Category: Uncategorized

This past week I worked through the recent (2012) autobiography of Lamin Sanneh, who grew up a Muslim in poor rural Gambia and then converted to Christianity as a young man. He has gone on to become a prominent theologian of Christian expansion in the global south – in a similar vein as Philip Jenkins.

My opinion on the book as a whole and of Sanneh’s thought is a bit mixed, but I really enjoyed much of what I read. Here is what I copied down as a few of the most interesting passages along with a few comments.

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In a village with virtually no books, he recounts his finding of a half-burnt copy of a book by Helen Keller. I know she gets used to often as “inspirational” figure, but in this case her work quite literally was.

By what can only be regarded as a miraculous coincidence, a chance encounter with the writings of Helen Keller (1880-1968) burst the chains of my intellectual confinement. When I was around eight years old, I was walking down a dirt road and I kicked up a pile of papers strewn at a garbage dump. What looked like the remnants of a book caught my attention. After I rummaged in the pile and stood up, I was holding torn leaves from Helen Keller’s autobiography, The Story of My Life (1902). I had recently learned to read, and with the thrill of a beginner stumbling on a godsend, I devoured Helen Keller’s words, entranced by her description of how she herslef learned to read. She described how she acquired literacy by Braille, and how she moved from silence and darkness to a life of vision and triumph over adversity. She insisted that although the world is full of suffering, the world is also full of the overcoming of suffering. I was enchanted, and could barely contain myself. I was not blind in the physical sense, true, but I was trapped by my adverse circumstances. The world felt strange and impenetrable, and this was God’s will, I thought. In stepped Keller with a new message ‘nil desperandum’, never despair. The true adventure of life, she taught me, lies not in destinations but in having new eyes to see the world. (p.18)

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Philip Jenkin’s often explains that Christianity just makes a lot of sense to people coming directly out of a traditional culture of blood sacrifice. That is, they are much more likely to take the Bible seriously without any mental gymnastics than children of the enlightenment. Think about the Psalmist and how distant his culture really was from that in the west.

[My sister] Maie chided me often, saying the West had made me successful, but only superficially. She pleaded with me to hold up my end of tradition by taking many wives, or at least by fathering many more children. I was being brainwashed, she insisted, to wait for Cupid’s arrow to stab me before asking for a quiver full of children. When I replied that life in America ruled out such calculations, she responded somewhat dismissively, “I am talking about the eternal law. Even America cannot defy the law of reproduction, which is God’s will.” How could I make the unnatural natural? It did not matter to her that she had never been to America; neither, it occurred to me, would it have mattered to the ancient scribe who wrote, “Your wife will be like a fruitful vine within your house; your children will be like olive shoots around your table” (Psalm 128:3) (p.35)

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On people discouraging him from studying theology.

My interest in theology was rebuffed at every turn. I recall and American student guide at Union Theological Seminary in New York City pointing me to the study of African folk religion instead of theology in graduate school. That is where you can make a real contribution, he said. I encountered similar attitudes elsewhere. A prominent Methodist churchman based in London advised me against theology during his African tour, saying the church should better spend its scarce resources feeding the hungry than in supporting theological bursaries. An eminent African theologian of his day, Harry Sawyerr, expressed skepticism in a different way when I sought his wisdom: the vocation of theology, he said, should draw you in rather than being something you choose because of personal experience. I didn’t see the difference. (p.145)

I have heard this line of reasoning before and I’ve believed it. I am beginning to have some second thoughts though.

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The following is a great section on how leaders in the west have been incredibly dismissive of the recent Christian resurgence in Africa and parts of Asia. Why discount it so much? It doesn’t seem to line up with the highly scientific definitions of value that we are in thrall too. If sanitation is still bad then Jesus must be a joke. If the country is still run by a dictator that it must mean that God doesn’t do jack squat for the people, right? I’ve wondered the same thing at times. Sanneh’s comments here are a proper antidote to that line of thinking.

