Carpe Cakem!

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.

In reading Philip Jenkin’s recent book Laying Down the Sword (which I have mixed feelings about), I made a list of all the different times Christian leaders have justified genocide by naming their enemies “Amalekites”. I’m not talking about just killing in self-defense or even conquest of foreign armies – I’m talking about (in many cases) the full-scale inhalation of women and children as well. But don’t worry, it’s all cool because these dudes are not just your average folk made in the image of God, they are “Amalekites”. You remember those guys that Joshua was commanded to wipe out? Well they’re back and it’s our job to finish what Joshua’s followers were chastised for not completing.

Who called their enemies Amalekites?

• Charlemagne, versus the Saxons in 782
• Pope Urban II, first crusade in 1095, against Muslims
• John Knox, 1550s, Against British Catholics
• Heinrich Bullinger, Swiss reformed theologian who legitimized this use
• William Gouge, Thomas Barnes, Puritans, 1620-30s, against native Americans
• Oliver Cromwell, 1650, against Irish Catholics
• Cotton Mather, against American Indians, 1689
• Dutch verses the Zulu in South Africa, 1838
• Germans in 1904, against tribal people of Namibia. Killed all women and children.
• Leaders of the Rwandan Genocide in 1994 described the Tutsi people as Amalekites
• Who’s next?

Ugg. This list is a nightmare – and from some folks who really should know better too. It makes me think that maybe, just maybe, those guys like John Howard Yoder are on to something when they suggest we Christians really need to just get out of this business.

In the years since independence, a strong relationship had developed between church and state in Africa. Many African churches had gained African leadership long before that was the case in the political arena of their countries. That development had two important consequences. First, the church had become a learning place for democracy, at a time when there were no other places to express political opinions. So the church became, to a certain level, the cradle of the new, postcolonial Africa. That gave the church an important role in public life in Africa – almost at the same time as it lost that role in Europe.

Second, when the newly independent countries were looking for well-educated leadership that was up to the new political responsibilities, it was clear where they could find them: in the mission and church schools and universities. Many of the new political leaders had even studied, at least for a time, at theological seminaries for pastors and priests. When they discovered that their vocation lay elsewhere – namely, in the political field – the friendship with their former classmates and future religious leaders did not come to an end; they continued to share a common understanding of life in Africa. When these new leaders were later given the responsibility to develop a new society in their countries, it was obvious that they sought counsel from their friends, many of whom were now bishops and church presidents in offices not far from their own.

-G. Jan van Butselaar, The Role of Churches in the Peace Process in Africa: The Case of Mozambique Compared

The author goes on to discuss how by the 1990s, it was very apparent that most Africa postcolonial states had turned into complete disasters. Dictators and oppressors abounded and though the church remained strong and members numerous, the leaders often did not have the nerve to challenged it openly. Still, when things collapsed and the people demanded democracy, the Church was there in a position to facilitate a lot of the mediation – something that would be unheard of (and forbidden) in the secular West today.

This still makes me think again that perhaps blood and shared history/culture is often thicker than fresh faith. When push comes to shove, people will fall back not on their hard beliefs, but on their ethnic background. So we get warring Muslim tribes in Iraq regardless of who runs the state and African Christians refusing to openly call out their old friends who are now corrupt government officials. This is also why democrats in the southern United States can sometimes still win elections by appealing to the shared culture, place, and heritage of their constituents, even when they share little with regards to desired policy.

The Body of Christ must transcend tribalism. Christ comes to unite all people in all nations. Though Israel is chosen, the salvation of the outsiders is foreshadowed from very early on. What is the book of Acts but a case study in the dissolution of walls of race, class, ethnicity, and nationality, and (to some degree, gender)? Christ’s body is not divided. A corollary of that is that it does not participate in divisiveness. Are you setting neighbor against neighbor? Congratulations. You now know your work is NOT animated by the spirit of God.

On Ethiopian news sites that I sometimes follow, the comment threads are often filled with expatriates complaining about how the leaders (both in the government and the Orthodox church) only ever hire or appoint people from their own ethnic group or region. (“That ministry only ever hires people from Tigray. It’s not fair!”) This sort of nepotism casts a wider net than we are typically used to experiencing in the U.S., but elsewhere in the world it is often the norm. The smart and competent people are repeatedly passed over in favor of the comfortable option. That might mean increased loyalty and comradery in the short term, but at the expense of many other things over time.

Modernism tried to deal with the evils of nepotism by dehumanizing people. If they can be broken down into their elements and raw skills, then tribalism won’t get in the way, right? But blind robotic hiring committees have proven to usually be even worse. So what is the solution? I say it is to cultivate love for each other. That means ecumenicism. That means “getting along” is very high up on the priority list – over many other things. That means taking a risk and appointing the guy from the wrong side of the theological or cultural tracks. I believe the community-building powers of doing such a thing are worth the hassle it takes to get along with the outsider.

Here, in this post (from an email newsletter a while back I think), Gil Bailie does an excellent job of pointing out how child sacrifice is alive and well in the West.

