The Language of Faith in Southern Africa

Front matter

HTS Religion & Society Series

Volume 6

Spirit World,

Contents

List of abbreviations appearing in the text xi Biographical note xiii Acknowledgements XV Chapter 1: The language of faith in Southern Africa 1 Introduction 1 Two common approaches to the language of faith in Africa 4 The language of faith in Southern Africa 9 African theology 13 Methodology 14 Part One 19 Chapter 2: The spirit world: Its reality 21 Introduction 21 One world 24 Adding a thousand qualifications? 27 A different direction 32 Prayer 36 My own context in the Netherlands 38 The African context 41 Not explanation, control and prediction 47 No explanation 47 No control 50 No prediction 53 Chance everywhere 55 Response to the world 59 A response to the uncertainty of what happens 59 A response to uncertainty about which way to go 60 A response to harmful things 63 The Southern African context 66 vii

Contents

Two questions

Conclusion

Chapter 3: The spirit world: Its diversity Introduction Spirits that can be coerced to help Looking for a middle ground Suspending our scepticism What is wrong with this quest?

A different-from-the-ordinary role | give in order that you give?

The spirit world is not used as a practical tool Truth and responses to the world Living with a diversity of responses

The belief in the spirit world responds to the same one world

No need for mediation between different responses Conclusion

Chapter 4: Power: In things and words

Introduction

The symbolic quality of things The power of anointing oil and anointed pens Things as part of a symbolic context Symbolic things are treated differently Enchantment

The material quality of words Positive confession and speaking into someone's life Performative or perlocutionary language?

The material quality of words

Conclusion viii

70 71 73 77

79 79 81 84 84 89 94 95 97

104 111

113 117 120

Contents

Part Two 171 Chapter 5: Community: In society 173 Introduction 173 Social harmony as greatest good 175 Inclusiveness 176 Harmony of the community as a moral principle 182 Hiding behind the community 184 Giving in to power 185 Looking for the best policy 186 Avoiding punishment 187 Avoiding shame and dishonour 188 The concrete community 190 Vulnerable individuals 196 Exposed individuals 197 Group pressure 203 A community of strangers 209 Relationships over freedom 216 Conclusion 221 Chapter 6: Community: In Christianity 223 Introduction 223 The purpose of religious meetings: From shared worship to obtaining a service 225 ‘Not really communities’ 225 No worship groups 228 Focus on needs 231 The role of the pastor: From facilitator to big man 237 Authoritarian big man 237 And egalitarianism? 240 Anointed man of God 243 The meaning of ecumenism: From unreachable goal to assumed fact 248

International community 248

Contents

We are all Christians Choosing one’s dependency

The government adapting to the shift in type of religious community

Unity and dialogue in the church as theological ideal A community of pilgrims Faith dialogue

Conclusion

Chapter 7: Holism: In blessings and salvation Introduction

The quest for holistic salvation

Causal or conceptual connections?

The prosperity gospel

What does it mean to be blessed?

A different kind of life

Not a bit of both

Conclusion

Chapter 8: Wrong questions Introduction Understanding the language of faith

The picture theory of language

The meaning of language is in the use Wrong questions One church?

250 256

259 263 264 269 275

List of abbreviations appearing in the text

AlCs ATR CCTV CMs NGO UCZ USA

African Initiated Churches African Traditional Religions Closed Circuit Television Charismatic Ministries Non-governmental Organisation United Church of Zambia United States of America xi

Biographical note

Hermen Kroesbergen

Department of Dogmatics and Christian Ethics, Faculty of Theology and Religion, University of Pretoria, Pretoria, South Africa

Hermen Kroesbergen is a Senior Postdoctoral Fellow in Theology at the University of Pretoria. He studied theology at the Rijksuniversiteit Groningen in the Netherlands. After an MA thesis in philosophy of religion on the work of Wittgensteinian philosopher D.Z. Phillips, he obtained a PhD in systematic theology from the Protestant Theological University in the Netherlands, investigating the relationship between systematic theology and ordinary language of faith from a Wittgensteinian perspective. He served for four years as a pastor in a congregation of the Protestant church in the Netherlands, and lectured in theology, philosophy and ethics at Justo Mwale University, Lusaka, in Zambia for six years. In Zambia, he became interested in African theology and the distinctive character of African language of faith. He published widely in leading international journals in theology and philosophy of religion, and he edited four books on contemporary themes in African theology with contributions from all over Southern Africa.

