The Kingdom of God in Africa: A History of African Christianity

The Kingdom of God in Africa charts the ebbs and flows, the vertical and horizontal dimensions, of African Christianity and thereby illumines the long duration of African Christianity as a robust, dynamic tapestry spanning twenty-one centuries. The rich insights and penetrating analysis of the complex trajectories, wrestling with history, and the interface of Christian traditions, Islam, and indigenous religious cultures in Africa, makes the book accessible. The kingdom of God motif, located within the contours of missional ecclesiology and World Christianity, helps unpack the resilience and continuum of African Christianity, and how translational expressions and experiences, and the church as agency of healing and transformation, may usher in human flourishing on the continent. The metaphorical wrestling with the kingdom as a future reality of justice and righteousness on earth can produce churches of protest that witness to the kingdom by fighting the structures of poverty and injustice (16). This book is authoritatively compelling as a significant resource for students and scholars of world Christianity and general readers.

Afe Adogame, PhD

Maxwell M. Upson Professor of Religion and Society,

Princeton Theological Seminary, New Jersey, USA

With a keen eye towards mission, context, and translation, Shaw and Gitau offer a concise and fresh ecumenical treatment of African Christian history by placing it squarely in the academic discipline of World Christianity, utilizing Christ and his kingdom as a guiding motif. Today Africans are 17 percent of the world’s population, 26.5 percent of all Christians, 33 percent of all Independents, 36 percent of all Pentecostal/Charismatics, and 44 percent of all Protestants. Consequently, the authors demonstrate how African Christianity is transforming the global Christian movement, dismantling centuries of colonial Christianity, and offering hope for the continent and the world. This compact second edition is a valuable resource for anyone interested in a truly global history of Christianity.

Todd M. Johnson, PhD

Co-director, Center for the Study of Global Christianity,

Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, South Hamilton, Massachusetts, USA

The new edition of this highly acclaimed book provides a welcome paradigm for interpreting African church history. By introducing the framework of world Christianity, the authors have succeeded in reconciling the two dominant and often conflicting approaches to African church history – the metropolitan and the nationalist. In addition, the authors have incorporated recent developments in African Christianity. The book offers a rich resource for students, teachers and researchers of African Christianity.

John Karanja, PhD

Professor of Church History,

Africa International University, Nairobi, Kenya

This revised edition of Mark Shaw’s The Kingdom of God in Africa, now co-authored with Wanjiru Gitau, makes a book that was already required reading for anyone wishing to study contemporary Christianity even more important. It traces the two-thousand-year story of God’s kingdom in Africa and carefully reflects on the implications of the seismic changes that Christianity has gone through in Africa since the first edition was published. Today, anyone wishing to learn something of Christianity must observe what God is doing in Africa, and to do that effectively, this book will be of the greatest help. No theology or world Christianity syllabus will be complete without Shaw’s and Gitau’s The Kingdom of God in Africa. It is highly recommended.

Harvey C. Kwiyani, PhD

Lecturer, African Christianity and Theology,

Programme Leader, MA African Christianity,

Liverpool Hope University, Liverpool, UK

Mark Shaw and Wanjiru Gitau’s decades of research, teaching and mission in Africa have produced a wealth of experience that is evident in the pages of this important work. In it, they provide a fresh, up-to-date, and thoughtfully written chronicle of the growth of Christianity on the continent. The authors’ World Christianity approach appreciates and restores dignity to various historical narratives which received less attention in many earlier one-volume accounts. Their attention to detail, woven around the kingdom theme, without losing the larger salient issues, offers a fascinating, informative read. This is an essential book for seasoned scholars, African religious studies students, and curious readers alike who are looking for an accessible introduction to church history in Africa.

