In Native and Christian: Indigenous Voices on Religious Identity in the United States and Canada, 68. New York and London: Routledge, 1996.

Steve Charleston (Choctaw) was consecrated as the sixth bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Alaska in 1991.  He has served as the national director of American Indian/Native Alaskan ministries for the Episcopal Church and as director of the Dakota Leadership Program, a training program for native church leaders in the Dioceses of North and South Dakota.  Most recently, Charleston was associate professor of systematic theology at Luther Northwestern Theological Seminary in St. Paul, Minnesota, and priest at Holy Trinity/St. Anskar Episcopal Church in Minneapolis.  This essay was originally published in Lift Every Voice (Harper and Row, 1990), an anthology of multicultural and liberationist methodologies in Christian theology.  Charleston begins with his own struggle as a native Christian in order to ground his theological proposals in personal experience.  Arguing that interpreting native religious traditions as an alternative Old Testament can be a useful strategy, both for affirming native Christian identity and for establishing the native Christian presence in the "theological supermarket," he develops this idea further by pointing out a number of theological and cultural parallels between native people and ancient Israel.  Charleston concludes by emphasizing—and modeling—the power of prophetic critique in religious discourse.

Steve Charleston, November 7, 2005:

I am amazed at how much time has passed since I wrote this article.  I am even more amazed at how many people have responded to what I had to say.

Over the last many years, I have received a steady flow of reactions (almost all positive) to my naming Native American tradition as an “old testament.”  Today, of course, if I were writing this article I would change the language to speak more of an “original covenant,”  but the idea is the same:  that the indigenous religious tradition of the Americas should be treated as a revelation from God and accorded the same respect as any other people’s spiritual heritage, including that of ancient Israel.

My only disappointment over these years has been my own inability to expand what I wrote in this article in any systematic way.  I believe the parallels to the Hebrew experience, the depth of the Native theology, and the implications for the growth of a Native Christian theology are all very worthy of more exploration.

My only problem is finding time to make that journey since I have left Alaska and am now the President and Dean of one of the historic Episcopal seminaries, Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, Massachusetts.  But I encourage any students who find this line of thought worthwhile (perhaps as it expresses a truth for other cultural communities) to develop the approach and help me continue the effort to base our theology in the ground of God’s universal revelation throughout human history and across human frontiers.

© 2008 by James Treat