xiii

Acknowledgements

From 2011 to 2017 my wife and | have had the privilege to lecture at Justo Mwale University in Lusaka, Zambia. It has been a wonderful time. | thank all the students, our colleagues and all the other people we met in Zambia for their warmth and openness and for allowing us to share their lives. It has been so interesting and | have learnt so much! This book is the result of my reflections upon and conversations about being a Christian in Southern Africa and how | can make sense of that coming from such a different context as the Netherlands.

| thank Professor Edwin Zulu (Vice-Chancellor during our years at Justo Mwale University) and Dr Gideon van der Watt (Representative of Partners in Mission and CLF) for encouraging writing about the context of Southern Africa by supporting the publication of four edited volumes on contemporary topics in African Christianity. | thank the Reformed Church in Zambia and in particular the congregation of Chilenje in Lusaka for welcoming me in their midst. | thank Kerk in Actie (Mission organisation of the Protestant Church in the Netherlands) for sending us to Zambia and connecting us to congregations in the Netherlands; and Professor James Amanze for expanding our network in Southern Africa through ATISCA (Association of Theological Institutions in Southern and Central Africa). | thank Professor Johan Buitendag for taking me under his wing as a Postdoctoral and now Senior Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Pretoria. | thank him and Professor Andries van Aarde (AOSIS) for encouraging me to write this book, and AOSIS and the Dean of the Faculty of Theology and Religion of the University of Pretoria for making its publication possible.

| thank Dr Naomi Haynes and Dr Chammah Kaunda for their comments on a chapter of this book. | thank Sherri and Dustin Ellington, and Jolanda and Charles Cartwright for their comments and corrections of my English. And, finally, my wife, Johanneke: you are a part of this book every step of the way. Thank you for exploring the world together with me!

XV

The language of faith in Southern Africa

‘Whose Christianity is normal now? And whose will be in fifty years time?’ asks theologian Philip Jenkins (2006:17), paraphrasing his Gambian colleague Lamin Sanneh. Asked like that, the answer to the latter question should be African Christianity. Demographically, during the past century, Christianity has shifted to the south. In 2000, the centre of gravity - the geographical point at which there live an equal number of Christians in the north, south, east and west - was Timbuktu in Mali and is still moving southwards (Johnson 2004:179). African Christianity is the new heart of Christianity. But what does African Christianity look like? What is its theology? If the future is African Christianity, then it seems that world Christianity is going ‘back to the future’. African Christianity is often portrayed as highly conservative and backward (cf. Jenkins 2006:1-17). For six years my wife and | have been teaching at a theological university in Africa, sharing our experiences with our sending church in the Netherlands. The opinions about Africa that

How to cite: Kroesbergen, H., 2019, ‘The language of faith in Southern Africa’, The Language of Faith in Southern Africa: Spirit World, Power, Community, Holism (HTS Religion & Society Series Volume 6), pp. 1-17, AOSIS, Cape Town. https://doi.org/10.4102/aosis.2019.BK117.01 we encountered during our meetings in congregations in the Netherlands often contained the word ‘still’ - ‘in Africa people still believe in witchcraft, in an active spirit world, in magic and powers in words and things’ or, ‘in Africa people sti// have community, a sense of connectedness, vibrant new churches and an inclusive, holistic worldview’. Africa is seen as a continent that has what people in Europe used to have - both the bad and the good - and | must say that our students and colleagues in Zambia did not discourage that view. They did not deny that they believed in witchcraft, the spirit world and all kinds of special powers; in fact, they emphasised over and over again that it is all real and tried to convince us with many stories. Concerning the importance of community, the vibrancy of the church and the holistic worldview, they took pride in that, and many considered it to be a gift from Africa to the world. So, is the future of the church to go back to the beliefs and community that Europe once had, via Africa? In this book, | wish to challenge this idea, not so much because of the problematic evolutionary perspective, but because of the assumptions about what it is to believe in something like the spirit world and what it is to be a community.