Kyama Mugambi, PhD

Researcher, Centre for World Christianity,

Africa International University, Nairobi, Kenya

Author of A Spirit of Revitalization: Urban Pentecostalism in Kenya

The beauty of a story is in the telling as much as in the content. Mark Shaw and Wanjiru Gitau here tell the wonderful, captivating story of Christianity in Africa. The comprehensiveness as well as the preciseness in which the authors tell this story makes one to want to keep on reading. They do not tell the story for the sake of telling, but they invite the readers to be part of this wonderful story in his or her time. Centering all discussions on the kingdom of God and its central message about Jesus as Lord, Shaw and Gitau do not cover up failures or ignore successes of any person who has been part of this story. Acknowledging that our perfect God has been pleased, in his grace, to use imperfect individuals (both missionaries and African nationals), the authors invite all of us to do our best to make our contribution in enriching the city of God – promoting the love of God and not self – particularly in the African continent.

Samuel M. Ngewa, PhD

Professor in Biblical Studies,

Africa International University, Nairobi, Kenya

With verve and imagination, Mark Shaw and Wanjiru Gitau deploy the multi-valent biblical motif of the kingdom of God to unlock the inner dynamics of the history of Christianity in Africa. Pushing beyond a simple narration of Christianity’s long history on the continent, they attempt to probe its meaning. Without compromising the historian’s discipline, and remaining always firmly grounded in empirical realities, they venture a theological interpretation of the many-stranded story. As they deftly pluck threads from different contexts, they weave a tapestry that sets forth the meaning of the whole. Whether you want to look closely at the details of the weave or stand back to contemplate the whole, this book will not disappoint.

Kenneth R. Ross, OBE, PhD

Professor of Theology,

Zomba Theological College, Malawi

What a timely revision of this work, given Africa’s rise to prominence within world Christianity today! Meticulous historians and masterful narrators, Shaw and Gitau recount the vast sweep of Christianity in Africa with striking clarity and wide appeal. From the ancient African church fathers, so significant in initially shaping the Christian faith, to the modern prophets, preachers, and politicians reshaping the Christian landscape across the continent and beyond. From rather obscure medieval African kingdoms to more obvious developments with the European discovery of Africa. And from longstanding engagement with African Religion and Islam to the more recent rise of African Instituted Churches and Pentecostal/charismatic movements. The rich complexity and dynamism of African Christianity make for a most riveting read, provided here in very accessible form. Most significantly, the authors’ interpretation of this story through the lens of the kingdom of God, integrating historical, theological, and missiological reflections, showcases the study of world Christianity at its best.

Diane Stinton, PhD

Dean of Students and Associate Professor,

Mission Studies and World Christianity,

Regent College, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada

The Kingdom of God in Africa

A History of African Christianity

Revised and Updated

Mark Shaw

and

Wanjiru M. Gitau

© 2020 Mark Shaw and Wanjiru M. Gitau

Published 2020 by Langham Global Library

An imprint of Langham Publishing

www.langhampublishing.org

Langham Publishing and its imprints are a ministry of Langham Partnership

Langham Partnership

PO Box 296, Carlisle, Cumbria, CA3 9WZ, UK

www.langham.org

Previously published by Baker Publishing Group in 1996 under the title: The Kingdom of God in Africa: A Short History of African Christianity.

ISBNs:

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To

Lamin Sanneh, in memorium

Contents

Cover

1 Introduction Wrestling with the Kingdom – Approaching the Story of African Christianity

Wrestling with History: Current Questions in Writing the African Christian Story

Wrestling with the Kingdom: Is There Any Continuity in the African Christian Story?

Wrestling with the Story: What Does the African Christian Narrative Look Like from a World Christianity Perspective?

Summary

Part 1

The Imperial Rule of God

Beginnings to AD 600

2 The Kingdom Along the Nile Christianity in Egypt to AD 640

The Period of Preparation: Egypt before Christ

The Stage of Introduction: Jewish Christianity (to 200)

The Stage of Maturation: Hellenistic Christianity (200–300)

The Stage of Indigenization: Coptic Christianity (300–600)

Conclusion

3 The City of God Christianity in North Africa to AD 640

The Second and Third Centuries: The Age of Tertullian and Cyprian

Crisis in the Fourth Century: Donatism and Augustine

Fifth-Century Captivity: Vandals and Catholics

Sixth-Century Liberation: Byzantine Reconquest

Conclusion: The Two Cities

4 Kings of Glory Christianity in Ethiopia and Nubia to AD 600

Religious Revolution in Ethiopia

Nubia

Conclusion: Kingdom Witness in Ethiopia and Nubia

Part 2

The Clash of Kingdoms

Medieval African Christianity (600–1700)