Beyond issues of reliability, critics have faulted the resurgence [of Christianity] for failing to deliver the Third World from its chronic problems of AIDS, corruption, tribal conflict, and general backwardness. For that reason, however otherwise accurate, the numbers are meaningless, for they indicate no movement toward improved sanitation and a higher standard of living. At this point of skepticism one realizes that critics have a much larger target in mind than mere quibbles about numbers, and that is the view that Christianity is valid only when it brings about a higher standard of living. In this view Christianity should be a stepping stone to a better life here and now, or its spread is extension of an illusion. Perhaps we should take the statistics as evidence of social regression, of movement backwards, the critics insist. These critics see progress as an evolutionary vaccine against the parasite of religion, explaining why the parasite migrates and festers in areas of limited progress, infecting those still fixated on their childhood fantasies. In the critics’ view the breeding grounds of religion are the shadow lands of progress.

Except by being equally dogmatic, one can provide no satisfactory answer to this sweeping objection except to say that it ignores a crucial dimension of the reality of religion and its roots in the human spirit. Religion has an other-worldly dimension, to be sure, but indubitably also a this-worldly dimension of moral progress and social justice. In their different ways St. Francis of Assisi and John Wesley attacked poverty, but attacked equally the dehumanization of the poor. The witness of Mother Teresa of Calcutta was in part a challenge to the idea of progress without social conscience. In that respect the breeding grounds of religion are the spawning fields of the struggle for justice and dignity. The religious voice is often a critical reality in the otherwise callous world of greed and self-centeredness. Progress cannot outgrow justice.

Critics who are jaded with the religion of their upbringing and are still in the throes of recovery find it hard to be sanguine about the rising fortunes of a religion that has been the source of their disappointment. But the criticism is overreaching in the sense that one may no more blame the early Christians for their faith not preventing the fall of the Roman Empire, or a Christian Europe for not preventing Nazi and Stalinist pogroms, than post-Western Christians for the resurgence not preventing the political and economic collapse of their societies. The stakes cannot suddenly be higher for Third World Christianity than they were for Western Christianity. (p.231)

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Here, Sanneh points out a key distinction between Christianity and Islam. The first transforms cultures by adapting and integrating them. The other fundamentally swallows them up. Christian missions have tended to fail when they try to act too much like the latter. “Jesus meets you where you are at” linguistically it would seem.

The embrace of the local name of God is a vital difference between Christianization and Islamization, and the discrepancy has lessons for the history of religion generally. Without the indigenous anticipations of the religion, the prospects of Christianity taking root are slim. Unless converts are able to call on the name of God in the vernacular, they remain fundamentally at risk of sliding away from the faith.
Vernacular translation, then, is key to cultural retrieval, renewal, and transformation, the secret to intercultural encounter in its positive phase. Without translation and its indigenous currency, cultural symbols in their isolation atrophy and eventually disappear when challenged. In Islam “Allah” is not translatable for the purposes of worship and devotion. Adoption of Islam in a traditional religious society strains reliance on the old deities. It may take several generations, but eventually “Allah” will have no acceptable local rivals or analogues. (p.233)

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This paragraph on the chasm between specialists and politicians in Washington D.C. is right on the money.

I doubt whether there is anywhere else in the world such as high concentration of experts and specialists in as many fields as there are in Washington, D.D., or where the gap is so great between them and the policies of government. I learned, in that sense, that a dynamic democracy can take a huge toll on the purveyors of scientific knowledge and accumulated experience, because what is politically expedient may not be reconcilable with that evidence and experience require. Political mobilization thrives in a parallel universe of its own making, with the effect that the world of facts and evidence is often too tame and innocent for the cutthroat business of wining allies and disarming enemies. (p.260)

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At one point in the book, he takes a justified pot shot at the prosperity gospel.

It remains fascinating that in the age of televangelism and the megachurch movement, the Catholic church has ceded ground to the prosperity gospel preachers who offer wealth, health, success, and instant miracles for cash first and last. Religious indulgences have staged a comeback, apparently, only this time not in the Catholic church. Religion as a market franchise will take cargo of any and all dimensions – other than that of the crown of thorns. (p.276)

I love this account of childhood in much of Africa:

An African childhood such as mine was not littered with the kin of stimuli we associate with age-specific gadgets, including toys of every description and sophistication. An African child learns pretty quickly that playmates are not the same as playthings, and that having friends is altogether different from possessing things. A childhood landscape in Africa is a pretty stripped-down scene, with not even the barest of things made for children. But what a child lacks in mechanical toys is more than made up for in the organic richness of human contact and relationships. Society was designed that way.

