Refuting the “Global Christianity” paradigm? (Wuthnow)

Raise your hand if you believe the following statements are true.

1) In 1970, Christianity was a predominantly Western movement, but by 2000, surging growth in Africa, Asia, and Latin America meant that the majority of Christians lived outside the West.

2) While Christianity in the United States was declining notably in the 1990s in numerical terms, in African countries like Ghana it was growing rapidly to majority status.

3) The number of career missionaries from the West is declining as the church of the “Global South” takes up the mantle of leadership in mission.

For the answers to these questions and some discussion on America and shifts in “Global Christianity”, see World Christianity and the American Churches by Andy Crouch (Books and Culture)

The Western Captivity of African Christianity (Black)

Yesterday I introduced Bill Black’s blog, Onesimus Online, but I thought his posts related to The Western Captivity of African Christianity deserved a little more attention (especially for those of you that are skimming titles; I see Eddie beat me to it .

… however well-intentioned our motives, we Western missionaries in general, and Western theological educators in particular, are engaged in nothing less than the colonization of the African church on a massive scale.

When the British sent out their surveyors across the savannahs and forests of Africa to map out their newly claimed territories, their apologists sold it in part as a vast humanitarian project to bring the ‘Three Cs’ of Christianity, Civilization and Commerce, as David Livingstone put it, to the poor benighted negroes of Africa. Of course the unquestioned assumption was…The resulting mess has completely warped African reality at every level and in every direction and will likely never be undone.

We missionary types don’t seem to have learned very much from the past two centuries of experience, because we are insisting on doing the very same things in our own spheres of influence. Oh, but we have the best of motives (for the Lord and the advance of his kingdom!). And who could ever accuse us of racism? We are all about partnership, all about taking into consideration the [fill in the blank with Kenyan, Ethiopian, Nigerian, etc] context, all about project sustainability, all about reducing dependency, all about working ourselves out of a job, raising up African leaders, etc, etc. We are up on the latest trends in globalization, we go to all the international conferences on servant leadership (whatever that means)…

…. my job is to teach Africans what the Evangelical [and thus ‘right’] position is for whatever the Bible addresses. But in doing so, I’m forced to make my African students into proper North American Evangelicals [one could just as easily insert ‘Presbyterian’ or ‘Reformed Baptist’ or ‘Pentecostal’ or ‘Methodist’].

…Not only are we forcing Western Evangelical categories on African students as the measure of all that’s true in the world, but we have simply assumed that our model of theological education itself is the baseline for all subsequent thinking on the matter…

…We theological educators in Africa are doing a bang-up job of reproducing North American Evangelicals for Africa, replete with our ways of thinking about and practicing Christianity. But in doing so, I’m not at all certain that we are either being true to New Testament Christianity or engaging effectively with the people of this continent as they really are…

Read the whole post: The Western Captivity of African Christianity

And again, (The Erosion of Inerrancy?)

…the fights (theological and hermeneutical) that have set the boundaries assumed sacrosanct by our best North American Evangelicals (or even British, though there is a huge difference even here) seem increasingly irrelevant over here.

…with the explosion of Christianity in Africa, Latin America and Asia, these presuppositions are increasingly exposed for what they are – presuppositions that unnaturally and unnecessarily limit what is understood as appropriate, to what is understood as appropriate if you have grown up in the West and been trained at one of its leading theological institutions. For that reason, systematic theology, for example, is difficult to teach in my present context as anything more than what certain Evangelicals understood at a particular time given their particular intellectual and religious contexts. To attempt to dress up Kenyan Christians in Evangelical clothes is attempt what the British did by insisting that Kenyans must adopt trousers, shirt and tie in order to appear civilized (never mind that…

…Africans can certainly wear western-style clothes, but we got to this point as a result of a certain amount of cultural imperialism that did violence to already existing cultures and perspectives. Anyway, the idea that the traditional Evangelical doctrine is eroding amongst Evangelicals may be true in the West, or at least a more or less valid observation. Our needs and concerns on this side of the world make such word play seem like yet another Western game. Playing ‘your’ game is a luxury ‘we’ can no longer afford. Anyone interested in playing our game?

And yesterday, What is your Game?

…Salvation too often means getting Africans to accept that our problems are their problems and that our solutions must be their solutions. For example, most Western missionaries assume that Christ has come to save us from our legal problem before a holy God; namely…

…while Western missionary Christianity misses the mark in terms of addressing African realities, the New Testament itself, along with the earliest expressions of Christianity as it spread throughout the Roman world, engages the pre-modern world view with dramatic and life-changing answers.