It shows up in two ways, both largely imperceptible. One is hard to see because it’s mostly invisible (abortion), the other, because it’s so slow (massive debt and servitude).

As Christianity [according to Rene Girard] has progressively crippled the elaborate moral ruses we use to camouflage the vestiges of the scapegoating system on which cultures continue to depend, we have sought out victims whose suffering is less morally troubling and/or less visible to us.The sexual revolution, for instance, demanded that sexuality be unrestrained by moral scruples and that it have no serious consequences. The hidden victims that made that regime possible were the unborn children, whose elimination was required if the regime was to be sustained.

What I would like to propose today is a corollary: The profligate and irresponsible “way of life” that we and our political representatives have just insisted on perpetuating in the so-called “fiscal cliff” debacle, has hidden victims: namely, our children and grandchildren, who will inherit, not only a crippling debt that they had no part in amassing, but a culture in moral and material ruin thanks to the irresponsibility and selfishness of their predecessors. We are reverting, along with the sexual revolutionaries, to child sacrifice, albeit in the present instance at least a less ghastly and less bloody form of it. Nevertheless it is shameful. We may be beyond the point at which we can fulfill the responsibility that was ours – to pass on to our children’s children the cultural blessings that were handed to us on a silver platter – but we should at least do what we can to lessen the weight of the burden that will fall on their shoulders.

It is true that our descendants may well rediscover a more robust form of Christian faith than an affluent society tends to foster. We can pray for that, but that possibility does nothing to relieve us of the responsibility we are currently woefully neglecting.

For the most part, the bulk of this child sacrifice is being initiated and sustained by selfish men. Yes, the woman may be complicit in her “choice” to eliminate her child, but this is nearly always done under the duress of men, be they boyfriends or fathers, or the ghosts of fathers. This is true of the second sort of “slow” sacrifice of our grandchildren. This comes about by ambitious men living for the moment and investing every cent in themselves. They have no inheritance to give and in fact it’s often an anti-inheritance, passing only debt and trouble on to their kin after death. Women have gotten in on the act too when, under the guise of equality or feminism, they try to emulate the nasty behaviors of men and steal from the same pot.

Just like the exposing of infants in the age of Rome, or screaming fires in the days of Molech, these abuses must be put to an end as well. They have hidden themselves so we will be less likely to stamp them out. I’m with Stanley Hauerwas when he said in an interview last year:

I say in a hundred years, if Christians are known as a strange group of people who don’t kill their children and don’t kill the elderly, we will have done a great thing.

I’ve been learning to say the Lord’s Prayer in Amharic, for fun, and for my daughter and the rest of the family to say at night. It wasn’t too hard to find a recording and a transliteration, but I wanted to know, literally, what each of the words meant. This is my best shot. Some of the grammar is over my head and the word order is, of course, a bit up for grabs. Nevertheless here it is for those who may be interested.

WordPress doesn’t support fidal script at this point and most people won’t have the font installed anyway so I turned it into an image to post here.

My current reading corner in the basement: Bible, cross, old vintage Game Boy, a pint of vanilla oatmeal stout, and “An Ethnography of the Religious Imagination in Africa”. Everyone else in the house is asleep, at least for a bit. Pretty happy about all that.

We think and write and preach one thing, but then do another. This is no surprise of course. If our theology has even a halfway proper view of the foolishness and frailty of man, then this is no surprise. But I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about larger groups – churches, and denominations. The leaders say one thing and nearly everyone else agrees but on the ground you find something much different and much messier. Pastors (at least ones who haven’t grown too famous or successful) still know this well. Theologians and anthropologists and other critters from the zoo of the academy, as well as occasionally even bishops speak about things as if this discrepancy were negligible. Ideals and abstract principals are easier to talk about than a conglomeration of individuals that undermine theories and discourse in a thousand different ways.

This passage from Todd M. Vanden Berg in the collection The Changing Face of Christianity: Africa, the West, and the World brings up several good points.

The second assumption that African scholars and theologians make when calling for the Africanization of Christianity is that such Africanization needs to be jump-started by theologians. This, I believe, is a false assumption that shows a lack of understanding of what has happened and continues to happen at the grassroots level of orthodox mission churches. Andre Doogers speaks of the general tendency for religious scholars to concentrate on the hierarchical upper echelons at the expense of the general religious populace when he states that “Students of religion…may develop a blind spot for the practical and the popular in a religion. Their main interest then is to systematize the cerebral side of religion, often presented as the only side or the representative side. The popular side – though majoritarian – is viewed as less interesting deviation from it.

This view would be fine if the cerebral side of things WAS the normal state of things and there were only a handful of deviations from it. In fact, in nearly all contexts, be it America, France, Africa, or China, just the opposite is going to be the case. The cerebral is the deviation. If you attend a church full of seminary students or spend a lot of time reading old books instead of going to BBQs, you can get this flipped upside down in your head.

