African Pentecostalism and World Christianity. Группа авторов

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СКАЧАТЬ scholars from John Mbiti64 to Kwame Bediako65 and Laurenti Magesa66 that for Africans, the spirit-world is not a distant reality and that spirits can break into the material world of human beings at any time. This is normal and generally expected and accepted among Africans, especially those outside Christianity and Islam. Indeed, for most cultures in sub-Saharan Africa, the gap between the material and the spiritual worlds is so thin that it is considered non-existent and whatever of it exists, it is thoroughly permeable that humans and spirit interact constantly. Indeed, for precolonial Africans, it was impossible to tell a people’s religion apart from their culture as the two are generally inseparable. Precolonial Africans understood religion to be entirely about staying connected with the spirit-world (of ancestors and other spirits, including that of god, whatever that god was called in each of their tribal languages), and they shaped their culture accordingly. Until today, almost two hundred years after the arrival of the missionaries, and even after a majority of sub-Saharan populations are Christian, the belief in a spirit-world among Africans is unaffected. If anything, as Asamoah-Gyadu shows us, this belief in an active spirit-world has made Christianity catch fire in the continent. It is spirit-centered Christianity that has exploded in Africa in the past fifty years. I cannot count how many times I heard as a young African growing up in Malawi that “the spirit-world is more real than the physical world,” and that “human beings are essentially spirits that have (and live in) human bodies.” This attention to and awareness of the spiritual world shaped—and continues to shape—the ways in which Africans engaged with the missionaries and read the Bible.

The missionaries, on the other hand, were shaped in modernity in Europe and would find it difficult to understand and acknowledge the vibrancy of African religions and their openness to the spirit-world. Of course, by 1800, the Enlightenment had been shaping European culture for almost 200 years. In this time—and this would go on for another 200 years—science and reason were the drivers of European life. Religion slowly gave way to science, losing its place on the public sphere in the process. European Christianity would have to keep adapting itself to a culture that was constantly shifting towards secular humanism. Even its theology would eventually lose its ability to understand and engage the spiritual nature of Christianity as a religion. Bultmann, a German theologian of the twentieth century, would become famous for having demythologized the miracles of the New Testament.”67 Consequently, when the missionaries came to Africa, they arrived equipped with a theology that could not fathom African spirituality, let alone its religion. Many of their converts would find this new religion, the Christianity of the missionaries, devoid of the Spirit. Without an active spirit, the Christianity of the missionaries would leave its converts unprotected from contrary spirits (both of their abandoned deities and ancestors and those sent by their enemies to harm them), and this was a real danger that cost people their lives. Victor Hayward is correct in his diagnosis:

Christianity was too Western, too rationalistic and otherworldly, to gain the confidence of its adherents at their deepest levels of experience. This showed up most plainly in those times of personal crisis, such as barrenness and sickness, when many baptized believers, thinking that Jesus Christ did not have any interest, or worse, the power to improve their state of affairs, felt they had to visit the traditional healer.68

      Gottfried Oosterwal would be more direct in 1973:

For it is precisely the absence or lack of the power of God as a reality people can live by that has been a precipitating factor to these movements. In the African traditional religions, power is as the center of their thinking, life, and experience. And the spirit—of God, the gods, or the ancestors—was a tangible reality. How remote, how intellectual, how powerless seems to be the God and the Spirit the missionaries preach about, or the Westerners show in their lives. As one leader once expressed it in a conversation with the missionary, “You have held back the Spirit!”69

      One of my ancestors, a spirit medium and herbalist, refused for a long time to convert to the Christianity of the Western missionaries saying, “Your religion has no sense of mystery and wonder. Its spirit is too passive; one would think it does not exist at all. Therefore, your religion is no religion at all.” Towards the end of his life, after he converted, he told me, “A religion that fails to connect with the spirit is only a moral philosophy whose only good news is either moral legalism or moral liberalism.” When I asked him to explain why he converted, he said that when he discovered the Holy Spirit it reflected the spiritual world in its purest form and it was more powerful than anything he had worked with. It is to people like him that African independent churches were attractive. The Africans who initiated independent churches had converted from traditional religion to Christianity only to find that (1) Christianity—as it was presented by the missionaries—did not know how to meet to their spiritual needs and (2) being a Christian meant they had to let go of everything to do with African culture. As a result, it was generally impossible for a person to be a Christian and an African at the same time. Christianity and African culture were mutually exclusive. Naturally, many converts to Christianity sought ways to keep their newly found faith without losing their Africanness. To do this, they had to reinterpret the Bible to make space for the active spiritual world they knew from the African religion. It was a great delight when the African converts discovered the Spirit in the Bible.

As Africans came to understand the Bible more, the gap between African independent churches and the missionary-led churches would widen. Often, the missionaries did not appreciate African independent churches and incited the colonial governments to frustrate them. In the Congo, for instance, Baptist missionaries would incite the colonial government to imprison Simeon Kimbangu in 1921 for establishing an independent healing ministry that proved more popular than the mission churches.70 Even though both William Wade Harris and Garrick Sokari Braide were wildly successful in their evangelism efforts in West Africa, reaching many thousands more than the missionaries could and challenging Africans in ways that actually resonated with their cultural sensibilities (for instance, to burn their fetishes and trust the spiritual powers of Jesus Christ to protect them), they both were maltreated by the colonial government while the missionaries nodded and looked away.71

      African Independent Churches in the Colonial Era

African independent churches started as a protest form of Christianity, first against the spiritually deficient Christianity of the missionaries and later against colonialism, especially where colonialism worked hand-in-hand with the missionaries (which was almost everywhere). Generally speaking, European colonialism took full advantage of the presence of the missionaries in Africa.72 To many, it actually appeared like the sending of missionaries to Africa was intended to prepare the way for colonialism, especially as Europeans needed to replace the trade of kidnapping and enslaving Africans to sell them in the Americas which had run for more than four hundred years with a new one. Edward Andrews argues that even though many modern mission historians—Kenneth Latourette and Stephen Neill inclusive—have portrayed missionaries as “visible saints, exemplars of ideal piety in a sea of persistent savagery” wider Western scholarship often labels them as the religious arm of European colonialism.73 Indeed, some missionaries actually worked for their European governments, pacifying the people before the full wrath of colonialism was unleashed and keeping them subservient to their colonial masters, forcing upon them racist ideologies of white supremacy—that everything African was evil and inferior. David Silverman adds that “by the time the colonial era drew to a close in the last half of the twentieth century, missionaries became viewed as ‘ideological shock troops for colonial invasion whose zealotry blinded them,’ colonialism’s ‘agent, scribe and moral alibi.’”74 While, of course, there existed many missionaries who sought to undermine colonialism, it is unthinkable that the colonial agenda did not aid mission in any way. The mere presence of a European colonial governor with his agents and numerous white traders made the work of the missionary somewhat easier.

Surprisingly though, Christianity began to take root in Africa during the colonial era. Even the missionaries themselves did not expect Christianity to gain traction in Africa. At the World Missionary Conference in Edinburgh in 1910—at the peak of both the colonial scramble in Africa and of the Western missionary movement—they believed that Africa appeared to be on the verge of converting to Islam. They were wrong. Christianity СКАЧАТЬ