In the course of my post-graduate studies in Rome, I came home to do research. At some point during an evening conversation with my father, I asked him: "Papa, why did you abandon the gods of our ancestors?" He looked at me with very penetrating eyes and said: "My son, Fada, I did not abandon the God of my ancestors. I saw Jesus preached to me by the catechist and the missionaries, as the Son of God, who came into this world, did wonderful things, was killed but he rose from the dead. I believed in Him and since then, I have followed him." His answer brought to my mind clearly that even as Christians in Nigeria, we still retain faith in God who is the same God that our ancestors worshiped". . . It seems to me that we still need to do more serious theological reflection on what conversion to Christianity means for our people who asked for baptism and became members of the church.
The passage above, taken from Cardinal John Onaiyekan’s book on interreligious dialogue in Africa, captures some of the important issues which this essay sets out to address. The first one is whether or not Onaiyekan’s father and people like him who converted to Christianity made a commitment to a different God than the one or the ones their ancestors in Africa worshipped before the more recent arrival of Christianity to the continent or before they were converted or became Christians. The second question is whether embracing Jesus Christ as “the Son of God who came into this world” changed, can change, or should change anything in the way Africans perceive and or relate to the divine reality. A third issue is to ascertain what in the end conversion to Christianity, in the words of Cardinal Onaiyekan, “means for our people,” that is, for Africans. Although these are old questions in African theological and religious studies discourse, they have refused to go away because they are very important to what it means to be a Christian in Africa and to the understanding of Christianity itself on the continent. The question of God in African Christianity has persisted not only because the God-problem is one which is endemic in Christianity itself, part of its DNA so to speak, but also and especially because that question is an important subset of a much larger question about African identity—an issue which has been extensively addressed in African post-colonial literature and in African post-colonial religious discourse. One must therefore first unpack these complicated layers of issues, including questions about Christian presence in Africa and the question of African identity, to be able to arrive at the God-question, which is our interest in this essay.
A Larger View of the Situation
From Chinua Achebe to Ferdinand Oyono, from Wole Soyinka to Leopold Senghor to Ngugi Wa Thiong’o, many African writers, especially of the generation before and immediately after Independence in the 1960s, have spent considerable intellectual and literary energy trying to attend to the roots of the sense of alienation and the crises of identity which many Africans feel about their predicament as a result of the devastating European negative conceptions of Africa and of the practical implementation of those negative ideas through policies of governance, commerce, and administration in Africa. For the European mind, Africa has always been, in the words of Achebe, “a place of negation,” a place from which not much good can come or is expected. This is a mindset which informed European slaving and colonial ventures in Africa. It was also at the root of some of the missionary ventures to Africa. African writers have challenged this Western representation of their continent through their writings. In fact, much of African post-colonial literature until very recently was devoted to this effort. Achebe, in his famous critique of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, notes, for example, that books like Conrad’s novella have helped to create and foster racist and denigrating stereotypes about Africa which in Conrad’s work, according to Achebe, is portrayed “as a metaphysical battlefield devoid of all recognizable humanity, into which the wandering European enters at his peril.” For Achebe, the real question in this novel “is the dehumanization of Africa and Africans which this age-long attitude has fostered and continues to foster in the world.” Achebe himself was stirred to literary creation by realizing that his own humanity as an individual was called into question by the negative impression of Africa that he encountered in Conrad’s novella and in the work of other European writers who had “located their imaginings in his continent of origin.”
