Ask a Theologian

Fifty said:

If you could only have the complete works of one theologian to read/study for the rest of your life (and you wouldn't be allowed to read any other theology work), what theologian would you choose and why?

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Plotinus said:

That's got nothing whatsoever to do with theology.

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...in the Middle Ages there were many areas of philosophy where one could speculate freely without trespassing on theological grounds.

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Perfection said:

This leads me to a question, how if any have traditional African beliefs impacted the Christian churches there?

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The most famous of these people was the man often referred to as the Prophet Harris. His full name was William Wade Harris, and he was a Grebo – one of the indigenous peoples of Liberia – who had been brought up as a Methodist but converted to the Church of England. He had tried to organise a revolution to turn Liberia over to the British crown; upon its failure he had been thrown into prison. Here, every night, he had a vision of the Archangel Gabriel, who instilled in him an unshakeable faith in himself as the divinely appointed Prophet of Africa. He gained a new sense of his African identity, and gave up the European-style clothes he had worn before and his American shoes. Instead, upon his release in 1913, Harris crossed the border into Ivory Coast to preach. He was barefoot, dressed in a white cloak, he carried a six-foot cross made of bamboo, and he was accompanied by two or three of his wives.

Harris was one of the most remarkable preachers in African history. Like a latter-day John Wesley, he spoke to crowds thousands strong, imploring them to turn away from idols to God. Harris’ message was uncompromising, and he had no time for accommodation to traditional African religions (apart from polygamy). Instead, all “fetishes” were to be burned upon the great bonfires that he lit. The people responded in their hordes: some 100,000 people were converted in little more than a year. Many were baptised by Harris himself with a small bowl he carried for the purpose; many more were baptised when the clouds opened and Harris cried out the Trinitarian formula, using the rain itself as the sacrament. Whole villages were converted at a stroke – and, even more remarkably, the Christian communities that were founded in this way proved surprisingly durable. Harris’ message was fairly simple, revolving around the need to turn to Jesus, who he believed would return imminently; he did not much mind which church people joined, provided they joined one. Church attendances swelled dramatically – even the Catholic churches found huge numbers of new recruits.

In 1915, the French authorities in Ivory Coast had had enough of this extraordinary but potentially volatile phenomenon, and they expelled Harris back to Liberia. He stayed here until his death in 1929, still preaching, but never with the same impact. But his assistant, John Swatson, continued to preach in the area, with continued remarkable success.

Harris had his imitators. One was Garrick Sokari Braide, who appeared in 1915 far to the east, in the region of the Niger delta. Like Harris, he was an Anglican and a fiery preacher, who inspired people to burn the “fetishes” and turn to God instead. Many thousands turned to him, but James Johnson, the local bishop, was displeased. Braide claimed to be a second Elijah, and he also tolerated polygamy. He was arrested and died soon after. Elsewhere in the region one could hear the preaching of Moses Orimolade and a female visionary called Abiodun Akinsowon, and, in the 1930s, Joseph Babalola, who led a revival among the Yoruba. Yet another African prophet was Sampson Oppong, who preached to the Asante people in Ghana in the early 1920s. Like Harris, Oppong travelled simply, bearing a cross, and wore a white robe (although he changed into a khaki one for travelling and a black one for preaching). Oppong, again, won vast numbers of converts – some 20,000 in a couple of years – although in his case they were mostly Methodist.

And the phenomenon was not confined to West Africa. The most famous prophet in the Congo region was Simon Kimbangu, who managed, if anything, to make an even greater impact than Harris in a shorter period of time. Born at Nkamba, Kimbangu became a Baptist at a young age and taught in a mission school. In 1918 he became a lay preacher, but he was disturbed by dreams or visions in which Jesus seemed to appear to him. In 1921, he visited a family where a woman was ill. He laid hands on her, and she was healed. Immediately there was uproar. People flocked from the whole region to see this new prophet and healer, and he quickly acquired disciples, including an inner cadre of twelve “apostles”. Stories of healings and even resurrections spread, as Kimbangu told the people to burn their fetishes and turn to God. There were wild demonstrations of the divine power, including speaking in tongues.

