Signifying (on) Scriptures

An African Understanding of the Bible

Aurélien Mokoko Gampiot, Cécile Coquet-Mokoko

• Publisher: Penn State University Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780271079707
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: African History
• Index: History

In this volume, Aurélien Mokoko Gampiot, a sociologist and son of a Kimbanguist pastor, provides a fresh and insightful perspective on African Kimbanguism and its traditions.

The largest of the African-initiated churches, Kimbanguism claims seventeen million followers worldwide. Like other such churches, it originated out of black African resistance to colonization in the early twentieth century and advocates reconstructing blackness by appropriating the parameters of Christian identity. Mokoko Gampiot provides a contextual history of the religion's origins and development, compares Kimbanguism with other African-initiated churches and with earlier movements of political and spiritual liberation, and explores the implicit and explicit racial dynamics of Christian identity that inform church leaders and lay practitioners. He explains how Kimbanguists understand their own blackness as both a curse and a mission and how that underlying belief continuously spurs them to reinterpret the Bible through their own prisms.

Drawing from an unprecedented investigation into Kimbanguism's massive body of oral traditions—recorded sermons, participant observations of church services and healing sessions, and translations of hymns—and informed throughout by Mokoko Gampiot's intimate knowledge of the customs and language of Kimbanguism, this is an unparalleled theological and sociological analysis of a unique African Christian movement.

Table of contents

• COVER Front
• Series Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Notes to Introduction
• PART I: General Background
• Chapter 1: Europe in Africa
• Notes to Chapter 1
• Chapter 2: African Responses: The Birth of African Christianities
• Notes to Chapter 2
• Chapter 3: Kimbanguism as a Social Movement
• Notes to Chapter 3
• PART II: Kimbanguism and the Bible
• Chapter 4: The Three Sources of Kimbanguist Theology
• Notes to Chapter 4
• Chapter 5: The Identity of Simon Kimbangu in the Contemporary Kimbanguist Faith
• Notes to Chapter 5
• Chapter 6: Miraculous Healing and Worship
• Notes to Chapter 6
• PART III: Expressions of Kimbanguist Messianism
• Chapter 7: Kimbanguist Prophetism, Messianism, and Millenarianism
• Notes to Chapter 7
• Chapter 8: A Theology of Identity Reconstructioni n a Global Context
• Notes to Chapter 8
• Chapter 9: Reclaiming Kimbangu’s Prophetic Heritage
• Notes to Chapter 9
• Conclusion
• Notes to Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index
• COVER Back