5 The Kingdoms of Allah and Mungu Islam and African Religion in the Middle Ages

The Kingdom of Allah: Early Expansion of Islam, 600–1000

Islam in the High Middle Ages, 1000–1600

African Kingdoms in West and Central Africa

The City States of East and Southern Africa

The Internal Kingdom: Kingdom Worship in African Traditional Religion

Conclusions: Islam, African Traditional Religion, and the Kingdom of Christ

6 Crumbling Kingdoms Nubian Collapse and Ethiopian Survival

Rise and Fall of Nubian Christianity

The Renewal of Ethiopian Christianity

Conclusion: Legacy of Nubia and Ethiopia

7 The Kingdoms of Christendom The European Discovery of Africa, 1500–1700

Changing Concepts of the Kingdom

The Portuguese Discovery of Africa

The Dutch Discovery of Africa

Conclusion: The Kingdom in Transition

Part 3

The Reign of Christ

African Christianity in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries

8 The Liberating Kingdom The Crusade Against the Slave Trade

The Revival of Evangelicalism and New Views of the Kingdom

The Antislavery Campaign

Conclusion

9 Kingdom and Community in West Africa

Enlightenment Mythology, Evangelical Eschatology, and Kingdom Community

The Founding of Kingdom Communities: Freetown, Badagry, and Abeokuta

The Missionaries – Agents of Christian Community

The Expansion of Kingdom Communities in West and Central Africa

Conclusion: The Failure of Christian Community

10 A Kingdom Divided South African Christianity

Afrikaner Christianity and the Great Trek: The Kingdom as a Reformed Theocracy

Missionary Christianity and the Evangelical Vision of the Kingdom

The Kingdom as Justice: John Philip, J. W. Colenso, and John Tengo Jabavu

Conclusion: Christianity’s Fragmented Witness

11 The Violent Kingdom East African Christianity

Ethiopia

Kenya

Tanzania

Uganda

Conclusion

Part 4

The Kingdom on Earth

African Christianity in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries

12 Ambassadors of the Kingdom The Missionary Factor in Colonial Africa

Criticisms of Colonial Missions

Missions Between the Scramble and the End of World War I: The Happy Accident

Missions Between the End of World War I and the End of World War II: The Uneasy Partnership

Mission Between the End of World War II and Independence: The Long Goodbye

Evaluating the Mission Impact

Conclusion

13 Cities of Zion Independent Christian Movements before 1960

The Rise of Independent Movements (1890–1950)

The Height of Independency (1950–1960)

Conclusion

14 Christianity in Post-Independence Africa

The Struggle to Be Holy: Church, State, and Secularism

The Struggle for an Apostolic Witness: African Theology

The Struggle for Oneness: Ecumenism, Church Growth, and Charismatic Experience

The Struggle for Catholicity: Reaching the World

Bibliography

About Langham Partnership

Endnotes

Index

1

Introduction Wrestling with the Kingdom – Approaching the Story of African Christianity

Wrestling is one of Africa’s oldest sports. When the Pharaohs built the pyramids, the lanky Sudanese men of ancient Nubia wrestled along the banks of the Nile. They wrestle there today. Chinua Achebe’s prize-winning novel, Things Fall Apart, tells the story of Okonkwo, who gained fame in the surrounding villages for defeating Amalinze the Cat, so called because for seven years he was an unbeaten wrestler whose back would never touch the earth. Okonkwo’s fame remained undiminished for twenty years, but it was the coming of Christianity that won a spiritual wrestling match with Okonkwo from which he never recovered.[1]

Like Achebe, I think wrestling is an apt metaphor for the story of African Christianity. For the Okonkwos of Africa, grappling with the person of Jesus Christ has been a long and absorbing contest. When Christ broke into human history in the first century, no single mind could encompass the whole, no single hand could draw the definitive portrait of him.[2] That is still true for many Africans today. Wrestling with the person of Jesus is an ongoing part of the African story.