Although the Baptist church in the area considered Kimbangu’s ministry legitimate, the Belgian authorities did not and they arrested him and his immediate followers after only a few months. Kimbangu was sentenced to death, but the sentence was commuted to life imprisonment in Lubumbashi. However, his movement did not die. On the contrary, the “Kimbanguists” flourished and spread, though they continued to revere Nkamba as a holy place. There were periodical rumours that the “Absent Prophet” would return. He never did – dying in prison in 1951 – but the movement remained a major element of Christianity in the Congo region, despite periodic clampdowns from the government and the mainstream churches alike. Not until 1958 were the Kimbanguists officially recognised as a legitimate church, and two years later Kimbangu’s body was returned to Nkamba, the Kimbanguist Rome, for burial.

Even as the Kimbanguists were receiving belated recognition, another prophetic movement was beginning hundreds of miles to the south, in Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia). Alice Lenshina Mulenga had been brought up as a Presbyterian, but in 1953 she had an experience which she interpreted as one of death and resurrection, and she became a popular preacher. Like the other prophets, she attacked traditional religion, or as she regarded it, “witchcraft”; she also fiercely denounced the drinking of beer. Her message was extraordinarily successful, with whole villages joining the “Lumpa Church” en masse and singing the hymns that Mulenga herself wrote.

The sheer numbers of people converted through the preaching of these “prophets” testify to the charisma and power they must have wielded. And they made a huge impact on the churches of the area. In Harris’ case, he cared nothing for denominations, and so all the churches in the Ivory Coast area found unprecedented numbers of converts. Indeed, European missionaries coming to the area in the wake of Harris’ preaching were overwhelmed with the unexpected size of their congregations: the Catholic churches in Ivory Coast, for example, swelled from just a few hundred at the start of the century to 20,000 in 1922. The numbers kept rising, too, for many years after the prophets had left, suggesting that this was not simply a shallow fad but a major development in African Christianity. Indeed, a new denomination appeared in Ivory Coast, the Harrists, who followed roughly orthodox Protestant theology but who were proud of the African origin of their church and of its founding prophet. The Harrists were closely associated with the Ebrie people, around Abidjan.

The Kimbanguists, Harrists and others represent the first major new Christian denominations that were formed in Africa. In many ways, the teaching of these prophets – and innumerable other, less well-known ones – was quite orthodox from a Protestant point of view. They were not doctrinally innovative. But they all had much in common which was drawn from traditional African religion. On the one hand, the emphasis on a “prophet” at all, a charismatic preacher, often with great healing powers, was typically African. In the Congo region, for example, such people were called ngunza and believed to be possessed by spirits. Simon Kimbangu was, in effect, a Christian ngunza. And like traditional prophets, the Christian prophet would generally carry a staff, which represented his authority. Indeed, Kimbangu passed his staff on to his sons, who even retained the title Mvwala or “Staff” as leaders of his church. So William Wade Harris’ bamboo cross was a sign not simply of Christ but of his own power to preach and heal; for healing was central to the ministry of the prophets, just as it was important to much indigenous African religion. Africans generally expected their gods to work for the health of their followers, and to do it through these charismatic wonderworkers. Little wonder, then, that where Jesus was preached, Jesus was seen to heal. This was especially so in the years immediately following the Great War, when Africa, even more than Europe, was gripped by the terrible flu epidemic that cost millions of lives.

Most of these prophets and their followers did not see themselves as mingling Christianity and traditional religion – on the contrary, a call to burn the fetishes was standard for all Christian prophets. They believed that what they taught and practised was entirely in keeping with the Bible, for the Protestant missionaries had taught their converts to believe what the Bible said. But they could never have anticipated some of the consequences of this – consequences that came from reading the Bible in an African context rather than a European one. In the Bible, the African converts read of events that seemed familiar to them: dreams and visions in which God taught his people, and great apostles and prophets who did mighty works and healed the sick. They expected to see this happen now. They also expected the Biblical prophecies, especially those relating to the coming of God’s kingdom on earth, to be fulfilled in their time: thus Kimbangu’s village of Nkamba was hailed as the New Jerusalem, while Mulenga’s village of Kasomo became “Zioni”.