Eddie Arthur, Wycliffe Bible Translators, has a nice 14 minute video on the topic of missions, culture, contextualization, and African theologies (see also this post for more links).

Eddie Arthur of Wycliffe Bible translators talks about the importance and implications of contextualising the Gospel.

Onesimus Online: a blog to stir your thinking (Bill Black)

Ask any of Bill Black’s students here about him, and they will probably say: “he provokes; he really challenges us to think.”   Thankfully, for the rest of us, Bill blogs at Onesimus Online: history, theology, culture, the church, and other dangerous stuff. If you are at all interested in theology, theological education in Africa, global Christianity, missions, evangelicalism, American cultural Christianity, and other related topics, you might enjoy his blog–and having your thinking provoked and deepened. I know Bill appreciates the broader dialog.  Bill and his wife are both pastors, graduates of Gordon Conwell Theological Seminary, PhDs from Cambridge, and teachers here at NEGST.  Previously, they taught in Ethiopia. Plus, they are a lot of fun to talk to;  I’ve learned a lot from them.

Here are a few “sound bytes” from some of Bill’s posts to whet your appetite:

The passing of evangelicalism

…We Western Evangelicals thought we were the center of the Christian universe, only to discover that the glory seems to have departed and moved south to Africa, Latin America and Asia. Those tongues-speaking, hallelujah-shouting, other-side-of-the-tracks-dwelling so-called Pentecostals, even more derisively labeled as ‘holy rollers’ by the upstanding Christians in my home church who, of course, knew better, have become the most explosive force in the global expansion of Christianity ever. There is not a single individual person in my systematic theology class who would not identify themselves as either Pentecostal or Charismatic. On the ‘mission field’ at least, the old paradigms of missionary Christianity are in the process of being leap-frogged entirely. ..
…Anyway, the point of all of this is that things have changed. Radically. Decisively. The old verities and polarities don’t work anymore (if they ever did). The systems and structures which we created to manage the world as we knew it are being pressed into service beyond their capacity to cope. This is not a call to somehow change Evangelicalism. It’s actually too late for that. Its day has passed and cannot be recovered. Instead, …

A Plea for Civility, Sanity and Integrity in Theological/Political Debate (3 personal examples)

Theology is not safe:

…there is another reason why I am undertaking this blog. Theology is a dangerous thing. Theology that attempts to reduce God to what I can understand about God is an attempt to tame God. But the God revealed in the Christian Scriptures is untamable. Our Western theological traditions, both Catholic and Protestant, are attempts to mount God onto a specimen board, attempts to dissect and label God’s constituent parts, attempts to deduce divine physiology from divine structure. But efforts to catalogue the parts fails to apprehend the whole. Our orthodoxies miss the point…

…This blog then is becoming increasingly like my own incident at the fords of the Jabbok, my own wrestling with the one who refuses to be named and categorized…

The Western Captivity of African Christianity

…Not only are we forcing Western Evangelical categories on African students as the measure of all that’s true in the world, but we have simply assumed that our model of theological education itself is the baseline for all subsequent thinking on the matter…

…We theological educators in Africa are doing a bang-up job of reproducing North American Evangelicals for Africa, replete with our ways of thinking about and practicing Christianity. But in doing so, I’m not at all certain that we are either being true to New Testament Christianity or engaging effectively with the people of this continent as they really are…

Brain tumors, theological education and the church

The human brain is an unimaginably complex piece of work…Though my extended parable may be like the tumor it describes – a malignant profusion of words that obliterates the intended purpose – the purpose itself remains. The concern of this post is with theological education as it is actually practiced, especially at the higher levels, and its relationship with the church it’s intended to serve. My concerns come from my own experience as one who has benefitted from theological education and who has gone on to serve several churches in a professional ministerial capacity, and from my observations of theological education in actual practice…

…I think there are likely a number of reasons contributing to this fundamental dysfunction in our churches. First,…

….The breathtaking irony of all this is, having created such an institutionalized system for training our leaders (the theological education industry), a system that has succeeded in taking us further and further afield from that which Christ is calling us to be, we heedlessly presume our institutional model to be the most effective way to train Nigerians or Indians or Chinese or Ethiopians for the ministry…

Africa, Spiral Logic, Systematic Theology, and the Perils of Theological Education

The Indefensible Evangelical Habit of Shooting Our Wounded

Last week there was a gun battle outside our gate. Four gangsters had hijacked cars and shot drivers and the authorities finally caught up with them just over the fence from my house. In the ensuing firefight, two of the carjackers were killed outright, one escaped over the fence (and through my garden!), and the fourth lay wounded on the road…

Believers Baptism vs. Infant Baptism, Must it Matter?