What to Western eye looks like childhood of deprivation, then is to the African a stage of life brimming with assets of childhood enrichment. The African child lives in a close crowded world, a world teeming with faces and sounds and movements that the child learns to decipher eventually into recognition and affirmation, each smiling face a lighted clue in the growing shape of knowing and belonging. In the workaday world a mother carries her infant on her back, tied with a strip of cloth. She talks to the infant, rocking and humming to reassure it, pointing out things, singing lullabies, and in general letting the infant in on greetings and exchanges with friends and passers-by. The education of the child begins on the mother’s back with the mother’s daily chores and physical exertions the setting of real-life experience.

The child is nurtured with the mother’s milk and trained on the mother’s back, always within reach, never forgotten or out of mind, and everywhere attended and surrounded by people. It provides a strong sense of company and society, reinforced with the steady hand of familiarity, support, and encouragement, Isolation and loneliness and considered extreme forms of child abuse, a form of social strangling. Women in Gambia would weep if they saw a child alone, even if not their own.

-Lamin Sanneh, Called from the Margin, p.26

An old pastor of mine used to often say “people are more important than things”. Unfortunately the dominant culture in the congregation was for both parents to work and have few children – much like the rest of America. Still, I think it’s true, though things are so much easier to love than people. I am glad I grew up with many siblings. I am glad my own kids have each other to play with for hours every single day, though they have lots of shiny playthings too – for better and worse(!).

Shortly after we were married, my wife would babysit a set of twins born to a woman from Ghana who taught her how to wrap the kids up on her back with a colorful strip of cloth. My wife went on to frequently do the same with the rest of our own kids. I am glad for that and also glad that my youngest daughter at least lived in an African orphanage where she was always around other children and often held. Children from western orphanages have better food and medicine but are often much worse off in other ways – especially with regards to emotional security and sociability. Malnutrition and disease are much more easily remedied afterwards than loneliness.

A couple of Girard’s first major works made quite the splash when they hit the ivory tower crowd back in the 1970s. They all expected a bunch of French secular post-modern literary criticism and that’s exactly what it seemed to be, until about the second chapter from the end where BAM! – he suddenly ties the whole thing into the four gospels with a completely straight face. Waaaa???

Gil Baile, a student of his at the time, recounts this fun anecdote:

“Professor Girard, what you’ve been saying is quite extraordinary. It almost appears, however, that you are suggesting that the revelatory power of biblical literature is categorically superior to that of all other literature. You are, after all, a Stanford professor; you’re not saying THAT, are you? Rene’s one-word response was all the more striking for the momentary pause that preceded it: “Categorically,” he replied. The impression one had was that Girard was the only person in this room full of Biblical scholars who was willing to say such a thing.

And then at the end of the day, another memorable moment came, when someone asked a practical question. Clearly, the panorama Girard had spread out before those assembled was astonishing, and against this backdrop, Rene’s sobering assessment of the contemporary historical and cultural predicament stood out in bold relief. Given all that you have said, someone asked Girard, what is to be done? In response, Rene was gracious and patient and humble. His answer, as I recall, was something like this: “Well, it is of course an enormous problem, and it does not lend itself to being easily ‘fixed.’ We are each called to different tasks, so perhaps we should begin by striving for personal sanctity.” I could hardly believe my ears. Biblical scholars, whose discipline had been for decades currying favor with the secular academy by renouncing a priori any distinctively religious preconceptions, were being advised on the practical value of personal sanctity.

-For Rene Girard, p.182-183

I love that. Conclusion – it turns out the Bible is actually true. Holy cow Batman – what are we supposed to do about that? Um, how about cleaning up your life a bit, like it suggests.

What is really wrong with Islam?

How would Rene Girard answer this? He suggests an answer in passing in his book Battling to the End, but I’ll expand on it a bit.