Most European missionaries had believed in the miracles described in the Bible, but they thought of them as special “Biblical era” events and did not expect to see them replicated. But many Africans did not distance themselves from the text in this way, and this led to quite new problems. For example, was polygamy permissible? The missionaries were emphatic that it was not, but the Africans saw that the Old Testament patriarchs apparently had many wives, just as they were accustomed to do themselves. Again, to what extent were dreams to be considered valid revelation alongside the Bible? After all, many people in the Bible received revelations from God in dreams. This was a question that no European missionary had even considered, and it was one to which they had no answer.

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Jamaa was the brainchild of a Belgian Franciscan friar named Placide Tempels, who while working in Zaire came to believe that Christianity should be preached within the framework of existing Luba culture and society, not as a replacement for them. He made an extensive study of this culture – publishing his findings in Bantu philosophy in 1945 – and within a few years Jamaa emerged at his mission near Kolwezi. Tempels believed that the central Luba value was loving union, as found in that of husband and wife, and so he organised Jamaa around married couples and their close relationship with a priest. Together, these three could hope to experience Christ in their midst, just as Christ is also known through his close union with Mary. Jamaa was thus about loving union but also priestly instruction, private devotion and discipline. In organisation it resembled traditional Luba societies, but with many of the Franciscan ideals that Tempels brought to the area. For example, it shared the value that the Luba traditionally placed on dreams. In each couple, it was hoped that the husband would develop a mystical union with “Bikira Maria”, while the wife would develop one with “Bwana Yezu Kristu”, in what were almost parallel marriages; and these were experienced through dreams. Some priests regarded all this with great suspicion, and the movement sometimes came close to being condemned. But in the 1950s and 60s it spread through the area, developing almost into a secret society: there were initiation ceremonies and strange jargon to preserve its mystique.

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These are usually known as AICs – African Initiated (or, sometimes, Indigenous, or Independent) Churches. The term is perhaps slightly insulting – as if it were surprising or noteworthy that churches in Africa should be initiated by Africans – as well as rather artificial. For example, it is common to distinguish between the “prophetic” churches of the 1920s and 30s and the true “AICs” of the post-World War II era, but in fact it may be equally valid to see them as parts of the same movement. Indeed, the more durable of the prophetic churches, such as the Harrists or the Kimbanguists, were in effect the first AICs. The main difference is that AICs do not, as a rule, derive from great prophets like those of the pre-war era. They may have charismatic founders, such as John Chilembwe of the Providence Industrial Mission in Malawi who led an abortive uprising in 1915; but these figures are not idolised as William Wade Harris or Simon Kimbangu were. In fact, there is considerable disagreement at the moment about how to categorise or even identify AICs.

Whatever one calls them, there is no denying the impact and importance of the AICs. By 1985, it was estimated that there were some 12,000 of them throughout the continent, with some 33 million members. But what are they, exactly? The essential characteristic is that they are new churches, founded by Africans to serve their local communities, as opposed to new congregations within the established denominations. But attempts to find common characteristics other than that have not always borne fruit – hardly surprising given the vast number of churches in question. A useful distinction with AICs is between “Ethiopian” and “Zionist” churches. “Ethiopian” churches are so-called not because they have anything to do with the Ethiopian Orthodox Church but because, like that church, they are indigenous: that is, they differ from the “mainstream” churches only in their origins. A good example might be the Moshoeshoe Berean Bible Readers Church, founded in Lesotho in 1922 by the charismatic evangelist Walter Matitta. This church followed orthodox Reformed doctrine.