Evangelicalism Inc.

…Not only are the Western Prosperity gods raking it in, but developing-world prosperity-god-wannabees are trying desperately to get in on the cash…Dare I even mention the Evangelical publishing industry, which seems to have taken on the role of God in conservative academic and popular religion circles, raising up this one and ignoring that one, and on the grounds of whether or not it is ‘marketable’. I can’t imagine Jeremiah being able to secure a publishing contract from this crowd…

…Then there are the incredibly large and wealthy Christian aid organizations poised globally to respond immediately to the latest front page disaster and who must raise gazillions of dollars not only to feed the starving, but to buy the planes and Toyota land cruisers and computers and iPhones and Blackberries and pay the travel fees for all the conferences and meetings and consultations that must happen in the background for the hungry to be fed…

Does this bother anybody else?

…I do not deny the good intentions of most (I hope) of my fellow Christians involved in these so-called ‘ministries’. But I can’t help but thinking that we Evangelicals have become like addicts hooked on methamphetamine. We’ve got to have more, more, more. We’ve got to be successful, or at least appear successful, because if we are or appear so, more people will be drawn to our ‘ministry’ which will make us all the more successful. But like the meth addict, this stuff is destroying us…We dare not take a genuinely prophetic stance on anything, because if we do, someone will be offended and we will lose support. We’ve become like Ahab’s court prophets, cunningly discerning which way the wind is blowing before committing ourselves on any issue, and viciously smacking down anyone who does not toe the party line.

We Evangelicals are seriously compromised. And seriously compromised people are like salt that’s lost its savor…

And much, much MORE.

Our collective amnesia about Kenyan (and African) histories (Eve)

On her nacent blog, Quill-Squeak, Eve writes about African history.

…As i think about the stories i have heard from my father and grandfather, it surprises me that someone would think that Africans have no history. Although these “savages” roamed around naked with no seeming sense of rational organisation as some have said, it is the observer that looked but did not see. In these stories i have found a goldmine of history. My family history. Now anyone who hears me speak (read butchering) my venacular, would be surprised that i have a sense of history at all. After all, i am a “mkosa mila” (one without culture) having had a lot of western influence. I have found that this history tells me where my family has been and how i got here.It gives me an identity. However, it does not make me want to go back to the past. Rather, i learn from it and move forward to embrace the future…

…My appreciation for family history has opened my eyes to the loss of history. While the west had the quill and ink bottle, we had story, proverbs, songs and other mnemonic aids. The introduction of literacy has slowly but surely choked these though culture change. I do not think that the past was ideal but i mourn the loss of history. I listen to my father’s tales of growing up in colonial kenya and i think how many are dying with their memories; history. The US project Storycorps captures my desire for this country. Oral history from the older generation (indian,african and european) is being lost and i would like to salvage it. How? I dont know. All i know is that the old men in the village can only tell stories and i want to give them a quill…[read more]

and on our collective amnesia about that history.

..The reference to the brutality of the colonialist on their labour force is consistent with the stories that my father has told me…Although others like Ngugi wa Thion’go have written about this period, the bitterness of colonial rule that paints all settlers black is evident. That I cannot stand. The political twist in the narratives, though part of the period, do not interest me. I want to hear personal experiences of Africans and the settlers in that period of time, good or bad in relation to each other…

Why the interest? The phenomenon I call collective amnesia…Apparently, when Kenyatta took power, he said two things. To the settlers; stay and shut up or get out. To the rest of us; let us forget the past and move on together. And forget we did. The history I learnt was stripped of humanity. All we ever learnt about is dry boring political manoeuvring and posturing that is no different from what we read in the papers today.

While at the time re-examining the things that had happened may have been painful and even counter productive, it is interesting that we have buried history and are determined to forget it. Instead of historical knowledge on the colonial times, I have been fed caricatures that may hang on some evidence but I have had no freedom to decide what I think. For example, were all settlers bad by virtue of the fact that they were colonizers/missionaries and the black good by virtue of being the oppressed?

