Review How Africa Shaped the Christian Mind

           What do we mean by Africa?  On the surface this seems to be a ridiculous question. Africa is a continent; a body of land consisting of multiple nations, religions, and tribal communities.  Ironically, the question of African identity lies at the heart of the late Thomas Oden’s work, How Africa Shaped the Christian Mind. Published by InterVarsity  Press in 2007 the book attempts to correct a glaring miscalculation on the part of Western Christianity.  Namely, that Western Christianity developed out of its own supposed rich soil of Christian traditions. Thomas Oden argues instead, “. . . the classic Christian mind is significantly shaped by the African imagination spawned on African soil. It bears the stamp of philosophical analyses, moral insight, discipline and scriptural interpretations that bloomed first in Africa before anywhere where else”  (Kindle location 50-51).
          On one hand the evidence in favor of his thesis is laid bare for all to see and has been throughout the history of the Church.  Indeed history is very clear on this point, theologians such as Origen, Tertullian and Augustine where all born and raised on the continent we today call Africa.  The origins of the monastic movement are grounded in the deserts of Egypt. By the oral tradition of the Church, Mark the gospel author and apostle lead the church in Alexandria.  Even many of the earliest heresies the church fought against had their origins on the continent of Africa.

         On the other hand, is the question I lead with, What do we mean by Africa? Oden points out what was once deemed Africa is not how we understand it today.  “In ancient times the term Africa referred to the indigenous nous people of coastal Mediterranean Africa in modern northeastern Tunisia. While in early times the term Africa first referred to the peninsula we today call Tunisia, it gradually became applied to all of Mediterranean Africa west of Egypt. During the first Christian millennium Africa was the provincial term designating all the lands from Tripolitania (now western Libya) all the way to the Atlantic (Morocco)-from from Tripoli (Oea) to Tangiers (Tangis)” (Kindle location 657). How should we label those early African Christians when they themselves may not have had a concept for such a thing as “Africa” as we now understand Africa.
          What I found myself doing as I read through this book, was wrestling with my own historical and geographical prejudices. Have I mentally framed Augustine, and other Church Fathers as something other then Africans? Why have I framed them this way?  Does my own mental framework injure the truth of these saints?  Do Nigerians, Kenyans, Rwandans understand these Church Fathers to be African in the same way they might consider themselves as African. This of course assumes Nigerians, Kenyans,  and Rwandans consider themselves African first as opposed to national or tribal identity first.
          It seems to me an exercise in geographical perception.  Personally, I do not consider myself primarily as North American.  I don’t consider myself, primarily as a Wisconsinite or a Midwesterner.  Neither does the term American fully do justice to my geographical identity as it leaves out something of the Midwesterner’s love of common sense. And for that matter my geographical identity is not even close to what I consider my primary self identification.  On some basic level of geography Oden has taken two hundred pages to state what is clear for all to see. But indeed this may very well be the point, it is not clear for all to see. Years of enlightenment prejudice and racism have smeared Africa’s place in the story of Christianity’s development and growth.  Racism has muddied the waters of intellectual history.
          To be honest I have always seen the Church Father or the desert fathers as connected culturally with Rome and the culture of the late Roman Empire before I ever stopped to consider their physical locations. The geographical marker I most associate with those Church Fathers is North Africa which is again a manifestation of prejudice to consider North Africa as separate and distinct from Sub-Saharan Africa.  Indeed Oden states, “Sub-Saharan Africa is a term that belongs to geography. Black Africa is a color designation grounded in the tragic fact of racism. North Africa is a location. Africa is a continent. None of these designations is more or less African. All are in Africa. All are African” (Kindle Locations 643-645).  But this seems to beg the question. How indeed did Augustine and the Church father’s understand their identity?
       Regardless of my wrestling with terminology and questions of semantics, I value this book.  Oden’s work attempts to clear the air and challenges our prejudice even if there are lingering questions. When I think of arguments made by some quarters that deem Christianity, “A white man’s religion” this book will be the first volume I will reach for on my shelf.   Christianity may have in the last 1500 years a complex and rich pedagogy of beliefs and practices in Western Europe, but the foundations where laid first in what we now call African soil.  Oden’s valuable book sets the corner stone of this argument clearly in place.
     To that end however I do have a historiographer’s beef with Oden. There is not one place were Oden provides citations for his claims.  Nor does he give very specific references to people or places.  For example, take the following comment concerning Origen.