Achebe, of course, is not alone in his response to European negative imaginings about Africa or in the attempt to “set the records straight” about the continent’s cultural and historical past. The well-known movement, négritude, is another example from Francophone Africa to address the issue of African identity and cultural alienation. Négritude as a movement in literature, politics, and the arts is a self-conscious attempt by African intellectuals to redirect African thoughts and expressions both to the recovery of the past and to a creative future which enhances African life and African prospects in the world. The dilemma which Francophone writers were faced with is very vividly expressed in many novels from that part of Africa. For example, in a haunting passage from Ferdinand Oyono’s Houseboy, we hear Toundi, the Cameroonian houseboy to the French commandant, now at his point of death in Guinea, bemoan his life when he asks, “Brother, what are we black men who are called French?” He had fled to the Guinean jungles to escape further punishment from his erstwhile colonial masters who were bent on torturing him to death because he had come to know too much about the dubious immoral and adulterous ways of his French masters and their wives. Toundi had devoted a lot of his energy to serving, first, the French priests whom he had initially seen as representing everything good in religion. At the death of Fr. Gilbert, his beloved mentor, he continued to serve Fr. Vandermayer (the former assistant, now made parish priest) but soon realizes that Fr. Vandermayer did not act like a priest and was very racist and condescending to the natives. He transfers his services to the commandant who initially represented for him the ideal of what a human being and a French citizen should be. The French policy of assimilation had given the natives the impression that they were equally French with the French no matter where they were born. Toundi and his fellow Cameroonian servants and workers in the French colonial service were soon in their various ways to discover that assimilation meant very little and that the promise of equality, liberty, and fraternity was not one which extended to them, African French women and men. It was a complete lie. The French would never see the Africans as French or as equally human. On the contrary, as one African author puts it for the European mind, Africa, before its more recent encounter with Europe, was a “dark continent of savages living in primitive jungles with other wild animals. Africans were said to be without industry, religion, history, and even without the capacity to reason.” The end result of such views as this is the much-talked about anthropological crisis in Africa. As one prominent African author puts it, “anthropological self-doubt is perhaps the most embracing factor in Africa.” African “self-appreciation as fully human, with many God-given intellectual and spiritual gifts as those of other people, has been severely diminished or in some cases almost destroyed. . . . All of this contributes to the challenge of African identity.”
Aside from literature, the other area in which the question of European disruption of African life is raised most loudly is religion. To understand what the issues are in this area let us first consider this exchange between Mazi Mbonu Ojike and an unnamed missionary to Africa. Ojike was one of the foremost and earliest advocates for Nigerian Independence from Britain. Like many of Africa’s nationalists of his generation, he had studied in the United States. While in the United States he developed a very critical attitude both to European imperialism in Africa and to European missionary ventures in Africa which like his many peers at the time he had come to associate with the colonial intentions of Europe in Africa. Here is an interesting dialogue between Ojike and an unnamed missionary to Nigeria, an encounter which took place at a dinner party, given in honor of the European missionary who happened to be visiting Brooklyn, New York, while Ojike was in the United States in the 1940s.
Ojike: “What is the future of Christianity in Africa”?
Missionary: “Just as Europe is now christianized; Africa will eventually be christianized.”
Ojike: “You mean that Muslims and Omenanans will have to be converted to your Christian ways?”
Missionary: “Not by force! Christ said, ‘I am the way, the truth and the life. No one cometh unto the Father but by me.’ So, you have it in the Master’s own words.”
Ojike: “Why do you go to Africa to preach to people whose religion produces better results than yours?”
Missionary: “We were sent.”
Ojike: “By whom”?
Missionary: “By God.”
Ojike: “Suppose we had come to Europe in the twelfth century and claimed we were sent, what would you have thought of us?”
Missionary: “But you were not sent.”
Mbonu Ojike ends his narration of this dialogue by asserting that European missionaries to Africa refused to recognize the laws and ideals of the African people and have instead gone on to demolish the “basic African moral fabric.” Although Ojike acknowledges the contribution of European missionaries to education and healthcare on the continent, he maintains that none of these contributions “can help a people who have been denied religious, social, political, and economic freedom.” Finally, he argues that “the superimposed religion [i.e., Christianity] has not touched and can never permeate the depth of the African mind because its practice and theories do not square with the fundamentals of African society. Yet it renders the African impotent because it imprisons his deeper culture.”
Before we move any further, it is important to note that Ojike’s assessment of Islam in this book is completely opposite to his views of Christianity. For Ojike, although Islam came to Africa from outside as did Christianity, it “has remained a people’s religion, the religion of practical brotherhood.” Ojike contends that “culturally, Islam fits Africa more than Christianity because it does not snub African culture.” Ojike mentions a few areas where this is the case. First is the area of God-language and discourse. Even though the name for God in Islam, Allah, is different from the local African names for God, Islam does not introduce “a new religious philosophy” to Africa. The difference for Ojike “is in Language, not in principle. Since like Muslims who believe that there is no god but God (Allah) . . . no African has ever believed that there are two or a thousand gods.” Another area of fit between Islam and African Traditional Religion, according to Ojike, is in the area of ethics. “Mahammedan ethics,” says Ojike, “does not widely conflict with the social ethics of Africa.” In summary, Ojike argues that the effect of Islam “in African societies is largely constructive” because Islam has “used its political power and cultural liberality to preserve and strengthen African social institutions.” The result of this is that “whereas Christian missionaries do not consider themselves Africans, Moslems have become Africanized. Since the nineteenth century no Mohammedan nation has attacked Africa or organized religious campaigns to convert us to its faith.”