…I think its time we stopped ignoring the elephant in the room. So what if there are skeletons? And there are. Ignoring them will not make them disappear.

I think its time we talked.

more of this post

I know you are buried in books right now, Eve, but keep writing! The world awaits.

He’s baaaack!!! The blogger formerly known as Sibboleth (Kirk)

I’m happy to announce that Daniel Kirk (the artist formerly known as Sibboleth) has returned to blogging at “Storied Theology: Telling the story of the story-bound God.” His first post Communal Story & the Face of God.

As a New Testament scholar and a blogger, he writes:

…My guild exists for the purpose of high-level, carefully developed, carefully articulated, fully digested assessment of data and arguments. A blog entry is an impression, a first thought, a work in progress. This means that a blog is a strange genre for a New Testament scholar. We need to continue the task of cultivating a new category for “blog,” one that assumes that the author’s thought is a work in progress, one that anticipates change, adaptation and growth of ideas expressed in public…

Update your blogrolls and set your RSS feeders to: http://www.jrdkirk.com/?feed=rss2

The New Testament is a short book; know its context (Keener)

…the NT is a short book, as far as scholarly disciplines go, and NT scholars ought to know its context better [Hengel]…It is simply naive to take a document written to a particular ancient setting, written in Greek, using figures of speech and cultural allusions that were shared assumptions by the ancient author and the author’s intended audience, and assume that we can read it without taking any of that into account.  I’m not saying that we can’t get many correct ideas from a translation without additional background, but you will also miss a lot.

Craig Keener, interview on Romans with Nijay Gupta. (Read the whole interview here.)

My day in Kibera’s law court

I’ve lived in Nairobi (“Nairobbery” for some) for almost five years and never once been robbed (though many of my friends have been) or arrested (though my friends have negotiated for me at least twice–once for not having “life savers” (reflective triangles), before I knew we were supposed to.

Over Christmas, I visited the US for the first time since I moved to Nairobi in 2005 (maybe I’ll post on that in one of the coming weeks.) On returning to Nairobi, I was arrested within 12 hours and robbed within 36.

I’m used to being pulled over out of a line of cars going past police checkpoints; white skin can mean quick money. Usually it’s routine: insurance card, check; driver’s license–I hand it over smugly. If they are ambitious, they ask for my “lifesavers” (I’m ready for them now.) Monday, however, the officer looks over my license and says, “Benjamin, do you know that your driver’s license has expired.” I look at him in disbelief, and he hands it to me to verify. Sure enough, Oct. 20. (How did I let that happen?)

So, Benjamin, what are you going to do?
Well, I suppose you will write me up, and I will pay a fine.
Oh, so you already know the system.

I nodded, but was thinking, “just a little bit.” The conversation was over in less than a minute, then I followed him to the police station and just kept reminding myself to be full of God’s peace.  I was second in line to go into the office.
“So… you will need to pay.”
“How much is the fine?”
“How much do you have?”
“What is the amount of the fine?”
“You will need to go to court.”
“Fine.”
“Cash bail for us to release you is 5,000.” (about $65 at 75 shillings/$$. )
“5,000!!! [I panicked briefly] I don’t have that much.”
“How much do you have?”
(I did a quick

Money, Power, and Radical Incarnation—a model for missions (Muriu, Urbana 09)

A little over a week ago, Pastor Oscar Muriu spoke at Urbana–a giant (16-20,000) missions conference for American college students.

Money and Power: Oscar Muriu from Urbana 09 on Vimeo.

For more Urban09 videos, click HERE

(We had the privilege of hearing most of it at Nairobi Chapel earlier in the year—just an average Sunday sermon for us .

Muriu begins by saying that if he were God, he would have brought Jesus as a powerful ruler, or a wise sage. He would have employed the the best marketing and branding strategies for all the world to see. The way God did it was to slow, too low tech. While the world waited desperately for salvation, God sent his son as a poor helpless infant.

His point is that before we go for missions, we must undergo an attitudinal incarnation. This incarnation has four doors:

1. From pride to humility.

2. From power to powerlessness (Phil. 2:6)

3. From privilege into poverty

4. From the harmony and the unity of heaven to the brokenness and dysfunction of the earth.

Side Note: I haven’t been able to locate a smaller MP3audio. I understand that this is directed at a young, American audience, but I couldn’t help noting that the very nature of the video link (124MB by my count), means that many Africans—even many with “reasonably good” internet access—won’t be able to see or hear this message. Just another way that Africans generally can be marginalized (by the missions infrastructure) from “missions” thinking and discussions…even when Africans speak. At least Americans are hearing their voices now; I commend the speaker lineup.