The statistics of African Christianity in the early decades of the twenty-first century may suggest to the reader that the wrestling match is over and that Christianity has won. Dana Robert was one of the first scholars of World Christianity to articulate the massive shift in global Christianity since World War II and how that changed the place of African Christianity in the larger story of the faith. As she writes, After World War II, rising movements of political and ecclesiastical self-determination materially changed the context in which non-Western churches operated, thereby allowing Christianity to blossom in multiple cultures.[3] The American based Pew Research Center summarizes the shift numerically. By 2060, a plurality of Christians – more than four-in-ten – will call sub-Saharan Africa home, writes Pew scholar, David McClendon.[4] This means that Africa is becoming the new demographic center of Christianity worldwide. In 1910, as the leading architects of Christian mission around the world gathered in Edinburgh, Scotland, to craft a global plan for Protestant missions in the twentieth century, they were informed that though the prospects for missions in most of the world were excellent, there was no hope for Africa. Islam was too strong. It was growing too fast. By the end of the twentieth century, Africa would be a completely Muslim continent. The fact that the opposite has happened not only warns us to be wary of our best predictions but indicates that this dramatic spiritual turn in African needs to be explained.

This shift of the center of Christianity to the Majority World, in general, and to Africa, in particular, may smack of triumphalism. However, Robert makes clear that such an attitude is inappropriate. She writes, As Christianity declines in Europe and grows in the South, historians need to recognize what the International Missionary Council saw in 1938: the future of world Christianity rests with the so-called younger churches and their daily struggles. As historians take seriously the struggles of these young churches, the most interesting lesson from the missionary outreach during the Western colonial era is what happened to Christianity when the missionaries weren’t looking, and after the colonizers withdrew. Robert ends her article noting that the challenge for historians lies in seeing beyond an extension of Western categories and into the hearts, minds, and contexts of Christ’s living peoples in Asia, Africa, and Latin America.[5]

Map 1: Africa Christians in 1900 and in 2020 (modern boundaries included for reference)

Despite this explosive shift in Christianity’s demographic center, millions of Africans still struggle with what it means to be both African and Christian. Part of the wrestling match has been over the foreignness of Christianity in Africa. African scholars are sharply divided over this question. Kwame Bediako eloquently argued for Christianity to be seen as an African religion. Though its origins come from outside, its long history on the continent and its embrace of so much of the spiritual value system of African cultures has made it a much-loved member of the family.[6] Ogbu Kalu quotes Andrew Walls on the Africanness of Christianity in Africa. African Christianity appears in two capacities: first, as a new period in the history of African religion, continuing the story begun in the primal or traditional religions; and the second, as a new period in the history of Christianity, in which the tradition is being expressed in intellectual, social and religious milieus which it has not previously entered.[7] The discussion about the foreignness of Christianity in Africa is a genuine one, but seen in the way Walls suggests, the gospel can also be seen as an agent of the renewal of African culture itself.

John Mbiti, an early pioneer in the study of Christianity and culture in Africa, makes clear that the transcendent core message of the faith and its innumerable cultural expressions work together: We can add nothing to the gospel, for this is an eternal gift of God; but Christianity is always a beggar seeking food and drink, cover and shelter from the cultures it encounters in its never-ending journeys and wanderings.[8] Mbiti reminds us that the heart of the Christian story in Africa is about the church becoming incarnate in the life of Africa. Ogbu Kalu reflects on this incarnational purpose of the church. The church’s task, he writes, is to bring the gospel to bear on all the things which concern the well-being of the human person and carry [on] a spiritual warfare against forces which deface.[9] Kalu continues this thought by noting that if the purpose of the church as a whole people of God is to bring healing and wholeness to a broken world, then church history is about the understanding of God’s activity among the poor and their responses to the presence of the kingdom in their midst.[10]

The African story told in this book focuses on the church’s struggle to bring about human flourishing on the continent and beyond, as African Christianity rapidly spread. How was the gospel of the kingdom brought to the poor and how did the poor respond to that gift? This question is at the heart of our narrative. This chapter seeks to prepare the reader for the story that unfolds in the subsequent chapters by addressing three key questions about how best to tell the African story so that the African Christian movement can be that agent of healing and transformation it was intended to be. We begin with the question of doing history.