In Ojike’s presentation of Christianity in Africa we see some very notable points, areas of contention among some African elite about Christianity in Africa, namely, whether and to what extent Christianity has permeated or can “permeate the African mind” already cultivated and taken hold of by traditional African beliefs; whether and to what extent Christianity does “square with the fundamentals of African society”; whether Christianity does indeed render the African “impotent” by imprisoning the “deeper culture” of the African. The question then is whether the African can be truly African and Christian at the same time. This question implies an assumption that there is something about Africa and Christianity which makes them antithetical to each other to the point where being one would pose problems for, or be an obstacle to, being the other. Also implied is the assumption that Christianity is something foreign to the African soul or soil, unlike Islam which in spite of its presence in Africa largely “through military crusades” has remained “a people’s religion,” which is “much more capable [than Christianity] of getting a rapid control over the people” For Africans, like Ojike, who think of Christianity as a foreign religion, the onus then is on the Christian faith to prove itself as either something to be taken seriously in Africa or as a non-disruptor of the African religious and social space. There is another layer to this discourse: when Ojike, the African nationalist and freedom fighter, hears the word Christianity, he immediately hears colonialism, exploitation, spoilage, and disruption-views he would not associate with Islam in Africa. He immediately equates Christian presence with Europeanism and the quest of Europe to civilize Africa and rescue it from its “barbaric and uncivilized” ways. Thus, the questions this encounter raises are many and as already shown above, they arise in three key areas—culture, ethics, and the foundation of all theistic concerns, “God” and what that word means and what it represents. In this work, I will remain largely with the latter issue, that is with the question of God and God-language in African Christian religious discourse.
The Questions Persist
The questions of identity and relevance, and the assumption of some level of incommensurability between Africa and Christianity are still contemporary, as are the ideas, among some people, of the foreignness of Christianity to Africa and the belief that Christianity is a spoiler and destabilizer of the African religious and cultural landscape. Like Mazi Mbonu Ojike before him, Laurenti Magesa, a contemporary African theologian, also asserts that Christian “missionary theology and Christianity were misled by the antiquity and concreteness of the forms of belief and practices of African religion into thinking that Christianity revealed meanings and worlds not available in African Religion.” For this theologian, missionary Christianity “erroneously” believed that there was discontinuity between Christianity and African cultures. On this view, therefore, the non-necessity of Christianity in Africa is built on the assumption that Christianity brings nothing new to the table in Africa. Its role as agent of transformation in Africa would thus, on this account, be largely negative since it upsets an African religious system which provides a system of beliefs and guides for the construction of abundant life in Africa.
The question of the foreignness of Christianity and its status as an interloper arises on several grounds. First, this question is raised from the understanding of Africa as Black Africa or Africa south of the Sahara. Unfortunately, this kind of thinking has suffocated theological reflection in African theology. African theologians therefore need to reclaim the Christianity of Cyril of Alexandria, Origen of Alexandria, Cyprian of Carthage, Tertullian, Augustine of Hippo, the African Martyrs of North Africa, like Felicity and Perpetua, etc. African Christianity covers “all early forms of Christianity in the first millennium in Egypt, Sudan, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Libya, Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco and possibly further south than we now know.” Thus, as Thomas Oden points out, Christianity must be historically considered as African Traditional Religion. The second reason for pointing to Christianity as a foreign religion on African soil is the assumed “longevity” of African Traditional Religion. The notion of tradition which is attached to African primal religions creates the impression that these religions have always been there in an almost ahistorical way, from a “mythological past.” However, such a view, as Cardinal John Onaiyekan has pointed out, fails to admit that the so-called African traditional religions “are themselves products of historical evolution,” with their own histories “in which events, personalities and normal contingencies of time and space . . . played their parts. That this history can no longer be traced does not mean it did not exist.” In other words, to cloak these religions with an aura of sacred infallibility and untouchability to the point where anyone who challenges their hold on African life is a spoiler, and therefore unacceptable. The third reason why Christianity is seen as a spoiler for African intellectuals like Ojike and Magesa is because in much of Africa the tradition is religious, and religion is the tradition. The two are intricately linked with one another. Magesa notes that African Traditional Religion is a worldview and “a lived” religion as opposed to “a doctrinal” one. People are “born into it and learn from it from childhood through all their lives by socialization. Since it involves the whole of life, whatever one thinks, says, or does is religious or, at least, can have religious implications. At all times in a person’s life, a religious consciousness is always explicitly or implicitly present. In no way is anything understood apart from the context or certain view of God, the ancestors, and the spirits; in no way is any thought, word, or act understood except in terms of good and bad (and one may add, understood within this religion and tradition) in the sense that such an attitude or behavior either enhances or diminishes life.”
