Transcript
It was hard to hear, but I do appreciate once more the generosity of the friends and colleagues of this place and the warmth with which they have received me and Dorian and I will look back on our years in Princeton with great gratitude, great affection. It's been the most glorious Indian summer. I must once more express my thanks for the honor of the invitation to deliver these lectures, not usually the spheres I realize of an incumbent,
even though a temporary one. And I'm grateful also that the seminary has consented to share this last occasion with our regular Currents in World Christianity seminar and it's so splendid to see this morning our friends who come regularly, including those who trek over many hard miles month by month to join us in our seminar. And I look forward to this really being a seminar in the sense that I hope that everyone will be able to participate
in taking this this subject further so that we have opportunity to discuss together and not simply further opportunities which the format of questions after a lecture sometimes encourages of additional room for pontification. I'm grateful to my very old friend and very esteemed colleague Lamin Sanneh for agreeing to be here and whatever he says will be something memorable for us all. Perhaps I shouldn't say this but I give it as my justification for the fact that while
Professor Sanneh has seen the text of the earlier lectures in this series, he has no idea of what I'm going to say this morning, mainly because I didn't myself. But a little time ago I was asked to give a lecture somewhere where he frequently lectures and they advertised a title which I found extremely inappropriate and I moaned to the director accordingly. He says don't worry do what Lamin does and I said what's that? He says speak
on something else. So I was quite confident that with Professor Sanneh whatever he spoke on and the few people you can say this it would be to the profit of all of us and we would be able to make connections. The lectures which you have so patiently endured and so graciously received have been I realize something of a pastiche. I've ranged freely over the whole period of Christian history in order to make statements about the 20th
century and the 21st and have used the 19th century and the 20th and indeed the 21st to make statements about Christianity in general. I've tread with circumspection. I've trampled about with all the masterly inattention to detail that goes with omniscience. As Hegel is alleged to have said when told that the facts were otherwise so much the worse for the facts. To these lapses of criminality I've added another. I've blurred the boundary between history and theology. Nay
worse the academic mask like the shamans fastened on to respectability to the task has slipped from time to time to reveal the ranting Methodist preacher underneath. In answer I can only plead that if the study of the history of Christianity or of church history I reserve the question whether there is an ideological difference here for another time. If it is a valid exercise it ought to be possible to make some generalizations about Christian history as a
whole. In accounting for missions as I've attempted to do this week three generalizations about Christian history have continually surfaced. Those who've worked with me and here I'd like to acknowledge all I've gained from the members of my various seminars here from in both in the MEHR program and those from other programs who've brought their additional gifts to them. They will not be surprised if the generalizations are what one of my Edinburgh colleagues cheerfully calls the same
old rubbish. First that the Christian faith is not progressive but serial in its expansion. That Christianity unlike Islam has a tendency to wither in its centers of strength and to establish new bases at or beyond the margins. And second that Christian faith involves translation cultural as well as linguistic. And third that conversion therefore is more about direction than about content. It means turning towards Christ within a specific segment of social reality. To these I'd now like
to add a fourth that Christian salvation depends on the aggregate of all the translations of faith, all the conversions of social reality of all peoples over all ages. Over all ages because God has chosen to carry out his work of redemption not only by means of a event but a historical process. If God had wanted to save the world by means of the incarnation, why didn't he not come at once and complete the process in a
single action? He did not choose that way. He used a historical process stretching over thousands of years involving the immigration of one small clan out of Ur of the Chaldees, the growth and diversification of that clan into tribes, the gradual solidifying of tribes into a nation eventually into a kingdom, the rise and fall and fall and rise of that kingdom over centuries. And over all that period God was revealing himself as the author of Hebrews puts
it at many times and in many ways. Here one aspect, there another until the whole picture was revealed in Christ. God was in no hurry over the incarnation. God in Christ entered into a historical process of redemption that lasted not just for centuries but millennia. And even then he didn't wind the process up even if some of those who knew Christ best expected him to do so. He left it to run on for many centuries longer
and after 20 centuries it's still running on. Here again the author to the Hebrews has a for us. Where after summarizing the careers and the sufferings of all the saints of Israel, he says they did not receive what God had promised because God had decided on an even better plan. Not for them but for us. God had decided on an even better plan for us. His purpose was that only in company with us would they be