Wrestling with History: Current Questions in Writing the African Christian Story

The Subjective Side of History

Voltaire once defined history as a trick we play upon the dead. His cynical phrase points to an important truth. History is not just a factual study of the past but is often a highly subjective interpretation of the past. Most of us learn our history through secondary sources, books about the past written by trained historians. What we sometimes fail to notice when we read these books are the values that shape the way the historians think and write. Historians do see the objective facts about the past but what they see is colored by the tint of the glasses they wear.[11] While we must avoid taking the subjective element to the extreme of skepticism about historical knowledge, we must at the same time recognize it as a part of every history book we read. How do these values affect the historian? Roy Swanstrom explains:

A historian from a developing country such as Kenya, anticipating a future dominated by the so-called Third World, will naturally look at the world and its historical past from a perspective different from that of an Englishman whose memory is filled with the glories of an empire almost gone. Historians identified with the radical left will differ in their perspective from a historian identified with the moderate middle or the radical right.[12]

Different approaches to African Christian history reflect the objective and subjective elements of doing history in a variety of ways. History is not Scripture. It is not a final word from above. It is a human word shaped both by careful observation but also deep convictions. Christian history needs to be interpreted. Understanding these differing interpretations of history is known as historiography. The alert reader needs be aware of the perspectives and values of the historian and how those perspectives shape the telling of the story. And this can be a good thing. What we may lose by admitting our presuppositions we gain by adding humanity and insight into the story. Christian perspectives on African Christian history are a necessary part of doing proper Christian history. To write uncritically about Christian history is a great error. To write without sympathy is a greater error.[13]

Because we all look at the world and its historical past from a different perspective, it is important to find out as much as we can about the values and perspectives of authors when we read their work. The study of how historians think and write about history is called historiography. Four major approaches to the writing of the African Christian story deserve mention.

Missionary Historiography

Missionary historiography tries to tell the whole story of the African church but in a way that emphasizes the role of the expatriate missionary as a church planter or discipler. Historically, the transmission of the gospel to Africa from outside the continent is a critical part of the story. African rejection of Western Christianity is either judged harshly or minimized. The role of the missionary or the native who cooperated with the missionary is the main story line.

The classic example of missionary historiography is C. P. Groves’s four-volume The Planting of the Church in Africa. Groves did extensive research in missionary archives, and his emphasis is on the role of the missionary or the national who emulated the missionary. This kind of approach tends to favor the story of Christian transmission over indigenous reception.

Ogbu Kalu, a Nigerian historian, writes that though this approach was often noble and unselfish as it sought to tell the story of the triumph of the gospel, it was bound to be propagandist because such books were often designed to boost morale and material aid. Even when this propagandist element is missing, European writers still tend to study the history of Christianity in Africa by focusing predominantly on what missionaries did or did not do.[14] Why is this? Kalu feels that the reasons for neglecting the African perspective were race and written sources.[15] Until fairly recently, Western historians assumed that Africa had no history beyond the history of European activity in the continent. The result of such an approach means that missionary historiography is often hagiographic, triumphalist and disdainful of indigenous non-European cultures.[16]

Nationalist Historiography

In contrast, nationalist historiography reacts against this Euro-centric approach and seeks to give new emphasis to indigenous or independent expressions of Christianity in Africa. Kalu describes its goal:

In the nationalist and critical writings of modern Africans, the old goals and methods have been discarded. It is recognized that the goal of church history in Africa now is to study how communities which had their own religions and viable instruments of social order came into contact with a new religious form, namely, Christianity and the variety of ways in which they reacted to this external agent of change.[17]

K. O. Dike captured the spirit of the nationalist approach when he declared that African history must be the history of African people and not merely the history of the invaders.[18] A striking example of this approach is A. J. Temu’s British Protestant Missions.[19] Temu argues that missionaries were agents of colonialism in Kenya. The real story of African Christianity in Kenya is the Kikuyu revolt against colonial missionaries and the establishment of independent churches and schools that acted as nurseries of nationalism.[20] This approach has been a useful corrective to the missionary approach, but the reactionary character has been criticized as a new form of propaganda as ideologically driven as the missionary approach. Such a perspective may distort the story of African church history as badly as the approach it seeks to replace.