When Christianity comes into such a space with rival claims about reality, it creates a tense situation. This is especially so in Africa where the method of Christian arrival in modern Africa sometimes made it appear as no more than an agent of Western imperialism. Thus, often when some scholars speak of missionary Christianity, they speak of it as a cultural component to the imperial conquests of Africa and as a reality which, embraced deeply, disrupts African personal and social identities. These situations combine to various degrees to create the question which one hears often: can one be both Christian and African? If one can isolate the tradition from the primal religions of Africa, one immediately realizes that the question is at heart more political than anything else. The issue is therefore whether my being an African should amount to my being an adherent of African primal religions with all the ethos it espouses. What difference does it make to me and my identity that I no longer worship like my grandfather did, that I have chosen instead to have faith in Jesus Christ as God’s offer of salvation and grace to everyone, including Africans? At what point should a Christian in Africa feel free to discard an aspect of the worldviews he has inherited from primal religions without being labelled a renegade? At what point is the Christian community or Church free to move against a practice and worldview in African societies (as it does elsewhere) without being seen to be going against African traditions and thus to be a destabilizing force for African societies? Both, the question John Onaiyekan puts to his father and the answer the older Onaiyekan gives to his son reflect this sense of unease in African religiosity. Nowhere is this unease more evident than in the question of God and in the discourse on God in African theology and in African religious studies.
God in Contemporary African Religious and Theological Discourse
The God-question has continued to be a very important one in African religious/theological discourse for several reasons. First is the obvious fact that God is the central issue in the Christian faith and that the reality of Jesus, his life and death and the Christian confession of him as “true God and true man,” brings up the question of God within Christianity itself and in Christian relationships with other faiths or worldviews. Secondly, for many Africans, the question, as Bolaji Idowu put it long ago, is whether African Christians “have been introduced to a completely new God Who is absolutely unrelated to their past” by Christian evangelization and conversion. Aside from the obvious theological importance of this issue, how one addresses this matter has obvious cultural weight. This is evident in Ojike’s preference of Islam over Christianity in Africa. For him, Islam did not claim to bring a new God to Africa. The difference between Allah and God in Africa is only a semantic difference. Like Islam, African Traditional Religion knows only one God, whereas Christianity claims to bring a different and perhaps superior deity who does not accept the reality and existence of others. Christians being “sent” in the name of this God have developed a kind of imperialism which is total because it is both theological, ethical, and cultural. A third important aspect of the God-problem and God-discourse in African religious space is therefore the claim by some early European missionaries and anthropologists to Africa that Africans had no God or the sense of God. As we have already noted, African intellectuals of all stripes have worked hard to refute this assertion and to assert the counterclaim that Africans already knew God and, for some, that Christianity had nothing to teach the African about God.
Bolaji Idowu, one of the pioneers of African theology and one-time Primate of the Methodist Church in Nigeria, states in response to this question that it is false to claim that Christianity had introduced Africans to a completely new God who is totally unrelated to their history. Idowu asserts that “the God of redemption is the God of Creation . . . He is the same God.” And since God had revealed himself to Africans prior to Christianity, the task of theology in Africa “is to show in what ways this revelation has occurred,” as well as to establish the link between the natural revelation of God in Africa and in biblical revelation. Fourth, the urgency of the God-question in Africa is heightened by the fact that African Traditional Religion continues to be an influential and increasingly vocal substratum and neighbor of Christianity and in some cases a violent and uncompromising challenger to the Christian presence and worldview in Africa. As Christianity grows in Africa and as African Traditional Religion makes a significant demographic resurgence in many parts of the continent so does the tension grow between it and African Traditional Religion on one hand and Islam on the other. In some parts of Africa, adherents of African worldviews who refuse to accept any distinction between African traditions and African religion or who believe that African primal religions are indeed African traditional religions have sometimes resorted to violence to force local Christians to observe some rituals or festivities which Christians consider antithetical to their faith. Ogbu Kalu, the late Nigeria theologian and Church historian, wrote about a conflict in the Aku community in Northern Igboland between adherents of African Traditional Religion and the local Catholic community over celebrations related to the Odo ancestral cult. In this account, Ogbu Kalu shows the continuing and deepening conflicts between Christianity and African Traditional Religion and the devastating effects it can have on intra-community harmony and peace. There appears to be a new wave of Christian “persecution” in Africa not only from Islamist fundamentalists like Boko Haram in Nigeria but from some elements in African traditional societies who strongly believe that Christianity is not native to Africa and that it disrupts African life. These conflicts are becoming rampant now that the European empires which supported Christianity in Africa are dead “and the Western value-setting of the Christian faith [is] largely rejected.” Christians are becoming soft targets to all sorts of militant groups on the continent—from Kenya to Nigeria and many places in-between. At the heart of these tensions is God.
