African Origins of Monotheism

Challenging the Eurocentric Interpretation of God Concepts on the Continent and in Diaspora

Muzorewa

• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781630875541
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

African Origins of Monotheism recasts an African knowledge of God in a new and original way. It aims to recapture concepts of God as originally reflected upon by pristine African religious thinkers. Muzorewa is seeking after the traditional African understandings of the Divine, which trace their origins back before the rise of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Monotheism, he maintains, is the ancient view of God, ubiquitous across the continent of Africa; indeed, monotheism comes "out of Africa." The book challenges the way that the idea of God has been manipulated by Eurocentric agendas, by colonizers, enslavers, and empire builders, all of whom were using God-talk to achieve their own personal ends. In African thinking, the God concept is guided by a sense of the presence of the all-pervasive and omnipresent God, which has instilled in the people a sense of respect for life at all costs. Thus, respect is not based on a commandment or on fear but on a propensity for affinity.

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Introduction

God’s self-revelation is among the most reliable channels by which humanity may know and even begin to comprehend the nature of the living God. This is true of humanity as well as any other creatures to which God chooses to reveal divinity. Human awareness and sense of not only the existence but ontological reality of the Ultimate also occurs through faith, experience, and/or cognitive knowledge, all made possible through God’s self-revelation. Furthermore, discussions on the subject of God are endless because God continues to reveal who God is in various ways and circumstances to diverse communities. Subsequently, these communities name God and develop anthropomorphic as well as other attributes relative to the Reality they experienced. From these one can garner concepts of God.

Generally speaking, divine attributes are based on what God reveals to humanity and how such theophanies are conceived by the recipients. In Sub-Saharan Africa, for instance, the majority of the indigenous names of God are indicative of what God has revealed to a particular community. Understood from a traditional perspective expressed systematically and conceived via the medium of an African spirituality, the Great Spirit is best described as the Unknowable, self-revealing one. In this book the author will try to avoid assigning gender to God because the African concept of God presented here is neither male nor female. I would rather be faithful to this concern than any grammatical rules. Differently put, awkward grammar is to be preferred to misrepresenting God just because the English language has its limitations. Furthermore, in my language as well as other African languages, there is no place for either a “he” or “she” or “it” in reference to God. If I say in Shona, Mwari ari kudenga, literally God is in heaven, the word ari is more than neuter gender. It does not make reference to either male or female. Yet, it refers to a person, not a thing. I am comfortable with the notion that God is a person who is “Wholly Other.” A casual glance at, not to mention careful scrutiny of, the attributes of God suggests that God is a Person, but nothing like you and me. God’s perfection cannot be limited to either gender, or to both genders combined or tripled. In my opinion, scholars who maintain that God is both male and female still limit God to these characteristics. To say “Ultimate” supersedes all and any human categories the finite mind may conceive, unless it is revealed by God’s own self.

Among monotheistic religions, Christianity claims to know God on the basis of five primary factors: (1) what God reveals to humanity in history (revelation); (2) what the word of God, that is, the Hebrew people’s recorded witness of who God is, and what God says and does (Scripture); (3) what the church’s creeds and traditions convey about who God is as the church professes its faith (tradition); (4) present personal or community experience of what God has done to manifest God’s own glory, which has helped people to believe that the Lord is God (experience); (5) reason, whether aided with God’s grace, revelation, or scientific observation (reason). But for Christianity in Africa two major sources of African theology should be added to this list, namely, (6) an African epistemology/culture that emanates from primitive divine revelation, and (7) traditional religiosity with all the “oral” sacred texts of theology, like prayer, proverbs, and myths (the primitive revelation of the Great Spirit God). It is for this reason that theology in Africa cannot be just like any other. There is need for this African component just as Scripture is a prerequisite for Christian theology wherever it is done.

With the exception of extreme biblicists like the late Dr. Byang Kato, many serious scholars agree that these two make an important addition to the people’s knowledge of God. Dr. Kato “stressed the distinctiveness of the experience of the Christian Gospel to such an extent that he rejected the positive evaluation of any pre-Christian religious tradition as a distraction from the necessary ‘emphasis on Bible truth.’”1 Dr. Kato lost ground not only to more moderate scholars, but even to other evangelicals who had initially shared his view.

One of the conservative theologians on the continent writes, “It is now being recognized that African traditional religiosity is playing a major role in African understanding of Christian faith, in the rapid expansion of Christianity, and in the nature of pastoral problems faced by churches especially in the rural areas.”2 Many scholars note with interest that “African Christians are discovering, often with passionate interest, that there are many religious and cultural ‘points of contact’ between biblical and African backgrounds.”3 These “points of contact” compel this theologian to glean traditional theology, which enriches Christian theology and most certainly Christian worship. Based on the universality and specificity of the revelation, many Christians are freely utilizing God concepts from traditional religion because both faiths believe in the same God.

Scholars who use “Christ” as the reason to separate Christianity from any knowledge of God through traditional religion do well to bear in mind that Christ is the mediator not castigator. The word of God says, “For God did not send his son to condemn the world but to save the world through him” (John 3:17). Dr. Kwame Bediako alludes to this crucial observation when he discusses a desirable continuity between traditional religion and Christianity. He observed that “the African Church needed to build its bridges to the ‘revelation’ given to Africans in their pre-Christian and pre-missionary religious traditions of the past.” Additionally, Bediako said that the intention was to “connect the ‘old’ and the ‘new’ in African religious experience.”4 Other scholars also agree with Bediako (Idowu, Setiloane, Kibicho, and Gaba).

