMT [Emergency Medical Technician], an international soccer coach, and a mountaineer', they wrote on Instagram.
John Allen Chau was killed on North Sentinel Island.
In a moving post, they ask for 'understanding and respect for him and us during this time'.
Their grief is palpable. But this tragedy raises questions that sadness cannot be allowed to silence.
North Sentinel Island is inhabited by a few – anything from few dozen to a few hundred – tribespeople who are among the most isolated in the world. Though rules appear to have been confusingly slackened quite recently, they are still out of bounds for tourists. The Indian government believes the best policy for the islanders is to allow them the isolation they clearly desire – they killed two fishermen in 2006 – and operates a 'hands off, eyes on' policy, patrolling the coast to deter anyone from landing. A key reason for this is the vulnerability of the tribespeople to modern diseases: their isolation means they lack the antibodies to protect them.
Initial reports of John Chau's death were contradictory, with some denying that he went to the island as a missionary. It now appears that he did. A release from the All Nations missions organisation in Kansas, US, describes him as 'one of its missionaries' who had 'studied, planned and trained rigorously since college to share the gospel with the North Sentinelese people'.
Its executive leader Mary Ho describes him as a 'gracious and sensitive ambassador of Jesus Christ who wanted others to know of God's great love for them' and says, 'We remember too, how throughout church history, the privilege of sharing the gospel has often involved great cost. We pray that John's sacrificial efforts will bear eternal fruit in due season.'
We also have his diary entries from before his death, in which he writes of his attempts to contact the islanders. A boy shot at him with an arrow that went through his Bible. He writes that he shouted out to them, 'My name is John. I love you and Jesus loves you... Here is some fish!'
He wrote to his parents: 'You guys might think I'm crazy in all this, but I think it's worth it to declare Jesus to these people.
'Please do not be angry at them or at God if I get killed. Rather, please live your lives in obedience to whatever he has called you to and I'll see you again when you pass through the veil.
'This is not a pointless thing. The eternal lives of this tribe is at hand and I can't wait to see them around the throne of God worshiping in their own language, as Revelations 7:9-10 states.'
One response, then, is to hail Chau as a martyr, as Ho appears to do in her statement. But those questions won't go away.
His landing on the island was illegal. Should his personal convictions allow him to override the rule of law?
Not only did he break the law himself – and there might certainly be cases where Christians would feel free do to that – but he implicated other people in his lawbreaking. Is that justifiable?
He was putting lives at risk – not just his own, but the North Sentinelese themselves, who lacked any immunity to any pathogens he may have been carrying. Suppose the price of his evangelism was the deaths of those he evangelised – would it really have been worth it?
He was going against their clearly expressed wishes and invading their territory. Why should he have thought they would welcome him, when others had been driven away or killed?
Who knew what he was doing, and to whom was he accountable?
How, when he didn't speak their language, was he going to witness effectively to them?
Now, there are answers to all of these questions, based on a particular theological point of view which it appears, from a clue in Chau's message to his parents, that he shared. He said: 'The eternal lives of this tribe is at hand' (sic). He appears to have meant that their eternal destiny was at stake. In other words, unless he preached the Gospel to them and they became believers, they would go to hell. With that in mind, all of the questions above are beside the point: all that matters is to save souls.
That's a view that is deeply ingrained in a particular strand of evangelicalism. It has driven superhuman evangelistic efforts and made many heroes of the faith. In his own eyes, in the terms of his theology and church culture, Chau was not behaving unreasonably. He was following, with considerable personal courage, the logic of his beliefs.
This is not the place to argue about whether this view is correct. It is right, though, to ask whether glorifying this kind of action is appropriate, even for those who share Chau's apparent beliefs.
Because even if one does believe that everyone who isn't a Christian is going to hell, that doesn't relieve a would-be missionary of the responsibility of acting ethically and wisely. We are not responsible for God's policies, but we are responsible for our own. If it turns out that this theology is correct, well, so be it – but in the meantime, we have to try the best we can to do the right thing. This doesn't mean breaking the law, trespassing on other people's lands and trying to bring them a 'gift' they do not understand and do not want. It does mean acknowledging that there are some things we can't do, and leaving the upshot to God.
There is a terrible mis-match between the world-view of a stone age tribal people and that of a 21st-century North American evangelical. The tragedy is that John Chau was evidently encouraged to believe that this didn't matter.
We should, as his family requested, respect him for his courage. But those questions still won't go away.
Regardless of his motivation, what he did was foolish and poorly planned. He paid a terrible price for his lack of common sense.
See that selfie he’s taking?
THAT is why people should suspect this guy’s motives.
He wanted to “preach the gospel” where nobody else was able.
Sad to see something like this coming from CT.
Was the loss of Jim Elliot’s life worth it? Nate Saint?
If their going to the Auca indians resulted in a deadly illness for the indians and yet the Indians souls were saved, would it have been worth it?
Serious question - which is more important to the Christian - the temporal or the eternal?
He was an idiot.
Everyone told him he would die if he went there.
He should have evangelized someplace safer, like Pakistan.
A total idiot. But he died what he loved doing, screaming in terror.
Very poor decision on his part and a clear violation of law.
With that being said, how could that tribe ever survive without smart phones and 4K HD flat screen TV's?
My only sadness for the situation is for the islanders having to kill an invader.
Even a lot of people who want to become missionaries are motivated by the flesh.
This is depicted pretty well by Charlotte Bronte in the character of St. John Rivers in her novel Jane Eyre.
ok,so this young man is not allowed to take a selfie without it speaking to his motives? he’s clearly not on the island taking that picture.
The Nagaland piece is highly germane to this conversation.
He is no fool who gives what he can never keep to gain what he can never lose.
Jim Elliot
“Sad to see this from CT”.
I agree. Twice the piece implied that maybe people who don’t know Jesus Christ might go to heaven anyway. There may be a tenuous thread of hope of that view in Romans 2; but we are told to carry the Gospel, and to obey God rather than man in these situations.
Be it far from me to impugn Chau from where I sit. I WOULD, however, commend the tactics and strategies used by Elliot, McCully, Saint, et al, in the Amazon, whereby they learned the language through an informant, played phrases of friendship via microphones as they hovered above in a little plane, and dangled gifts from the plane via a rope. I.e., they plowed some evangelistic ground before trying to make personal contact.
They still got killed; but the desired effect was achieved.
I do agree with an attempt to lay the ground work but apparently even the closest islands are unable to understand the north sentinalese islanders. he did understand the danger apparently. I’m a little taken back by the responses on here about him. i can understand the liberal rags attacking his motives.
RE: My only sadness for the situation is for the islanders having to kill an invader.
If this man is an invader, how are not the Europeans who came to America not invaders as well?
Vocab Malone mentioned this in his live-stream the other night. CT has really gone far afield of its original mission, although I suppose people who dislike Billy Graham will say it’s just doing what it was set up to do.
His sacrifice clarifies the anti-Christian convictions that have come to dominate our intellectual culture.
It is sad to see some of that here at FR.
I appreciate his sacrifice and reject the murder as some socially altruistic compressible act.
Murdering the innocent is what unites humanity. Jesus shattered that reality and I am grateful for that every day.
“The natives’ lethal hostility to outsiders is widely known. This guy must have had a martyr complex to go there as he did.”
You could say the same for Korea, Japan, etc.
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