made perfect. By us of course he means the Christian believers of his own day. God had delayed the full significance of Abraham's life until they could share it. Abraham was waiting for them. Putting it another way that miscellaneous body of first century Christians are bound into the whole catalog of the history of Israel. The history of salvation comprehends them all and one is not complete without the other. Their story takes its significance from the story of
Abraham and Moses and Isaiah but the story of Abraham and Moses and Isaiah and we can add Peter Paul is not complete without them. Now if it's legitimate to apply this principle to the couple of additional millennia since the author to the Hebrews wrote, then Abraham is waiting for us too as are those first century Christians who first received that letter. We and the whole company of faith in between are bound together as part of a
single story. None of us is complete without the rest and we will not be complete without those who follow us. Others will see us not as the final stage of Christian formation but our incompleteness. The work of salvation is a historical process that stretches to the end of the age. Similarly, to people's not only of all times but of all places and all cultures. Let us go back to that first company, that first Jesus company, wholly
Jewish in lifestyle, keeping the law, delighting in it, worshipping in the temple, doing what Jesus himself did and he himself had said that not a jot or tittle would pass from the law by his agency. It was the life the apostles had led and Peter never ate anything that was common or unclean. It was the life expressed so well by the Lord's own brother, James, leader of the Jerusalem Christians, James the just, the righteous, the one
who lives in accordance with the law. They lived God's law, they honored it and it led them to share their property and share their meals in the enjoyment of the company of his followers. And then at Antioch those people from Cyprus and Cyrene that we keep coming back to, driven out from Jerusalem, shared their faith in Jesus with their Greek pagan neighbors. And the realized that for these people's circumcision the regular gate for Gentiles to enter
Israel was not the way. Nor should the food laws be binding on them or the other requirements of Jewish life. They were to find a way of life that expressed Christ under the conditions of Hellenistic life. They were to represent him, represent Christ in Hellenistic Antiochian society. Christ was to be manifested there in Antioch, in Hellenistic Antioch, in human terms, just as he had been in Palestinian Jewish society. It meant developing a whole new Christian lifestyle
under the guidance of the Spirit. It meant coping with situations no Jerusalem believer had ever had to do before. And no Jewish believer ever would, such as what to do in a pagan friend's house if you think the meat may have been bought from a pagan temple. It's never going to happen to a Jewish believer. They're not going to be invited to dinner in the first place. It meant living in a world that didn't observe the
Sabbath. So many of the guideposts removed, and yet Christ has to be recognizable for who he is in the style of life. Two societies, each living by its own rules, each historically seen as utterly distinct and their distinctiveness stated by the meal table. Jews ate with Jews, Gentiles ate with Gentiles. Two Christian lifestyles, one for Jewish society, the other for Hellenistic society, and both meant to reflect the life of Christ. But this does not mean two
separate Christian communities. As the Epistle to the Ephesian puts it, in union with him, you are being built together with all the others into a place where God lives through his Spirit. There was to be only one Christian community. In obedience to Christ, that community was becoming more diverse as it crossed cultural frontiers. But the diversity was part of the unity. These were different bricks that were being used to make a single building, a temple, a
place where God would live. They were different parts of a single body of which Christ was the head, different parts of Christ's body. Hellenistic Christianity wasn't some Torah-less soft option for benighted heathen, as some Jewish believers perhaps thought it. Judaic Christianity was not some legalistic bondage for people who'd never entered cosmopolitan culture, as some Hellenistic believers may have thought it. Nor was it, in the postmodern style, each an authentic form of Christian faith complete and
valid in itself apart from the other. Each was necessary to complete the other. Each was necessary to correct the other. Each was an expression of Christ under certain human conditions, and Christ is humanity completed. This is a word perhaps for the time now present. When the Epistle to the Ephesians was written, there were only two basic cultures in the Christian church, Jew and Gentile, and they stand not just for two races, as we normally think when
we're talking about the breaking down of the middle wall of partition, but of two cultures that often clashed and yet have to live side by side in the same church. They could have formed separate churches. It was the natural product of what they were doing. The Apostle will not allow the thought. The two had been historically divided by the meal table. Now the meal table was the thing that joined them. There at the meal table above
all they must meet. The Ephesian moment was quite brief. Circumstances, the destruction of the Jewish state in AD 70, the scattering of the Jerusalem church that followed, the sheer success of the Gentile mission. All these things meant that the church became monocultural again, became as overwhelmingly Hellenistic as it had once been overwhelmingly Judaic. Now we have the Ephesian moment back again, not this time with two cultures, but with cultures innumerable. Christ is being expressed under human