Despite the fact that Islam upholds many truths about the one infinite creator God, its theology and practice on the ground level ultimately does not fundamentally undermine the scapegoat mechanism. This is the demonic machinery that keeps society glued together from age to age by periodically unifying the people against one sacrificial victim. The Gospel of Jesus Christ fatally cripples this system by revealing the victim to be innocent. Unfortunately, Islam ends up keeping it intact.

Islam persist throughout history by keeping its internal fighting to a minimum by the casting out of infidels. On a good day, the infidel just gets run out of town, expelled from the country, or defeated on the battlefield. On a bad day they get their throats slit by a neighbor. This keeps restless men effectively united against a common enemy. But what do you do when your nation is eventually virtually 100% Muslim? Who makes a good scapegoat then?

The answer is: wayward women. Here is the deal though – there usually aren’t enough actual wayward women to sacrifice to keep a lid on things. And so what happens? You have to invent wayward women! Before you may have had a genuine seductress that was sleeping around. But now you go after the daughter that is just suspected of having a boyfriend from the wrong clan. And I don’t mean that she’s been sleeping with him, but only that she’s met him for coffee a couple of times behind her family’s back. When the community in say, a village in Pakistan (where there is little secularized law enforcement) is desperate for a victim, this imaginary wayward woman will do the trick. An “honor killing” is then in order. Women fared better when their brothers were busy fighting in the army.

So who do we scapegoat now in the West? This is largely the function of celebrity worship/hate. While I am writing this, the scapegoat-of-the-week happens to be celebrity chef Paula Dean who was caught behaving badly. About this time a year ago it was Tom Cruise. A couple years before it was Tiger Woods. Whoever happens to be the U.S. President makes a good stand-in sometimes when it’s a slow news day. The folks of Westboro “Baptist Church” seem to enjoy putting themselves at risk.

The thing is, our culture, even though it’s largely secular and post-Christian, has had the scapegoat mechanism so undermined by centuries of the Gospel, that we can’t stomach blood anymore. People want Paula Dean fired, but not lynched. They want to see Obama (or Bush, or David Cameron if your a Brit) impeached, but not actually burnt at the stake in the national mall. Our blood is hidden. The actual lynching doesn’t unify us any more so it has to be kept under wraps. We prefer our enemies to be killed by drone strikes – keeping the executioners hands from smelling of iron. We dump a staggering 3,000+ babies in trash cans every single day, but we work very hard to keep that out of sight.

The Muslims mock our decadence and they are right to. The difference is that deep down, Christianity has the power (via the Holy Spirit and through philosophical tools) to truly, eventually, completely erode the sacrificial order and put and end to it. Our Abrahamic brethren are unfortunately unaccepting of the centrality of Jesus Christ and so the Satanic scapegoat mechanism persists. Of it there can be no end in that world.

As a final note, I will add that Girard warns Christians not to make Muslims their rivals and I wish to echo this. I have absolutely no desire to victimize my Muslim neighbors. To do so would be to fall into a grave trap. One of my daughter’s favorite playmates at school this past year was an Egyptian girl. I wished on several occasions that I could tell her parents that I liked and appreciated them, but words are awkward. All I could bring myself to do was smile and say hello in passing.

I am critiquing Islam in the abstract here. As a Christian, I naturally believe that turning to the worship of Jesus is, in some sense, a cure-all for any situation. When Muslim nations adopt Western human rights laws that, for example, protect women, they are indirectly receiving some side-effects of that cure. On the other hand, when they adopt some of our corrupt banking practices, they are only learning techniques to sweep things under the rug.

There was a lot of push-back against the first Amharic bible translations. Why? No red ink! This had been a really key feature of the text for centuries – one that had been around so long in Abyssinia that to see a copy without it made the reader say, “What the heck is this? This can’t be scripture. How come God’s name isn’t highlighted?” A reasonable question if that is what you’d only ever seen. Feedback to the printing press operators was likely met with much groaning.

In Donald Crummey’s contribution to The Missionary Factory in Ethiopia, he writes of Birru Petros, a bright young Ethiopian man who was sent to Europe to study in 1858. He loved it at first, but eventually left after several years when the quality of instruction deteriorated. A letter he sent detailing his troubles sounds like it could have been written yesterday. He complains how the school is staffed by student teachers “who do not even know how to teach” and “two principals who do not like to teach.” He also comments, “Since they want to be successful with collective money from people by saying that an Abyssinian youth is studying in their school, I do not think they will discharge me soon.”