Ecumenical Historiography

A third perspective is ecumenical historiography. Kalu describes this approach as the most inclusive of the various approaches to the African Christian story: It is the story of the pilgrim people of God and their experiences of God’s redeeming grace in the midst of their existence in various cultural and ecological milieus.[21] Such a broad and inclusive perspective turns from the purely institutional and denominational stories that so often fill church history texts and invites us to a new and wider vision, learning, commitment and action.[22]

One can see this approach in Catholic church historian John Baur’s 2000 Years of African Christianity. One strength of this approach is that the contribution of different churches, Christian movements, and races can be brought out with a minimum of favoritism.

But an ecumenical perspective also raises questions. One concern is that such an approach tends to be too uncritical of the kinds of Christianity it surveys. The ecumenical historian may feel obligated to present on equal footing any movement professing to be Christian and having a large enough membership to be taken seriously. Can an ecumenical perspective provide solid ground for value judgments beyond those of ecumenism itself, with its concerns for formal unity and justice? Can it appreciate new movements and churches in the African story that express little interest in the ecumenical agenda? Somewhat surprisingly, those churches and movements that have not joined the ecumenical movement or are critical of the ecumenical movement (such as fundamentalist, Pentecostal-charismatic, and conservative evangelical groups) are not always treated evenhandedly by ecumenical historians. Unless great care is taken, an ecumenical approach may be just as limiting as the approaches it seeks to replace.

The Perspective of World Christianity

Additional strategies are needed to keep the story of African Christianity as inclusive and diverse as possible. The discipline of World Christianity comes to the aid of the student of African Christian history. World Christianity admires the strengths of the approaches mentioned above and seeks to build upon them while offering additional perspectives to bring out the scope and diversity of the African story in new ways.

First, however, we must answer the question, what is World Christianity? Lamin Sanneh, one of the pioneers of the discipline, speaks of it as the movement of Christianity as it takes form and shape in societies that are not Christian. World Christianity is not monolithic but rather a variety of indigenous responses through more or less effective local idioms.[23] Sanneh distinguishes the study of World Christianity from the study of global Christianity. The latter, in his usage, is the faithful replication of Christian forms and patterns developed in Europe.[24] The discipline of World Christianity is shaped by this quest to move beyond euro-centric approaches and focus on indigenous expressions of faith and the role of local agency. It is interdisciplinary, utilizing history, theology, linguistics, missiology, and the social sciences to uncover the movement of the Spirit in the church around the world as it raises up new expressions of the faith and revitalizes older expressions. World Christianity focuses on both non-Western expressions of Christian faith and non-Western perspectives on the movement of this Christianity around the world. Applied to Christian historiography, such an approach is ecumenical in its breadth and inclusiveness, evangelical in its roots and core commitments, and contextual in its mission and sensitivities.[25]

One of the more exciting features of this approach to the African Christian story is that it helps explain the dramatic transnational expansion of African Christianity in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Many African churches and movements have become international, planting their churches in every major city and nation on the globe. The largest churches in Great Britain and Europe in the early twenty-first century were founded by Africans. While an early generation of World Christianity scholars focused on the crucial question of indigenous reception and translation, a more recent generation have added the important dimensions of trans-nationalism, as African Christianity becomes a global movement.[26]

Practically speaking, what will a book on the history of African Christianity, that is shaped by the perspective of World Christianity, look like? A key concept of World Christianity is the concept of translatability. Lamin Sanneh has written about the power of indigenous translations of Scripture in Africa and the role those translations played in the revitalization of local cultures, local expressions of the faith, and even local initiatives in de-colonization.[27]