[More detailed notes]

1. From pride to humility.

The incarnation of our attitude is more fundamental than geographical relocation. Your attitude should be the same as that of Jesus Christ (Phil 2). Before you go, we must undergo an attitudinal incarnation; consider others better than yourselves. Leave your pat answers, your degrees, your learning…and take on the attitude of a humble servant.

By way of illustration, Pastor Oscar talks about

Ken Schenck has some harsh words for Carson, Beale, and Piper for their “innoculation” of the complacent

In Who’s a scholar, Ken Schenck (Dean of Wesley Seminary at Indiana Wesleyan University) has this to say:

…It seems like whenever a study or trajectory of real significance arises, some “conservative”–meaning someone resistant to change–then commissions a counter-study to address it. Such counter-studies, far from actually disproving the new development, more innoculates the complacent, who can now simply say, “You can see that the new book by D. A. Carson or John Piper shows that this or that is not in fact true but another liberal conspiracy to corrupt the masses.”

….Justification and Variegated Nomism…the “scholarly” excuse for ignoring genuine developments. Of course the volumes themselves are far more “new perspective” than old…

So also N. T. Wright introduces the actual ancient background of the New Testament into his interpretations of Scripture and it begins to make its way down into the masses. Commission a study! So John Piper produces a “scholarly” volume refuting it to innoculate the masses. Sorry. Just because you can write a book doesn’t mean you haven’t been caught with your theological pants down.

Another reactionary “scholarly” innoculation is D. A. Carson and Greg Beale’s Commentary on the Use of the Old Testament in the New. Sorry. The truth doesn’t care. The New Testament simply isn’t majorly concerned with the context and original meaning of Old Testament passages. [Jim West complains about this last sentence, but see Peter Enns's chapter on the Christotelic interpretation of the Old Testament in the New Testament - Inspiration and Incarnation. ]

There have been a glut of new commentary series it seems this last decade, but most of them promise to fill Amazon with this sort of innoculatory rubbish. Books to allow us not to grow, not to wrestle truly with hard issues.

Oh where is objectivity to be found? Nowhere, of course, but there are better and worse examples of the attempt. It used to be that we simply ignored the experts. Now the anti-intellectuals have infiltrated them, across the spectrum of scholarly disciplines in America.

Read the whole post– Who’s a scholar. I have a lot of respect for John Piper. I appreciate many of his books and sermons, and he has done some wonderful things, and I think that he genuinely has the glory of God at interest. However, I have to agree with Shenk on this point, and I think the harsh truth needs to be told.

In a somewhat related issue (for those of you that aren’t already completely ensconced in the biblical studies blog world) Scot McKnight responds to Dan Wallace’s frustrations about biases against evangelicals in scholarship (more than 500 comments so far.) David Miller has collected some of the links to this issue and says,

… AKMA’s comment (scroll down to #38) on the Jesus Creed is the most helpful I’ve read yet. There’s plenty of good advice in the comment thread for students interested in graduate schools too.

*For other posts on the same general subject see Biblia Hebraica, kata ta biblia, Exploring Our Matrix.
For my own thoughts on the intersection between faith and scholarship, see here and here.

No matter how original a scholar’s imagination, . . .

“No matter how original a scholar’s imagination, no matter how penetrating and critical his judgment, society does far more of the writing of any book that lives than the author himself.”[1] However humiliating it may be formulate such a principle, its justification scarcely requires demonstration. We can no more escape the influence of our cultural climate than people at the equator or in the Arctic regions can remain unaffected by their physical conditions. This seems plain enough when pointed out, yet in theological discussion it is rarely thought necessary to take account of the environment in which ideas are formulated and the motives of their sponsors. A book is cited and a name mentioned in connection with an attractive theory; let it be endorsed by a few impressive authorities and it rapidly spreads; in due time it may be regarded as critically orthodox. But how did that theory come to be formulated? What precedents did it have in its own field, and what prompted the author to put it forward. Most significant advance in thought are the product of long processes, brought to an issue by a gifted person…(George Beasley-Murray, Jesus and the Last Days, 1998, p. 1)

---

[1] C. C. McCown, The Search for the Real Jesus (New York, 1940), 18.

