Theology after Colonization

Bediako, Barth, and the Future of Theological Reflection

Tim Hartman

• Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780268106539
• eBook ISBN: 9780268106553
• Topic: Teología y religión
• Subtopic: Globalización

Tim Hartman's Theology after Colonization uses a comparative approach to examine two theologians, one from Europe and one from Africa, to gain insight into our contemporary theological situation. Hartman examines how the loss of cultural hegemony through rising pluralism and secularization has undermined the interconnection of the Christian faith with political power and how globalization undermined the expansive (and expanding) mindset of colonialization. Hartman engages Swiss-German theologian Karl Barth (1886–1968), whose work responded to the challenges of Christendom and the increasing secularization of Europe by articulating an early post-Christendom theology based on God's self-revelation in Jesus Christ, not on official institutional structures (including the church) or societal consensus. In a similar way, Ghanaian theologian Kwame Bediako (1945–2008) offered a post-colonial theology. He wrote from the perspective of the global South while the Christian faith was growing exponentially following the departure of Western missionaries from Africa. For Bediako, the infinite translatability of the gospel of Jesus Christ leads to the renewal of Christianity as a non-Western religion, not a product of colonialization.

Many Western theologies find themselves unable to respond to increasing secularization and intensifying globalization because they are based on the very assumptions of uniformity and parochialism (sometimes called "orthodoxy") that are being challenged. Hartman claims Bediako and Barth can serve as helpful guides for contemporary theological reflection as the consensus surrounding this theological complex disintegrates further. Collectively, their work points the way toward contemporary theological reflection that is Christological, contextual, cultural, constructive, and collaborative. As one of the first books to examine the work of Bediako, this study will interest students and scholars of Christian theology, African studies, and postcolonial studies.

PART I

Western Christian Theology Today

ONE

A Crisis of (Shifting) Authority

The Decline of Christendom and the Rise of Secularization and Globalization

One month after his twenty-fifth birthday, a young man from West Africa found himself in Bordeaux, France, crying in the shower. He was struggling to write his master’s thesis on Francophone literature. Raised just outside the capital city in the Gold Coast (present-day Ghana), young Bediako excelled in school and was admitted to Mfantsipim, the top high school in the country, where Kofi Annan (later, secretary-general of the United Nations) was a few years ahead of him.¹ Graduating at the top of his class, Bediako matriculated at the University of Ghana, where he studied French language and literature. Deeply influenced by French existentialism, he became an avowed atheist. His intellectual heroes were JeanPaul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, and André Malraux. He received a grant for postgraduate study at the University of Bordeaux with the stipulation that he would return to Ghana to teach French. He studied the work of the Congolese poet Tchicaya U’Tamsi, who was in exile in Paris, and became immersed in the authors of négritude: Aimé Césaire, Léopold Senghor, Léon-Gontran Damas, and, with particular fondness, Frantz Fanon.² In his master’s thesis, he sought to gain a greater understanding of négritude and its application to African personal identity in light of the cultural and religious challenges of the twentieth century.

Consumed by writer’s block that August day during his summer break, Bediako decided to take a shower to clear his mind. Before he could turn on the faucet, his feet were wet with his tears. Instead of gaining the insight he had expected, he “experienced a rather sudden and surprising conversion to Christ,”³ wherein he learned that “Christ is the Truth, the integrating principle of life as well as the key to true intellectual coherence, for himself, and for the whole world.”⁴ Within two months of his conversion, his thesis was completed and work on his doctorate had begun. However, the course of his life had changed.

Later in his life, Kwame Bediako reflected, “When Jesus Christ became real to me nearly thirty-five years ago, I discovered that I was recovering my Af rican identity and spirituality.”⁵ In his last public address, he referred to his own “personal Damascus road [experience] . . . where in becoming Christian, I was becoming African again.”⁶ In hindsight, Bediako understood that the lasting impact of colonization on him was atheism, not Christianization. Contrary to colonial missionary hopes, Bediako’s journey had taught him that one could be “Western” without God or religion. Yet he believed that to be African was to be incurably religious.⁷ By renouncing atheism and becoming a Christian, Bediako understood himself to be recovering his African identity and the African spiritual view of life. His future theological vocation can be understood as an extended exercise in seeking to “understand what had happened to [him]”⁸ —and to many other Africans. By becoming Christian, he became more African—and less Western.⁹

On a similar August day, fifty-six years earlier, in 1914, a twenty-eight-year-old pastor in the working-class town of Safenwil, Switzerland, experienced an awakening of his own that radically changed the course of his life. As Kaiser Wilhelm II made machinations of war, ninety-three German intellectuals publicly declared their support for his military policy. On that list young Karl discovered almost all his theological teachers. He reflected on the significance of this discovery some forty years later: “In despair over what this indicated about the signs of the time I suddenly realized that I could not any longer follow either their ethics and dogmatics or their understanding of the Bible and of history. For me at least, nineteenth-century theology no longer held any future.”¹⁰ For Karl Barth, Christian theology should have been able to resist warmongering, not support it. For him, this moment revealed a fatal flaw in the theology that he had been taught.There was a gap between belief and action, an inability for one’s convictions to give one the confidence to stand against the temporal ruler. The church needed to confront the state, not support it.

