Ancestral Feeling

Postcolonial Thoughts on Western Christian Heritage

Renie Chow Choy

• Publisher: SCM Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780334060901
• eBook ISBN: 9780334060925
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: History of Christianity

The language of heritage permeates Scripture, encouraging Christians to approach church history like a family history. But the notion of ancestry also constrains the world's Catholics and Protestants to trace their confessional descent from Europe, rendering them perpetual latecomers in the historical chain."Ancestral Feeling" systematically diagnoses the postcolonial problems generated by an ancestral outlook. But, applying critical theories in cultural studies to the study of church history, the book experiments with ways that the Western Christian inheritance can awaken the memory of one's own ancestors.Writing a personal reflection on her family's history in British-ruled Hong Kong, Renie Chow Choy engages autobiographically with England's ecclesiastical art, architecture, music, and literature, in order to affirm her attachment to a heritage normally associated with English national identity. For global and immigrant Christians brought into a relationship with English Christianity by colonialism but are bypassed by its history, this book makes a bold declaration: England's Christian heritage is also our story.

1. ‘Religious Ancestry’: Christian Historiography and English Imperialism

He remembering his mercy hath holpen his servant Israel:

as he promised to our forefathers, Abraham and his seed for ever.

(Magnificat)

For Christians, the language of descent within the family of God is the default mode for thinking about confessional faith and history. Yet it is precisely this genealogical orientation which prompts the accusation that the Christian view of history is fundamentally ideological and embroiled in issues of power and domination. Therefore the inclination to talk about faith as an ‘inheritance’ and ‘heritage’, though second nature for Christians, requires close scrutiny. This chapter discusses: (1) the origins of ancestral thinking in Christian thought, (2) the process by which this way of thinking became associated with English national identity; and relatedly, (3) how the language of Christian heritage shaped ideas about the relationship between metropole and colonies, and therefore in what way the notion of Christian ancestry exists as an imperial legacy today.

To understand the centrality of genealogical concepts in the Christian approach to historicizing, we should begin with the letter of St Paul to the Romans. In Romans 4 and 9—11, Paul makes the claim that Abraham can justifiably be called the ‘ancestor’ of Gentiles who profess faith in Christ, employing a rationale that has been understood in various ways.1 One view is that Paul, by establishing faith as the basis of salvation, installs Abraham as the father of Christ-followers on the grounds that he is a prototype of faith, exemplar of salvation by faith without works. A related view stresses Paul’s attack on an essential component of first-century Jewish self-understanding: by claiming that Abrahamic ancestry can be ‘re-assigned’ to Gentile Christ-followers, Paul explicitly rejects the Jewish assumption that covenant privileges are strictly associated with ethnic Israel and therefore unavailable to Gentiles. Another view interprets Paul as proposing for Gentiles only an imagined kinship to Abraham, while reserving ethnically and ritually derived conceptions of Abrahamic ancestry for the Jewish community, so that Jews continue to relate to God as they always have, with a separate but parallel line of relationship to Christ for Gentiles.2 There are many more possible readings of Romans and what concerns us here is not which one is best but how they all highlight Paul’s preoccupation with patrilineal descent, an emphasis expressed most clearly in Galatians 3.7 (NIV): ‘Understand, then, that those who have faith are children of Abraham.’ Romans, Galatians, 1 Corinthians and Philippians 3 consistently promote this rhetoric of identity: Christ-believing Gentiles receive an entirely new founding ancestor, and with it a stock of experiences appropriated from Jewish culture and history, the ‘Abrahamic mythomoteur’ to use Robert Foster’s term.3

Christian historicism fundamentally rests on the belief that Christians are joined to Jews by an ancestral relationship. Whichever term has been used to describe this belief – supersessionism, covenant theology, replacement theology, fulfilment theology – and whichever way it has been variably denounced, the fact is that Christians feel that Jewish history and the history of Israel have something to do with them.4 Paul’s teaching trained Christians to consider it possible to insert themselves into the composite of ethnic, racial and ritual dimensions which constituted the Jewish people; he taught Christians that ‘faith’ could transcend these specific definitions of the ‘people of God’ and that the set of instructions and promises delivered to the Jewish people could be ‘inherited’ by Christians. Using arboreal imagery, Paul represented patriarchs and prophets as the trunk on to which Gentile believers in Christ have recently been grafted.5 With this move, Paul permitted the fleshly, ethnic descendants of Abraham to be redefined in allegorical and figural terms as descendants by virtue of faith and by grace rather than literally and physically. Ethnic status is translated into a spiritual community, and the physical sign (genealogical descent from Abraham) is given allegorical meaning (spiritual genealogy). Paul seemed even to suggest, according to Boyarin, that the true meaning of physical genealogy is spiritual genealogy; a promise, one once made to Abraham, is now fulfilled in those who, although in some cases Abraham’s physical heirs, discover their more fundamental genealogy to lie in their common faith.6 Therefore, Christians can readily interpret any references to forefathers, inheritance, heritage and so on in the Old Testament as having something to do with them. A classic example is Psalm 16.6 (‘The lines are fallen unto me in pleasant places; yea, I have a goodly heritage’, AV), or Psalm 90.1 (‘Lord, thou hast been our dwelling place in all generations’, AV), or the whole of Psalm 78, which Christians tend to interpret as the heritage of blessing that comes from faith, passed down from generations of God-fearing Israelites to the Church and future generations. This is why Christians can pray the Magnificat and thank God for his mercy ‘promised to our forefathers, Abraham and his seed forever’ with a sense of personal devotion. Christians can even read the famous ‘begats’ employed in the genealogical lists of Genesis, Numbers, Ruth, Chronicles, Ezra and Nehemiah, despite their literal meaning to the ethnic Jewish community and use in the justification of priesthood, as somehow fundamental to Christian identity.7 For Christians, genealogies (particularly the two in Matthew and Luke) recounting generations of Jewish ancestors not only confirm that Jesus came from the line of David and by fulfilling prophecy has a legitimate messianic claim, but also identify the lineage of faith from which Christians descended. The Epistle to the Hebrews displays the historical thinking resulting from this logic. Chapter 11, the ‘Faith Hall of Fame’ as popularly known, marks a turning point in the early Christian appropriation of biblical history, as the writer lays hold of key figures and events in Jewish history and makes them pertinent to Christian faith and history. Hebrews 11 ‘functions as a genealogy which legitimates the Christian audience by providing them with a biblical ancestry’, identifying a list of important ancestors from whom Christians can rightfully claim to be descendants: Abel, Enoch, Noah, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Moses’ parents, Moses, Gideon, Samson, David …8