The evolutionary perspective has often been criticised and rightfully so. It is arrogant and neo-colonial to assume that other cultures will go where Europe and the United States of America (USA) have gone. It is questionable whether contemporary beliefs in Africa and earlier beliefs in Europe are really that alike. It is also unlikely that other cultures will develop towards what society is like in contemporary Europe and the USA. The global revival of religion and the success of authoritarian regimes, for example, seem to point in a different direction. Notwithstanding this, | hold that there are bigger problems with the ideas that people in Africa still believe in the spirit world and powers and that they still have community and a holistic worldview than their evolutionary context.

The problems | will address in this book concern what it means to believe in witchcraft or magic. Can we even imagine what it is to believe in those things? This question applies both to Euro-American theologians who try to prepare for the new global Christianity and to the African theologians who accept and defend that the spirit world and these powers are real. Both groups assume they know what it is to believe in such things and then try to deal with it, but | will argue that more clarity is first needed about what it means to believe in the spirit world and powers in things and words and so on. People in Africa genuinely believe in the spirit world; yet, in many respects, their lives are no different from those of Europeans who do not believe in such things. The spirit world may be very real and someone from Africa may bump into it around every corner, yet he or she is aware that his or her European friend does not bump into it around every corner. With a tree, this is different - both would bump into it in the same way. So, what is it to believe in the spirit world or not to believe in it? Similarly, what does it mean to (still) have a community? How does this fit in with the many stories from Africa about widows being robbed by their in-laws, orphans living on the street, civil wars, corruption and so on? Instead of grasping at everything positive that we can find about Africa, we need to investigate the following:

e What does community mean in an African context? e What does it mean to be a church or ministry in Africa? e What are the implications of a holistic worldview?

Instead of assuming that we know what it is to believe in the spirit world or what it is to have community and using these assumptions to build an African theology or a theology for what Jenkins (2002) calls the next Christendom, let us first take a step back and try to establish what believing in the spirit world and having a sense of community is. This is what | propose to do in this study. Fellow theologians who try to construct a contemporary African theology as well as those who are interested in theology in Africa, given the well-known shift in the centre of gravity of Christianity towards Latin America, Africa and Asia, are the primary target audience of this book. As renowned scholar of religion Elias K. Bongmba (2016) argues in an important recent companion to African Christianity:

The place Africa has attained in global Christianity requires new critical appreciation from scholars. Such a critical appreciation should be celebratory without being apologetic [and] should also raise new questions about the nature of faith in the twenty-first century. (p. 559)

Raising such new questions about the nature of faith, given the shift of the centre of gravity of Christianity to Africa, is what | aim to do in this study. As will become clear soon, the argument presented in this book also has implications for wider discussions within systematic theology, anthropology of Africaand philosophy of religion.

E Two common approaches to the language of faith in Africa

When | arrived in Zambia in December 2011, the Africa Cup of Nations soccer championship was about to start. The tournament went well for Zambia and in February 2012 they were crowned champions of Africa for the first time. Zambia’s success during the tournament was widely spoken about in the country - even churches could not refrain from referring to it. In fact, every Sunday pastors prayed for the country’s success. They not only prayed for peace and calm among the supporters - as pastors in the Netherlands might have - but they also prayed for Zambia to win the next match and, when they won, they thanked God for Zambia’s victory. Having just arrived from the Netherlands, this sounded very strange to me. Did they really think that God would intervene on their behalf? Outside of church, people complained about the juju or magic that the opponents were said to use and joked about the white shirt of the Zambian coach. After winning the first match, he continued wearing it as a kind of charm. | often wondered, do people in Zambia really believe that such things work?!

