Inside the Whirlwind

The Book of Job through African Eyes

Carter

• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781498230704
• Topic: Théologie et religion
• Subtopic: Religion

How would ordinary African Christians interpret the figure and book of Job--the quintessential biblical book on suffering--from contexts of extreme poverty, tropical disease, and rampant suffering? How do African Christians culturally understand issues of theodicy and the nature of evil? What role does the devil play in African Pentecostalism? How does the biblical lament empower faith and foster hope for people living with HIV/AIDS? In what way does a theology of (eschatological) hope inform the spirituality and prayers of ordinary African believers in the midst of suffering? Inside the Whirlwind offers insight on these fascinating questions. Based upon the perspectives of Fang Christians in Spanish-speaking Equatorial Guinea (Central Africa), the thematic and theological reflections on evil, suffering, and hope emerging from sermons and Bible studies on the book of Job offer a remarkable window to view the main theological issues shaping grassroots African Christianity in the twenty-first century.

Part 1

The Hermeneutics-Culture-Praxis Triad

1

Readings of the Book of Job as a Window on African Christianity

Introduction

What lies ahead is a critical theological construction which will relate more fully the widespread African confidence in the Christian faith to the actual and ongoing Christian responses to the life-experiences of Africans. Here, academic discourse will need to connect with the less academic but fundamental reality of the “implicit” and predominantly oral theologies found at the grassroots of many, if not all, African Christian communities . . . 23

—Kwame Bediako (1945–2008), Ghanaian Theologian

Kwame Bediako’s conviction regarding the need for scholars to engage with lived expressions of the faith in African Christian communities defines the central scope and trajectory of this book. Scholars of African Christianity often recognize that “much more work needs to be done on how ordinary Africans interpret the Bible” not merely out of a “nostalgic or romantic yearning for a lost naivete” but because the Bible lies at the heart and center of African Christianity.24 Philip Jenkins argues that Christian communities in the global south “are still in the initial phases of a love affair with the scripture” and evokes the axiom of Martin Luther (“The Bible is alive—it has hands and grabs hold of me, it has feet and runs after me”),25 which may be taken as quite a significant and astute insight as to the Bible’s “aliveness” and “power” in African Christianity. Yet regrettably, studies of popular or grassroots interpretations of specific biblical books within African Christianity are remarkably atypical.26

Despite the centrality of the Bible within African Christianity and the growing scholarly interest in “African” approaches to the scriptures which have resulted in several major publications in recent years including the Africa Bible Commentary,27 Gerald O. West and Musa W. Dube’s substantial edited volume The Bible in Africa,28 and Jenkins’ The New Faces of Christianity: Believing the Bible in the Global South,29 the tendency still remains for scholarly voices to dominate the conversation. Grassroots interpretations of the Bible which have sustained the vibrant expansion of the Christian faith all across sub-Saharan Africa remain largely unexplored academic territory. As Paul Gifford notes, the nascent resurgence of interest in African practices of biblical interpretation has largely been performed by “Western-trained academics” for the consumption of western audiences as “[t]here has been relatively little study of the way the Bible is actually used in churches, especially at the very grassroots.”30 In similar fashion, John S. Mbiti has acknowledged that three chief theological forms comprise contemporary African Christianity including written theology (academic expressions), oral theology (sermons, prayers, Bible study, songs), and symbolic theology (art, sculpture, drama) but laments that popular oral expressions of the Christian faith which are “produced in the fields, by the masses, through song, sermon, teaching, prayer, conversation” are “often heard only by small groups, and generally lost to libraries and seminaries.”31 Thus, the need to situate the hermeneutical process holistically within its most natural environment—in dialogue with cultural dynamics and ecclesial practices at the popular level—remains of utmost importance for not only recognizing the shaping influence that the Bible continues to play within African Christianity but also for understanding African Christianity itself, in all its complexities and nuances. By pitching our tent at the corner of local grassroots realities and biblical interpretation, we can begin to appreciate not only the role that the Bible continues to exercise within African Christianity but also make great strides in understanding African Christianity “from below,” as a loosely-connected series of movements, institutions, theologies, and histories which self-identifies itself intimately with biblical texts.

A central argument of this study is that experiences of the Christian faith as well as the dominant beliefs, values, and theologies adopted by local believers are uniquely informed by the dynamism of the hermeneutics-culture-praxis triad.32 Based upon the presupposition that everyone reads the Bible in a certain way (hermeneutics), from a particular vantage point (culture), and with a certain group of people who distinctively engage in being the church (praxis), comprehending the dynamics of the hermeneutics-culture-praxis triad is essential to unveiling the contours of contemporary African Christianity. So, it is to this important triad that we now turn.

The Hermeneutics-Culture-Praxis Triad in African Christianity

Hermeneutics: What is African Hermeneutics? Reading the Bible in Africa

Despite the fact that the demographic changes of the global church have almost become yesterday’s news amongst students of world Christianity, the facts bear repeating: the typical Christian in the twenty-first century is no longer an Anglo-Saxon of European descent living in the western metropolises of New York City, London, or Berlin but may be described more accurately as a Brazilian mother living in a favela of São Paulo or a young Nigerian man attempting to survive on the informal economy of Lagos.33 These profound changes in the demographics of the global church are not without their consequences, particularly as Christians in the global south—like St. Augustine so many centuries ago—tolle lege (“take up and read”) their Bibles in contexts very different than their northern counterparts. Today nearly one out of every four Christians on the planet lives in Africa, which is e...