form, under the conditions of Africa, of India, of China, of Korea, of North America, of Europe East and West. New Christian lifestyles are developing under the guidance of the Spirit in each of these areas in order to express him. There are two dangers. One is the instinctive desire to protect our own version of the Christian faith, our own understanding as the true one. And perhaps to want to impose it. The other is to take each as
equally valid and enjoy our own in isolation. Either of these involves the destruction of God's temple or the tearing of Christ's body as these are the expression of Christ's life. That's not the Ephesian way. None of these Christian expressions is complete in itself. Only in Christ does completion, does fullness dwell, as the epistle says elsewhere. And his completion comes from all humanity, the life of Jesus Christ translated into the life ways of all the world's cultures
and subcultures. We cannot realize his completeness on our own. We need one another's vision to correct and balance our own. It's only together that we are complete in him. There has never surely been in Christian history such a recurrence of the first Ephesian moment as has come to us in our own day. And the demographic transformation of the church brought about by the missionary movement, which has been the subject of these lectures, leaves us with a
post-Christian West and a all the Ephesian implications of how we live together to express the body of Christ in this amalgam of parts. We have considered, as we looked in the first lecture, the path from Christendom to world Christianity. And last night we considered particularly the nature of Christendom, and in particular its territorial character. Post-Christendom Christianity lives in close, sometimes tense, relationships with other faiths, which was not a feature of territorial Christianity. Other faiths
often provide the substructure of Christian belief and practice. All of us are primalists underneath at different layers. The special reasons for studying the religions of Africa or of Asia or of other parts of the world is that these are the substructure of Christian belief. This is the material out of which the Christian expression is itself formed if conversion is about change of direction rather than substitution of content. So, post-Christendom Christianity has, I think, to be
studied in the setting of other faiths. It's post-Western Christianity. The Western influences have been vital in constituting it, and the international influences will continue, but the landmarks will change. Some may disappear. Some may attain a different significance from the one which they've traditionally had. We've become used to thinking of Christianity as subsisting in three modes, Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox. All these modes arise from developments in Western history. They'll still have a significance as indicators of
association. They will be less and less use as descriptors. New traditions of Christianity have been developing that have perhaps as much coherence as descriptors of Christian experience, or Christian existence rather, as the terms Catholic or Protestant. I suspect, for instance, there's already a tradition which one could call African, which would cover thousands of people who associationally are called Catholic and thousands of people who associationally are called Protestant. We are made by our past and a series
of African and Asian pasts are now reshaping Christianity as surely as the Greek philosophy and Roman law and Germanic customary law shaped earlier phases of Christianity. It's made out of pre-existing materials. The doctrine of the Trinity is made out of neoplatonic materials. That's no criticism of the doctrine of the Trinity, which is what people tend to be doing when they make that statement. That's the stuff. It's the pre-existing material turned towards Christ. The whole
areas of Christian activity are affected. Bible reading, for instance. Western Christianity has developed a distinctive method of Bible reading. It comes out of Western intellectual history. It's evident, for instance, that St. Paul knew nothing of it and some of his exegesis would be ruled out of court in a seminary exercise. It's not a matter of theology. Liberals and conservatives apply the same method if they use it differently. But there are now generations of Christians who, even
though they have learned the Western method, are in practice more influenced by older ways of understanding sacred or classical texts, Buddhist or Confucian modes, for instance. Another feature of post-Western Christianity will be a break with the association with political and economic power. I'd like to come back to that in a minute. In recent centuries, that link, the 19th century, it could be said without embarrassment that this was a recommendation, a proof that the blessing of
God followed obedience to his word. In the new chapter, Christianity will increasingly be the religion of relatively poor people who come with no gifts except the Gospel itself. We've considered the missionary movement this week in relation to two themes in particular, culture and political and economic reality. We considered the Western movement in relation to those two, and now I think we're bound to consider these same themes in relation to the new Christianity with its southern centre
of gravity. I'd like to take the two in reverse order. The political and economic implications of a post-Western Christianity and a post-Christian West. There's some food for thought here in the recent United Nations report on population. The calculation in the report is that the world's population is growing by 1.2%, that's 77 million people every year, and that half that increase comes from six countries, India, China, Pakistan, Nigeria, Bangladesh, Indonesia, in that order. Second,