Recently, | realised that my attitude towards my Zambian fellow Christians is in many ways similar to the attitude of my secular fellow-Dutchmen towards me as a Christian. The Netherlands is now a very secular country and, especially among my generation and the following generations, it is considered to be unusual and strange to be a Christian. Christians are often dismissed as a bit backward and silly, believing in all kinds of weird things like God, heaven, sins and so forth. Reflecting more upon it, however, such a straightforward dismissal does not work. Christians live in the same society as their secular counterparts, they live their lives in much the same way, they do not seem to be significantly less intelligent and they are well aware that their secular neighbours do not feel the Holy Spirit or see God in his creation. The case of Christians, in general, differs significantly from that of people who hear voices or suffer from hallucinations. Christians are different and strange, but they do not simply erroneously assume the existence of things that are not there. Most often, it is left at that. Christians are different - it is not exactly clear in what way - but we simply carry on. Basically, | have lived these six years with a similar attitude towards my fellow Christians in Zambia, wondering if people in Zambia really believe that soccer matches are won through prayers and magic. It sounds strange and silly to me but, then again, how was | able to share their lives for six years if they are such strange and silly people? They do not seem to be significantly less intelligent, and they are well aware that people from Europe like me do not believe in prayers and magic in that way.

| think there is something wrong with the most common approaches to these kinds of puzzles, concerning both Christians in the Netherlands and pastors in Zambia. Having experienced the situation from both sides - being considered ‘silly but then again maybe not’ and considering others that way - | wish to propose a different approach to this problem of understanding than the ones generally used in theology, anthropology and philosophy. Systematic theology, anthropology and philosophy of religion struggle to make sense of the language of faith, both in Europe and in Africa, and the same two approaches appear in all of these disciplines.

Many theologians consider themselves to be critical realists. Religious believers themselves may be certain about the realities they speak of in their language of faith, but critical realist theologians consider it their task as theologians to investigate the statements of believers as hypotheses about the ultimate reality. The language of faith should be tested and adapted in accordance with the latest state of knowledge in other areas of life and science. According to critical realists, Christians in the Netherlands experience the Holy Spirit but, actually, that is a metaphor for something like a force field in the natural sciences. Pastors in Zambia pray for their soccer team to win but, actually, that is a metaphor for raising a kind of mental power to psychologically support their team.

Other theologians question this critical realist approach. According to them - we could call them postmodernists - religious beliefs do not need to be adapted when they are in conflict with scientific statements, but they can be basic beliefs of someone’s worldview. The language of faith reflects the metanarrative of the world in which believers live, and no external standard can be conceived to judge between a secular and a religious worldview. According to these theologians, Christians in the Netherlands experience the Holy Spirit, and for them that is simply reality - there is nothing miraculous about it, it is their world. Pastors in Zambia pray for their soccer team to win because in their metanarrative God straightforwardly intervenes in worldly affairs, causing one or the other team to win.

There is a huge gap between the critical realist approach and the postmodern approach that takes the religious worldview as a basic metanarrative; however, both approaches presume to know that to believe in the Holy Spirit or to pray for soccer results means that what is spoken of is somehow descriptive of something in the world out there. It must be descriptive - the words used must be a designation of some object in the world, with language as a picture of reality - and we must find out how and of what, or so it is assumed. In anthropology about Africa, we find the same assumption and the same two opposite approaches.

Some anthropologists try to understand practices in Africa that at first may seem strange to Euro-American outsiders by connecting them with practices that are more familiar. Prayers and magic in soccer can be connected with the endless debate of soccer pundits and with superstitious rituals of soccer players all over the world. Such practices indicate that the results of soccer matches remain ultimately elusive. Both the familiar practices and the practices from Africa are then interpreted as metaphorical attempts to reflect upon this elusiveness. The words and practices involved are considered to be approximating designations of an ultimately inscrutable objective reality.

However, the people involved themselves may not consider their words to be metaphors and approximations. For them, what they speak of is real. In an attempt to do justice to this latter fact, a so-called ontological turn has been proposed by another group of anthropologists. Instead of interpreting an African language of faith as metaphorical, this language should be seen as ontologically describing the reality that the people involved live in, ‘Anthropologists must allow that “visions” are not beliefs, nor consensual views, but rather worlds seen objectively’ (Viveiros De Castro 2011:133). If people in Africa speak of spirits influencing the results of soccer matches or of God guiding the soccer players’ feet, this should be seen as part of the ontological world in which these people live. As we saw with the theologians before, both the metaphorical and the ontological approaches apply a designation-object model of language. The idea is that, in order to take someone’s statements seriously, we need to consider their words as descriptions - or, at least, attempted descriptions - of particular objects in reality. In this case, the strange language | heard in churches in Zambia is either taken to be an approximation of an ever-elusive reality or this language describes in what reality people live.

