Christianity In Africa by Kwame Bediako

May 26, 2004

A Review by the Reverend Alan Morris

David Barrett wrote in 1970 that the phenomenal growth in numbers in conversions in Africa could mean that ‘African Christians might well tip the balance and transform Christianity permanently into a primarily non-Western religion’. (p.viii)

Andrew Walls suggested that ‘what happens with the African Churches in the next generation will determine the whole shape of church history for centuries to come’ what sort of theology is most characteristic of the Christianity of the twenty-first century may well depend on what has happened in the minds of African Christians in the interim’. (p. viii)

The book is presented in three parts. Part I treats some of the issues that this new role of Christianity would present in African life, and how Africa can establish its credentials. Part 2 deals with the idea of a ‘primal religion’ and how it may be that those who still have this are more fertile to hear the Gospel. The faith itself could need to be re-conceptualized in these terms. Part 3 deals with the challenges that post-missionary Africa may need to face if it continues as a leader of Christianity.

I: Even though Western dominance is on the wane, Christianity continues to have a profound effect in Africa. There is criticism of the attempt by some African theologians to integrate the pre-Christian primal cultural tradition into its religion. John Mbiti wrote that the ‘Christianizing’ of the pre-Christian tradition could also be seen as one of the most important achievements of African theology. (p. 4) The Africanizing of the Christian experience is concerned with how African Christianity can set about mending the torn fabric of African identity. They were originally perceived as inferior to Europeans when the missionary movement coincided with colonialism, and were thought of in economic terms. They were relegated to the bottom of the scale and were oppressed by Westerners for the purpose of slavery.
A West Indian-born Liberian citizen named Edward Blyden made it his own to champion the African cause, and claimed that the missionary effort to Europeanize Africans without reference to their race peculiarities resulted in a religion that was not permanent. He felt that the only way for Negroes to realize their own dignity was to keep them entirely separate from Western influence. In a study of African traditional customs, he sought to create awareness that the African had already a system in place which was valid and useful. This would include plural marriages, which virtually eliminated spinsterhood, and communalism and clan unity which minimized accumulation of wealth by the few. By 1866, Blyden wrote that the African needed Christianity, but without the distortions of it. They possessed distinct qualities which they could offer the world, such as a sense of openness to the spiritual realm and a capacity to suffer and to serve. This made them not unlike the ancient people of God, the Hebrews. He came to the unusual conclusion that it was Islam, not Christianity which held the greater promise because of its lack of racial prejudice, and that this would prepare them for the more authentic form of Christianity.
Osofo Okomfo Kwabena Damuah and his movement, Afrikania, began as an attempt to return to the African traditional religion. He was an ex-Catholic priest who among other things was a Consultant of Afro-American Affairs in the diocese of Pittsburgh before finally returning to Ghana in 1976. His main concern and also the dilemma facing African today was whether Christianity’s image in Africa is a de-Africanizing institution which leads to the adoption of an alien culture and a turning away from African roots. (p. 26) He proposed a ‘new synthesis’ which would be a reconstruction of the traditional religion which would be within the divine purpose for Africa and for the world. In his Afrikania Handbook, Damuah would be explicit:

All of us have to serve God, and the best way to do so is through our culture. God is satisfied with the widow’s mite and we do not need foreign exchange to fulfill this duty. The Afrikania religion has a lot to offer the world. We can’t neglect our heritage. This is our choice and a challenge. (p. 29)