the population growth and the predictions go to the middle of the present century, to 2150, sorry to 2050. The population growth will be concentrated in the countries least able to support it. The 48 least economically developed nations will triple their population by 2050. Africa will have three times as many people as Europe by 2050, and this despite the fact that 300 million Africans will die of AIDS. The population in the developed countries will fall in Germany
and Japan by 14%, in Italy by 25%, in Russia and Ukraine by perhaps as much as 40%. Migration will therefore be necessary to maintain economic levels. The prime target of migration will be the United States, where allowing for a further million immigrants a year, the population by 2050 will rise to 400 million, but will rise entirely as a result of immigration. In other words, when we consider the cultural and demographic transformation of the church, we shouldn't
consider the transformation as all taking place in Africa and Asia and Latin America. African and Asian and Latin American Christianity will spread to other parts of the world, and the United States will present the church with its prime ecumenical challenge and its prime ecumenical opportunity. The 1965 immigration law, which I've already suggested in the first lecture, has been a crucial factor in 20th century Christianity, may prove to be a highly significant piece of legislation for the
future of the church. It means that all the Christian discourses are already present in the United States, as they are in no other country in the world. This is the country which has the opportunity to realize or to fracture the body of Christ. But it will also make poverty and the sharing of resources among Christians a primary issue within the church. As we've said, Christianity will be more and more the religion of poor people, the relatively
and the absolutely poor. There has been a church for the poor very often. Now it really will be a church of the poor. Further, who but the Christians are left now to think through the issues of poverty since the demise of Marxism. In much of the world, the only apparent alternative left to unattainable consumerism and cancerous corruption is the radical application of Islam. It is by no means certain what the outcome of this process will be.
The process will go on against the background of geopolitical developments that are dictated by the developed world and are already becoming apparent. What will happen if the main concern of the principalities and powers in the coming century is to defend the lifestyles of the economically prosperous against the economically powerless? The main security parameters are likely to be the deep divisions of wealth and poverty across the world, coupled with increasingly dominant global environmental constraints on economic activity
and human well-being. The end results will be increased by greater repressions, conflict over the control of resources and markets, and violent responses from the dispossessed. Western military strategists are now already re-orientating their outlook towards such a world, one polarized more by economic contrast than by ideology. With this scenario, it will be all too easy to perceive and justify the comfortable lifestyles of the global elites as representing civilization, complete with their own new warrior class, United
Nations peacekeepers perhaps, protecting them from the barbarians at the gates. Thus far, Rogers. Translated into religious terms and bearing in mind the demographic shift in Christian profession, this means that the levers of global economic power will be located in the post-Christian West and East Asia and will be employed to effectively keep people out. And the Christian faith will be the religion of the relatively and absolutely poor, centered in the poorest parts of the world. And
this would condition the theology and the practice of the Christian church. As to culture, we have time for only one aspect. The importance of culture as the workplace of creative theology. Our faith depends on the word made flesh, on God made human. One way of looking at this is as a great act of translation. In the incarnation, God is translated into humanity. The whole meaning of God is expressed in human categories, as though humanity is the
receptor language into which God is translated. But when God became human, it was not as generalized humanity, but as a particular person living in a particular culture at a particular time, the culture of a Palestinian Jew of the first century. The only humanity we know is culture specific. The cross-cultural spread of the gospel leads to Christ being received by faith in other cultures and thus successively retranslated into the customs and languages of those peoples. The
extraordinary thing, however, is that that process of retranslation constantly reveals new truths about Christ. The obvious example we've referred to more than once, the fact that when Jewish believers who themselves saw Christ in Jewish terms came to share their faith with Greek-speaking gentiles, they found it was little use to talk of Jesus as Messiah. The word needed endless explanation. They had to translate and find a term that meant something to a Greek pagan. According to
Acts 11, they choose the word curious that Greek pagans used for their cult divinities. Jewish believers, and the action was taken by Jewish people, had long thought of Jesus as Messiah, and this was a rich, pregnant concept. The Greeks could readily think of the Lord Jesus, but it gave a new dimension to thinking about Christ. From a Jewish point of view, it must have seen an impoverishment after all that Messiah meant and how you could fit
the whole of scripture around it. But the translation also raised questions that a Jew would never ask. Jewish believers could readily use a phrase like Jesus is at the right hand of God, and the significance of that was so well understood by the Sanhedrin that it brought Stephen to his death. But for a Greek, the phrase solves nothing. Did it mean the transcendent God had a right hand? If you could get past the anthropomorphism, what you
