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African Christianity and the Eclipse of the Afterlife

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 March 2016

Paul Gifford
Paul Gifford*
Affiliation:
School of Oriental and African Studies
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Extract

When asked to address the issue of the afterlife in African Christianity, my immediate reaction was to doubt whether there is much stress on the afterlife in contemporary African Christianity. This brought the response: ‘Well, deal with that; a Christianity from which the afterlife has been displaced.’ What follows is an attempt to do just that.

Type
Research Article
Information
Studies in Church History , Volume 45: The Church, the Afterlife and the Fate of the Soul , 2009 , pp. 413 - 429
Copyright
Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 2009

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References

1 Mbiti, John S., New Testament Eschatology in an African Background: A Study of the Encounter between New Testament Theology and African Traditional Concepts (Oxford, 1971).Google Scholar

2 Lodge, David, How Far Can You Go? (Harmondsworth, 1980), 113.Google Scholar

3 Lodge, David, Paradise News (London, 1991), 352–53.Google Scholar

4 Barrett, David, Kurian, George and Johnson, Todd, World Christian Encyclopedia, 2nd edn (New York, 2001).Google Scholar

5 Gibbon, Edward, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, abridged version (London, 1980), 260–327.Google Scholar

6 Evans-Pritchard, E. E., Nuer Religion (Oxford, 1956), 154.Google Scholar

7 ‘To Africans this is the only world, and it is neither inferior to any other, nor “illu sory”’: Okot p’Bitek, African Religions in Western Scholarship (Nairobi, 1971), 110.

8 For the remarks that follow I have consulted several standard books on African religion: Evans-Pritchard, Nuer Religion; Parrinder, E. G., African Traditional Religion, 3rd edn (London, 1974)Google Scholar; Idowu, E. Bolaji, African Traditional Religion: A Definition (London, 1973)Google Scholar; Ray, Benjamin C., African Religions: Symbol, Ritual and Community, 2nd edn (Upper Saddle River, NJ, 2000)Google Scholar; Bourdillon, Michael, The Shona Peoples, 3rd revised edn (Gweru, 1987)Google Scholar; Zahan, Dominique, The Religion, Spirituality and Thought of Traditional Africa (Chicago, IL, 1979)Google Scholar; Magesa, Laurenti, African Religion: The Moral Traditions of Abundant Life (Nairobi, 1998).Google Scholar

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10 National Mirror, July 2006, 10 (this is a Kenyan Catholic monthly).

11 The Kenya Catholic Directory 2006 (Nairobi, 2006) gives some idea of the Catholic involvement, listing 178 dispensaries, 100 health centres, 54 hospitals, and so on – even 11 schools of nursing.

12 Only 30% of the funding for the Catholic AIDS programmes mentioned above came from local contributions: Secretariat, Kenya Catholic, Inventory of the Catholic Church’s Response to HIV and AIDS in Kenya (Nairobi, 2006), 14.Google Scholar

13 Catholic Relief Services’ $55 million for Ethiopia in 2005 came almost exclusively from USAID. The Lutheran World Federation in 2005 received over 50% of its Sudan/ Kenya funds from UNHCR and the US Department of State. In 2004–05 DanChurchAid received only 35% of its 340 million Danish kroner from private donations. Caritas Switzer land in 2000 spent 60 million Swiss francs abroad, only 25% from (mainly church) donations. Christian Aid, by contrast, stresses that only 30% of its £60 million comes from governments. CAFOD, too, in 2004–05 received less than 20% of its £47 million from governments.

14 At Nairobi’s Strathmore University at a thanksgiving Mass for Opus Dei’s founder, June 2007: National Mirror, July 2007, 24. Pope Benedict XVI in his first encyclical, Deus Caritas Est (25 December 2005), was insistent on the same point: sections 30–33.

15 National Mirror, May 2006, 14.

16 Internal Serving In Mission (formerly Sudan Interior Mission) document, dated 2 July 2003.

17 Nation, 4 July 2007, 32.

18 The late John Wimber’s Vineyard movement, with over sixty churches in its Association of Vineyard Churches East Africa in 2006, have drawn up ‘Guidelines for Visiting Ministries’ addressing this issue directly and at length. The tone is caught in this extract: ‘It is our concern that the generosity of visitors be encouraged but that, instead of creating unhealthy, ongoing dependency, it strategically acts as a boost or launching-pad for ongoing fruitfulness that becomes self-sustaining.’

19 Standard, 4 September 2007, 6.

20 Statistics from Registrar General’s Department of the Government of Ghana, for which I am indebted to Dr Michael Perry Kweku Okyerefo.

21 Oyedepo, David, Breaking Financial Hardship (Lagos, 1995), 51.Google Scholar

22 Winners’ Chapel, second service, Nairobi, 20 August 2006. Cf. Mombasa’s Wilfred Lai: ‘You are not poor because you were born in a poor family … It has nothing to do with your parents. It has everything to do with you. You are the way you are because of the way you believe’: God’s Army, January 2006, 9 (a Kenyan evangelical monthly).

23 Miracle Magazine, March 2006, 19.

24 Oyedepo, David O., The Miracle Meal (Lagos, 2002), 30–31.Google Scholar

25 Cox, Harvey, Fire from Heaven: The Rise of Pentecostal Spirituality and the Reshaping of Religion in the Twenty-First Century (London, 1996), 281–87.Google Scholar

26 Chilembwe (c. 1871–1915) preached militant resistance to colonial rule in Nyasaland (now Malawi); Kamwana (c. 1870–1956) preached the millennialism of the Watchtower, predicting the return of Jesus in 1914; Harris (c. 1865–1929), a Liberian, preached divine judgement along the West African Coast; Braide (c. 1882–1918), a Nigerian visionary, preached the withdrawal of the British from Nigeria during World War I, contributing to a revolt.

27 Hal Lindsey with Carlson, C. C., The Late Great Planet Earth (New York, 1970).Google Scholar

28 It may be that even in the USA Pentecostalism is now jettisoning this pre-millennialism: see Margaret Poloma, The Millenarianism of the Pentecostal Movement’, in Hunt, Stephen, ed., Christian Millenarianism: From the Early Church to Waco (London, 2001), 166–86, at 169.Google Scholar

29 Often one sees a this-worldly emphasis in the interpretation of biblical texts. For example, I have heard ‘Enter into your rest’ (Heb. 3: 11) interpreted as promising rest here and now: ‘the promised land’ as on this earth; expecting ‘what eye hath not seen’ (1 Cor. 2: 9) in this life, and so on. I have dealt with this interpretation of Scripture in Gifford, Paul, ‘The Bible in Africa: A Novel Usage in Africa’s New Churches’, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 71 (2008), 203–18.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

30 Economist, 10 February 1996, 70.