Routledge Companion to Christianity in Africa

Elias Kifon Bongmba

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781134505845
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christianity

The Routledge Companion to Christianity in Africa offers a multi-disciplinary analysis of the Christian tradition across the African continent and throughout a long historical span. The volume offers historical and thematic essays tracing the introduction of Christianity in Africa, as well as its growth, developments, and effects, including the lived experience of African Christians. Individual chapters address the themes of Christianity and gender, the development of African-initiated churches, the growth of Pentecostalism, and the influence of Christianity on issues of sexuality, music, and public health. This comprehensive volume will serve as a valuable overview and reference work for students and researchers worldwide.

Part I

Selected Historical Perspectives

1

Christianity in North Africa

Elias Kifon

Through years of selecting and editing, guiding and producing this patristic commentary, I learned, to my surprise, how so many of these earliest and wisest lovers and critical readers of sacred Scripture came from Africa. Africa has been the most fertile seedbed of intellectual depth in Christian reflection on Scripture …. I have come to a new respect for the African mind, which means the larger African textual intellectual tradition. These African teachers have already changed us all.¹

Thomas Oden

The beginning of Christianity in North Africa

Africans have articulated two perspectives about Christianity that have historical groundings. The first view is that Christianity is an African religion because Christianity was established in North Africa before it went to Europe and other parts of the world. The second view is that Christianity is a colonial project because modern Christianity came to Africa through extensive and intensive contacts between Africa and Europe. In this chapter, we will concern ourselves with the first viewpoint: Christianity is an African religion because its roots in North Africa go back to apostolic times.

North Africa was a cosmopolitan region that drew people from the Mediterranean region. What we call North Africa spanned all the way from Egypt in the East to Mauritania in the West. North Africa was a rich source of food, wines, olive oil, and wheat that supplied food for the imperial society. Alexander the Great conquered Egypt and Hellenised it and many Greeks settled in Alexandria, named by Ptolemy in honor of Alexander the Conqueror. Roman incursion and domination started in 36 BC and North Africa became a Roman Province in 30 BC. Greek continued to be a dominant language but in Egypt locals spoke the Coptic language and, throughout the region, the Berbers spoke their own language. Both colonial powers, the Greeks and later the Romans, traded in food and medicine. North Africa boasted an early civilization in Carthage that ended in 146 BC but Carthage was later revived and became an important ecclesiastical see at the time of Cyprian. The evangelist Mark is believed to have established the church in North Africa about 62 CE. Alexandria was a thriving intellectual center. The city grew to house important and intellectual institutions of the region including the Catechetical School of Alexandria founded by Pantaenus in 180. John Baur argues that the first leader of the church in Alexandria was Demetrius (189–231). The church grew under his leadership and, at its height, there were some 100 bishops associated with that Patriarchate.² North Africa would produce several ecclesiastical, theological leaders including Pope Victor and Emperor Septimius Severus.³

Christianity thrived in North Africa in both urban and rural areas. Contrary to the view that it was mostly a rural phenomenon, J. Patout Burns Jr. and Robin Jensen have argued that Christianity existed in urban areas as well.⁴ Christians came from all sectors of the society.⁵ Thomas Oden has argued Libyan Christianity was as complex as that found in many regions of the Middle East and Turkey.⁶ North African Christianity did not exist in a religious vacuum because different religious traditions existed and there were temples in many of the cities of North Africa. Egypt had a long religious tradition and these had a lot of influence on Christianity. The Egyptians had many Gods, but many of these traditions were brought together and Osiris became a high God, and Isis was his wife and Horus was their son. In the eschatological vision of this tradition, at death it was Horus who led the good souls to Osiris. Osiris made those people share in his divine essence and immortal status. Isis protected all life. One can also see early seeds of a Trinitarian theology and eschatology that would also develop in the North African church.⁷ In addition to local and Roman religions, Judaism thrived in the region. Prior to the coming of Mark the Evangelist, Jesus had come to Egypt as a little child according to New Testament accounts. One of the first converts from another religion to Christianity was Apollos.⁸

The development of Christianity in Egypt benefitted from the large presence of Jews in the region, especially Alexandria.⁹ The translation of the Hebrew bible into Greek called the Septuagint took place in Alexandria. Alexandria was also a leading center for Gnostic teachings that were suppressed in the fourth century. One of the first Christian leaders in Egypt was Annianus, ordained in 62 CE. Egypt had people of different backgrounds: the local Copts, Jews, and Greeks. The name Copt came from the Arabic spelling of Egypt and came to be used to refer to the people who were not Hellenised. Later, the name Coptic was used to designate what would become the Christian minority group in Egypt after Muslims took over the country.