really want to know is the relationship of the ultimately significant Christ to the Father and of inevitably the language of Uzziah and Father of the same Uzziah, different as to Uzziah, similar in Uzziah. To find out meant a process of exploring what Christians really believed about their Lord using the indigenous methods of Greek intellectual discourse. It was a long, painful process, but it issued in an expanded understanding of who Christ is. Christian theology moved on to
a new plane when Greek questions were asked about Christ and received Greek answers using the Greek scriptures. It was a risky, agonizing business, but it led the church to rich discoveries about Christ that could never have been used using only Jewish categories such as Messiah. But of course, you didn't have to give up the word Messiah. Translation did not negate the tradition, but enriched it. And similar developments can be traced in later Christian theology every time
a Christian frontier is crossed. We are now at the threshold of a time when new questions will be asked that arise from the attempt to express him in settings that are dominated by the venerable traditions of Asia and Africa. And if past Christian experiences anything to go by, this can only enrich the church's understanding of Christ and lead to new discoveries in theology. Potentially, we are at an age of theological discovery, unparalleled since the early centuries
with the materials provided by Asia and Africa. Perhaps I could take that on in my closing minutes, and I realize I must close soon, to be a little more specific about theological tasks for the 21st century. And here perhaps you will permit me to restrict my comments or to give priority in my comments to an African situation. We're suggesting that the theological enterprise of the 21st century is parallel in scope and extent to that of Christians
in the Greek world of the third century and beyond. It will include thinking Christ into the entire cultural framework of Africa and the Asian countries so that they really are, as Ephesians puts it, summed up in him so that the Lord of all really rules past and present. The issues are too vast for even cursory discussion here, so let us take what might be involved in rethinking the framework of theology in Africa. This is not as
pretentious as it may seem. For good historical reasons, most African theological thinking necessarily started within the particular Western framework that belonged to those from whom the Christian message was transmitted to much of Africa. Neither party was conscious of how far that framework was the product of a particular period of Western cultural history. The complex series of intellectual movements, which we designate collectively as the Enlightenment, presented the greatest challenge to the Christianity of the West since the
rise of Islam. Its exaltation of reason, its exaltation of the autonomous individual self, battered the supports that had upheld Western Christianity since the barbarian conversion, revelation, and the corporate consciousness expressed in Christendom. The flurry of scientific activity and discovery assisted in refocusing the view of the universe so that it concentrated on the empirical world that we can see and feel. The Enlightenment turned much of traditional thought upside down, and that traditional thought had known centuries of
Christian penetration. It could have strangled Western Christianity. In France, it nearly succeeded in doing so. But Christianity recovered. It accommodated many Enlightenment themes and methods, modified or redirected others. It set about the penetration of Enlightenment thought as it had penetrated pre-Enlightenment thought in Europe. The evangelical revival made a special contribution. Since it could be reconciled with the individual consciousness and the new primacy of the of Enlightenment thinking that was hostile or at least unfavorable to
Christianity, and that stream was to broaden in the 20th century. But a Christianized form of the Enlightenment developed. A Christianity shaped to the Enlightenment world view, and this became the dominant Western expression of Christianity. Modern Western theology is Enlightenment theology. The modern missionary movement, child as it was of the evangelical and pietist movements, was deeply influenced by the Enlightenment. Its concern with education and health care, its confidence in science and technology, its ideas of civilization as
the fruit of evangelization, many more features, good and bad, came out of the Enlightenment. And generations of missionaries, as they set forth the gospel, also set forth that Enlightenment world view which had given shape to their theology. They belonged to the Enlightenment tamed and conquered in the name of Christ. Fundamental to the Enlightenment view was a demarcated frontier between the empirical world, the world of what we can see and touch, the realm in which repeatability can
reasonably be looked for, and the other world, the world of spirit. Natural could and must be distinguished from supernatural. The non-Christian and anti-Christian wing of the Enlightenment argued that there was nothing on the other side of the empirical world, or if there is, we can know nothing about it. The greater part of the western secular academy now works on that assumption, though it does not always make the assumption clear. It brackets out the whole
of the other world, the world of spirit, even in the study of religion. Of course, the Christian Enlightenment could not leave the matter there. It accepted the frontier between the worlds but asserted there were identifiable crossing places, the incarnation, resurrection, revelation, prayer, perhaps miracles. But these were recognized crossing points of a frontier that was generally closed, and theological activity was sometimes a matter of deciding where the bona fide crossing points were. Theology, in effect, policed the