“Zionist” churches, by contrast, are not simply indigenous but have quite a different flavour from the mainstream churches. It is a distinction recognised by the churches themselves: in Lesotho, for example, the Zionist churches refer to themselves as the Dikereke tsa Moya – the Churches of the Spirit – as opposed to the Dikereke tsa Molao, the Churches of the Law. The tension between them that this suggests is a little like that between Pentecostals and evangelicals in America – and indeed, African Zionism owes a great deal to American Pentecostalism.

The movement goes back to a South African named P.L. Le Roux, whose commitment to what he believed to be the promptings of the Holy Spirit apparently overrode his fidelity to any ecclesiastical organisations. In the early years of the twentieth century he worked as a Dutch Reformed missionary to the Zulus. But he became deeply influenced by a recently founded church in Chicago called the Christian Catholic Apostolic Church, and in 1903 he left the Dutch Reformed Church to found a new one, the Zionist Apostolic Church. This church had much in common with the Pentecostal movement which was just beginning to emerge in the United States at this time. Like the Pentecostal churches, the Zionist church emphasised the power of the Holy Spirit within the congregation: there was speaking in tongues and healing. Indeed, Le Roux himself became more deeply involved in Pentecostalism and left the Zionist church in 1908 to join the Apostolic Faith Mission, leaving his earlier experiment in the hands of his follower Daniel Nkonyane. However, the Zionist church expanded rapidly to become a network throughout South Africa. Pentecostalism was itself deeply influenced by African American Christianity to begin with. Its emphasis on the power of God through the Holy Spirit, and the subjection of the life of the community to that power, was extremely attractive to the Africans, especially the Zulus, the Swazi, and the Sotho. In the 1920s, it spread to northern South Africa under Ignatius Lekhanyane and to Zimbabwe under Andreas Shoko and others.

It is something of an irony that the archetypal African Initiated Church should have been founded by a white South African inspired by an American movement, but Le Roux’s abdication from the church, and its massive success with the black people of southern Africa, ensured that its origins were quickly forgotten. Zionism was a movement, rather than a single church, and leaders such as those already mentioned founded their own groups based upon their own “Zions” or holy cities, usually near a river or lake which would be renamed “Jordan” and used for baptisms. Typically, these leaders believed themselves to be divinely called: they would often have dreams or visions, perhaps of God or Jesus, or of their own ancestors, calling them to found a new holy city. Often this would be associated with a period of illness, during which the visionary drew close to heaven. Thus again we see similarities to the great prophets of the inter-war period.

The most important of these leaders was Isaiah Shembe, who was very similar to those prophets. In 1911 he established the Church of the Nazarites (or the Amanazaretha) at Ekuphakameni near Durban, where he soon became regarded as a true prophet of God – indeed, more than this, for the people would sing of him:

Our Liberator,
We Dingaan’s people
We have heard him,
He has come,
The Liberator has arrived
You, Zulus, we have heard him.

This was one of the songs in the Amanazaretha hymn book, which was mostly written by Shembe himself, suggesting a certain genius for self-promotion on the part of this prophet. Indeed, after Shembe’s death he continued to be revered as the revealer of Christ to the Zulu, and the church was run by his family.

Today, the Zionist churches and related movements continue to be of major importance in South Africa; the country has far more than its fair share of AICs (some 4,000, accounting for a third of the black population), as though they had somehow drifted down and collected at the tip of the continent. Yet they are found throughout Africa, and they really came into their own in the independence era. Before this, they were the object of considerable suspicion on the part of the colonial authorities and the established churches alike. But once African nations became independent, the AICs often became the source of considerable pride. After all, people reasoned, if the country deserved its own government, then it should have its own churches, too. Indeed, membership of such a church acquired a certain social cachet: many churches have uniforms, and their members wear them even in everyday life; and many companies prefer to employ AIC members, since they have a reputation for hard work and honesty. Tobacco and alcohol are usually forbidden for church members. As the number of AICs suggests, most are small, with only local appeal. But some have transcended their origins to become major factors in their own nations, such as the Aladura Church in Nigeria. Even in these cases, however, one of the defining features of AICs is their local flavour. There may be large rallies or dramatic festivals, but most of the time they meet in groups of perhaps a couple of dozen people.