God, the Problem
The main issues in the discourse on God in African theology include, as already indicated above, whether Africans knew God before the advent of Christianity on the continent, whether the term or notion “God” referred to the same idea in both religious contexts, and whether in the African context, the word God, referred to a singular entity who is “supreme” and “almighty,” and universally recognized in all of Africa or in some significant sections of the continent. Bolaji Idowu’s answer to the question whether pre-Christian Africans had knowledge of God is a resounding yes. God revealed himself to Africans, prior to Christianity, in many ways. Africans had always known and worshipped God. Agbonkhianmeghe E. Orobator, the Nigerian Jesuit scholar, notes pointedly that Africans, “know God from birth,” as they grow up in “an environment filled with many experiences of God,” and “live in communion with many spiritual beings and entities.” Africans are “never isolated from faith,” and “share space with God, the Supreme Being.” Like Idowu, Orobator maintains that “God is not a stranger to Africans” and that although African conceptions of God may be different from “the Western ideas of God,” they “remain invaluable for an interpretation and understanding of God in African Christianity and any attempt to talk about God, that is to do theology in Africa.”
What Orobator is pointing to is to the reality of what Adrian Hastings and Kwame Bediako have also noted, namely, the advantage which African theologians have over their Western counterparts of having a living primal religion as dialogue partner in matters of faith. The one gain from this situation is that for the African theologian working in an Africa which is replete with theistic concerns there is always an abundance of ideas from African Traditional Religion to help his or her speculation concerning the divine reality. There too comes the challenge whether and to what extent these ideas can help to explain the divine mystery or whether these African ideas need elaboration or purification or even outright repudiation from the point of view of Christian revelation. The Congolese-born theologian, Bénézet Bujo, also notes that African societies ascribe much of the same attributes to God which are found in Christianity and in some other religions. Speaking of the Masai of East Africa, for example, Bujo asserts that “the Masai are monotheistic,” and that for them, “God is a spiritual being, creator of all things, almighty, ubiquitous, omniscient, merciful, and eternal. Because he rules everything, he is also the guardian of moral laws and of morality in general.” Other theologians have also asserted that the divine attributes in many African communities show that Africans worship the same God as the God of Christian revelation and that there is continuity between African Traditional Religion and Christianity on the God- question. God is one, as Idowu says, even though he reveals himself to every people in various modes. Recall that this is basically the same response that the older Onaiyekan gave to his son who had asked to know why his father “abandoned the gods of our ancestors” through his conversion to Christianity. “I did not abandon the God of my ancestors,” the older Onaiyekan replied. “I saw Jesus preached to me by the catechist and the missionaries, as the Son of God, who came into this world, did wonderful things, was killed but he rose from the dead. I believed in Him and since then, I have followed him.” John Onaiyekan’s own position following the encounter with his father summarizes the views of some African intellectuals and religious leaders: “We still retain faith in God who is the same God that our ancestors worshipped.”
A related question to that of the sameness of God in Christianity and African Traditional Religion in the discourse on God in Africa is whether pre-Christian Africans had the idea of a Supreme God, akin to that idea in Christianity. For Idowu, the God of Yoruba religion is unique, supreme, and absolute. Emefie Ikenga Metuh makes the same claim for the Igbo by asserting that among the Igbo there is a layered world. At the apex of this world sits Chukwu, or Chineke, then come the Spirit world and then the human world. Thus, the African spiritual world while admitting of a Supreme God who creates and rules everything, also has room for lesser (created) divinities who in their various ways help God in the governance of creation. This is a widely shared view among many African theologians. The best known exponent of this view of God in African religion is the Kenyan Protestant theologian John Mbiti who speaks of the idea of the Supreme God as one which has “sprung independently out of African reflection of God” and which is universally shared among African peoples. According to Mbiti, “African soil is rich enough to have germinated its own original religious perception. It is remarkable that in spite of great distances separating peoples of one region from those of another, there are sufficient elements of belief which make it possible to discuss African concepts of God as a unity and on a continental scale.”
