Translating Theological Liberalism into African Evangelicalism

Theological Liberalism in the West was substantially an Enlightenment project.  It sought to broaden or generalise theological understanding by making it universal through the reason and religious experience in common with all human beings.  It was, therefore, construed as relevant across social groupings and at the intensely personal level.  Just how, then, could theological liberalism at all be a feature of African theology, with its concerns for relevance to African experiences and contexts?  Even more, what does it have to do with African Evangelicalism?

Western theological liberalism found Christian theology too confining.  Theologians did not want their theological reflection to be confined by Scripture.  They found theology to be too confining in an environment that championed reason.  They reduced the Son of God to a good moral teacher.  They understood the essence of Christianity to be the threefold creed not of Trinitarian orthodoxy but of the fatherhood of God, the brotherhood of mankind, and the infinite worth of the human soul.  They located doctrine in religious experience such that the uniqueness of the Christian faith was diluted in the ecumenical and universal search in all religious quests.

African theology arose as a postcolonial enterprise, fulfilling the desire of Africans to do theology.  Just what did that mean—or does it mean?  For some, it meant to do theology as it was taught by the conservative missionaries who brought traditional Christian faith to the continent: a study of Scripture, an understanding of Christian doctrine, the history of the Christian Church, and its ethics.  For others, it meant to do theology in a different way.  These scholars tended to reject theology from both the liberal and conservative perspectives.  They had—and have had—two concerns: to honour Africa, its history, people, and African traditions, and to address ‘African realities’, that is, the issues facing Africans today.  These two concerns can be translated into the concerns of ‘contextual theology’ and ‘public theology’.

Five terms in general parlance today that reflect contextual and public concerns in postcolonial contexts are: holistic (spiritual and practical theology), transformational (holistic theology bringing social change), relevant (theology that begins with and answers present needs), and ‘African not Western’.  The ‘African’ emphasis can be construed as honoring certain aspects of African traditional religion, particularly the communitarian rather than individualistic emphasis in African communities and, relatedly, some role of dead answers in the living community.  One emerging scholar in Evangelicalism in the 1980s was Byang Kato, who opposed the direction of this trajectory.  He saw it as anti-orthodox and anti-Evangelical.  He died in a tragic accident at an early age and could not continue his challenge to developments separating African theology from Evangelical theology.  The scholars in Africa representing the opposite gained control of the conversation, at least insofar as their ideas made it into print and established the literature for African theological reflection.

The argument in this brief essay is that the universalising project of Western liberalism and the contextualising project of African theology are cut from the same cloth.  To understand this, we need to understand that the universalising project of Western liberalism was a contextual project.  It reflected both the Enlightenment’s emphasis on reason and the existentialist emphasis in Western philosophy of human experience.  Moreover, the emphasis on reason was a rejection of Christian theology of the Church.  The Church’s theology had understood theological reasoning to be done a certain way, as interpretation.  First, theologians were interpreters of Scripture.  Second, they were interpreters of the Church’s theology—its theological tradition.  This was the case, though practiced differently, for Orthodox, Roman Catholic, and Protestant scholars up to the Enlightenment.  Post-Enlightenment theologians who rejected theology as interpretation turned it into theology as reflection upon philosophical and theological ideas.

African theology has proceeded in the same vein.  As a theological project already devised by liberal Protestantism, it sidelines Biblical interpretation and the study of historical theology, and it rejects such interpretation as constricting, non-contextual, irrelevant, colonial, non-transformational, and not holistic.  Liberal theology had already defined theology as existing above tradition by virtue of reason and below tradition by virtue of human experience.  African theology exists above Christian tradition by focussing study on African tradition and below Christian tradition by focussing much more narrowly on contemporary African realities/needs.  Whether as Western liberal theology or as African theology, the study of Scripture as the mode of theological enquiry and of the Church’s history and theology are rejected.

African Evangelical theology is easily allured by Western liberalism.  Or we might say that Western liberalism, translated into African theology these past forty or fifty years, is attractive to African Evangelicalism.  The allure is to replace the study of Christian tradition with African tradition (‘contextualism’), and it replaces theology as Biblical interpretation with theology as reflection on African realities (‘political’ or ‘practical’ theology).  A truly Evangelical response to this African attraction to liberalism would involve an articulation of how theology must proceed from Biblical interpretation and how it is an extension, not rejection, of historical theology.

First, then, African colleges and seminaries must resist this pull by training students to be more Biblically literate than in the West and as capable in Biblical interpretation as Western seminaries.  It will only do so when it recognises that the Bible is not simply a resource for theology, to be engaged for our agendas and for rhetorical purposes.  It is God’s authoritative Word and, as such, defines us theologically and ethically, both corporately and individually.  It analyses, critiques, and defines us.  We interpret the Bible so that it will interpret us. It determines culture more than it needs to be contextually applied.

Second, African colleges and seminaries need to recognise that the theological enterprise is not first to be creative but conservative.  From the beginning of the Church, the theological goal was to live faithfully under the Word of God and thereby to live faithfully to God.  Good teachers in the Church were those training believers in the faith that was once for all delivered to them (Jude 4).  Faithless teachers were those attaching Christian tradition so closely to the non-Christian context that it was reshaped by that context, whether its theology or ethics.  The lure of being relevant and contextual is a faith-altering lure that distorts Christian doctrine and alters loyalties to God and Scripture to align with culture and context.

Third, African colleges and seminaries need to understand what the West forgot, that the Gospel is not some philosophy but the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, whether the Jews or the Gentiles (Romans 1.16).  We do not ‘translate the Gospel’ into culture but are baptised into Christ by the Holy Spirit.  Transformation by the Gospel trumps cultural translation of the Gospel.  Translation in its various senses is important, but for the sake of communication, not theology.  The error of Israel was to go after the other gods of other nations.  The heresies rejected in the New Testament church were the heresies mentioned in the letters to the seven Asian churches in Revelation 2-3, heresies of accommodation to non-Christian beliefs and practices in the culture.  Instead of speaking of ‘African theology’, the African Church needs to speak of ‘Christian theology’ in Africa.

Africa has no special claim on ‘holistic’, ‘relevant’, ‘contextual’, and ‘relevant’.  Its postcolonial impetus resides in Western liberation theologies.  Its African spirituality is not essentially different from liberalism’s interest in religious experience, despite the contextual flavour.  Western liberalism has critiqued orthodox theology as non-holistic for its emphasis on spiritual matters and has critiqued dogmatic theology for its not being relevant to human needs and not being contextually sensitive.  In fact, the criticism African theology makes of Western theology leads African theology into the same theological errors of the West.  Both broaden theology so that the message of the Gospel gets diluted among other pursuits while also being views as only a theology and not the power of God in Christ Jesus.  Jesus is removed from the centre of theology and Biblical interpretation.  He illustrates other agendas, and the cross and resurrection become metaphors without power.  The person of the Holy Spirit is replaced with a ‘spirituality’ that is never properly defined.  Evangelicals in Africa often think that they are safe from Western liberalism, but by adopting the theological programme that they do they actually proceed on the same trajectory, just with a slightly different accent.