The commentary continues:

Not only does this side seem less interesting and less important to many theologians but also, it may be a more uncomfortable topic for them to consider because it often is manifested in unexpected ways. At the grounded level, the spirit moves in mysterious ways – apparently too mysterious for some theologians. Not only may theologians’ discomfort reflect the unusual nature and character of the specific areas of integration that occur at a grassroots level but also it may reflect the challenge they may feel on issues of identity, power, and authority with African churches. For the most part, it appears that theologians feel free and comfortable to call for the Africanization of Christianity when such calls are focused on peripheral religious beliefs that do not speak to the core of what it means to be a Christian. Theologians are relatively comfortable in discussing, for example, liturgical forms such as dancing and drumming. But when the topic moves more into core religious beliefs, there is little discussion. Mission theologian Robert Schreiter observes that in discussing the relationship of anthropology to Christian missions, “liturgical accouterments and religious rites may be adjusted in light of anthropological data, but the question of the existence of a spirit world and the need for performing exorcisms may be deftly avoided by those same Christian adapters.”

p.47

I think there is more variance going on that we care to admit. This is why you can have more than a few closet charismatics in a Reformed church that is (on paper) cessationist. You can have parents feeding their kids communion even though they are under the approved age. You can have people attending spending their whole lives under teachers, say, at an Assembly of God church, who articulate a synergist soteriology, and yet they are personally completely at rest in the grace of God and not concerned with backsliding. Plenty of people practice penance of some sort (maybe without even knowing it), even if they’ve been told not too. It’s a deep reaction. And I’m not talking about problems of sin of unbelief here – this is amongst the most faithful.

A very pastoral theology has room for all this discrepancy. It fills in the cracks with love. The other kind has no room for cracks and so eventually no room for people to walk around inside.

In a 1996 report by the Organization of African Instituted Churches, based in Kenya, it says, “We may not all be articulate in written theology, but we express faith in our liturgy, worship, and structures.”

O, how many books and research and opinion pieces have documented the dumbing down of American culture? Few can now really handle rich or difficult literature. Our children are barely literate and being fluent in online chatroom jargon doesn’t exactly make up for the loss elsewhere. Stupid American’s make for stupid American Christians too. We’re doomed! No. We are only doomed if being a man or women of letters is some sort of prerequisite to receiving the gospel properly and living faithfully for Jesus Christ. (Hint: It’s not.)

We may have fallen from our rigorous classical roots, but consider Africa. They had nowhere to fall from. For many regions, their language has only even existed in written form for little more than a century. Some fantastic scholars and thinkers have risen from this field, but they are anomalies. The bulk of the people are still much less readers today than the dull American turning a paperback thriller that you sat next to on the subway today. The Africans are bringing their linguistic articulation game up even as we have let ours slip. But they’ve got a long way to go, and so do we. So what can be done about this? What can help our increasingly illiterate culture to receive a healthy helping of orthodox theology and knowledge of God?

The answer is via liturgy, not written words. We need better prayers, better songs, better worship forms, and better art. These don’t to need to assume giant vocabularies to be of value. They don’t necessitate a pound of abstract philosophical discourse powers. These things meet people where they are – be they smart and well educated or not so much.

Don’t write another 400-page book explaining the Trinity. (OK, do that maybe), but how about you write a better song about the Trinity? How about you recite a short creed or prayer EVERY DAY about it. Don’t depend so much on the “icon” of the written word. Consider other truthful icons – things you see through to see Christ more fully.

(This picture is of the icon of the Trinity painted or “written” by Anton Rublev in 1411. You are invited to sit down at the table.)

So we have lots of lousy worship music today. So what? Make it better! Just figure out how to do it without lots of big words. Go hit the psalms again – even the ones that don’t sound so happy. They are simple, but powerful.

When we gather to worship, we always follow some sort of pattern. Make this a healthy pattern. Don’t let it be dominated by one guy, be he a preacher or guitar player, or whatever. Diversify. Have more scripture reading. Have more singing together. Express you love for God together in the ways the church as done throughout the centuries – eating the bread of his body and drinking the wine of this blood together – the more the better. People aren’t going to get this by reading a book anymore or listening to a debate. Give them Jesus a better way.

Start a school and teach people to read well again, by all means! But don’t demand they all do this just so you can FINALLY feed them the meat of systematic theology and bring things back to snuff. Reform liturgy – our daily patterns. This is the future for much of the church of the west. We may yet become more like our brothers and sisters in Africa, not less.

All of this is a prelude to saying that I most enthusiastically support the “master plan” of biblical studies, ecumenicism, and liturgical reform that the Trinity House Institute is setting out to accomplish. Peter Leithart recently articulated their dreams and visions here. Three cheers.

This week: Get four children ready for vacation bible school each day, another for painting camp and violin rehearsals and recital, and another for blind cane training. Also work full time and do lots of chores. Am I forgetting something? Oh yes, interact with my wife. Good grief. I hope things quiet down pretty soon. I just about lost it today. Yes I know this reads more like a fairly pointless Facebook status update, but I needed somewhere to stick this highly appropriate pic.