Egypt was not the only country in North Africa with a strong Christian presence because Cyrene, located in Libya, had strong ties with Jerusalem and Tripolitana and Leptis. Thomas C. Oden has argued that the Christian presence in Libya might have started in the first century and lasted until the seventh century.¹⁰ Libyan presence is recorded in several places in the New Testament including the account of Simon of Cyrene who carried the cross of Jesus.¹¹ His sons, Alexander and Rufus, were part of the early Christian community in Jerusalem. We also know from Acts 2:10, that Jews from Cyrene were present in Jerusalem on the Day of Pentecost. Oden also argues that Lebbaeus, who was also called Thaddeus, might be the same individual as Jude or Judas who was known as the son of James as possibly one of the twelve or among the seventy disciples who became one of the first preachers in Libya and was also Bishop of Pentapolis.¹² Oden argues that Christians from Cyrene included Lucius of Cyrene in Antioch, and Simon the Black. In addition, John Mark, his mother and her brother Barnabas may also have been from Cyrene, and he argues: “Coptic historians hold that Mark returned from the mission in Italy back home to Cyrene, where he converted many Jews and Greeks, and subsequently went to Alexandria where he preached and founded Christian communities.”¹³ While people travelled and took the Christian story, persecution also helped the community to grow, especially during the Scillitan Martyrdom when seven men and five women were killed for refusing to offer sacrifices to the emperor.

The development of monasticism

One of the earliest gifts of the North African Church to the Christian movement was the development of monasticism by Christians who voluntarily gave up all they had and chose a life of devotion, prayer, and communion with God. These people were called the desert fathers and the most renowned of them was Saint Antony of Egypt. We know more about him from his biography written by Athanasius.¹⁴ He was born in Egypt in 251. He took the teachings of Christ about renouncing everything so literally that he decided to give up everything and take up the life of a hermit in the desert. He lived in the desert for twenty years and his action was copied by many in Egypt. This strong indigenous Christian movement would spread from Egypt to other parts of the world. Antony thought he would become a martyr during the persecution of Maximus, but that did not happen. He lived a long life and died in 356. His sister’s home became a center for female cloisters.¹⁵

The story credits Antony with the Monastic tradition in Egypt and subsequently has been challenged by other scholars. For example, James Goehring, has argued against the appropriateness of conclusions which insist that “Antony as the first monk and of Egypt as the source from which his innovation and its developments spread throughout the rest of Christendom.”¹⁶ Goehring argues that the accounts that portray the desert spirituality of the ancient Egyptian world were mythic accounts which created an artificial desert, “the power of the myth is generated through the effective equation of this natural ecological divide with the spiritual separation of the ascetic and the world.”¹⁷ One cannot dismiss Goehring’s concerns because some of the accounts do leave a lot to be desired. For example in Athanasius’s Life of Antony, we are told that some of the Christians who took this desert abode were effective in driving away demons to the extent that the devil himself said: “I now have no place, no weapon, [and] no city. Everywhere there are Christians, and even the desert is already full of monks.”¹⁸ While one can understand the view that these ancient narratives which portray an extraordinary withdrawal of humans from the world into the desert so effectively that the devil complains about his exile from the desert, are unimaginable or even unreasonable, I would argue that these accounts do hint at what perhaps were the extraordinary efforts of these individuals to demonstrate a complete and unadulterated devotion to their faith.

If one ignores the ecology that is portrayed in ancient accounts, they still paint the picture of an emerging spiritual tradition that would define and institutionalize monasticism for the rest of Christian history. Jason Zabarowski has argued that an intellectual tradition emerged from the monastic tradition that would reach “its most complex and stylized expression in the writings of St. Shenoute (c. 348–465 CE), the archimandrite of the White Monastery in Upper Egypt.”¹⁹ He ran an operation that at one point is believed to have about 4000 monks and nuns. He preached in the Coptic language and maintained an extensive writing career and his works have been distributed around the world.²⁰ He was an influential leader who shaped the Coptic Christian tradition and literature for ages to come.