       There can be no doubt that Origen grew up in Africa, wrote much of his work in Africa and then transmitted his extensive African library and teaching to Caesarea Palestina. It is a strange and demeaning ing criterion to apply to Origen the odd assumption that because he was adept at many languages he was not very African. By his metaphors, the greatest biblical interpreter of early Christianity shows many indications of being indigenously African, whatever his specific ethnicity. (Kindle Locations 536-539). 

       What metaphors?  Who has pointed this comparison out? What makes Origen’s metaphor’s particularly African? What or where are the original metaphors? It is claims like the above that drove me crazy.  I do not doubt the sincerity of Oden’s claims or the validity of the claims.  As a scholar I would hope Oden would show me his sources, so that I may go and investigate on my own, but he does not. This leaves me frustrated and disappointed.
          One cause for the lack of citations and detailed analysis is that Oden understands just how much Early African Church studies has been neglected. Indeed, in the book he pleads with African scholars to do the hard and complex work of cementing the ties between African cultures and the Church Fathers’ writings. Scholars have throughly studied the connections between Cranmer and the cultural backdrop of England. Likewise scholars have rigorously examined Paul and his background.  However, nothing remotely close has been undertaken, it would seem, concerning African Church father’s and their cultural heritage.   Thus Oden is left pleading with his audience to do the scholarship necessary to enlighten the events of history.  Personally I can not wait for the scholars to start writing. The African continent is at the center of much of what is making the Christian Church vibrant and dynamic in our world today.  I for one can only hope the intellectual productivity of the African Churches  will match their zeal for orthodoxy and mission. Hopefully Nigeria, Kenya, Rwanda, South Sudan are producing scholars that will head Oden’s plea.
      As frustrated with aspects of this book and what was missing from its pages, I was thankful for the overall contribution of the book.  Indeed How Africa Shaped the Christian Mind seems like a necessary step in correcting our perceptions of the early church.  One of the necessary questions it seems to me that needs to be answered is, “How did the early Church understand their political and geographic identity?” And then, “How did that identity shape their work and writings?” As I put down this book I have more questions and a shift in my perspective as it relates to the early Church Fathers. When a reader comes away from a book in such a way it is always a good thing.

Purple Hibiscus: A complex and compelling Novel

One of the ways I put myself in the shoes of other cultures and peoples is to read their literature.  I have read such novels as Endo’s Silence, Potlock’s My Name is Asher Lev,  and Hussein’s Kite Runner.  Purple Hibiscus by Chimamanda Adichie  is the first novel I can remember reading from an African author. I could not, I believe, have chosen a better one.    Adichie’s novel is set in her postcolonial home country of  Nigeria.  I first encountered her as a novelist when she presented a Tedtalk on the theme of “The Danger of a Single Story” . If you have not seen this Tedtalk I highly recommend you take a look at her presentation. I have finally, several years later been able to get around to reading one of her novels. Purple Hibiscus is a novel that can be read on a number of levels, each of which raises questions of both our diversity as human beings and our shared human brokenness.

The plot centers around a financially well off family in the city of Enugu in the country of Nigeria.  The story is told through the eyes of Kambili Achike, the youngest child and only daughter in a family of four. The plot slowly twists, turning the emotional tension of the novel up a degree with every page. About half way through the novel, the tension is sprung as the result of a small infraction committed by Kambili.  Her father Eugene beats her so badly she has to be hospitalized.
The beating results, in turn in an extended stay with her paternal Aunt Ifeoma. As her aunt states after the incident,  “When a house is on fire, you run out before the roof collapses on your head” (pp. 213-214).  Here Kambili and her older brother, Jaja, have their first real taste of freedom and love. “I had felt as if I were not there, that I was just observing a table where you could say anything at any time to anyone, where the air was free for you to breathe as you wished” (p. 120).  But it is not meant to last and after a period they are brought home. However, their journey home comes after both siblings have realized their father is not simply difficult but dangerous.  In the end steps and taken to protect themselves.  Events are quickly brought to a boil once again. When the story draws to a close, Jaja is forced to protect his mother and sister by  spending time in prison. Thankfully the novel does not end in complete tragedy but a feeling of hope and expectation of redemption. 