There are, however, some voices among African scholars who argue that scholars like Mbiti and Metuh and other African religious apologists are not right in the claim that African Traditional Religions harbored universally the idea of a Supreme God. M. J. C. Echeruo argues that no such idea existed among the Igbo, and that what happened was a recent phenomenon in which, as a result of the ascendency of the Ibin Upkabi cult in Arochukwu in Eastern Nigeria, a regional deity, Chukwu, was enthroned over other deities in Igbo land. Chukwu in fact won out over the Igwe ka ala cult in Umunneoha, in the East Central zone of Igboland. Wole Soyinka also contests the idea of Olodumare as supreme God among the Yoruba and rather pleads for the respect of the polytheistic imagination of the Yoruba religion. He argues that “affirmation of the existence of a Supreme God belongs to Christianity and that the African is not obliged to subject himself to a supreme Being in order to accomplish his humanity.” But as I have already noted, and as the theologian Bede Ukwuije points out, “the advantage of the apologetics of African monotheism is that it affirms the necessity to move away from the disdain of African religious traditions . . . it highlights the fact that a major characteristic of the Christian faith is to reveal to the human being that he/she is already in contact with God in his/her experience. If it is true that no culture is totally closed to God, then the presentation of the Christian God can assume the features of African cultures.”
The issue with the discourse on God in African theology is, however, not whether Africans have a sense of the divine or not, nor whether they “know God’ or not. It is not even whether there is an idea of a Supreme God which predates the Christian presence in Africa or not, or how universal this idea was. The question is whether the reality which the designation points to is the same in Christianity and African Traditional Religion and to what extent. John Onaiyekan’s summation of his father’s answer to his question, “we still retain faith in God who is the same God that our ancestors worshipped” while correct on one account, is problematic on another. I contend that the notions of God in both worldviews are very different, they are not the same. As Ukwuije puts it, one limitation of the apologetic of African monotheism in African theology is that “it fails to confess the specificity of the Christian God. Because it pursues the project of self-defense and justification of African cultures and traditions, this theology toes the line of Western theism that discusses God without God’s revelation in Jesus Christ.” To put it another way, although it is true that Europeans or even Christianity itself did not teach Africans the sense of the divine it is equally not true that when Africans in African Traditional Religions talk about God they mean exactly the God of Jesus Christ, that is, the nature of the divine reality as revealed in Jesus Christ. The God of Jesus Christ is not like the deities that are talked about in African religions or in any other religion in the world. Though they share some attributes, the understanding of God in African Traditional Religion is not sufficient for Christian life and ethics in Africa, therefore, as James Owino-Kombo states, “African inculturation theology is obligated to clarify how God has been made known to the entire world and to all men without losing sight of the fact that this God appeared in the flesh . . . only there did God actually become manifest.” The God Jesus revealed to the world is different from that notion in every tradition or philosophy, including Africa, and to deny this is to rob Christianity of the one transformative forces it has for itself and for African societies at large.
To bring further clarity to the God-question in Africa I want to turn briefly to the thought of Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI on the matter. Doing so should not be construed as bringing in an outsider to a purely African problem. In first place, the question of God and the way it pertains to local contexts in the various parts of the world is not a problem only in Africa or for African alone. Christian presence raises the question of God everywhere and in every context. Secondly, I believe that Ratzinger/Benedict XVI has a viewpoint on this issue which is as valid in Europe, Asia, and elsewhere as it is valid in Africa because it represents a truly Christian viewpoint regarding God. This viewpoint is faithful to the Christian tradition and understanding on God. Thus, although, to my knowledge, Ratzinger never entered into any open and direct discussion with any African theologian on the God-question, his views interrogate a number of assertions such as we have seen above and consequently bring clarity, from a Christian viewpoint, to the matter of God and God-language in African Christianity. His views agree with my own and are very succinctly stated as only Joseph Ratzinger can do.
Joseph Ratzinger on God
In the first of his three-volume work, Jesus of Nazareth, Pope Benedict XVI points out that the most important thing Jesus contributed to the world is a unique sense of God. As he puts it, Jesus has brought God to the world: “He has brought the God who formerly unveiled his countenance gradually first, to Abraham, then to Moses and the prophets, and then in the wisdom teacher—the God who reveals his face barely in Israel even though he was also honored among the pagans in various shadowy guises. It is this God, the God Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the true God, whom he has brought to the nations of the earth.” In an earlier book, Introduction to Christianity, Ratzinger had argued that an essential characteristic of God, the one whom Jesus calls “Father” is that he is personal. God by his name is personal. This implies not only that we can experience God beyond all other experience, but also that he can express and communicate himself: in Jesus Christ God has also shown himself to be universal. In bringing the gift of the God of Israel to the nations, Jesus has brought the gift of universality so that through him all the nations “recognize Israel’s Scripture as his word, the word of the living God. . . . This universality, this faith in the one God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob—extended now in Jesus’ new family and all nations over the bonds of descent according to the flesh—is the fruit of Jesus’ work. It is what proves him to be the Messiah. It signals a new integration of messianic promise that is based on Moses and the prophets, but also opens them up in a completely new way.” The church is the vehicle of this new universalism “whose only admission requirement is communion with Jesus, communion in God’s will.” This universalization of Israel’s faith and hope and the concomitant liberation from the letter of the law loses its historical weight and its whole foundation if Jesus is interpreted merely as a liberal Reform Rabbi and not as Son of God who has authority from God.