What was an ascetic, unorganized movement received structure with Pachomius. Born in 292, he served in the Roman army at the time of Maximian. He started his spiritual journey in 313 and reportedly lived only on salt and bread. He also engaged in activities that would later be the hallmarks of monastic life. He sang songs and practiced meditation. Twelve years later, he built a monastery in Tabennae and went on to set some rules about the way of life of the community. The monastery operated under the leadership of an abbot. Pachomius died in 343.

The struggle with the Roman authorities: persecution

The term “persecution” has been used to describe the punitive actions taken against Christians who did not follow the religious practices of their day ordered by Roman authorities. Local Roman authorities observed the activities of Christians and occasionally reported them to the emperors. When the Emperor sanctioned punishments for the Christians some of the persecutions were named after the Emperors. Persecutions in the North African church targeted individuals as part of an effort to eliminate the teachings of the new faith. While actions taken by the Emperors against Christians were brutal, and widespread, many of the persecutions were limited in the provinces from which the complaints came and were carried out by local authorities.²¹ Burns and Jensen argue: “Christians were ipso facto potentially on the wrong side of the law, but some local circumstances were required to realize that potentiality: especially popular agitation arising from religious fervor or from superstitious fear occasioned by earthquake, drought, flood, plague, or famine, or, occasionally, in response to Christian enthusiastic provocation.”²² Persecution created and nurtured an atmosphere for people to desire and aspire to martyrdom in North Africa. One of the most brutal periods of persecution occurred during the reign of Emperor Diocletian and it was so severe that sacred and liturgical texts were burned by state authorities in an attempt to destroy the ideas of the movement. Those actions were so severe that the era was called era martyrum. ²³ The Roman officials had a difficult time understanding the stubbornness of the rural masses of North Africa.

Theology and leadership

North Africa’s gift to the Christian tradition includes the many talented scholars and theologians whose imagination and thinking played a decisive role in shaping what emerged as the Catholic tradition and contributed to the formation of Christian doctrine. Catechetical and theological schools were opened in Carthage and Alexandria that would develop methods of biblical interpretation and produce theological formulations that have become part of Christian doctrine today. The first leader of the school in Alexandria was Pantaenus, and its most influential scholar was Clement of Alexandria, an early proponent of philosophical theology. Origen followed Clement as the head of the school, and introduced the allegorical method of interpretation in Biblical studies, thus beginning a rich tradition of hermeneutics. One of its impressive leaders was Didymus who was blind. Adolph von Harnack argued: “As a church province, Africa has a timeless endurance in the history of the church through its three great sons, Tertullian, St. Cyprian, and St. Augustine. It is one of the most paradoxical facts of history that, after St. Paul, Christianity received its strongest impulse for further development from the seashore of Tunisia.”²⁴ A large part of key Christian theological ideas were created and nurtured in North Africa.

One of the central figures, who was called the father of Latin theology, is Tertullian (Quintus Septimius Florend Tertullianus). He was born in the City of Carthage in c. 150. He became Christian forty-three years later and would go on to distinguish himself as a leading theologian in the church. Tertullian was trained in the classics, law, and philosophy and that background prepared him to become a defender of the Christian movement. He is known in Christian history as a great apologist for the faith. He developed ascetic habits and promoted purity in the church. His intellectual leanings also led him to the group Montanism. It was founded by Montanus and headquartered in Phrygia (hence the nickname Cathaphrygians). It was an eschatological and apocalyptic movement; its members believed in the immanent end of the world, and that a New Jerusalem would be established in the town of Pepuza. As part of their emphasis on individual preparedness to enter the New Jerusalem they stressed holy living and a life of discipline which called for fasting and the readiness to suffer martyrdom. They prescribed new rules that forbade marrying someone who was widow...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of contributors
• Preface
• Introduction
• PART I Selected historical perspectives
• PART II Modern developments and interreligious encounters
• PART III African initiatives in Christianity
• PART IV Christianity, politics, and development
• PART V Ecclesial life and lived experience
• Index