Sound familiar? Grad students teaching all the classes, lazy professors who like research but hate teaching, and a diverse student body maintained for political correctness points and fundraising. And this was over 150 years ago! Apparently, nothing is new under the sun once again.

On page 1 of The Missionary Factor in Ethiopia, the editor Getatchew Haile dares to call modern Protestant missionary biographies for what they in fact are: hagiography.

Now he is not derisive and the book is not at all dismissive of their work. But he does point out something that fanboys of all ages are usually loathe to admit – their heroes are usually not as holy and amazing as we wish they were we should be honest and treat them as such. To do otherwise, I believe, is damaging to our witness.

Along those lines, if I hear one more “inspiring” sermon about how freakin’ amazing Jim Elliot was to get himself killed in the Amazon, I’m gonna scream. The guy was faithful and brave. That’s great! But that’s all. That’s all. His story just doesn’t get, in my opinion, as much mileage as the story of many other faithful men who aren’t told. It’s really hip to get speared by natives in the jungles of Ecuador while trying to preach Jesus to them and have a large network of people back home who care about your work. It’s not near as cool to get gang-raped in Iraq because they heard you were secretly a Christian. And nobody knows about it – not even your family. We talk about one far too much and the other hardly ever.

Someone might think that I’m all cynical about these stories. Not so. I really enjoyed reading about the Sudan Interior Mission a couple weeks ago. I admire those folks tremendously and also realize that they, in hindsight, made some bad decisions. Some unwittingly and some through failure of character. I think Mother Teresa of Calcutta was a true contemporary saint. People were shocked a few years back when some of her journals and letters were published and it was revealed that she had various problems and often felt very discouraged during most of her life. But this is completely normal – at least when human beings are concerned.

I vote for less celebrity worship and fewer big names. I’m for less hagiography and more biography. Let’s have a bit less polish and more humility and along with that love and acceptance of flawed heroes.

Below – Some examples of hagiography of, ahem, varying quality:

The almost universal tendency of the missionaries to exaggerate their own importance and success in order to keep the economical contributions in Europe on a high level is usually not taken into account. The focus is on the missionary and the people they encounter are either characterized either as eager listeners, that is potential converts, or aggressive enemies, both categories promoting the supporters of the mission to send more funds and missionary personnel.

-Samuel Rubenson, The Interaction Between the Missionaries and the Orthodox: The Case of Abune Selama, p.74

Before I continue, I want to note that despite the negative tone of the quote above, I do not believe the author is scoffing at Christian missionary work and it is not my intention to do so either. In fact, I enthusiastically support the bulk of it. I am just trying to provide a bit more light on certain aspects of it as I study the interaction between Africa and the West.

The passage above points out one of the most fundamental problems with “narrative” (I put narrative in scare quotes only because of it’s over-use as of late). The problem is that good stories are spun – massively edited accounts. It’s the nature of the medium. Virtually every film that has ever won the Oscar for Best Picture was also at least nominated for Best Editing. True story. An 800-page academic biography and a 300-page thriller can have exactly the same subject matter and facts, but tell it in remarkably different ways. They each have their virtues and pitfalls.

But that’s the problem with spin and it affects our understanding of international cultures and churches as well. That’s why it’s not uncommon to hear conflicting accounts from the mission field. Were the Orthodox Christians really welcoming and hospitable or where they hostile and dangerous? Were the Muslims eager to hear the gospel or did they try to burn down the missionaries house? What about all the people inbetween these too poles? It turns out that MOST of the people were somewhere in the middle as to their response and opinion. There were lots of people that didn’t like the missionaries, but didn’t do anything in particular to stop or sabotage them. In the same way, there were plenty of people that came to Christ after years of work – they were not at all interested at first. These people’s stories aren’t often told though because they are slow and boring. But real life is slow and boring. The problem with journalism is that it nearly always goes for the easy-to color folks. Oh, sure maybe they have some nuance if given enough time but in short stories, most folks are still pretty well delineated as either heroes or villains. To tell a good story is a good thing, but it is also, often, a deceptive thing. Remember that there is always way more going on behind the scenes – most of it dull and tedious!

