wfn.org | Days of western Christian dominance are numbered, theologian says

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Note #6210 from PCUSA NEWS to PRESBYNEWS:

6-October-2000
00348

Days of western Christian dominance are numbered, theologian says

Seminary lecturer says it's time to look to Africa, Asia, South America 

by Alexa Smith

PITTSBURGH -- A time is coming -- and soon -- when western Christianity will
no longer dominate the theological world.

	That's the message Andrew Walls, the former director of the University of
Edinburgh's Centre for the Study of Christianity in the Non-Western World,
had for an audience at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary early this month.

	Walls, whose address was part of the seminary's W. Don McClure Lectures in
World Mission and Evangelism program, titled his three-part series of
lectures From Tertullion to Tutu: Africa in Christian History.

	"The western-European model for Christianity became the dominant one, until
it became conceived of as the only one," Walls said in a soft but firm
voice. "(But) the western model alone will not suffice any longer. And the
future of the church depends on dialogue with the biblical traditions and
culture of Africa and Asia."

	Walls pointed out that it is in the southern hemisphere that churches are
growing and spiritual practices and traditions are coming to rival those
chronicled in the ancient Gospels -- in Africa, Asia and South America.

	The immediate danger, Walls says, is that the European/North American
culture may try to guard its lock on orthodoxy or impose itself on others.
According to Walls, the result could end up "tearing ...  the Body of
Christ" if the northern and southern believers declare each other's work
valid, then go no further, each developing in theological isolation.

	"Only in Christ does fullness dwell," he told his listeners in a sermon in
the PTS chapel. "We cannot hope to reach ... completion on our own.  We need
each other. Only together are we complete."

	Although he is an academic -- he is now putting in teaching stints at
Princeton Theological Seminary and the Divinity School at Harvard -- Walls
hasn't reached his conclusions in a cloister.

	He has devoted much of his career to collecting fragments of African church
history that have never made it into the textbooks -- for example, the story
of ex-slaves who spread the Gospel in countries such as Sierra Leone, where
they waded ashore from anchored ships singing the Isaac Watts hymn, "Awake,
Sing a Song of Moses in the Land." Years ago, Walls was a missionary
himself, in Nigeria, Sierra Leone and Lesotho. He still travels regularly to
Ghana.

	Walls' point is simple:  Protestants in tropical Africa were African from
the beginning.

	 In Sierra Leone, for instance, no white missionaries arrived until 20
years after the first churches were established. What's more, in Egypt in
northern Africa -- where the Copts have been pondering in the desert for
centuries, and where Tertullian and Augustine put what became doctrine into
words -- Christianity is an indigenous faith.

	"African church history isn't the same as mission history," Walls points
out. "Missionaries hardly show up in it."

	That is partly because Africans responded intuitively to Old Testament and
New Testament stories, incorporating them into the symbols and language of
their (usually) rural cultures. The movement of Christianity across Africa,
Walls said, has been similar to that of Islam -- through informal lay
channels where what was intuitively and symbolically understood got
immediately appropriated.

	That is still true, he said.

	"I just want people to start thinking about the implications of the change,
particularly the fact that the main theaters of Christian activity are now
seen to be in the southern continents," Walls said. (He argues that the
heyday of western Christianity in western Europe is long past, and that
Christians ought to be looking south by 2050.)

	Walls told the Presbyterian News Service that he hopes the coming change
won't be as threatening as it sounds to North Americans accustomed to
thinking that they are the primary bearers of the Gospel to the world.

	"(Northern-hemisphere Christians) won't have to give anything up," he said,
recalling how Jewish Christians were jolted by the switch from
messiah-language referring to Jesus to what became the norm in the
Greek-speaking world: Jesus as the eternal Son begotten by the Father before
all worlds. But they didn't have to stop thinking of Jesus as messiah. "We
needn't fear a revision of theology.  But we'll probably find what (has
been) important to one group of Christians ... is not necessarily so for
another," Walls said.

	For instance, the eastern churches have never produced a doctrine of
atonement, he says. It was western churches that characterized the
crucifixion as compensation for guilt.

	Describing what is now essentially "post-missionary Africa" as "a great
theological laboratory," Walls asserted that missionaries are less
influential on the continent than ever before. He said northern-hemisphere
Christians will benefit from southern-hemisphere theology and a new freedom
from Enlightenment criteria.

	Historically, the Enlightenment's insistence on reason has limited western
understanding of the spiritual world, Walls says, barriers that were simply
accepted by churches.

	"Modern western Christianity is essentially (bound) to Enlightenment ...
theology, with its stress on reason and on the empirical sciences," he said.
"What you can feel and touch, as divided from the spiritual world. In the
incarnation, in revelation, in prayer, the crossing points to the frontier
are closed. The theology is policing the frontier. Things like prophecy,
tongues and healing, which were previous crossing places, are no longer in
use.

	"But the African frontier between the physical and the spiritual world is
crossed and re-crossed daily," Walls said, and Africans have something to
teach western theologians.

	"(Western) theology," he said, "fits into a small-scale universe. Most
Africans live ... in a bigger universe."

	Walls said Africans must think outside the framework of Enlightenment
theology to even begin to address the horrible realities facing the
continent, such as the Rwandan genocide, the AIDS pandemic and the economic
pitfalls of globalization. Individualized, "psychologized" western
theologies tend to diagnose pathology instead of exploring the nature of
evil, he said.

	The good done by missionaries in Africa did was often a byproduct of what
they were actually assigned to do," Walls said: "The really liberating thing
the missionaries did was let the scripture loose. 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 says it is time for missionaries to rethink the role they have played
in Africa and elsewhere in the southern hemisphere. He bemoans is the dearth
of missionaries with long-term exposure to, and understanding of, native
cultures. It may be timely again, he said, to put missionaries into place
who intend to stay for the long haul.

	"The crucial thing is to be alert to the Spirit moving us in these ways,"
he said. "Cooperation, I think, must be part of this."

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