Jesus at the Center
At the center of the discussion of God in African theology is Jesus. For the Christian, Christology is an integral part of theology. The meaning of the idea of God cannot be sought or obtained without recourse to Jesus, who he is, and what he teaches or reveals about the nature of God. For Christians, Jesus not only reveals the face of God; he is, as Edward Schillebeeckx puts it, the human face of God. Reflecting on the Gospel of John, Ratzinger points out that John “presents the Lord Jesus as the real living name of God. In him is fulfilled what a mere name could never in the end fulfill. In him the meaning of the discussion of the name of God has reached its goal, and so, too, has that which was always meant and intended by the idea of the name of God. . . . In him, God has become him who can be invoked.” Christian faith professes that Jesus is “God from God, true God from true God,” who not only shows us the face of God but also “shows us the path that we have to take.” Comparing Jesus to Moses, Ratzinger states that although Moses’ immediate relation to God made him the great mediator of revelation, the mediator of the covenant, it has its limits. Moses did not behold God’s face, even though God permits him to enter his presence and “speak with God as with a friend.” Thus, it is in Jesus that the promise of a new prophet which Moses himself had made is fulfilled. Jesus lives before the face of God not just as a friend “but as a Son. He lives in the face of the most intimate unity with the Father.”
Ratzinger is not by any means implying that Jesus was the first nor the only one to introduce the idea of God. What he refers to here, as in other areas of his work, is the uniqueness of the Christian notion of God. The God of Jesus is trinitarian. He is personal and he is universal. Catholic tradition has always acknowledged God’s presence and revelation in human societies everywhere, including Africa. In fact, Pope Benedict himself in his homily at the opening Mass of the Second African Synod on October 4, 2009 said as much when he stated that “the absolute Lordship of God is one of the salient and unifying features of the African culture.” What he is inviting his readers to do in his book on Jesus of Nazareth, something very much necessary for our discussion here, is to pay attention to the unique features of Jesus’ revelation about God. As Bede Ukwuije points out, we are not engaged here in a defense of “the Christian God” against “the African God.” It is not enough to ask how one can present God to Africa “that this God might correspond to the God of African Traditional Religion or to the God Africans knew before the coming of Christianity.” The question, Ukwuije argues, should be how Africans can confess the God who revealed himself in Jesus Christ and in the activities of the Holy Spirit in a way that such confession can make them more humane. Such a theology, Ukwuije concludes, “assumes dogmatic responsibility by helping Christians to confess their faith in such a way that corresponds to the way of being of the trinitarian God.”
The God of Jesus is new in every culture, including the African culture, and what we believe about him has important consequences concerning the way we live our lives here and the way we organize society. Thus, as James Owino-Kombo argues, “what African Christians need is not the African concept of God. What African Christians need is a clear picture of the Christian view of God.” And yet, this is what is often lacking in much of African theological discourse. It is not enough to enumerate the attributes of God. For theology to be Christian, it needs to draw its lessons from Scripture and from the Christian tradition on God. What, for example, is the ethical import of the doctrine of the Trinity for Africa? What lessons are there for Africa in the God which Jesus Christ taught about in the parables? Consider the rich and yet untapped lessons which lie hidden in such great parables as the story of the prodigal son/prodigal father, or the parable of the Good Samaritan. Consider also the moral motivations which are implicit about the God who like the poor widow gives everything she has to recover a lost coin, the God who lets his sun shine on everyone, the good, the bad, and the terribly unlovable. What lesson is there for an African Church, family of God, which draws on Jesus’ saying in John 3:16 and many other such passages? How would the praxis of Jesus with regard to women and the marginalized of society in his day affect the construal of relationships in Christian Africa? What warrant would the teaching of Jesus on forgiveness, personal and communal, provide for the ethics of forgiveness among Africans? Because the God of Jesus is yet unknown, every renewal of the life and mission of the Church must begin with revisiting Jesus’ God. African theology needs a robust treatment of God based on the Christian Scriptures and Tradition. And, to the extent that it can get closer to the image and understanding of the one Jesus called his Father, and which the entire New Testament teaches about, it will it be able to live right and do right in this world, building a church that is indeed a family of God. In other words, twenty-five years after Ecclesia in Africa, the most important project of the church, family of God in Africa is still an evangelizing project. But this project can succeed only it follows “without compromise in the footsteps of Jesus Christ, to seek God.” Since “an essential task of the church is to bring the message of the Gospel to the heart of African societies, to lead the people to the vision of God,” this task has important implications for some other aspects of the life of the church as family of God in Africa, including the understanding of the human person in Africa (anthropology), and the identity and relevance of Christianity to African societies.