In philosophy of religion, we again find similar approaches. In Continental or French philosophy, the hermeneutical or apophatic approach takes a metaphorical or critical realist stance in its critique of onto-theology, whereas the phenomenological approach emphasises how people do not fully control their knowledge of reality but are as much grasped by and constituted by a reality beyond them - the reality described in their language is the reality in which they find themselves. In Anglo-Saxon philosophy, analytical philosophy of religion represents a critical realist approach, whereas, for example, Reformed Epistemology assumes a similar stance to that of the ontological anthropologists and the postmodern theologians.

In anthropology, systematic theology and philosophy of religion, there are similar debates going on about how to interpret, for example, an African language of faith. These debates happen both among outsiders trying to understand this language and among insiders trying to defend it. The gap between the two opposing sides in these debates is wide, yet all the approaches alluded to above share a designation-object model of language. Outsiders, for example, trying to construct a theology for the Christianity of the future feel that they must take an African language of faith to be descriptive in order to do justice to it, whereas insiders, for example, constructing an African theology using the spirit world and community as building blocks, do not question what they are. In this book, | consider the problematic underlying philosophical assumptions and show how an alternative approach is possible. Instead of shifting from a metaphorical approach to an ontological one or from a phenomenological to a hermeneutical one, a deeper shift is necessary, that is, a shift towards a different understanding of language. To do justice to the kind of reality that an African language of faith has, a different approach is necessary. African language of faith has meanings different from what seems apparent if the designation-object mould is applied. The critical part of my research concerns pointing out the shortcomings of the scholarly accounts of African language of faith referred to above, whereas the constructive part shows how paying attention to how people actually use this language opens avenues to an alternative and more adequate account of the reality implied in African language of faith.

E The language of faith in Southern Africa

| heard Zambian Christians discuss among themselves the practice of praying for their national team to win. They wondered what it meant to do so if one knows that the other side will pray just as hard to the very same God. Talking to us about it, they reminded me of the octopus in 2010. | was told that their prayers and magic did not differ much from the publicity surrounding an octopus in Germany that, during the World Cup in 2010, was apparently able to predict the match results. | tried, without much success, to explain that this octopus business was nothing serious, but maybe this showed that | misunderstood their prayers and comments on magic as well. Reflecting upon this in a weblog at the time, | compared it to the game of picking petals from a flower saying ‘he loves me, he loves me not’ in turns. Nobody would take this as a genuine oracle predicting someone else’s romantic disposition, but it is a way to deal with someone’s own uncertainty about his love. In Chapter 2 and Chapter 3, | use the example of the concept of luck; if someone tells me that luck made him win this game, does this mean that he believes in the existence of some strange force out there called ‘luck’? To take this person seriously, do we need to assume that ‘luck’ for him either metaphorically describes some elusive reality or is a force that simply exists within his metanarrative of the world? No, we do not need to assume that people who seriously and genuinely speak of luck believe in the existence of some mysterious force that happens to be untraceable for us. If we look at how people actually use language about luck, we see that people speak of luck winning them a game, when there is no force at all that makes them win. In fact, that is what it means to speak of luck. Similarly, | will argue that the meaning of references to the spirit world or to powers in things and words may remain obscure as long as we try to force this language into the mould of the designation-object model. Critical realist theologians and postmodern theologians - from both outside and inside Africa - misconstrue African language of faith by assuming that they already know that people who seriously and genuinely speak of the spirit world must believe in the existence of some mysterious entities that happen to be untraceable to us.

In anthropology, systematic theology and philosophy of religion, similar debates about how to interpret an African language of faith are ongoing. Trying to avoid the ‘othering’ discourses of past generations - when people in Africa were mentally classified as ‘not one of us’ - scholars are careful to take seriously what people in Africa say without portraying people’s beliefs as weird or backward. Yet, in their desperate attempts to avoid othering, these anthropologists, theologians and philosophers often painfully misconstrue the language of faith in Africa. To do justice to the kind of reality that an African language of faith has, a different approach is necessary. The lead question of the research in my book is, therefore, ‘how do we account for the reality implied in an African language of faith?’