 Adichie’s portrait of a broken family is an arresting one.  It is interesting to see how community and extended family play an outsized role in the disfunction compared to what an American novelist might have written. But broken family dynamics are sadly universal. One could map out the classic roles of villain, hero, victim.  One can easily contrast the monetarily poor, but happy and free Ifeoma and her children with the monetarily prosperous but oppressed Achike family.  The narcissistic father who pleads in the moment of violence and betrayal that he is simply trying his best to love those he is hurting. As Aunty Ifeoma describes, “Eugene quarrels with the truths that he does not like.” (p. 95).  Kambili states in one of the most haunting lines of the book that she was, “feeling the love burn my tongue.”   Jaja sacrifices himself to protect his sibling and his mother. The mother who seeks to defend her husband even as she carries the scars of her husband’s abuse.  The lies that are continuously presented to the outside world in order to cover up the sickness within.  All of these elements make for a compelling if heart breaking picture of the Achike’s.

 Another way in which to read this novel, or at least an element within the novel to pay close attention to is the place of religion in the story. Kambili’s father is as abusive physically and emotionally as he is deeply religious.  It is well worth noting that Adiche does not bash religion universal, but again contrasts what is of the husband and father’s religion with the religious faith found in Ifeoma’s network.  In the Achike family religion is used as a means of gagging protest, of keeping those around the father inline with his own desires. It is meant to terrify individuals to proper behavior.  But in Ifeoma’s network religion is of the people, growing into and out of a mix of Roman Catholic Faith and native culture in a unique but orthodox Christianity. One of the most interesting characters is Ft. Amadi. A priest who toward the end of the book journey’s to Germany to do missions work.  His presence, his peace and the love he has for others is literally attractive to Kambili.

Finally, one could also examine this novel in light of colonialism and post colonial struggles.  I imagine this is to be an expected element in any novel out of Africa.  However, I feel Adiche does an excellent job looking at the complexity of the issue.  I feel stung with guilt by Adiche’s words, “We had to sound civilized in public, [Eugene] told us; we had to speak English” (p. 13).  Or when Eugene extols the virtue of his grandfather, “He did things the right way, the way the white people did, not what our people do now!” (p. 68).  Adiche’s characters have perspective on the events and tragedies of their home.



“There are people, [aunt Ifeoma] once wrote, who think that we cannot rule ourselves because the few times we tried, we failed, as if all the others who rule themselves today got it right the first time. It is like telling a crawling baby who tries to walk, and then falls back on his buttocks, to stay there. As if the adults walking past him did not all crawl, once.”  (p. 301).
      
In conclusion, I have appreciated this novel on  number of levels. This novel works as a study of genuine faith verses controlling abusive faith. It works as a story of families broken  by expectations and fears, and families living free under the oppression and failures of others.  It is also a novel of the complexity of cultural identity.  The mixture of different stories trying to find their place in a larger more complete story.