Some Ethical Implications of Belief in the God of Jesus
Jesus not only reveals the true nature of God. He also reveals to us the fullness, nature and meaning of the human person. Africa is facing “an anthropological crisis” as Pope Benedict and other observers of Africa have pointed out. The causes and symptoms of this impoverishment and diminishment of the human person in Africa—poverty, wars, violence, conflicts, racist xenophobia, segregation and division of peoples into classes and castes, and denial of human rights in various forms, still play a large role in the world of human relations in many parts of the continent. African societies sometimes appear to be sitting on a keg of gunpowder which is ready to explode at the slightest provocation. To counter this situation, as Pope Benedict XVI points out, “Africa will have to rediscover and promote a concept of the person and his or her relationship with reality that is the fruit of a profound spiritual renewal.”
The much-desired anthropological renewal that is needed in Africa is not happening because the theological renewal has not yet begun. This is to say that because the African Church has not been able to adequately transmit the unique Christian understanding of God in Africa it has also had very little success with improving the anthropological situation and eradicating the anthropological poverty which the Pope speaks about in Africae Munus. African episcopal conferences, bishops, and other Church leaders often write about the need to respect human rights without providing a firm foundation for such assertions in a sustained manner, both in theology and catechesis. It is of very little use expending ecclesial energies working on poverty alleviation and relief matters when people’s consciences have not been formed regarding the basis for such undertakings. These all amount to mere firefighting, cutting out the brush fires when one has not attended to the very cause and source of the fire. One important source of the inferno in Africa is that African traditional societies were largely organized on the understanding that all human beings are not created equal and therefore are not of equal importance. In fact, not only has Christianity in Africa been unable to counter such situations, it has sometimes seemed to embrace this understanding and even reinforce it through various practices as the over-hierarchization of the Church itself. But an African Christian anthropology, properly so-called, in fact offers an alternative vision when it asserts that all human beings are created in the image and likeness of God, are redeemed by and destined for God, and that God’s love is inclusive of all persons and is for all. “Creation in the image of God confers dignity and makes everyone equally valuable. As the foundation of human dignity, ‘it dictates who is to be considered worthy: every individual, regardless of condition’ and highlights human equality, regardless of functional importance.”
To say that we need an expanded anthropology for African theology and life is to say that there must be more discussion about the reality of our creaturehood in God, our sinfulness, our being redeemed in Christ, grace, etc. If these issues are adequately addressed, then the much-vaunted African discussions on solidarity and relatedness would be much more significant and effective than is the case now and the idea of the church as family of God would make more sense and be more effective in transforming African societies. Africa’s culture of the “big man” in which some people see themselves as entitled to the goods of the world while others do with the leftovers, is a result of a severely limited understanding of the human person. So are Africa’s many caste systems, ethnic rivalries and violence, and sometimes appalling treatment of women and other human beings considered undesirable by society. This is an area where the church can and must be an agent of transformation. As Pope Benedict notes in his Post-Synodal Exhortation on Africa, “the contribution of Christians will be decisive if their understanding of the faith shapes their understanding of the world. For that to happen, education in the faith is indispensable, lest Christ become just one more name to adorn our theories.”
This education must include not only a robust image of God as Jesus has taught his community, it must also show how his teaching on the fatherhood of God can shape relationships in the very ethnically and socially stratified societies of Africa. The common fatherhood of God and the real bond it creates could be better explained and made the subject of continuous reflection at all levels of the life of the church on the continent. The African love of family is real. Most Africans would normally not want to do harm to members of their family. So, the synod tapped into a deep sentiment when it described the church in Africa as family. The failure to integrate this notion in the African Christian psyche continues to raise important questions for Church family of God in Africa.
EDITORIAL NOTE: This article is excerpted from Joseph Ratzinger and the Future of African Theology, ed. Maurice Ashley Agbaw-Ebai and Matthew Levering (Wipf and Stock, 2021). All rights reserved.