The significance of this commonality far exceeds the danger of elements of syncretism. Syncretism is to be regarded as negative when a religion “borrows” beliefs that contradict each other from one, two, or more traditions. However it is positive when “borrowed” beliefs either compliment each other or are supplementary. For example, traditional religion places much emphasis on spiritual or faith healing. In fact, many independent churches are founded on this basis alone. Kimbanguism based in the Democratic Republic of Congo is a prime example.5 Because Simon Kimbangu emerged as a faith healer, just as Jesus of Nazareth, he gained a following which has now become one of Africa’s largest independent churches.

Being a non-seminarian, Kimbangu’s reading of the Bible, his hermeneutics, his liturgics, and even his administration is definitely heavily tinted with African cultural concepts of authority and mindset. When his followers call him “Father,” the title has a double meaning. Sociologically, he is a family man properly respected as such. Spiritually, he is believed to be everyone’s “father” also representing the heavenly Father. He is both fully spiritual and fully physical. The two natures are both attributed to him. Neither nature is viewed as secondary or inferior to the other. After all, it seems to be the nature of any religion to take on not only local color but also philosophical thought-forms of the new environment.

Across the board, African independent churches manifest both christological and cultural tendencies, and yet they uphold some basic concepts of God which are traceable to traditional religion. The various religious sectors of the Apostolic Faith are easily recognized by the attire worn by the adherents as well as the special Shepherd’s staff carried by the leadership as well as by most male members. Most branches of this church practice polygamous marriages, like King Solomon or King David in the Old Testament. One thing is obvious about this movement. They are not bound by Western or mission-founded “ecclesiastical principles.” Consequently, some of their concepts of God are drawn purely from either the Old Testament in general or African traditional religion, or both. Specifically, John the Baptist’s attire is regarded as a symbol of being prophetic.

While concepts of God are not the essence of God, they are useful in expressing in human language what we otherwise could not communicate to others or pass on to younger generations. Over centuries traditional religion has developed its own concepts of God, which are necessarily couched in the people’s culture. As a result there is a great diversity of perceptions of who God is on the continent and in diaspora. For this reason, we have devoted chapter four to the people of African descent who are not domiciled on the continent but share African concepts of God because wherever they are, belief in the one God, creator of the universe is obviously evident. Thus belief in God is one aspect that the African slaves in North America retained after they were bereft of their identity, dignity and language. African Christianity in diaspora and traditional religion wherever it is being practiced enjoy a common concept of God based on knowledge of the self-revealing God they worshipped. This similarity of the concept is largely dependent upon sustained cultural affinity and even identity.

If who God is were totally dependent on what we say about the Great Spirit, God would probably be nothing more than a fuzzy notion of reality named on the basis of mere human imagination. Fortunately that is not the case. African religion, which is the oldest form of monotheism,6 has acknowledged and worshipped the one God, creator and ruler of the universe, who made divinity known to humanity. All the concepts of God discussed in this book reference us to this.

The God-talk and concepts described here are based on the premise that the Great Spirit referred to is the Unmoved Mover, the Uncreated Creator who sustains all creation. Note that these few chapters therefore do not seek to prove the existence of God. (This author cannot even imagine any existence without God’s prior existence!) The task and focus here is a discussion of concepts of God from the point of view of select African sources including culture, traditional religion, philosophy, experience, revelation, and specific oral traditional sources like prayers, proverbs, songs, and the like. The book attempts to present concepts of God, the Great Spirit, in a language free from sexist and gender limitations since God is, in fact, beyond the limitations of the human language as previously noted. Furthermore, the author will use interchangeably the phrase “concepts of God” or refer to these collectively as “concept of God,” just as one might talk about “African beliefs in God” or collectively “African belief in God.”

Humans would have named God everything but who God is but God took the initiative to reveal who God is and that process is incessant. Every community has its local concepts of God; some concepts are the same as, or similar to, the biblical ones. However where such similarity occurs, it indicates universality, but where contrast is evident, that is due to the particularity of the revelation. Differently put, the historicity of the Incarnation is not to be confused with locality of divinity because God is both immanent and transcendent. Such instances only serve to reinforce the central concept of the universality of the one singular Divinity. Therefore, the concept of God could not possibly be merely a figment of human imagination. Of the various theories of origin of religion, the ones that Africans least identify with are the materialist theories espoused by scholars like Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx, and Ludwig Feuerbach. God has made God’s own sovereignty known to humanity. The materialist theories assume that humanity was groping in the dark as it were, so it had to create something called God. Concepts of God in African religion come from anything other than Feuerbach’s personal objectification, Freud’s illusion, or Marx’s theory of religion as the opium of the people.

There are many who believe that God is God in spite of humanity’s faith or unbelief. What encouraged me to write this book, despite the fact that the topic has been addressed by many from various angles, is that African religion, which founded monotheism, after decades of theological distortions by slavery, colonialism, and other forms of cultural invasion, is regrouping once more to give spiritual leadership to the world. Also, several of my seminary students, too many to name, kept pushing me to “share your African perspective...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Foreword
• Chapter 1: Introduction
• Chapter 2: African Origins of Monotheism
• Chapter 3: African Theological Concepts of God
• Chapter 4: God Concept in African Diaspora
• Chapter 5: God, Good, and Evil
• Chapter 6: Theologizing a God Concept
• Bibliography