Dreher's mono-colored glasses

         The Benedict Option by Richard Dreher fails as a book, and on the whole as a project. It fails not because of what it is but because of what it so obviously ignores.  The Benedict Option as an argument sets out to convince the reader the Church must preserve at all cost.  The Church will do so by retreating, like a turtle into it’s shell, from the larger world and the chaos of postmodernism. It must do so not only because truth and virtue and not valued in our time but also because the Church defends all that is good and beautiful in the West. Instead of Tolkien’s Aragorn pronouncing “Men of the West, Stand and Fight,”  Dreher would have the Church run and hide.  The Church’s act of preservation as Dreher contends will in the end result in creating a Church that is peculiar in the extreme. A church that is outside of the norm as much as a Division One state university not having a football program is to college sports. He pronounces technology dangerous and current sexual practice on par with the like of Sodom and Gomorrah.  I too believe technology needs to be understood and utilized within its proper limits.  I believe that our  current sexual practices and beliefs leave people in absolute ruin.  What troubles me is the alarmist tone which underlines and shadows every claim and piece of evidence.         No, what is needed is something more. Dreher fails to convince that his book is anything more than alarmist hand ringing because he fails to call for something new based on the examples of the past. Indeed the past must be mined. But we can not simply look to recreate that past that has long since fallen into the history books.  He jumps 1500 years in the past in order to find communities that can provide a model for the future.  What he so clearly misses to me is that the church in the recent past has been living out what he argues. 
              Here is what really dooms his book, his mono-culturalism. One of the benefits, blessings even of postmodernism is our awareness of and interactions with dozens of other cultures.  It is no longer the elite ambassadors traveling to foreign countries but it is the local high school student who is shaped and becomes aware of more then his small community. Dreher’s is fixated with white, European, liturgical expression of church in the first millennia. He ignores rich traditions of other ethnicities.
 The black Church for 100 years at least (since reconstruction at minimum) has been developing a peculiar Christian church.  The Black Church has stood fast in the face of racial injustice and a larger corrupt culture bent on shaping the world not into the kingdom of God but a safe kingdom for a particular ethnic identity. There are many lessons and pitfalls that we should learn from.  Or Dreher might have looked to the Chinese Church under communism. Or the Roman Catholic Church in Japan and authors like Suski Endo. His argument what have felt more substantive had he broadened his research sources.
               What I wish Dreher would have written is an analysis of the black church for white Christians who are waking up to their minority status in American culture.  What lesson does the black church have to teach us about being The Church?  What pitfalls and problems has the Historical Black Church faced? How can we avoid these mistakes in the church that will come about in the next 100-200 years?  I look forward to a future taking the tradition of Dante, Augustine and Bach and seeing the creative explosion of new art, music and literature when it is placed in conversation with Endo, Du Bois, and Ellington. Not to mention the countless other Christian communities living out what he argues for in a non-western context.

               He begins his argument by demonstrating that the Church is losing the culture wars. Really?  Is anyone in Western Christianity really still so naive to believe we are wining against secularism? Why thump us over the head, again with what many of us have already come to decades ago?  I  find only the out of touch, arrogant, and cloistered away in ever smaller churches would hold fast to the belief that power politics and strict moralism will save the Church. 