frontier. Even the reading of the Bible became subject to frontier policing. So much of the Old Testament could not be accommodated within an Enlightenment universe that Enlightenment Christians developed ways of reading it at a certain distance. And even some features of the New Testament and the Apostolic Church, prophecy, for instance, healing, other works of power, were designated as frontier crossings, formally in use, but no longer available. In such a framework, the Gospel came to Africa, and
the Gospel was accepted and appropriated by Africans. Missionary education regularly expounded an Enlightenment worldview. An American missionary in Sierra Leone, early in the 20th century, writes home, after giving a science lesson, of the privileges to reveal a law of nature when his pupils expect a witch. The scientific worldview and Christian conviction intermingled and seemed equally opposed to the magical. But the African worldview was different. The frontier between the empirical world and the spiritual world was being
crossed and recrossed every day in both directions. Africans responded to the Gospel in multitudes, but they could not easily lose the vision of that open frontier. As a result, the theology they inherited and the church practice based on it frequently did not fit the facts of daily experience. The problem was that Western theology is a pared-down theology, cut and shaved to fit a small-scale universe. Most Africans, even when they were participating in Enlightenment activities,
science and technology readily found a home in Africa, lived in a larger universe, where the frontier was still open. The distinction between natural and supernatural was not easy to preserve. Some of the most devastating aspects of life, witchcraft, for instance, were beyond the reach of theology. In an Enlightenment universe, witchcraft does not exist. It's an imaginary crime. As the Enlightenment took hold, legislation against witchcraft, which every European country had, was struck from the statute books of
Christendom. For similar reasons, and generally with missionary approval, legislation against activities to neutralize witchcraft, such as ordeals, was established by the colonial authorities. Missionaries acting from Christian charity could protect unfortunate people accused by their neighbors of witchcraft. What they could not generally do was to cope with witchcraft itself. The Enlightenment worldview blurred the line between the activity of witchcraft and belief in the existence of witchcraft. Enlightenment Christianity swept witch and witch doctor together with every form
of magic and divination and most forms of traditional healing into a single pile of refuse, designated superstition. The resultant gap between worldview and theology, between what people see the world to be and the resources the church supplies for coping with it in a Christian way, has been calculably damaging. Multitudes of Christians have not known what to do in emergencies for which traditional Africa had traditional remedies. They sincerely wish to live as Christians, but they live in
a larger, more populated world than the one that supplied the belief, the theology and practice of their churches. They see things that church theology and church practice does not envisage, so they go to the diviner, but secretly and with a bad conscience. It's an act not of apostasy, but of desperation. The people who first explored the gap between worldview and theology were often semi-educated people. More highly educated people could hope to find the missing key
as their knowledge increased. Those with no such hope had to make provision for the world as they saw it, for the strains of living in two worlds could be intolerable. They could see that the world that for Christians, God in Christ, ought to fill the whole world, ought to relate to everything in it. But the theological framework they inherited left huge areas of the world as they saw it, untouched by Christ. It had nothing to say
on matters of high importance to ordinary people, matters that belonged to common experience. And as they read the New Testament themselves, they saw stretches of material that enlightenment influenced theology had bracketed out. The Old Testament too is not a foreign book in Africa. It doesn't need a special course to understand it. You don't have to keep distant from it. It needs no special spectacles. They put two and two together and did some theological reconstruction. There's evidence
of creative informal theology all over Africa, carried out by people who never realized that they were theologians. The songs of the Ghanaian Afuakuma, a traditional midwife by calling, are a good example. Among those informal theologians were the founders of some of the early African instituted or spiritual churches and the problems they addressed were essentially those of theology and worldview. At the time, they were commonly seen as on the margins of Christianity on account of the extent
to which they reflected traditional worldviews. In fact, many of them were at heart radically Christian. They were seeking to actualize the saving activity of God in Christ in the world as large numbers of Africans saw the world. Much has happened since those early days. Africa is now one of the Christian heartlands and the missionary episode there may be nearing its close. It certainly no longer determines the course of events. The missionary movement brought the gospel to
Africa and brought the enlightenment with it. Africans took the gospel and they took something from the enlightenment and the extent to which Africa shares in the enlightenment is to a large extent due to the missionary contribution. But as we look at the continent at the beginning of the 21st century with its burgeoning Christian communities, we must conclude that part of the strength of Christianity today in Africa is the fact that it is independent of the enlightenment.
