wfn.org | Western theological models no longer dominate

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2000-161

Western theological models no longer dominate
http://www.ecusa.anglican.org/ens

by James Solheim

     (ENS) Western theological models alone no longer dominate in world 
Christianity--and the future of the church will depend on "dialogue with the 
biblical traditions and culture of Africa and Asia," Andrew Walls told an 
audience in Pittsburgh in early October.

     The former director of the University of Edinburgh's Centre for the Study of 
Christianity in the Non-Western World pointed out that that church growth in the 
Southern Hemisphere is raising a number of issues. Spiritual practices and 
traditions in the churches in Africa, Asia and South America, he said, are at the 
point of rivaling those in the early church.

     Walls warned that European and North American theologians may resist this 
shift in power and try to guard their lock on orthodoxy and end up "tearing" the 
body of Christ. 

     As a scholar on African church history and former missionary, he made the 
point that Protestants in many parts of the continent were African from the 
beginning. In Sierra Leone, for example, no white missionaries arrived until 20 
years after the first churches were established. And the Coptic Orthodox 
Christians in Egypt are an example of an indigenous church. "African church 
history isn't the same as missionary history," Walls said. "Missionaries hardly 
show up in it."

     One of the main reasons is that Africans responded intuitively to the Bible 
stories, incorporating and appropriating them into the language and symbols of 
their own rural cultures.

     He invited his audience at Pittsburgh Seminary to "start thinking about the 
implications of the change," especially the fact that "the main theaters of 
Christian activity" are now in the global south. 

     Yet he said in an interview with Presbyterian News Service that the change 
need not be threatening to Christians in the developed world. "We needn't fear a 
revision of theology," he said, although it will probably become more apparent 
that what has been important to one group of Christians "is not necessarily so 
for another." And Christians in the global north might even benefit from 
influences of theology from the south because "post-missionary Africa" is what he 
called "a great theological laboratory."

     Because theology in western Christianity stressed reason and the empirical 
sciences, it developed a more limited understanding of the spiritual world, he 
contended, closing some of the frontiers to a wider appreciation of various 
practices such as prophecy, speaking in tongues and healing. "But the African 
frontier between the physical and spiritual world is crossed and re-crossed 
daily," Walls said, and therefore Africans have something to teach western 
theologians whose theology "fits into a small-scale universe" while Africans live 
in a much larger universe.

     "The really liberating thing the missionaries did was let the scripture 
loose," he said. "That was crucial. That did more to preserve, transform and 
renew the culture than the best intentions of missionaries, which were often more 
destructive."

     Walls said it may be time to send missionaries again, those with a 
commitment to study native cultures and who might "be alert to the Spirit moving 
us in these ways."

--James Solheim is director of the Episcopal Church's Office of News and 
Information. This article is based on a release by Alexa Smith of Presbyterian 
News.