Spirit-Filled World

Religious Dis/Continuity in African Pentecostalism

Allan Heaton Anderson

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9783319737300
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Denominations

This book is about African Pentecostalism and its relationship to religious beliefs about a pervading spirit world. It argues that Pentecostalism keeps both a continuous and a discontinuous relationship in tension. Based on field research in a South African township, including qualitative interviews and focus group discussions, the study explores the context of African Pentecostalism as a whole and how it interacts with the concepts of ancestors, divination, and various types of spirit. Themes discussed include the reasons for the popularity of healing, exorcism, the "prosperity gospel, " the experience of the Holy Spirit, Spirit manifestations and practices resembling both traditional and biblical precedents, as well as scholarly discussions on African Pentecostalism from theological and social scientific disciplines. The book suggests that the focus on a spirit-filled world affects all kinds of events and explains the rapid growth of Pentecostalism outside the western world.

Part IAfrican Pentecostalism in Context

© The Author(s) 2018

Allan Heaton AndersonSpirit-Filled WorldChristianity and Renewal - Interdisciplinary Studieshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73730-0_1

Begin Abstract

1. The Spirit of Dis/Continuity

Allan Heaton Anderson¹

(1)

University of Birmingham, Birmingham, UK

Allan Heaton Anderson

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

Pentecostalism and the Continuity Debate

Pentecostalism was the fastest growing sector of Christianity in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries and could be the fastest growing religion in the contemporary world. There is no sign that its growth has abated, especially in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, where at least three quarters of Pentecostals and Charismatics are found. One estimate put the number of “Pentecostals/Charismatics” worldwide at 669 million in 2017, which is over a quarter of the world’s Christian population. ¹ This figure, however, really needs to be unpacked into the many different forms of “Pentecostals/Charismatics,” including many millions of Catholic Charismatics and independent churches included in this figure. ² The scholarly studies about the rapid expansion of Pentecostalism in different regions worldwide have not explored thoroughly what I consider to be a principle reason for its popularity—the extent to which Pentecostalism, through its experience of the Spirit, often unconsciously taps into deep-seated religious and cultural beliefs. Pentecostalism draws from these ancient sources in continuity with them, while also simultaneously confronting them in discontinuity. In doing so, it uses a biblical rationale for its beliefs and practices. This book explains the popularity of Pentecostalism from this perspective, unravelling the debates concerning the tension between continuity and discontinuity. By empirical observations, I demonstrate that Pentecostalism makes a “radical break with the past,” but that in southern Africa at least, it is not an either/or situation. What often appears as continuity is often actually discontinuity because of the interpretation and meaning given to the phenomenon. The reverse is also the case, where practices found throughout global Pentecostalism are invested with new meanings through the encounter with a local religious and cultural context.

One of the most influential people in my academic life, Marthinus L. (Inus) Daneel , was the supervisor of my two research degrees from 1986 to 1992. I became familiar with his extensive writings, which constantly strove to rid the study of African Christianity and in particular his own specialisation from ill-informed suppositions. His three-volume Old and New in Southern Shona Independent Churches is a rich ethnographic tapestry of independent church life in Zimbabwe and well illustrates the continuity/discontinuity debate. ³ In brief, Daneel’s argument in these and many other publications is that despite critics who denounce African Spirit independent churches (Zionist and Apostolic) as continuous with pre-Christian religions, these churches succeeded in effecting a transformation of the old views—in other words, they achieved a discontinuous relationship with the past religion. His influence was reflected in my research, but in particular, my first book, Moya: The Holy Spirit in an African Context. ⁴ I now return to this subject, my “first love,” here. Daneel has lived among African churches for much of his life and has done substantially more research and writing on the subject than anyone I know. Although his thick descriptive ethnography was written many years ago in a different world, his pursuit of accuracy in the studies he has made of independent churches in Zimbabwe, where both he and I were raised, has been a constant source of inspiration. I have since moved from southern African themes into the study of global Pentecostalism in the rare atmosphere of British academia. But I have kept throughout my academic life a keen interest in African Pentecostalism and am returning to these roots. I describe and evaluate the tension between the Holy Spirit and the spiritual world in African Pentecostalism in the hope that this will also help explain the continuing growth of Pentecostalism worldwide—for there are striking parallels to be found elsewhere.

I am not suggesting that the continuity/discontinuity tension in Pentecostalism has never been studied. In a landmark article, anthropologist Joel Robbins remarks that his discipline tends to be a “science of continuity” and that anthropologists use “foundational arguments about the inability of people to view the world except through their received categories.” ⁵ Therefore, anthropologists who study religion see the introduction of new religions like Pentecostalism as taking on the ideas and characteristics of the old religion. He argues that to understand global Pentecostalism properly, anthropologists need as robust a science of discontinuity as one of continuity. He shows how Pentecostalism has two paradoxes that make it both and at the same time continuous and discontinuous with the host culture. The first paradox is that “in attacking local cultures, Pentecostalism tends to accept their ontologies—including their ontologies of spirits and witches and other occult powers—and to take the spiritual beings these ontologies posit as paramount among the forces it struggles against.” ⁶ The second paradox refers to the characteristics that make Pentecostalism distinctive in Christianity: the practices of spiritual gifts like healing , exorcism, prophecy , and speaking in tongues or glossolalia—practices found in Pentecostalism throughout the world. Anthropologists have also tended to observe the continuity of these practices with pre-Christian religions or their similarities, without giving attention to their widespread use in many different cultural settings throughout the world—in other words, their differences with local religions. In another essay, Robbins argues for the same idea from the perspective of globalisation that Pentecostalism “appears to weigh in both for theories that stress processes of Western cultural domination and homogenization and those that emphasise the transformative power of indigenous appropriation and differentiation.” ⁷ In other words, this is illustrative of the tension between globalisation or westernisation, and the localisation that occurs when outside ideas are appropriated by a given culture. Martin Lindhardt, another anthropologist, also notes that the “most fruitful work” results from a non-dualistic approach to African Pentecostalism by exploring “the complex ways in which rupture and continuity, modernity and tradition or the global and the local are combined in the production of cultural forms.” ⁸