Review Minorty Body by Elizabeth Barnes

In her book Minority Body Elizabeth Barnes in my opinion both makes a prescient observation, those with a physical handicap are onto themselves a minority population that is no better or no worse than any other minority, while also making her argument by means that are deeply disturbing and flawed.  For full disclosure, I consider myself mildly disabled white man.  I  have hemispherical Cerebral Palsy which is by and large limited to my right hand. Over my 40 years on this planet I have had 8 surgeries on my hand.  But my understanding and reading of this book is also seen through the lens of my personal faith— orthodox, evangelical, anglican Christian.  Dr. Barnes writes, as evidenced from her work from a secular, postmodern narrative.  Our differing points of view contrasts with one another in significant directions.
Barnes, rightly I believe, discusses the hermeneutical injustice that is a constant feature of those with a disability.  I have been addressed in ways that discount or discredit my experience.   “Well just act normal.”  “Don’t be defined by your disability.”  I have experienced  bullying from one particular religious leader who insisted that I shake hands with my disfunctioning hand.  He assumed that not greeting others with my broken hand was a sign of  internal self loathing on my part.  There is a reality, that one can not speak to a person’s experience of disability, and here we could extend it to any minority experience, unless one has lived it. My accomplishments and successes are somehow more stunning because I have a handicap. But in such a thought is assumed something about how little people expected of me in the first place. They assumed I was incapable of accomplishing “the normal things in life”  because of my disability. There are assumptions being made by the abled majority about what it is and is not meant to experience disability. Not all parts of the disability experience as Barnes points out are necessarily all bad.  There are ways in which disability positively shapes a persons life and outlook.  From my own experience, I have a greater intuitive understanding I believe of other minority experiences.  I can make the epistemological leap in a way many others are not.
I am grateful for her articulation disabled and abled are indeed shaped in much the same way by their bodies.  In other words a man who stands 5’4” will not likely have a career in the NBA simply because his body dictates other choices.  Our culture tends to over look and underestimate the importance our physical being plays in shaping life outcomes.  Barnes makes clear  that all of humanity is shaped by their physical, bodily existence.
 In relation to this point is her excellent job at the beginning of her narrative of demonstrating how difficult a precise definition of disability is to articulate. One cannot simply declare that it is the absence of something, limbs or sight.  For in doing so one eliminates those who like me have Cerebral Palsy whose limbs are intact but we can not control them. Even to include cases of CP and the like in our definition would still exclude those whose condition are temporary (epilepsy) or indeed invisible (lupus). Disability is far more complex than what it might first appear.
However the ease at which she conflates gayness and disable-hood seemed to me to undermine her argument. Not with standing an orthodox Christian view of human sexuality as condemning sexual relations and acts between two people of the same sex. Whatever the particular reality of gayness is, it has to be far more complex of a reality than mear physical disability. There seems to be both physical, emotional and environmental factors in a person’s sexual identity and behavior. That there are personal narratives that defy the majority gay story, see Wes Hill and Rosaria Butterfield,  should give one pause. To not see that physical handicaps are just that, primarily physical with social and and behavioral issues arising primarily out of the reality of one’s physical condition seems misrepresent both minority groups.
   Still further is the intellectual (and admittedly emotional) discomfort with her argument concerning her doubts with the idea of a ‘cure’ for disability.  On the very next to last page Barnes quotes Chicago Disability Pride founder Sarah Triano. “Disability is a natural and beautiful part of human diversity. . . . Stereotypes the parade  refutes by giving us a time and space to celebrate ourselves as we are.” And then in the final paragraph of her manuscript Barnes writes, “the point is not that there are no bad effects of disability.  We are, all of us, limited by our bodies. . . .But the disabled body is a pathologized body.  It’s a body that departs from the ‘normal’ in ways we assume are bad or suboptimal.”
I am tempted at this point  to respond with a theological argument, and maybe there is simply no way not to object except on theological grounds. But even without a view of a ‘fallen’ or broken world, is in not safe to say that the world as it is, is not the world that we would hope it would be or even be one day in the future? Even as one needs to treat the disabled as a minority, one can not also treat the disabled as one would treat an a person with black or brown pigmented skin. It is not the dark skin tone itself that is hindering a person in society, it is societies reactions and actions toward the person with a dark skin that creates difficulties. A disabled person on the other hand is different. As Barnes points out there are indeed bad effects from the disability itself. From my own subjective personal experience even as disability has opened doors for me it has overall been something that has closed more than it has opened. Why then would we consider that which causes bad things in very specific ways to be  ‘normal and beautiful?’  Please understand I am not calling the person with a handicap unnatural or ugly. I disagree that disability is value neutral as she here argues.  Admittedly this simply may be a case of faith over philosophical speculation, but I will take it over Barnes’s noble but ultimately disconcerting argumentation.

Untitled Poem Rhyming Exercise

Pry open the souls of men. Their blackened ears,

Their broken pain, their dying lives can not hold the tears.

Their bodies purchased and sold by deviant cashiers

Who seek will gleeful will to break all hope like plundering buccaneers.

Two Untitled Poems

POEM 1

It is in the land of the human heart

Are were the greatest battles are fought.

To the depths of the broken being, 

On a Ridgeline of identity,

Searching shards of childhood’s memory.

For the signs of wholeness, which are like the signs of mouse trails.

The landscape of self burned and shattered by words thrown 

As ignited daggers at the image of red pine innocence.

POEM 2

Pry open the souls of men. Their blackened ears

Their broken pain, their dying lives can not hold the tears

Their bodies purchased and sold by deviant cashiers

Who seek will gleeful will to break all hope like plundering buccaneers

Collects for Diversity and Faithfulness

Collect 1

Father of all the Nations, You have sought from the very beginning for mankind to diversify and multiple across the many borders of our world.  Humble your servants that we may see in every tribe tongue and nation your work of sanctification in the Church.  So that we might glorify your Holy name as the creator of and sustainer of all humanity. We pray this through Christ our Lord by the power of the Holy Spirit. Amen

Collect 2

Heavenly Father, You have set the course and boundary of every individual’s life. Give to each man peace and faithful trust, so that each of us may faithfully run the course you have laid out and thus bring you honor and glory by the power of the Holy Ghost and for the name Christ our Lord. Amen.