The Church as Salt and Light

Path to an African Ecclesiology of Abundant Life

Ilo, Ogbonnaya

• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Year: 2011
• eBook ISBN: 9781630879617
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

This book is an attempt at a critical, constructive, and creative theological praxis of social transformation in Africa. The authors apply a multi-disciplinary approach to examining how Christianity in Africa is engaging the problems of Africa's challenging social context. This is a prophetic work that applies the symbols of salt and light as ecclesiological images for reenvisioning the path towards procuring abundant life for God's people in the African continent through the agency of African Christianity. The contributors to this volume ask these fundamental questions: What is the face of Jesus in African Christianity? What is the face and identity of the Church in Africa? How can one evaluate the relevance of the Church in Africa to African Christians who enthusiastically embrace and celebrate their Christian faith? In other words, what positive imprint is Christianity leaving on the lives and societies of African Christians? Does the Christian message have the potential of positively affecting African civilization as it once did in Europe? What is the relevance and place of African Christianity as a significant voice in shaping both the future of Africa and that of world Christianity?

1

Beginning Afresh with Christ in the Search for Abundant Life in Africa

Stan Chu Ilo

As servant of the Word, the Church lends its voice so that the world may hear God. But in Scriptures, God does not only speak; God also listens. God listens especially to the just, the poor, the widow, orphans, the humble, and the persecuted. Mysteriously enough, God listens to those who have no voice. The Church must learn to listen the way God listens and must lend its voice to the voiceless.

—Bishop Louis Tagle of Imus, Philippines

Introduction

At the beginning of the Third Millennium, Pope John Paul II (Novo Millennio Ineunte, 1–4) called on the Church to start afresh from Christ, to fix her gaze on the founder of the Church, whose word and deeds drew the early Church along the path of prophetic witnessing and authentic Christian living. During the Second Vatican Council, Pope Paul VI released his first encyclical, Ecclesiam Suam (August 10, 1964), which was less discussed but contains important inspirational teaching on the identity of the Church as rooted in Christ. The Second Vatican Council did not produce any specific christological document, but we could find some teachings on the person and works of Christ in Dei Verbum. However, one of the points raised by Paul VI, taken up at the extraordinary synod of 1985 dedicated to Christ, is that the Church can know herself better and carry out truly her prophetic ministry and the work of evangelization when she experiences Christ in herself in both her inner life and external works (Ecclesial Suam, 8). This is an important message which has constantly re-echoed in the teachings of successive popes, culminating in the recent work of Benedict XVI, Jesus of Nazareth. The call for the Church in Africa to become “salt and light” to the world and to help bring about the building of God’s kingdom requires a foundational first step that demands a richer and more intimate contact with Christ. African peoples (Christians, Muslims, practitioners of African Traditional Religions, etc.) who wish to see Our Lord are looking up to African Christians and the Church in Africa

Ben Witherington III begins his impressive work What Have They Done with Jesus? by pointing out that Western society has been churning out strange theories about Jesus with increasing regularity.1 These theories, according to him, are radically removed from the biblical evidence and the faith of the Christian community. His concern is shared by many Christians beyond the Western world, especially in Africa, where the name of Jesus has a reverential and spiritual hold on the life and destiny of most African Christians. However, Christianity, unlike Islam, is not a religion of the book. Christianity is a religion that grew out of personal relationships, personal love, and contacts between Christ and his small circle of friends. Christianity began as an oral proclamation validated by the transformative presence and power of the Lord and by the living faith and prophetic lives of the followers of Christ, who built new communities of love, faith, hope, and witnessing that were rooted in the words and deeds of Christ.

The truths of the faith that gave birth to the Church were not generated from texts, but rather by the oral proclamation and deeds of the Master and his subsequent followers. Christianity was born from the wounded side of the Lord, and through the miracle of Easter, which vindicated the message of the Messiah and determined for all eternity the futures of those who follow his path and that of entire creation as well. The unity of revelation is found in the mystery of salvation in Christ. This is our highest truth and in itself it is a totality that goes beyond what the texts of Scripture present.

In a sense, the timeworn theological debate over the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith becomes irrelevant when one underlies the inseparable link between faith and history for the Christian. The word proclaimed is not different from the personal encounter with the Word made flesh. Christ preached is not different from Jesus encountered historically, because the authority of the Word proclaimed draws from the authenticity of the witness or preacher, whose life flowing from a deep intimacy with the Lord proclaims the Word. Throughout all ages, the goal of all Christian spirituality and life has been to make Christ present in the lives of individuals and societies. This is why the best interpreters of the Scripture are the saints whose lives point to and reveal the person and works of Christ. The person that the early Christian communities proclaimed was a Christ whom they encountered, whose reign they had accepted, and whose mission, project, and destiny became also theirs as well. The scriptural evidence was a testimony of lived experiences, and not a mere invention. The faith of the early Church was intimately linked to the lives of the early Christians; it also shaped their personal and group history. The unfortunate separation of history and faith, especially within Western Christianity, presaged by the Enlightenment, led some historical-critical biblical scholars to wrongly extrapolate the same mentality in the faith of the early Christian community whose culture, life, and faith had Christ at the center.

