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Divine Imperium and the Ecclesiastical Imaginary: Church History, Transnationalism, and the Rationality of Empire

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 December 2014

Sylvester A. Johnson
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Extract

Laurie Maffly-Kipp's address to the American Society of Church History proffers the challenge of engaging seriously with the “church” in church history. She notes that scholarship on Christianity has increasingly focused on broader cultural themes in lieu of a more strict concern with churches as institutions in their own right. Maffly-Kipp's challenge reminded me of a particular context in the history of Christianity: the eighteenth-century city-state of Ogua (or, more familiarly, Cape Coast), in present-day Ghana. In the 1750s, the family of a local youth sent their child, Philip Quaque, to study abroad in London under the auspices of the Anglican Church. The young Quaque spent the next eleven years of this life cultivating expertise in Anglican liturgy, Christian theology, and British mores. Before returning home in his early twenties, he was ordained to the Anglican priesthood—the first African to have done so.

Type
Forum on “The Burdens of Church History”
Information
Church History , Volume 83 , Issue 4 , December 2014 , pp. 1003 - 1008
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of Church History 2014 

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References

44 Maffly-Kipp, Laurie, “The Burdens of Church History,” Church History 82, no. 2 (June 2013): 353–367CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Reese, Ty M., “Philip Quaque: African Anglican Missionary on the Gold Coast” in The Human Tradition in the Black Atlantic 1500–2000, ed. Mamigonian, Beatriz G. and Racine, Karen (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2010), 39–40Google Scholar; Carretta, Vincent and Reese, Ty M., The Life and Letters of Philip Quaque, the First African Anglican Missionary (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2010), 5–6Google Scholar.

45 Agbeti, J. Kofi, West African Church History (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1986), 7–8Google Scholar; Curtin, Philip D., ed., Africa Remembered; Narratives by West Africans from the Era of the Slave Trade (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1967), 99–100Google Scholar.

46 Ty M. Reese, “Philip Quaque,” 39–40. Carretta and Reese, The Life and Letters of Philip Quaque, 5–6.

47 Stanley, Brian, Christian Missions and the Enlightenment (New York: Routledge, 2014), 47Google Scholar.

48 Maffly-Kipp, “The Burdens of Church History,” 354.

49 Angell, Stephen Ward, Bishop Henry McNeal Turner and African-American Religion in the South (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1992), 215–220Google Scholar.

50 Maffly-Kipp, “The Burdens of Church History,” 366.

51 Augustine of Hippo, Concerning the City of God Against the Pagans, trans. Bettenson, Henry (New York: Penguin Books, 1984)Google Scholar. Augustine expounded the classic notion of catholicity as an essential feature of the church—it was universal and was particular to neither region nor time. The totus christus comprised the entire community of saints from the earliest humans to the end of humanity. Mersch, Emile, The Whole Christ: The Historical Development of the Doctrine of the Mystical Body in Scripture and Tradition, trans. Kelly, John R. (Milwaukee: Bruce Publishing, 1938), 401–408Google Scholar. See especially Augustine's exposition of Psalm 26 in Augustinus Hipponensis, Enarrationes in Psalmos, Series A, Clavis Patrum Latinorum, Brepolis Library of Latin Texts, Northwestern University, http://clt.brepolis.net.turing.library.northwestern.edu/llta/pages/Exporter.aspx?ctx=567153&extra=10.