Another common feature of AICs is the way in which they incorporate traditional indigenous religious beliefs or customs. We have already seen how the African Christian prophets were, in many ways, similar to traditional African prophets, and we can see the same sort of similarities in the AICs. These churches typically stress the power of God and his active intervention on behalf of his people, just as indigenous religions regarded their gods, and this is often demonstrated by the prominence of healing ceremonies. These are not just for physical ailments. They can also be performed for spiritual or mental malaise, or as reconciliation ceremonies where relationships have broken down. In each case, the sufferer is presented to the community and the divine power is invoked. Holy objects may be used – a staff, the Bible, or holy water – in a Christian counterpart to the “fetishes” of old.

But such “Africanising” of Christianity remains controversial among the AICs and indeed African Christians in general. Consider the case of the Swazi, whose worldview was traditionally dominated by the emadloti, the spirits of the dead. The living would pray to the emadloti to intercede with the divine on their behalf, and remember them with sacrifices and other rituals. The emadloti, for their part, would watch over the living and often help or warn them, perhaps through dreams. Today, the emadloti remain a major element of Swazi culture, and they are therefore a highly controversial topic among Christians. Some simply regard them as demons. Others, however, believe that veneration of the emadloti is compatible with Christianity. Emmanuel Milingo, for example, the former Catholic archbishop of Lusaka, argues that an authentic Swazi theology can present Christ himself as the greatest emadloti, a figure of the past who is with us today and intercedes with God on our behalf. On this conception, instead of opposing the traditional spiritual world with a new Christian one, the traditional spirits can simply be Christianised. Milingo himself is a controversial figure – the Vatican’s concerns about his large healing and exorcism services led to his being removed from Lusaka in 1983, and he subsequently became involved with the Moonies and even briefly married before returning to the Catholic fold. Throughout it, he remained committed to the ideal of the church existing to minister to the people, for which he insisted that it had to become genuinely African. This meant becoming open to the uniquely African spiritual experience, and to the spiritual world that had always been central to African beliefs. Debates of this kind are still highly prominent among churches throughout Africa today, whether AICs or established denominations: to what extent can the church legitimately take on the forms or even the beliefs of pre-Christian faiths?

The AICs remain on the move. Much of Africa has been conquered by either them or Pentecostal elements within the traditional churches, and now they are spreading overseas. As we saw earlier, many young Africans in the post-war years began travelling to Europe or America, and this trend has continued, with large numbers of Africans either visiting or moving permanently to the old colonial powers. They have brought their religions with them. In south London, for example, where there are many West Africans, there are AICs practically everywhere one looks – some in large and fancy-looking buildings, others wedged in between small shops on busy thoroughfares. These churches have successfully transplanted African-style Pentecostalism to Europe, and they have started outreach and missions to white Europeans – in a kind of reverse replay of the coming of European Christianity to Africa, which came first with settlers and then with missionaries. These churches, like their parent communities in Africa, offer a mixture of Pentecostal-style worship, conservative doctrine, and great emphasis on the Bible.

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MCdread said:

Great thread, possibly the best I've ever seen in CFC.
A couple of questions:

1. What elements of pre-christian religiosity have made their way into Christian doctrine, or (perhaps more adequately) into what one might call popular religiosity and what kind of relation has existed between theology proper and what the church has taught as its doctrine and that more popular religious experience, with its rituals, superstitions, saints, etc. (isn't pagan after all a word that originally meant rural or an inhabitant of a rural village?)? Maybe this isn't so much of an issue today in protestant countries, but it strikes me as something very vivid and particular in the catholicism of southern european countries (which are the ones I know better), and probably later on also in latin America and nowadays Africa.