Afrikania’s ideology taught that African should know themselves and work hard for the development of Africa, and seeks to be a universal religion. It seeks to become a traditional religion ‘come alive’, reformed and updated, to fulfill the dream of the new Africa. (p. 32) The challenge of Afrikania to the Christian churches in all of Africa, Bediako believes, is important and far-reaching. It asks the question to ask whether the massive Christianity today is instinctive religion or reflective faith. It is now believed that ‘much of the theological activity in Christian Africa today is being done as oral theology’, from the living experiences of Christians as people pray or read and discuss the Scriptures. (p. 33) Perhaps the most fundamental challenge of Afrikania to Christianity is the problem of identity. Have the Christian churches indigenized the Christian gospel when they have accepted traditional drums, dance and dress into their practice? Or are there other practices which need to be integrated into their practices to make them fully African? (Is church hierarchy necessary?)
Next, Bediako discusses the importance of the vernacular, with which people everywhere can hear in their own language the wonders of God. This must lie at the heart of all authentic religious encounters with the divine realm. It is through language that the Spirit of God speaks to convey divine communication, and he speaks to men and women in the vernacular. “All of us hear in our own languages the wonders of God”. (p. 60) Bediako believes that there is no better single explanation for the massive presence of Christianity on the African continent than the availability of the Scriptures in many African languages. This creates the likelihood that the hearers of the Word will make their own response to it and on their own terms. It is not others’ but their own questions which they would bring to the Bible, taking from it what they would consider to be its answers to their questions. This would also help explain the success of the African Independent Churches, or “spiritual churches”. These churches were seeking to be an African expression, and dealt with the real needs of the people, especially the role of spiritual agencies in human life. Christian Baeta saw these churches as having turned to God and away from idols, to serve a living and true God. (p. 63)
Baeta suggested that the spiritual churches brought the traditional world-view of their old religion into allegiance to the Christian faith by way of the vernacular Scriptures. Hearing the Scriptures in their own languages and desiring to find African answers to African questions produces a much deeper and longer lasting faith. The missionary failure was to accept the Christian religion along with a western interpretation of reality. On the whole, it has been unable to relate to the spiritual realities of the traditional world-view. Bediako believes that if African theologians will make greater use of the Scripture in the vernacular, their interests and goals will be shaped and controlled by the genuine needs of Christianity in African life. “African theology will therefore fulfill a crucial pastoral function: nurturing and equipping a people of God, who have heard in their own languages the wonders of God.” (p. 73) This comes at a time when the Western churches do not seem to have trust in the gospel anymore.
Part 2 of Christianity in Africa is concerned with the Christianity as a non-Western religion. In Harold Turner’s framework for understanding primal religions as authentically religious, he lists six features. (p. 93) First, a sense of kinship with nature, in which everything created has their own spiritual existence in the universe. Second, a deep sense that man is finite and sinful, and needs a power that is not his own. Thirdly, man is not alone in the universe, with a spiritual world of powers more powerful than himself. The fourth feature is the belief that man can enter into a relationship with the benevolent spirit world and share in its powers and blessings. The fifth feature which is an extension of the fourth, is an acute sense of the afterlife, and the sixth is the conviction that man lives in a sacramental universe where there is no sharp dichotomy between the physical and the spiritual. He drew a special relationship with the primal religions and Christianity, and concluded that it is the people of these religions who have made the greatest response to the Christian faith. This could have far-reaching significance for the understanding of the nature of the Christian faith itself.
Particularly intriguing is the ‘multiplicity’ of spirits in the African primal imagination. There are two distinct categories of spiritual reality, that of the divinities and that of the ancestors. Divinities are everywhere, and operate within themselves rather than having different attributes of God. They have been more or less replaced by their demon counter-parts, but the ancestors represent a more enduring problem. Even though the African sense of God has been monotheistic, the daily lives of the people reflect a spiritual realm in which there are many divinities which operate as ends in themselves. In this unified cosmic system, the physical acts as a sacrament for the spiritual world, and it is not separate from the realm of human existence. The transcendent God of the African is mainly concerned with his creation and with his people. The primal religious world-view is decidedly this-worldly, and the purpose of the universe is an abiding relationship between God and man. (p. 101) God has never left man and is never far removed from him.
John Mbiti is one of the major contributors to the understanding of primal religions, in which all things are in unity, God, spirits, man animals, and plants. Jesus became incarnate to retain this unity, as he became one of us and we became one in him. He believes that if the African understood the Gospel in these terms, he would not have to go far before walking on familiar ground. The revelation of God in Christ is not so much coming down from heaver, but a rending of the veil to reveal the whole universe. (p. 103) Modern theology in the West has pursued a course of separating the Gospel from human quests and questions. The primal imagination may help us restore the ancient unity of the spiritual and temporal things. This would call for a more radical conversion of the will and mind, a transformation of the mind so as not to be conformed to the things of this world.
As Africa moves toward a more indigenous Church, it needs to stop seeing Jesus Christ as an imported deity and come to see him as God’s Messiah to Africa, as their own personal Savior and Lord. Mbiti came to make a distinction between Christianity which is indigenous and culture-bound and the Gospel, which is eternal and does not change. He believed that an African theology could not be artificially created but had to evolve spontaneously as the Church teaches and lives her faith. The Gospel is genuinely at home in Africa, and God was not brought by the missionaries, but the missionaries were brought by God. The African converts assimilated the message on terms of their own religious background and understanding. The missionary needs to discover God in the new culture. With this approach, the Christian religion is rescued from a Western perspective. An indigenous church should be always translating the Gospel and continually reaching into the heart of the culture.
