African Pentecostalism and World Christianity. Группа авторов

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СКАЧАТЬ movement to the mediatization of religion, and from the deployment of religious symbols in sport to the relationship between witchcraft and Christianity, Asamoah-Gyadu has done a lot to advance knowledge on how African Pentecostalism has evolved in relation to world Christianity.

      This volume investigates and interrogates the critical junctures at which World Christianity invigorates and is invigorated by African Pentecostalism. In exploring the dense connections between World Christianity and African Pentecostalism, the volume pays particular attention to how their dynamics are responding to, are reenergized, and are reworked by the media and mediatization. The scholars who have been assembled to flesh out this argument constitute one of the most distinguished groups of experts on Pentecostalism ever assembled to investigate the intersection of World Christianity and African Pentecostalism.

      In trying to outline the critical juncture at which World Christianity and African Pentecostalism intersects, this volume becomes a distinct contribution to the discourse about the nature of these two Christian formations, or rather, one complex formation with multiple sides. The dynamics and practices of this complexity have done a lot to re-inscribe our understanding of the evolution of Christianity especially within the African context. In this particular context, multiplicity of historical circumstances (mediated by coloniality and postcoloniality) and sociocultural disarticulations have not only facilitated the penetration of Christianity as a religious system, but also the transformation of Christian practices into diverse forms and formations. How has World Christianity affected the condition of the African continent? How has African Pentecostalism mediated the theological assumptions of World Christianity? What are the specific African elements of Pentecostalism? The scholarship of Professor Johnson Kwabena Asamoah-Gyadu, the President Trinity Theological Seminary, Legon-Accra, Ghana helps us to tackle these questions, and many more.

      Asamoah-Gyadu and African Pentecostalism

      We have discerned three basic ways of interpreting African Pentecostalism in the course of our studies. More precisely, we can say that there are three regnant regimes of discourse. There are those (such as theologian Amos Yong and Frank Macchia) who interpret Pentecostalism at its strongest theological perspective. There are others (such as Ruth Marshall and Nimi Wariboko) who read it at its theoretically most accessible point. There is yet another group (including Matthews Ojo and Allan Anderson) which interprets it at its contextually most engaged corner. Professor Johnson Kwabena Asamoah-Gyadu institutes a fourth regime, which we are naming for the first time here as the “Legon” discourse (Legon is the capital city of Ghana, from where Asamoah-Gyadu operates). He does this by making a diagonal cut through the three other forms of discourse. He accomplishes his objective by adopting a wide-angled lens which sees African Pentecostalism more deeply, more perceptively, and more sympathetically at the dense intersection of the “theologically strongest” and the “contextually most keen” than any scholar today. He brings theology and context together in brilliant analyses and discussions that are theoretically inflected. In his works, theology, theory, and context interact dialogically to shed ample light on African Pentecostal situations.

His scholarship is a rich tapestry of sophisticated academic analyses and profound sensitivity to the Africanness of Pentecostalism, the aim of which is to uncover the unique contributions of sub-Saharan Africans to global Pentecostalism and World Christianity. In his work, African Pentecostals are neither the venerable saints that some scholars in the declining centers of Christianity in the northern hemisphere make them out to be, nor the contaminating, transgressive devotees excreted by African traditional religions into the pure body of Christ. African Pentecostalism is instead a bold development whose dynamism and creativity forge new paths and ideas in ways that are supremely relevant to Christianity today. African Pentecostals are relevant not only for Africa, but also for the world. He states that he has found them “very fascinating, serious, religiously innovative and very entrepreneurial in their approach to Christianity. I do not support everything that I have seen them do in the name of Christianity, However, I find their general argument that God has raised them to undertake a fresh assignment in mission very compelling.”14 In this same text, he consistently and insistently argues that African Pentecostals are claiming territories for Christ in tandem with “God’s Spirit of renewal that has been at work in them.”15

      In the quotation, above we see his scholarly temperament of “Yes-and-No” to the practices and ideas of African Pentecostals on display. In his writings there are no easy or cheap resolution of the contemporary tension between the distortions and achievements of Pentecostalism in Africa. He both affirms and criticizes, fully living into the tension and in this way, he forges his own stance.

The tension is clearly observable in his analysis of the prosperity gospel as it is instantiated in Sub-Saharan Africa. He writes that contemporary African Pentecostals “have developed a certain penchant and proclivity for things that reflect glory and power, which includes seeing material acquisitions as reflective of God’s favor almost to the total exclusion of any discussion of why people suffer.”16 When they do discuss suffering, he maintains, they attribute it to witchcraft.17 Yet he is also astute and careful enough to understand the contextual dynamics that have made this gospel or, indeed, Pentecostalism so successful in Africa. Pentecostalism, according to him, “affirms traditional worldviews of mystical causality and provides the appropriate Christian ritual contexts within which the fears and insecurities of ordinary people may be dealt with.”18

      All this is not saying that Asamoah-Gyadu is a dialectical theologian or philosopher. He does not proceed by arguing that the affirmative is always fissured by negation, and from which another positive is engendered. Though the “Yes and No” are included in all his analyses and discussions—the sense of the novelty of Pentecostalism conserving and sublating the traditional context contoured by African Traditional Religions—he goes beyond simple dialectical movement. The “Yes” and “No” are two distinct movements, one does not inevitably entail the other. The good accomplishments of African Pentecostalism are not stated to merely balance the negatives. They come from a careful and sympathetic understanding of what God’s Spirit is doing in Africa; they come from a sense of mission. In a sense the accomplishments are “subtractive”; they represent irruption of new meanings that names the void that exists in historic mission-church Christianity. Pentecostalism is an affirmative subtraction of Christianity in Africa from the path of irrelevance.

On the whole, Asamoah-Gyadu’s work has helped the academy to critically reflect on the role of Pentecostalism in the advancement of Christianity or in mission work. He defines Christian mission as knowing what God is doing and allowing God to engage you in it.19 In his scholarship, there is an underlying thread that runs through: the tracing, mapping, and analyzing the work of the Holy Spirit in Africa. He considers the purpose of his scholarship as that of recognizing what God’s Spirit is doing in the world and allowing God to engage him in the enterprise. Put differently, his scholarship is about recognizing God’s work in Africa and being interpellated by such divine work.20 In this sense, his scholarship is a work of mission and mission is his study.

In his fervent pursuit of recording the work of the Holy Spirit in the world or the body of Christ, Asamoah-Gyadu has developed a theological framework that has five dimensions. It focuses on the “promise, experience, fulfillment, impact and significance” of Africa’s encounter with the Spirit.21 The essays gathered in this volume (in various ways that are not only complementary but also innovative) shed ample light on these five dimensions of Africans’ encounter or engagement with the Holy Spirit, Creator-Redeemer.

      In this book eighteen scholars delineate the contours of his scholarship, highlighting how it deeply reflects his African context and how it celebrates the universal truths of Christianity as a religion, practice, and a thought system—and they join him to tell beautiful stories of what God is doing in Africa. In the pages ahead we will see how Asamoah-Gyadu’s work has become very influential in the global academy, how he has become one of the best interpreters of African Pentecostalism, and, indeed, one of the fiercest critics of its excesses.

      Chapter Outline

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