The theme of continuity has also dominated theological and religious studies. The architect of contemporary Pentecostal studies, Walter J. Hollenweger , wrote that Pentecostalism is based on its “black roots,” mediated through its African American founders at Azusa Street, Los Angeles. These aspects of African religion cause it to flourish in similar cultures where “orality” is the dominant feature. ⁹ Harvey Cox takes this a step further in his book Fire from Heaven, where he states that the rapid spread of Pentecostalism is because of its “heady and spontaneous spirituality,” which he calls “primal spirituality.” Pentecostalism’s emphasis on experience is spread through testimony and personal contact. ¹⁰ In one of his most telling paragraphs, Cox suggests that for any religion to grow, it must include two underlying factors: “be able to include and transform at least certain elements of pre-existing religions which still retain a strong grip on the cultural subconscious,” and “also equip people to live in rapidly changing societies.” He sees these two “key ingredients” in Pentecostalism, which helps “people recover vital elements in their culture that are threatened by modernization.” ¹¹ What Cox hinted at when referring to “pre-existing religions” with “a strong grip on the cultural subconscious” is the theological equivalent of a stress on continuity, which emphasis—because he wants a more balanced perspective—Robbins is keen to avoid. Robbins thinks that ideas like these “skate close to a kind of generic primitivism,” an outdated anthropological viewpoint. ¹² According to Cox’s view, many of the beliefs and practices found in, say, Korean Pentecostalism can be traced back to Korean ancient shamanistic religion. So he describes Korean Pentecostalism as “a massive importation of shamanic practice into a Christian ritual.” ¹³ Cox gleaned this idea from Hollenweger, whose only Korean Ph.D. student’s thesis on “Korean Pentecostalism” was aimed at charismatic practices in the Presbyterian Church, which he considered to be a resurgence of shamanism. He did not study Korean Pentecostalism itself. ¹⁴

Similarly, many who have written on African Pentecostalism and African Independent Churches have attributed their success to their continuation of an “enchanted worldview” that retains ideas from pre-Christian African religion—as Swedish missionary Bishop Bengt Sundkler famously put it, creating a “bridge back to the past”—in other words, continuity. Sundkler later almost retracted this view, and insiders to Pentecostalism are quick to point out that Pentecostals confront, rather than accommodate the spirit world, so they would almost invariably point to a radical discontinuity. The result is two contrasting views of insiders and outsiders—and seemingly, never shall the twain meet! An exception to this is Nigerian Pentecostal scholar Nimi Wariboko , whose philosophical study describes the ability of Nigerian Pentecostals to be simultaneously “inside and outside African traditional religions,” representing “both continuity and rupture in the same Nigerian religious landscape.” ¹⁵ This inside/outside tension, though not developed in an explicit way, remains an underlying theme of his significant work. What Robbins and Lindhardt have argued for the social sciences and Wariboko hints at philosophically, I want to argue empirically for theology and religious studies. This is what this book hopes to achieve: to provide an answer to this seeming contradiction. I make assumptions that are influenced by years of immersion in Pentecostalism in eight countries in southern Africa. Now in Britain since 1995, I interact with other African Christians, both Pentecostal and others, especially from Ghana and Nigeria , some of whom have completed doctoral studies under my supervision. I discovered common threads in their ideas and practices that resonated with what I am familiar with in southern Africa.

The Holy Spirit occupies an important place in charismatic Christianity in Africa, whether it be the beliefs of Pentecostal or new charismatic churches, Charismatics in older churches, or older African Independent Spirit Churches. At the same time, this becomes more meaningful when placed in the context of the spirit world that permeates most aspects of African life. While recognising that the ideas concerning the spirit world are by no means homogeneous throughout sub-Saharan Africa, certain foundational similarities exist that can also be shown in other local religions outside Africa. When referring to “Africa,” the sub-Sahara is intended. Here, it is important not to make generalisations, just as “European Pentecostalism” will not be the same in Portugal and Poland. In southern Africa, like the rest of the continent, Pentecostalism has become one of the most prominent forms of Christianity. It permeates every historic denomination and independent church. It has not only contributed to the reshaping of the nature of Christianity but has also left an indelible mark on popular religion and culture. The ordinary adherents of Pentecostalism and related independent churches are usually on the cutting edge of encounters with the dynamic, popular religion that has existed for generations and still permeates African societies, albeit in interaction with a constantly changing context with globalising tendencies.

Christianity on the whole is affected by and affects religious beliefs in many fundamental ways. Both in its similarities and in its differences...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• Part I. African Pentecostalism in Context
• Part II. A Spirit-Filled World
• Part III. The Spirit in a Spirit World
• Back Matter