The evidence is plentiful in country after country that African Christian practice now recognizes the need for Christ to fill the world as Africans see the world, to be applied to entities and areas of life that the old theology never had anything convincing to say to, to cope with the open frontier between the empirical and spiritual worlds with its insistent crossings and re-crossings. No longer is it the African instituted or spiritual churches who take the lead in
this. They've been quite outflanked by the charismatic movement which now finds a firm base of support in the old denominational churches as well as in countless new churches and ministries. In effect, all these use the same maps of the spiritual universe. Pastoral and evangelistic practice is in process of transformation, but there's still no adequate theology to express the change. The framework of theology inherited from the West, still the staple product in the Africans live in. There's
now plenty of church practice that takes the universe that universe seriously and seeks to demonstrate the power and love of Christ within that universe, but there's also a great deal of confusion and ambiguity. Some of the confusion comes from aspects of the charismatic movement that have been imported and can have a baleful effect when applied near the African open frontier. Alongside the proclamation and the demonstration of Christ's deliverance from the entire range of evil powers, there's
another message that prosperity and health is the normal state of the true Christian life. What's the outcome when prosperity does not follow? Concern leads to anxiety. Anxiety leads to suspicion. If I have not received the blessing, who is responsible? I mentally go through the list of people who may be impeding me. Suspicion is the very seedbed of witchcraft accusation and hatred is the very essence of witchcraft itself. And so what brought delighted liberation at one stage
turns back again into bondage. The context in which the new ministries have arisen has also produced a tendency to deal with the demonic solely in terms of individual pathology. This can mask its presence in the way that societies, including the church, are organized, what Paul calls the principalities and powers. Not to speak of the mystery of iniquity. It could inhibit African Christian thinking from grappling with the massive eruptions of evil that appear, such as genocide. Western
Christian theology is still wrestling with the fact of the Holocaust, the systematic murder of millions of Jews and the attempt to exterminate the race. African theology has to deal with the genocide in Rwanda and above all how this happened in our own day in what by most calculations was the most Christian country in Africa. A coherent theology of the open frontier between the empirical and the spiritual worlds could immeasurably develop ecumenical understanding of the nature of
evil. I wish I had time to look at some of the other questions where African theology will have to do things for the sake of African Christianity that could be of worldwide benefit, not just local. I, the theological vigor that will be needed in the 21st century becomes evident when we consider the work that the interaction with the cultures of Asia will bring. In India, for instance, perhaps the most testing environment in which the Christian faith
has yet had to survive. Or the other Christian communities that stretches from the Himalayas through Southeast Asia which has appeared only in the last century. There's never been such a call for devout minds with a mastery of scripture, an awareness of earlier Christian thinking and as confident an apprehension of the cultural traditions and realities of life of the southern continents as was once brought to Hellenistic Roman civilization. We have no time to consider what those implications
would be. If the church is Christ's body, if the picture that we have described from the epistle to the Ephesians of the relation of the different cultural presences in the body is neither of uniformity nor of separated diversity but of mutual possession, then the fullness of Christ's stature is achieved only as Hellenistic and Jewish cultures come together in the one body and as the theological, as the fullness, the fullness is achieved as the other cultures come
into the same body. And theological activity in Africa and Asia is not a matter of indifference to the Church of the West. We are one body and the health of the whole is involved. True sharing of academic resources would be a small step towards the enjoyment of riches that will be available in the body of Christ as his people from all over the world grow up in him. And the discoveries about Christ that are made in
the African and Asian and Latin American heartlands will belong to us all. [applause]