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MCdread said:

2. From what I've read it seems that no other religion has created such a complex, vivid and multiform demon character as the christian devil. One might say that there have been many different devils throughout the centuries with different representations, powers and attributes, from the ridicule figure you can sometimes see in medieval illuminated manuscripts (brute and unintelligent) to an almost God rival all powerful entity. Is this multifaceted devil something intrinsic to the christian doctrine, ie, within christian theological trends is such a central devil character inevitable? And how has he evolved and been depicted by both orthodoxy and herectical groups? Finally, in relation to the first question, can it be said that such colourful character is precisely an output of that relation between the deeper theological inquiry of the fathers and doctors of the church and the simpler and practical (and sometimes superstitious) views of the common people, ie, a product of one trying to accomodate with the other?

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Bill3000 said:

I'm just curious; how exactly is conservative evaangelicalism false/unorthodox? I'd assume that Rapture goes without saying, but what else is there?

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Bill3000 said:

As well, what about liberal protestantism?

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Bill3000 said:

Finally, one last question: If you were a Christian, what denomination do you think would best suit you?

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Atticus said:

Can you tell some of the sayings which are thought to be authentic and/or tell where to find them?

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Atticus said:

Has somebody examined Jesus from the viewpoint that Jesus didn't think himself as the son of God (or to have any kind of special relation to god, or that Jesus dint believe in god)?

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Atticus said:

Is there some reason why catholics hold on transubstantiation? I mean: it's so wacky idea that they must have something to gain with it.

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El_Machinae said:

Hey, quick one.

Regarding the Global Flood. Is the Jewish Scripture clear that the event covered all the tallest mountains and covered the whole planet? The Bible uses pretty clear language.

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Fifty said:

If you could only have the complete works of one theologian to read/study for the rest of your life (and you wouldn't be allowed to read any other theology work), what theologian would you choose and why?

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C~G said:

What is your general perception how church and religion affected the whole Europe during the middle ages and what kind of effects (good/bad) in terms of later progression it had?

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CartesianFart said:

The role of logic is an element within the culture.

Both in the West and East, the origin of logic is associated with an interest in the grammar and in the methodology of argument and discussion, be it in the context of law, religion, or philosophy. The reason why logic prevailed in the West, that logic thrived, is because they upholds the conviction that controversies should be settled by the force of reason rather than by the orthodoxy of a dogma or the tradition of prejudice.

Aristotle said something that logic has a part to play in general discussion. Before embarking on the study of any science (humanities), one should, as Aristotle thought, recieve some training in logic. It is the most abstract and general description of reality. So, therefore, theology alongside philosophy and metaphysics has a part to play in the ramified heirarchy, with logic at its head.

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CartesianFart said:

So it does have something to do with theology since most of them were, by profession, theologians. Meaning that some of the contents in their writings were not only theological, but also philosophical. That is why I choose to be indifferent and take the liking to blurr myself by labeling some of them only as a theologian, philosopher, or logician.

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Plotinus said:

Well, I sort of wrote a book about that already, so rather than go over it again, I'll refer you there! Cop out, I know, I'm sorry. In brief, the church affected Europe so enormously in the Middle Ages that its influence is pretty much everywhere, and still is. I think its effects were more good than bad, especially in its influence on ideas, education, science, and so on.

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Plotinus said:

I should think most theologians today would regard a belief like that as simply laughable.

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Plotinus said:

Is there some reason why catholics hold on transubstantiation? I mean: it's so wacky idea that they must have something to gain with it.

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Because they think it's true, of course. I don't really see what's wacky about it!

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Eran of Arcadia said:

I have asked this question before - what makes a god?

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Eran of Arcadia said:

Many people (even- perhaps especially - atheists) will mention omnipotence, but that would disqualify the vast majority of beings that have been considered gods (from Zeus to Quetzlcoatl to Jehovah, as the ancient Hebrews understood Him) and doesn't seem a very good prerequisite.

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Eran of Arcadia said:

I also assume that, for the question to mean anything, actual existence is not a necessary attribute.

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Eran of Arcadia said:

I have asked this question before - what makes a god?

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Eran of Arcadia said:

Okay that's nice, but not at all my question. What are the characteristics or attributes that are necessary to refer to a being as a god? And actual existence is for the purposes of definition irrelevant, if the word is to have any meaning.

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