Nollywood’s booming Christian film industry

Nigeria: Christian movie capital of the world (CT):

Nollywood recently surpassed Hollywood in film production, according to a UNESCO survey released in May. The Lagos-based industry has existed for less than 20 years, yet produced 872 feature-length films in 2006, nearly twice Hollywood’s 485 productions. (Both trailed India, which produced more than 1,000 films.)

Most Nigerian films, almost all of which are low-budget affairs shot on location and released on DVD, are spiritual in nature. About 20 percent are Christian, according to Obidike Okafor, an arts and culture reporter at Nigerian newspaper Next. Others champion Islam, animism and witchcraft, or simple morality.

The Christian-themed movies often aim at encouragement and evangelism more than sheer entertainment. Groups or churches often screen the films and follow them with discussions or an altar call…

…"Half of the Christian movies are not done by faith-based organizations, but by directors who want to take advantage of the strong religious inclinations of Nigerians to sell [movies]," Okafor said. "The others do it to promote their faith."…

…Nollywood’s Christian films offer revelations into what one of the world’s fastest-growing Christian populations believe, [Philip] Jenkins said. "When people are discussing splits within [Nigerian] churches, or moral issues, it helps to know the supernatural vision underlying some of these concerns. … If you went to America in 1800 and wanted to find out about the nature of their religion, you’d listen to the hymns. These videos also give you a good snapshot [of what Nigerians believe.]"

Keep Reading

 

Technorati Tags: Nollywood,Christian movies

my bizarre blog stats; peeling back the curtain for friends

You, my friends (especially my wife and my supervisor) know that I’m not blogging these days; I try to focus on my dissertation– with exception of a helpful link or quote here and a brief reflection there. Since I’m extremely small fry in the blogging world, I don’t get too excited about my stats. I do, however, check occasionally to amuse myself and to see what kinds of things people are reading and linking to. Today, I was struck by the stats for the last three days.

• Monday: 170
• Tuesday: 170
• Wednesday: 170 (exactly; no fudging)
• Thursday/Today: will surely break the chain (70 more to go as I as I write).
• Last Thursday: 169
• Last Friday: 171

In case you are curious, the most popular post almost every single day is a cartoon – “What financial crisis?” rural Africans. (Posted 27 October 2008).

In case you don’t know, I’m also an ugali expert.  Anywhere from 5-10 people every single day find me in their quest for ugali. Along the same lines, I’m apparently a source of information for Buckingham Palace – Buckingham Palace’s new Dinka guard (photo), malaria’s 3 stages, and  Dubai airport–see here and here.

Oh yeah, last month I was apparently one of the 20 hottest blogs in east africa. Timing is everything. According to Afrigator,  I was the #12 most popular blog in Kenya the day she posted–that made me #18 in East Africa. Today, I’m #29 (#351 in Africa).

In case you are curious, all this makes me #143 in the biblioblogging world for September.  (My only top 50 appearance was in February (#49), thanks mostly to my crisis cartoon.) Hope that provides a good boost to everyone’s self-esteem .

Appreciating African values in the American rat-race

Recently, the Daily Nation had an interesting story about Peninah Njuguna, a Kenyan-American Kiswahili and culture lecturer at South Carolina University, who left the job she had held for six years to become a kindergarten teacher. She has a master’s degree in adult education and agricultural economics from the University of Wisconsin, a doctorate in curriculum and institution development from the University of South Carolina and a master’s degree in early childhood education from the same institution.

“When I quit my university job in 2001 to teach in a kindergarten, many people thought I was crazy. Some professors felt I was wasting my education,” Njuguna says…

…“The American system does not meet the needs of the black community. Parents work very long hours and leave their children at daycare centres. They have very little time for their children. We have no house-helps because we simply cannot afford such a luxury,” says Njuguna, a graduate of business education from the University of Nairobi.

Although she and her husband, Dr Njuguna Nagi, a marriage counsellor and therapist, acquired US citizenship after settling there in 1986, they decided to put their children through the Kenyan secondary education system before they settled in the US. They say this helped the children — Zawadi, Tumaini and Baraka — get a sense of community, “which is lacking in the US”.

“Zawadi”, Njuguna explains, “symbolises the many gifts God has given us Africans. We should exploit these gifts. We should not look so much to the West for help.

