THEODOR AHRENS [*] 1. May/should grace interrupt reciprocity and retribution? Lorenzo Brutti in his fine study Waiting for God,, [1] sees fertility rites based on periodically performed human sacrifices, at core of traditional Oksapmin religion. [2] Such rites were meant to regenerate the ground, forest, garden, animals, plants, in a word, whole cosmos of Oksapmin territory. [3] Brutti's question of how Oksapmin people became Christians [4] may be largely, yet perhaps not fully answered with his suggestion that they adopted Christianity as a functional substitute for a pre-modem native millenarianism. That nativistic as Brutti calls it, and in so doing stretches word millenarianism perhaps a bit too far, was rooted in a local myth about primordial killing of a human victim, an act which subsequently set free a circle of exchange(s). [5] The Oksapmin people became Christians basically and mainly because they wanted hardware. [6] As a result, a Christian god took over Oksapmin universe whilst polytheistic background of traditional religion remained almost unaltered. [7] That makes sense and has been observed in other places. [8] In line with P. Lawrence [9] Brutti suggests that Oksapmin people and Christian missionaries could not fully understand each other for linguistic and cultural reasons. [10] The Seventh Day Adventists, who according to Brutti were influential as missionaries among Oksapmin, not only give biblical millenarianism, with its explicit phantasies of retribution and retaliation, a prominent place in their teaching; they also consider suffering and death of Jesus expiating for human sin an uncompleted event [11] and celebration of Lord's supper as a memory thereof. It might be that Oksapmin people and Adventist missionaries had as a common denominator not only some sort of commodity [12] and its sense of punishment and reward, but also a basic notion that for life to go on life must be given, and in return for killing of a human person a new generation may live. In other words, it may have been Adventist combination of retributive millennialism with a notion of eucharist as an ongoing sacrificial process, which provided two focal points for Oksapmin people as they attempted to make sense of Christianity in terms of their pagan religion. To phrase basic issue in somewhat more general terms: The Oksapmin worldview assumes that something like a cosmic balance in a cycle of crisis and socio-cosmic order is re-established time and again by means of killing of an innocent victim. Can Christianity be presented within that frame of reference, or would that amount to some sort of repaganization of Christianity? Perhaps it is that Christianity is making sense of system of retributive logic in its cosmic and anthropological applications, in a different way than that usually assumed. In other words, can and should Christianity be presented as (perhaps) confirming, enlarging and cultivating a traditional Melanesian, and in fact universal ideology of reciprocity, retribution and retaliation, or does grace interrupt or absorb retribution (or, to use another word, karma)? This as far as I can presently see, is basic issue confronting contextualization of Christianity in Melanesia. 2. Christian folk religion meets 19th-century Protestant soteriology In Pidgin Lotu Buk (hymnal) used in many congregations of Lutheran Church in Papua New Guinea, one can find numerous references to Jesus having died blong lusim sin b'long mi. [13] In many cases these songs are more or less literal translations from Anglo-Saxon revival songs of 18th and 19th century, when a sacrificial understanding of Christ's death had a central importance within Protestant soteriologies. …