Notwithstanding the warning in the Pastoral Epistles of the dangers of debating or discussing genealogies,9 genealogy is foundational to Christian historiography. Referring to the legalization of Christianity in AD 313 which gave rise to the first systematic histories from a Christian perspective, Howard Bloch asserts, ‘From the fourth century on, the defining mode of universal history was that of genealogy.’10 The ‘universal history’ to which he refers were attempts to produce a history of the world as chronologically and geographically global as the resources available to the chronicler allowed. For medieval Christian chroniclers, this generally meant beginning with creation and the forms of ancient history provided in the Hebrew Scriptures and the ‘epitomes’ of Greek and Roman historians, which they then updated to their own time, often with a general focus on their local context as well as some awareness of broader events in world history.11 Christian writers considered the universal histories they wrote to be ‘salvation history’.12 The first significant work of Christian chronography, Eusebius’ fourth-century world chronicle (often called Eusebius-Jerome because it is known to us in the form of Jerome’s Latin translation), merges the historical accounts found in the Hellenistic, pagan tradition of Olympiad chronicles with the genealogies and king lists of the Old Testament, beginning with the birth of Abraham.13 By making Abraham the starting point for his dating system, Eusebius makes it clear that this forefather is the ‘founding ancestor’ of world civilizations.

Genealogical thinking, a way of historicizing that assumes succession from an original source to the thing generated or begotten, of which Eusebius-Jerome’s chronicle was an early example, became entrenched in the genre of the ‘chronicle epitome’ adopted by historians in the Middle Ages.14 The most influential of these works organized and sequenced historical events according to Augustine’s ‘six ages of the world’, which became the normative structure for chronicles written in the Latin world. In Bede’s universal chronicles, for example, events are dated according to the first age from Adam to Noah (ten generations); the second from Noah to Abraham (ten generations); the third from Abraham to David (14 generations); the fourth from David to the Babylonian exile (17 generations); and the fifth age to the birth of Christ (14 generations).15 Although counting by generations is ‘suspended’ in the sixth age (because it is not known when the sixth age will end), the continuity of style implies that the sixth age works by the same principle of generation as the previous five. Thus, just as the first five ages of Bede’s chronicle contain records such as ‘Tanaus became the first ruler of the kingdom of the Scythians’, ‘Vizoues was the first to reign over the Egyptians’, ‘Belus was the first to rule the Assyrians’, and so on, so the sixth age is structured in much the same way: Bede describes Mark as the first Gentile to be made bishop, Philip the first of all emperors to be a Christian, Orosius the first to bring the relics of Stephen to the West, Palladius as first bishop of the Irish, and so on.16 This narrative style, preoccupied as it is with identifying founding fathers, betrays an unmistakable ‘genealogical consciousness’, as noted by Hans Hummer. Hummer shows how, for early medieval Frankish chronicles, the progress of the world proceeds along generational lines, first through the primordial trunk of biblical father-to-son generations and then by a combination of overlapping royal, priestly, imperial, episcopal and filial successions.17 In this way, the order of history was made visible ‘in the lines of generational descent and in the succession of empires’, extending to the kings and bishops contemporaneous with the chronicler. Early medieval chronicles such as the Chronicle of Fredegar, the Liber historiae Francorum and the Royal Frankish Annals thus ‘remained deeply enmeshed in the chronological scheme and organizational “grid” of genealogy’.18 Hummer therefore uses words like ‘primordial trunk’ or ‘main stream’ to denote the way biblical genealogy undergirded early medieval historiography in the Frankish realm: the ‘generational progression of history’ can be seen ‘most obviously in the unbroken line of descent f...

Table of contents

• Copyright information
• Contents
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1. ‘Religious Ancestry’: Christian Historiography and English Imperialism
• 2. ‘Religious Ancestry’: The Postcolonial Critique of Christian Historiography
• 3. The Ancestor Effect
• 4. Ancestral Hardship and the Western Christian Canon
• 5. Ancestral Nostalgia and Ecclesiastical Heritage Sites
• 6. Ancestral Migration and Christian Cultural Capital
• Conclusion
• Afterword