This is what’s missing from the Iron Man movies – Tony Stark spending weeks debugging the navigation sensors on his power suit due to some bad wiring and miscalibration. Can you imagine a sequel like that? Yawn. But it would be undeniably much more accurate.

That is a question I’ve been asking myself a lot lately. Why am I so interested in Africa and Ethiopia in particular? I’ve read everything I can get my hands on on the topic during the better part of the last year. And I’m not quite sure why. I’ve had several friends give me strange looks when I try to mumble an explanation. I think I can finally articulate some of it right now though.

If I am right in suggesting that what really distinguishes the modern missionary movement from its earlier predecessors is the fact that virtually all modern Western missionaries have been moulded to some extent by the assumptions of the Enlightenment, then the dialogue between Westernized Christians and those still largely shaped by the primal imagination is of the very greatest significance. Indeed Bediako may be correct in thinking that it will largely influence the role of Christianity in the twenty-first century. Ethiopia, with its long reception, experience and meditation upon the Christian Gospel and sacraments, is a most fruitful area in which to study and reflect upon the ongoing encounter between the primal imagination and the emissaries of the Enlightenment.

-Getatchew Haile, The Missionary’s Dream: An Ethiopian Perspective on Western Missions in Ethiopia, p.15

THIS right here is why I am really and truely fascinated with Africa, and Ethiopia in particular. This is it right here. I think that the Christianity of the global south (Africa, south Asia, and Latin America) is THE future of Christianity for the next century or many centuries. And I think that we in the north, in the West, have a lot to learn from them. I love theology but I don’t want to rehash Augustine or dig for some more nuggets hiding in Calvin’s Institutes or tear apart Romans from a better angle. I know there is still plenty of good work being done in these areas, but I’m just not the guy to do it. I can’t sustain my interest in that long enough to do a worthwhile job. I want to see what can be dug up in old Abyssinia, and what still lives on today in its faithful children and even its unfaithful but Christ-haunted children, whatever problems or confusions they may have. I think this holds a key part of the future of our race.

I don’t want to have the writing of software be my main productive contribution to humanity and society and to God’s people. Talk about short-lived – it lasts barely longer than the food in the refrigerator! But Christianity in Ethiopia has been percolating for two centuries and it’s still there in force. We’ve had it in America for 1/8th that time and it’s already on the serious decline. Maybe they know something we don’t. “Oh hell no! Of course not. They are backwards syncretic icon-kissing heretics! WE need to help them get with the program!” says the fat child of the enlightened West. I am not so sure. How has that been working out for us lately anyway? How about we turn the facet on the other way for a while.

This is why I was so excited to see bishops from Nigeria, Rwanda, and elsewhere sponsor and guide the conservative Anglican movement in the America during the past decade. Frankly, I’d like to see them remain involved. I’m not looking to follow their tradition – that is their lot. But I would like to see mine reformed so that it daily points more to Christ and less to myself.

Catholic Missionaries have never had much success in Ethiopia. Their crew still makes up less than 1% of the population. Ayele Teklehaymanot in his piece The Struggle for the “Ethiopianization” of the Roman Catholic Tradition details several ways in which the liturgy was (in his opinion and mine too) unnecessarily “Latinized”.

• No display of the Tabot (replica ten commandments).
• Using wafers instead of fresh baked bread.
• Giving the people bread from the box instead of the table up front.
• Not using near as much incense.
• Using a crucifix with a sculpted Jesus on it instead of the traditional stylized Ethiopian cross.
• Not going barefoot in the church to show that it was a holy place.
• Having private low masses. The Ethiopian mass is always high (public with lots of personnel)
• Relaxed fasting traditions, especially in the usually intense week before Easter.

And you thought arguing about whether to have guitars on Sunday was a problem. Ha! All these changes only served to alienate the local Ethiopians and defamiliarize them with the practices they grew up with. It’s no wonder they had trouble swallowing many of the teachings when the form was so disrupted.