Andrew Walls has widened this translation principle to include the entirety of Christian theology and practice. Beginning with the theological paradigm of the incarnation of Christ, in which the divine life was translated into a particular person in a particular culture, Walls traces the entire Christian movement from ancient Antioch to modern Africa as a translation, or conversion, from one cultural expression of the gospel to another. For Walls, Paul’s translation of the gospel from its Jewish heartland to its new Hellenistic home was not a distortion of the faith but rather a renewal of it. It is a delightful paradox, writes Walls, that the more Christ is translated into the various thought forms and life systems which form our various national identities, the richer all of us will be in our common Christian identity. As Christ moves from culture to culture, receiving the ultimate categories and titles of each, his glory is enhanced, not muted. This process takes place in two different ways. The first is through the indigenizing or homing principle. This principle creates in diverse communities a sense that Christianity belongs there, that it is truly a place where we can be at home. The gospel accepts us where we are and as we are. But it does more than that. The second principle is the pilgrim principle that creates within the Christian community a desire to grow, change and expand. The gospel is at home in all cultures, but it is never so at home that it stops seeking those in the far country. Throughout Christian history, these two forces of indigenization and pilgrimage remain in constant tension. Christianity can never be so at home in any one culture that no one else is welcome. The indigenous principle tends to localize the vision of the church, the other to universalize.[28]

In the African Christian story that lies before us, we may well be struck by the dramatic differences between African Christianity in the age of Augustine or in medieval Nubia or in an African initiated church in the twentieth century. What must be kept in mind is that these varying and unfolding expressions of the Christian faith happen through this process of serial translation, in which the dynamics of translation and its twin processes of indigenization and pilgrimage move the story forward in dramatic and not always predictable ways.

One example of writing African Christian history from a World Christianity perspective is Ogbu Kalu’s study of African Pentecostalism. Kalu notes that Pentecostalism is a global phenomenon. His focus, however, is on local appropriation of that movement and how indigenous values, like the timeless African belief that spiritual power can have real world impact, informs the new faith.[29] Kalu sees the African reception of global Pentecostalism in terms of indigenous reception. Africans translate the message and generate new movements of witness and mission that in turn are making their way around the world. Indigenization and globalization go hand in hand in gospel movements.

Wrestling with the Kingdom: Is There Any Continuity in the African Christian Story?

From the perspective of World Christianity, is there a recurring and translatable core to the African story? This question raises the issue of continuity in African Christianity through time. The diversity is plain for all to see. The river that runs between the innumerable expressions of Christianity and its essence is less visible. As we seek to utilize World Christianity and its perspective to tell the African Christian story, particularly the concept of translation as developed by Sanneh and Walls, we need to ask what it is about Christianity that gets translated from one culture or time period to another. What are some of the enduring values and motifs of African Christianity that take on different forms at different times?

A chorus of African Christian scholars have suggested a central theme – a continuing core value that weaves its way through the story like a silver thread. In 1980, Dr E. A. Adeolu called for a new church history that went beyond Marxism and capitalistic analysis and did for our time what Augustine did for his: discern the mysterious intermingling of the City of God with the earthly city.[30] More recently, Nigerian theologian Ukachuwu Chris Manus, called for a new kingdom emphasis in African Christianity in order to promote social justice. The reality of the kingdom of God, writes Manus, provides men and women of all ages the vista to judge this world and to renew it through their total commitment to peace, justice, freedom.[31] Justice is served by a kingdom consciousness.

So also is ecumenicity. The need for a viable ecumenical perspective has led African church historians like Ogbu Kalu to explore a kingdom theme for African Christianity. Kalu called for a rediscovery of the kingdom in order to move beyond the parochialism of institutional church history: The basic assumption of Church history is that the Kingdom of God is here among men, providing enormous opportunities for renewal and reshaping of individual and communal lives.[32] While we must avoid the triumphalism that such an approach suggests, Kalu feels that seeing the kingdom of God in Africa as the core of its story would illumine the ways in which the community sees herself and the intruding presence of the Kingdom.[33]

These scholars point to one of the earliest African answers to this question of theme, and one of the most enduring, Augustine’s summary of the kingdom of God in history, found in his De Civitate Dei (The City of God). Augustine’s kingdom motif has captured the imagination of Christians in every era of African Christian history. When African Christians talk about their faith, they do so, not in ways that historians or social scientists would use. They speak in ultimate terms. In almost every era, African Christians explain their faith using terms like seeking the city of God or following Christ and his kingdom. Augustine’s conception of Christianity as the history-long struggle between the eternal city of God and the earthly city of man is as important in shaping African Christianity as it has been in shaping Christianity elsewhere around the globe. But how does Augustine describe the kingdom theme at the heart of the Christian story? The city of God and the city of man tell the dialectical story of two value systems. The first is marked by its emphasis on the power of love. The second by the love of power. This battle between love and power, between divine self-giving love and fallen self-love, runs down the middle of every culture, every individual and every church. As we tell the African Christian story, following Augustine’s lead, we must expose and explore this perennial conflict as it ripples through every era in the timeline and every actor in the story.