The evidence of the Word made flesh is an ongoing testimony attested to in the Church in all that she has and all that she is, including the Word that is written in Scripture. Once the priority of this testimony as faith and life is given, with the concomitant flow of the grace and truth into the heart of the Church, the particular forms in which the Word is made manifest in Scripture—preaching, liturgy, the Church’s undying tradition, and the prophetic witness of the people of God among others—assume an organic unity. This creates a compact of faith in the Christian which does not separate the Bible and the Church, or the Christ of faith and the Jesus of history, since the Church gave birth to the Scripture and is, at the same time, sustained by the Word. In addition, the early Christians were giving testimony to a living Person. Their faith, which was prior to and continuous with their witnessing, was not separate from the source of their witnessing: Christ the Lord. In the same vein, one could say that the Christian—who, as Jerome emphasizes, should give testimony to the faith of the Scripture (the revelation of the Son of God)—is the bulwark of the Church.

In the search for the foundations of the Christian faith in Africa, we need to begin with a deepening of the testimony from Scripture, tradition, and the living faith of the Church in the divine identity of Christ. The reign of God, which Christ brings, can only be built on the foundation of the word and deed of the Lord and his followers.

The oldest known definition of theologian, found in a third-century document, is one who shows the divinity of Christ. Most theologies of Christ in African Christian thinking have wrestled with the challenge of showing the true face of Christ, in order to help African Christians to see their own face and the face of the Church in Africa. Unfortunately, one can make the same remark like Witherington: “What have they done with Jesus in Africa?” The images of Christ in contemporary African Christianity have not shown clearly the transcendence of Christ and his immanence in history in the present painful and challenging African social context. These images in African theological writings are speculative creations, often not rooted in biblical evidence; nor do they reflect or respond to the liturgical practices and pastoral challenges facing African Christians.2 As Alonso Schokel points out: “Christ did not only speak words; He is a Word, an expression, in His very being and in his acts and speech. Therefore, since Christ is the ultimate revelation of God, any new knowledge of God must consist in penetration ever deeper into the fullness which dwells in Him, all of the New Testament is one, since it derives from and speaks of this mystery.”3

The images of Jesus presented in African theology have often been based on inadequate cultural hermeneutics and anecdotal and scattered references to biblical evidence, without any thoroughgoing exegetical commitment in the explication of the data of Scripture. Holding the two together is very important in recovering and redirecting African christological dialogue. More importantly, centering emerging christologies on the living faith of the Africans, such that they relate to, form, and transform the faith development and the social context of the Christian community, is very essential. We may not be able to fully undertake such a task in this chapter, but we wish to show that it is possible to develop an image of Christ that relates to the African socio-cultural context and is faithful both to Scripture and the Christian tradition.

I shall be using the christologies of John and Luke in showing how the vertical and horizontal dimensions of time and history meet in Christ. I will conclude each of the two sections of this essay by showing how the life of Christ should be placed at the center of the churches and societies in Africa for the transformation of the Black continent. It is not possible to span the entire gamut of Johannine or Lucan Christology in this short work, so I have chosen Herod’s question in Luke 9:9 and the Good Shepherd analogy of John 10:10 as two texts that will help us to get a clear picture of the person and work of Christ.

Who Then is This about Whom I Hear Such Things?

The section of Luke 9 of interest in my analysis begins in verse 7. The account says that Herod the Tetrarch heard about all that was happening (verse 7). He was puzzled because there was a diverse opinion on the part of the populace about whom Jesus was; some thought he was John, or Elijah, or any of the old prophets. These puzzles led Herod to ask the question: “Who then is this about whom I hear such things?” Upon closer examination, one could easily discover that Herod’s perplexity is a deliberate hermeneutical ploy by Luke to establish the divine identity and authority of Christ, as well as the authority of his witnesses, the early Church: Who is Jesus? Who are his witnesses in history? What was the content of “these things” that Herod heard about Jesus?

We will use both exegetical and theological approaches here, two distinctive frames of reference: history and faith. Before Herod’s question, the divine identity of Jesus has been previously questioned four times in Luke’s Gospel in the course of our Lord’s Galilean ministry. In each case, the operative pronoun used is “who” Tij), or the longer definitive question tij estin outoj (Who is this?).

(1) The first place that the divine identity of Jesus is raised in Luke is in 5:21. In this episode, the scribes and the Pharisees are the ones asking the question in relation to Jesus’ offer of forgiveness to the paralytic: “Who is this man talking blasphemy? Who can forgive sins but God alone?” The question here relates to the authority and claims of Jesus as God. In this encounter, Jesus doesn’t claim to be God—but he doesn’t have to. His action of forgiving sins is properly understood as identical to the divine activity of the God of Israel, as understood among the Second Temple religious elites (the Scribes and Pharisees), as well as the ordinary Jews who were his listeners. Only God can forgive sins; if Jesus is forgiving sin directly without any appeal to God, and without following the requirements of the law, his Jewish listeners then understand his action as a “claim” to divinity in continuity with their understandi...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Beginning Afresh with Christ in the Search for Abundant Life in Africa
• Chapter 2: The Church in Africa and the Search for Integral and Sustainable Development of Africa: Toward a Socio-Economic and Politically Responsive Church
• Chapter 3: The Church in Africa: Salt of the Earth?
• Chapter 4: The Church in Africa and the Search for Abundant Life: Signposts for Renewal and Transformation of God’s People in Africa
• Chapter 5: Globalization and the African Woman: A Socio-Cultural Analysis of the Effect of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) on Women
• Chapter 6: New Evangelization in Africa: Learning from the Culture of Love in the Early Church
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Contributors