The three chapters that make up the first part of this book deal with aspects of the language of faith in Southern Africa that are often strange to outsiders from a Euro-American context. People in Africa regularly speak of a spirit world which they try to influence and which they assume to be responsible for everything that happens in the ordinary world. Furthermore, people in Africa appear to see power everywhere, such as in things and words, where people from a Euro-American context would not expect it. In this part, | argue that if one avoids some common but misguided assumptions about language, these aspects of the language of faith in Southern Africa are not as strange as they may seem.

In Chapter 2, | will continue discussing the meaning of prayer, in both the European and, especially, the African context. | will show how language concerning the spirit world is different from language that can be analysed with the designation-object model. In Chapter 3, differences between people who speak of the spirit world will be discussed. Being a Christian coming from the Netherlands, | do pray, also in connection with soccer tournaments, but | would not pray for my national soccer team to win. Now, does the fact that Zambian pastors pray for victories show a difference of opinion between us? Does it mean that there is some kind of disagreement or does speaking of the spirit world work differently in this respect as well? In Chapter 4, the white shirt of the Zambian soccer coach will return. | investigate what it could mean to attribute special powers to particular objects or to particular words; speaking positively - for example, about the national soccer team - is considered to be even more important in African contexts than in Europe.

The chapters that make up the second part of this book deal with aspects of the language of faith in Southern Africa that are not so much ‘strange’ to outsiders from a Euro-American context but ‘romantic’. In Africa, it is said that people still have a sense of community that people in Europe and the USA have lost. In Africa, it is said that people are holistic; they are not burdened by all kinds of divisions and contrasts that haunt their Euro-American counterparts. In this part, | argue that one needs to look carefully at how concepts such as community and holism are used in Africa. Community in Africa - within society as well as within Christianity - means something different from community in Europe and the USA. Some challenges are resolved, but others appear. The same can be said for holism, which, in the context of faith, is most often used to refer to the blessings and salvation expected by believers. Compared to the Euro-American context, there are advantages as well as new risks - these aspects of faith in Southern Africa are not as romantic as they may seem.

In Chapter 5, discussing the meaning of community in an African context, similarities will appear between the kind of community created by a national soccer team and community in general in African society, in its organic open-endedness and continuously re-negotiated nature. Africa may (still?) have community but, in order to do justice to this concept of community, we need to be clear about its downsides as well. In Chapter 6, differences between a local soccer club and the many vibrant new Neo-Pentecostal ministries in Southern Africa - which | will call Ministries International - will be discussed. A local soccer club consists of a group of people who are members, whereas the new Ministries International - and the older churches in response to Neo-Pentecostalism as well - are organised more like service providers. The focus is not on a group of people but more on an anointed man or woman of God and what he or she can do for you. The concept of community in this respect shifts from local congregations to the entire nation within which everyone is considered to be a Christian, whatever ministry or prophet one may frequent. Having concluded this chapter with a proposal for how to maintain unity and dialogue within such a differing ecclesial context, in Chapter 7, | discuss the often-praised holistic worldview of people in Africa, particularly concerning blessings and salvation. People in Africa do not only freely pray for their national soccer team to win; they also pray for victory in their own lives. | show how holism is not as romantic as it is often portrayed, as it easily slips into materialism; however, it is not necessarily materialistic either. The same statements may be used in expressing very different spirits, and a similar spirit may be behind very different expressions, such as that of the extravagant prosperity preacher and the humble pastor who emphasises his poverty. Often, it is not easy to differentiate between different ways in which the same words can be used. One cannot determine how someone uses his or her words by looking at those words themselves, but only by deducing this from the role that the words play in the life of this person with others. In all of the chapters of this book, | provide tools for discerning the spirit behind the language of faith in Southern Africa. Instead of assuming that we know what it is to believe in the spirit world or special powers, and what it is to have a community or a holistic worldview, we should look at how language is actually used in people’s lives to try to make sense of it.