“Tumaini,” she continues, “means there is no hopeless situation in mankind, while Baraka represents people’s capability to help one another. Each one of us deserves to be successful. We all deserve to make it in life. Every person can give hope and encourage others to give. Giving is not just about money. We need to restore hope to our people, one person at a time.”

Says Njuguna, a trustee of the Kenya Christian Fellowship in the US, whose aim includes strengthening social culture and race among Kenyans in the US: “Many children in the US are left to video games and television. In fact, they are left to bring themselves up. Fathers have little time for their sons. But they are good dads working to earn a living for their families.”

…migrating to the US or any other developed country is not reason enough for one to discard one’s African values and cultures.

“We have to understand ourselves and our culture. Even the “modern” African woman needs to become an innovator rather than a consumer of Western culture. Usually, women adopt Western culture much faster than men. We have become consumers of Western culture, and this has really messed up families. We have lost our identity. We should not adopt the Western culture so blindly. We cannot raise our daughters when we have lost our identity,” says Njuguna.

Read the whole story here. We’ve had our kids in both places, and I’m happy mine are growing up here.  Let me add a few observations based on a couple things she says—almost in passing. 1.) One of the things I appreciate about Western culture is the increased equality for women; there’s a good reason African “women adopt Western culture faster than men.” 2.) Kids can be just as neglected here, but the community infrastructure compensates for it. My kids can run out our front door at any time of day, have tons of friends to play with, and have enough adults around who can intervene if anyone gets hurt. The irony is, I probably pay less overall attention to my kids here than I might in the states, but their lives our fuller, and our time together is more focused on them 3.) One of the big things that makes raising kids here easier is the ability to hire relatively inexpensive “house help”—someone who can help cook, clean, and watch your kids. This “luxury” depends on significant economic disparity—a workforce desperate enough to work for 25 cents an hour or less. I would hope that our sense of economic justice is working toward eventually creating more equal opportunity—even if it means having to pay more for help or even having to do without that luxury.

Ideally, we would have a good mix of the best of both worlds. Right now, I can’t tell you how often we thank God for being able to raise our children in this multi-cultural African environment; I’m really happy to have them learning African core values. Even in better Western environments, raising young kids can be a lot more of a stressful, individualistic enterprise where you have to do things like schedule “play dates”. I know first hand, I was an at-home dad for four years in Washington, D.C. and in Paris.

A Goldmine of NT Resources (Powell)

The companion site for Mark Allan Powells Introducing the New Testament has an incredible amount of (free) resources for teaching New Testament – all the sidebars and maps from the book.  See: http://www.introducingnt.com/

all of this material can be used in the classroom—you may print and reproduce it, display it on screen in the classroom, or use the information in PowerPoint slides. Even if you are not using this particular book in your classroom, you will find resources here that are helpful for teaching any New Testament course.

Here are some examples of the hyperlinked resources for Luke:

7.1. Content Summary: Expanded Overview of the Gospel of Luke – Download as a PDF

7.2. Authorship of Luke’s Gospel – Download as a PDF

7.3. The Community of Luke: Clues from the Gospel and Acts – Download as a PDF

7.4. Distinctive Characteristics of Luke’s Gospel – Download as a PDF

7.5. Passages from Mark Omitted by Luke – Download as a PDF

7.6. The Journey Motif in Luke – Download as a PDF

7.7. Worship in the Gospel of Luke – Download as a PDF

7.8. The Last Supper and Other Suppers in the Gospel of Luke – Download as a PDF

7.9. Jesus as Messiah, Lord, and Savior – Download as a PDF

7.10. Jesus as the Promised One – Download as a PDF

7.11. Pagan Images for Jesus in the Gospel of Luke – Download as a PDF

7.12. Luke’s Use of “Today” – Download as a PDF

7.13. The Passion of Jesus in the Gospel of Luke – Download as a PDF

7.14. Parallel Stories of Jesus and John the Baptist in Luke – Download as a PDF

7.15. Two Christmas Stories: Similarities and Differences – Download as a PDF

7.16. Jesus as Son and Servant in Luke – Download as a PDF

7.17. Luke in the Revised Common Lectionary – Download as a PDF

7.18. Bibliography: The Gospel of Luke – Download as a PDF

HT: Mark Goodacre, Duke, who is impressed with the book, but not happy about how it presents the Synoptic issue.

Free access to ALL SAGE Journals till 31 Oct

Just a reminder that SAGE is offering FREE online access to over 500 SAGE journals 1999–current, until October 31! Register HERE or you wait and pay $25/per day/per article . (It’s relatively painless; I’ve been registered for years–no obligation.)