Primarily, Barth’s theological work sought to counter what he took to be the misleading impact of “cultural Protestantism” (Kulturprotestantismus) on the task of theology.¹¹ This reorientation of Barth’s thought began through his study of the Bible, particularly the Epistle to the Romans; he then demonstrated his opposition to cultural Protestantism in particular moments of protest, first against the theologians endorsing the Kaiser’s war effort and later against the German Christians’ cooperation with Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party. In essence, Barth was protesting their claims that asserted human reasoning over against God’s self-revelation. These movements in Germany shared with colonial officials in Africa an overconfidence in the human interpretation and application of revelation over against, or in addition to, God’s self-revelation in Jesus Christ.

Western Protestant theological reflection—of which Barth is a product and a representative example—has typically been an insular affair. There is a canon consisting of the Patristics; Nicaea, Chalcedon, and other ecumenical councils; and Augustine, Luther, Calvin, and Schleiermacher, which is then interpreted and debated. Barth is often read as someone who is an heir to that legacy and as someone who is either more or less faithful to the tradition. Barth’s deep immersion in and engagement with the tradition led Pope Pius XII to call him the greatest theologian since St. Thomas Aquinas.¹²

The tumultuous events of the twentieth century (two world wars, the Holocaust, nuclear warfare, apartheid, colonial independence movements, etc.) suggested that many of the plausibility structures of Western Christianity had collapsed. In this context, both Karl Barth and Kwame Bediako sought to articulate anew the gospel of Jesus Christ amid societies in which one’s religious beliefs are determined in some sense over against others, not received by fate. In the twenty-first century, holding multiple beliefs or professing no belief at all is a real possibility. From across the colonial divide, both Bediako and Barth responded to the failings they saw and experienced in nineteenth-and twentieth-century European theology. In Germany and Switzerland, Barth criticized the lack of self-critical reflection in theological discourse regarding “religion” expressed through cultural Protestantism. In Ghana, Bediako criticized an intensification of a different kind—one that sought to “civilize” Africans through colonialism, as conveyed by European missionaries. Both authors appealed to an understanding of God’s revelation. Both believed that their adversaries had confused revelation and culture in the name of religion by using religious arguments to privilege cultural assumptions over a genuine wrestling with divine communication. And their shared hope was that through a fresh approach to revelation, Christian theology could once again be rooted in the story of Jesus Christ, over against the religion of nineteenth-century European Protestants.¹³

For both Bediako and Barth, the critique of European Protestantism was as much about identity as religion. As the historian John Largas Modern has noted, “Any viable description of the nineteenth century must account for how one’s identity becomes bound up with one’s relationship with the religious.”¹⁴ Bediako’s and Barth’s responses to nineteenth-century European Protestantism are intriguingly similar: both sought to uncouple the connection between the gospel of Jesus Christ and culture that had been forged in the name of colonization in Africa and religion in Europe. Both theologians sought to answer quite similar questions about revelation, religion, and culture despite very different cultural backgrounds. Barth sought to articulate a new theology at the end of the era of modern Christendom; Bediako sought to articulate theology in the aftermath of the colonial period. The similarities of their responses are not coincidental; European Christendom and colonization were not parallel processes but an interconnected whole.

The Colonial-Christendom Complex

Christendom and colonization were both fueled by the use of authority in explicit ways (e.g., conquest) and implicit ways (e.g., defining what children were taught about the world). To buttress the colonial-Christendom complex, narratives arose to legitimate its authority. These narratives took various forms, including but not limited to cognitive superiority, racial superiority, and cultural superiority, all of which privileged Eurocentric ways of knowing and living.

Over the past five hundred years, the Western cultural and religious consensus around Christianity has been crumbling and has nearly collapsed entirely. In Europe, the Christian church has dramatically lost power and influence. Even though the United States remains a deeply religious society, church attendance and membership are declining, as well as trust in the church as an institution.¹⁵ Sociologists have posited that previously accepted plausibility structures have been rejected or abandoned and belief in God has become one option among many.¹⁶ In such a cultural environment, theological systems whose emphases were birthed in the context of medieval Europe require updating and reorientation if they are to address contemporary contexts and cultural concerns.