The view that all theology, wherever it is produced, is contextual and therefore provisional rather than universal, and that theology itself is always a struggle with culturally related question- is a contribution of the Two-Thirds World-African theology. (p. 129) All the expressions of contextual theology in the Two-Thirds World are essentially missionary theologies. This type of theology tries to answer the question of how theology can reach the people most deeply. Bediako call this Church the Third Church, or the religion of the poor. It is a new reality alongside what existed before, which realizes that world history did not begin in Europe, and gravitates towards the poorer peoples of the world. It recognizes that the Gospel is wholistic-physical as well as spiritual-corporate as well as individual.
The Gospel is good news to the poor. They can read the Bible in the midst of their poverty and discover the reality of the power of the Kingdom of God through faith in Jesus, who in order to save the world became poor. Those who share their outlook with the poor, and can share their resources with them will be blessed by their generosity and involvement in the struggle for justice to the poor. If the West is to be re-evangelized, then the rediscovery of the Gospel as “good news to the poor” will be paramount. Spirituality is not the practical conclusion of theology but the involvement with the poor and the oppressed. We can only know Jesus by doing what Jesus would do.
Bediako argues that the nature of church history should also be examined in light of the fact that there can be no one center form which Christianity radiates. The good news was made available to all people, and during the process of conversion all nations will turn towards Christ of everything that is there already. Therefore in terms of the Great Commission calling for the discipling of the nations, no Christian history anywhere ever ceases to be a missionary history. (p. 165) The whole of Christian history might be better read a mission history. As the centers of Christianity shift and the message is understood to be a universal message which every nation contributes, the whole church has greater opportunity to hear and share the good news in their own languages and cultures about the great things that God has done. “Christian history in the post-missionary era, therefore, brings Christians everywhere potentially into the experience of shared space for self-expression, the experience of community.” (p. 167) The exchange of gifts and resources then is a demonstration of the missionary proclamation of the Good News, one which can create a new people, one people, the people of God with no walls separating them and keeping them enemies. This coming together will be evidence of what God has been doing since the foundation of the world. (p. 169)
Part 3 centers on the making of Africa as a Christian continent. After a discussion of the well-known attitudes of the Western missionary movement in converting the savage and barbarous pagans of Africa, Bediako makes a case for the surprise ending of the movement which unleashed forces that would lead to a major Christian breakthrough on the continent. The Western missionaries did not see this because they did not expect it. Foundations for this breakthrough were laid by men such a Robert Moffat and Johannes Christaller, both who were from very humble backgrounds. By its early vernacular movement, the Africans had the means by which they could make their own responses to; the Christian message, in terms of their own needs. The independent churches in Africa were a result of the frustration over paternalism and control of the mission churches, but it became clear that the Christian gospel in Africa had in fact a liberating effect on the people, setting them free from fear and free from the powers of darkness. It was never conceived by the West that the heathen Africans would be among those who would make the most significant response to the Gospel message. It was not what the Western missionaries did particularly, but what the Africans did, and have done with the Gospel, and what will prove to be the most enduring element in the making of Christian Africa.
The question of ancestors in the African world-view is dealt with in the next chapter. Bediako believes that it is essential that there should be a Christian theology of ancestors. In their primal religions, there were many smaller gods, or divinities, which were non-human spirits. The belief in angels and demons replaced this practice without much difficulty. However, one African theologian commented that ‘to take the ancestors from an African is robbing him of his personality’. (p.216) The question arises whether or not the Africans worship their ancestors or venerate them. However, when Jesus entered the world, he had not been named previously. The Gospel enabled African people to utter the name of Jesus Christ. When he entered the realm of spirit-power, he became in African terms the Supreme Ancestor. The ancestors relate to Him as the living-dead, and remain essentially human like ourselves. They are therefore, not rivals since there is a clear distinction between natural ancestors and Christ the Ancestor. The major difference between their understanding of the dead in the Western mind and in the African mind is that they do not leave. They are re-established in the family and continue to have relevance in his society.
An area of Christian affirmation to which African ideas on ancestors could make a contribution is the doctrine of the Communion of Saints. This could satisfy the African’s desire to be linked with their dead ancestors. This could be interpreted in such a way that the knowledge of the grace of God in Jesus Christ was truly anticipated and prefigured in the quests and responses to the Transcendent in former times. A theology of ancestors therefore becomes the by-product of the continuity of God in African experience. “If the God of African pre-Christian tradition has turned out to be the God of the Christians, then it is to be expected that He has not left Himself without testimony in the past.” (p. 225) It is very important to show that in the African context God did speak to their forefathers through the prophets at many times. In missiological terms, the cross-cultural missionaries did not bring Christ into Africa, but since Christ was already present, He called in His messengers so that He might be made manifest. Local ancestors who prepared the way for the coming of the Gospel emerge as fellow witnesses in the Communion of Saints. This does not invalidate the Old Testament, but offers a story of people who had a similar journey in their past which was not perfect. Africans become heirs together with Israel, members together of one body. Thus the Scriptures become their story, illuminating their past, and they participate in the meaning of the scriptural events. Their ancestors were like the Biblical ancestors, who made choices that went into the shaping of their traditions until their histories were merged, in Christ, with the history of the people of God.
Bediako concludes his book with the place of Africa in a changing world. He makes the claim that Africa can become the laboratory for the world, especially in the field of Christian and religious scholarship, throwing new light on old issues.