Translating the Message

How do we apply Walls and Sanneh’s translation paradigm to Augustine’s great theme? The story of the city of God and its struggles with the earthly city has shaped the wider Christian story in other parts of the world and provided historians with a motif that helps make sense of the diversity of new expressions of the faith through time. H. Richard Niebuhr, found the kingdom of God to be a useful interpretive key to American church history.[34] He recognized that the Augustinian concept of the kingdom had three distinct but interconnected elements: God’s sovereign rule, which is tied to the doctrine of providence; Christ’s redemptive reign over hearts, which is tied to the doctrine of salvation; and the coming kingdom as an earthly utopia, which is tied to eschatology and ethics:

The Christian faith in the kingdom of God is a threefold thing. Its first element is confidence in the divine sovereignty which, however hidden, is still the reality behind and in all realities. A second element is the conviction that in Jesus Christ, the hidden kingdom was not only revealed in a convincing fashion but also began a special and new career among men, who had rebelled against the true law of their nature. The third element is the direction of life to the coming of the kingdom in power.[35]

What was most striking about Niebuhr’s model was the suggestion that the church in different periods of history tended to put more emphasis on one of these three aspects of the kingdom to the relative neglect of the others.

The seventeenth-century New England Puritans, according to Neibuhr, emphasized the kingdom as the sovereign rule of God over all of life and attempted to witness to that reality by building a theocracy (or more accurately a theonomy) where the word of God ruled every sphere or institution of society. The very success of their witness led to a rigid institutionalizing of the theocracy which was unable to withstand the forces of change that occurred in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In response to the demands of a changing America, the church moved from the old witness and – under the fire of revivals – bore fresh witness to the kingdom by emphasizing the redemptive reign of Christ over hearts.

The awakenings and revivals of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries created an evangelical movement that emphasized converting individuals instead of building theocracies. However, the changes brought on by the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (urbanization, immigration, religious pluralism, secularization) led to the social gospel which reinterpreted the kingdom as an earthly utopia brought about by the steady advance of human progress. The institutionalizing of this liberal vision of the kingdom led to discontent and restlessness in the church, for the kingdom can never be reduced to any human institution or structure.

Niebuhr was critical of this broken witness to the kingdom and called for the restoration of the whole gospel of the kingdom because the three notes of faith in the sovereignty, the experience of the love of Christ and hope of ultimate redemption are inseparable.[36] Niebuhr was particularly critical of liberal Christianity with its focus on the earthly kingdom to the neglect of the cross of Christ. There was no way, argued Niebuhr, toward the coming kingdom save the way taken by a sovereign God through the reign of Jesus Christ.[37]

But does this perspective apply to Africa? John de Gruchy has tried to use the kingdom of God concept in understanding South African Christianity.[38] Gruchy has used Niebuhr’s categories to illumine the meaning of church history in that region of the continent:

As the struggle of the church in North America was a struggle for the kingdom of God, so too, the struggle of the church in South Africa is for the kingdom of God in another segment of world history. Indeed, as we look back on the history of South Africa, and the theologies that have shaped and interpreted that history, the cruciality of the kingdom emerges strongly and resemble in an almost uncanny way the story of the kingdom of God in America.[39]

I would like to follow up on the ideas of Augustine, Adeolu, Niebuhr, Kalu, and Gruchy by suggesting that African church history can benefit from a kingdom lens. I believe the concept of the city of God, its pilgrimage in Africa, and the ceaseless tension between the love of power and the power of love can open up the meaning of the story of African Christianity. But what