Excerpt of "Theology after Colonization"

THEOLOGY AFTER COLONIZATION Kwame Bediako, Karl Barth, and the Future of Theological Reflection

TIM H A R TMA N University of Notre Dame Press Notre Dame, Indiana

University of Notre Dame Press Notre Dame, Indiana 46556 undpress.nd.edu Copyright Š 2019 by the University of Notre Dame All Rights Reserved Published in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data to come

∞ This book is printed on acid-free paper.

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments ix Abbreviations xiii Introduction xv

PA R T I . W E S T E R N C H R I S T I A N T H E O L O G Y T O D AY

A Crisis of (Shifting) Authority: The Decline of Christendom and the Rise of Secularization and Globalization 3 ONE.

TWO.

Transcultural Theology through Juxtaposition 000

Transitional Theological Interlude 000 PA R T I I . R E T H I N K I N G D I V I N E R E V E L AT I O N THREE. FOUR. FIVE. SIX.

Christological Reflection: Revelation in Jesus Christ 000

Contextual Reflection: Revelation, not Religion 000

Cultural Reflection: The Location of Revelation 000

Constructive Reflection: Imaginative and Prophetic 000

SEVEN.

Collaborative Reflection: Learning, not Helping 000

Notes 000

Bibliography 000 Index 000

INTRODUCTION

Colonization and Christendom are interrelated phenomena that have shaped the history of Christianity over the past seventeen hundred years.

The impulses to expand and to rule have reinforced each other through a hegemonic cultural consensus that has defined the boundaries and content of Christian theological reflection. A key feature of this complex has been the confusion of Christianity with North Atlantic white culture.

Particularly during the past five hundred years, this consensus has been disintegrating when confronted with the impact of secularization and globalization.

Christendom and colonization are not merely parallel processes.

Though distinct, they are interrelated, interdependent, and mutually reinforcing. As the Christian faith became yoked to imperial political power, there was a push to expand and dominate. On the night before the decisive battle of the Milvian Bridge that allowed Emperor Constantine I to consolidate his power, he saw a vision of the cross of Jesus Christ with the words, “In this sign, [you shall] conquer.”1 At the moment that Constantine ordered crosses placed on the shields of his army, the Christian faith became tethered to military conquest. A year later, in 313, Constantine issued the Edict of Milan, declaring Christianity an officially tolerated religion within the Roman Empire. By 380, Christianity became the sole authorized religion of the Roman Empire. The once-persecuted community on-the-way — ​as the Acts of the Apostles described the early church — ​ was co-opted to support power and privilege. Since this institutionalization of the Christian church, including formalized doctrines and structures xv

xvi Introduction

of authority, Christianity has been inseparable from the quest to expand and conquer.

The first part of this book demonstrates how the loss of cultural hegemony through rising pluralism and secularization has undermined the interconnection of the Christian faith and political power and how globalization has undermined the expansive (and expanding) mind-set of colonization. The second part then engages two twentieth-century theologians who opposed this complex from within their own social locations — ​ sometimes in strikingly similar ways (though the similarities themselves are not the subject of this book). The Swiss-German theologian Karl Barth (1886–1968) responded to the challenges of Christendom and the increasing secularization of Europe by articulating an early post-Christendom theology that based his dogmatic reflections on God’s self-revelation in Jesus Christ, not on official institutional structures (including the church) or societal consensus. Instead, he used Christian theology to counter claims made by the Nazi-sympathizing state church. In a similar way, the Ghanaian theologian Kwame Bediako (1945–2008) offered a post-colonial theology. He wrote from the Global South as the Christian faith grew exponentially after the departure of Western missionaries from Africa.

For Bediako, the infinite translatability of the gospel of Jesus Christ leads to the renewal of Christianity as a non-Western religion, not as a product of colonization.

Bediako and Barth each responded to the coupling of Christian faith and political power, which was manifested in externally focused imperial colonization and internally focused cultural hegemony. While for many in the West this conflation of gospel and culture was, and has been, so pervasive as to be imperceptible, theologians in the Global South have identified Western Christianity as deeply syncretistic, with capitalism and cultural domination defining how the gospel of Jesus Christ has been understood. The Christian faith has been all too willing to aid the ever-expanding growth of capitalism in its attempts to serve its own aims. As one example, the nineteenth-century British missionary David Livingstone proudly proclaimed that he was bringing the three C’s to southern Africa: Christianity, civilization, and commerce.2 Christian theologies that are wedded (or indebted) to this colonial-­ Christendom complex — ​often without knowing it — ​currently find themselves struggling. Assumptions embedded in these theological systems

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are based on power, privilege, and societal consensus. They are not accustomed to being challenged or having to explain themselves. Often, theological knowledge has been based on centralized or top-down structures.

These theologies (and I would include most Western theologies here) find themselves unable to respond to increasing secularization and intensifying globalization because they are based on the very assumptions of uniformity and parochialism (sometimes called orthodoxy) that are being challenged.

This book turns to Kwame Bediako and Karl Barth as prophets of alternative ways of theological reflection. Though the church historian Andrew Walls wrote, “Kwame Bediako was the outstanding African theologian of his generation,”3 Bediako’s insights and theological acumen nonetheless remain at the margins of contemporary theological reflection in the West. Barth is widely considered the most significant Protestant theologian of the twentieth century. Both men developed Christian theologies that were not dependent on the colonial-Christendom complex, even before it collapsed socially and materially. Accordingly, they can serve as helpful guides for contemporary theological reflection in this time when the consensus surrounding this complex is disintegrating further. Collectively, their work points the way toward contemporary theological reflection that is Christological, contextual, cultural, constructive, and collaborative.