While this process of secularization has meant the recession of Christianity in Europe and North America, there has been unprecedented, exponential growth of Christianity in the Global South over the past fifty years, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa. In a development that few saw coming, the end of colonization and the withdrawal of many missionaries led to a dramatic increase in the numbers of adherents to Christianity throughout the formerly colonized world. Colonization essentially intended to extend the reach of Christendom outside of Europe. The process of globalization—which began with the early “explorers” over five hundred years ago—has intensified during the past fifty years as developments in the technologies of transportation and communication have brought into even greater proximity peoples who live far apart and have enabled regular, rapid exchanges with others near and far. The process of colonization is as significant an aspect of globalization as the spread of European languages, systems of thought, and governmental structures. Then, in the mid-twentieth century, formerly colonized peoples emigrated to the former colonial powers in a process that the Jamaican poet Louise Bennett described in her 1966 poem, “Colonization in Reverse.” These new citizens brought their customs, worldview, and religious traditions with them as they “settle in de mother lan.” And, as Bennett saw, they posed a question to the old colonial powers: “What a devilment a Englan! / Dem face war an brave de worse; / But ah wonderin how dem gwine stan/Colonizin in reverse.”¹⁷

A Failed Narrative

The indicators of the end of a Christendom-era consensus based in a white, Western European Christianity are all around us.¹⁸ The loss of cultural hegemony, the rise of religious pluralism, increased levels of immigration, and appeals to experience and culture as sources of theological reflection are all evidence of a shift in the West away from the Christian church as the political, social, and intellectual center of society. In the United States, the religious landscape has dramatically changed over the past half century. The percentage of Americans who claim that they are Christians continues to decline. Most of the growth in North American Christianity has come from immigration and the births of babies of color.¹⁹ Meanwhile, in Africa and other areas of the Global South, Christianity is growing exponentially. Rather than bemoan the end of Christendom or seek to reinstate it (either in the Global North or the Global South), I argue that the collapse of Christendom is not a threat but an opportunity for Christian theology to let go of the Western cultural shackles and embrace a plurality of perspectives and theologies from around the world.

My approach contrasts sharply with the long-standing narrative of European-led progress to which Christianity yoked itself in the nineteenth century. Three twentieth-century events demonstrated the delegitimization of this narrative: World War II, the Holocaust, and movements for colonial independence. All three “simultaneously delegitimized the West as axiomatic center of reference and affirmed the rights of non-European peoples straining against the yoke of colonialism and neocolonialism.”²⁰ Nazism and the Holocaust revealed the “internal sickness” of Europe as a site of racist totalitarianism, while the movements for colonial liberation, especially in Africa and Asia, revealed the “external” revolt against Western domination, “provoking a crisis in the taken-for-granted narrative of European-led progress.”²¹ Many—predominantly white— Christians have allowed this narrative of European-led “progress” to replace the narrative of the gospel of Jesus Christ. This false narrative has many guises, including American exceptionalism, manifest destiny, and various forms of well-meaning ecclesial mission programs. The collapse of this taken-for-granted narrative has left many Christians (again, predominantly white) asking questions about how the church and Christian theology can survive.

A Crisis of Authority

Indeed, the roots of what will later be called secularization can be found at the very origins of the Christian faith. As Marcel Gauchet expressed it, “Christianity proves to have been a religion for departing from religion.”²²

There is something inherent to the Christian faith that seeks to undermine religion itself. The sociologist Peter Berger locates the origins of secularization even earlier: “The roots of secularization are to be found in the earliest available sources for the religion of ancient Israel. In other words, we would maintain that the ‘disenchantment of the world’ begins in the Old Testament.”²³ In the early centuries of the Christian church apologetic writings offered a rational defense of the Christian faith aimed primarily at those who practiced Greco-Roman religions.

After the biblical authors, the most significant apologists in the early church were Justin Martyr (ca. 100–165) and Origen of Alexandria (ca. 185–254). Once the Christian faith was legalized and declared the official religion of the Roman Empire in the early fourth century, the need to persuade people of the truth of the Christian faith disappeared. Adherence to Christianity was assumed and the authority of the church (backed by the ruling authorities) unquestioned. Though certainly not without significant historical moments of dissension, this trust in the church and this willingness to allow the church to interpret the revelation of God continued until the sixteenth century. The Protestant Reformers’ challenge to the authority of the Roman Catholic Church, among other factors, led to a growing uncertainty about the centrality of the C...

Table of contents

• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyrights
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• PART I. WESTERN CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY TODAY
• PART II. RETHINKING DIVINE REVELATION
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index