Biblical Studies & Theology

• CBR – Currents in Biblical Research
• JSOT – Journal for the Study of the Old Testament
• JSP – Journal for the Study of the Pseudepigrapha
• JSNT – Journal for the Study of the New Testament
• The Expository Times
• Studies in Christian Ethics

Some examples of SAGE journals in other fields that interest me:

Race & Class, Journal of Asian and African Studies, Cross-Cultural Research, Cultural Dynamics, Cultural Geographies, Cultural Sociology, Culture & Psychology, Current Sociology, Discourse Studies,

Diogenes, Ethnicities, Ethnography, International Journal of Cultural Studies, Journal of Black Studies, Leadership, Memory Studies, Management in Education, Time & Society, (many, many more)

political opinions, moral psychology, and persuasion(Haidt, TED)

In this TED interview, Jonathan Haidt sheds some light on why people hold the political views they do. It has implications for preachers and apologists of all kinds.

I think there are three basic principles of moral psychology, and I find it helpful to approach any new puzzle by applying them.

The first principle is intuitive primacy: Peoples’ judgments are based primarily on their intuitive reactions — on quick gut feelings, not on reasoning. This is how we make most decisions, and Malcolm Gladwell reviewed this research in Blink…

The second principle of moral psychology is that moral thinking is for social doing: We engage in moral thinking not to find the truth, but to find arguments that support our intuitive judgments, so that we can defend ourselves if challenged. The crucial insight here comes from psychologist Tom Gilovich at Cornell, who says that when we want to believe a proposition, we ask, "Can I believe it?" — and we look only for evidence that the proposition might be true. If we find a single piece of evidence then we’re done. We stop. We have a reason we can trot out to support our belief. But if we don’t want to believe a proposition, we ask, "Must I believe it?" — and we look for an escape hatch, a single reason why maybe, just maybe, the proposition is false…

That brings us to the third principle, which is that morality binds and builds. I said in my TEDTalk that morality and politics are team sports. People aren’t just engaging in post-hoc rationalization to justify their individual feelings. Rather, moral reasoning and rationalizing are done in large part to help your team, and to show that you are a good member of your team. Moral teams tend to form around principles held to be sacred…

…logic plays little role in our moral lives. Moral claims and arguments function like gang signs — they show others what team you are on, and they let you share emotions with other people, which bonds you more closely together.

…Both sides [liberals and conservatives] care about life, but in different ways. Both sides live inside their own moral matrices. And just like in the movie The Matrix, morality is a "consensual hallucination" that is very hard to step out of. But moral psychology can help people to understand that there are moral motivations on all sides. People may not be logical, but few of them are crazy…

While it is useful to rebut charges and get your arguments out in circulation, you have to understand that arguments and evidence have little impact on people as long as their feelings tilt them against you. You’ve got to create trust and liking first, and then people will be willing to listen. People can believe pretty much whatever they want to believe about moral and political issues, as long as some other people near them believe it, so you have to focus on indirect methods to change what people want to believe. You have to get them to the point where they ask themselves "can I believe it?" about your claims, rather than about your opponents’ claims…

My main suggestion is to boil the plan down to a few easy-to-understand ideas, each of which has some intuitive moral content…When it comes to moral persuasion, the way to the head is through the heart.

Jonathan Haidt TED blog, 27 Sept 2009.(With video link to his 2009 talk)

Technorati Tags: persuasion

Do 46% of evangelical scholars support creation by evolution?

Bruce Waltke recently conducted an interesting survey “each president of the Fellowship of Evangelical Seminary Presidents (FESP)” and wrote a 13 page white paper detailing his results: Barriers to Accepting the Possibility of Creation by Means of an Evolutionary Process (PDF).

1. The creation accounts of Genesis 1 and 2, when interpreted by the grammatico-historical method [hereafter assumed], cannot be harmonized with creation by the process of evolution. (44%)
2. The genealogies of Genesis do not harmonize with evolution (23%)
3. Evolution does not harmonize with the doctrine that Adam brought death and decay into the world (34%)
4. Evolution calls into question Adam as the father of original sin and of Christ as the Redeemer from the effects of sin (28%)
5. Evolution is bad science in part because it presumes an old earth (19%)
6. Evolution is bad science, even though the Big Bang occurred 13.73 billion years (8%)
7. ID explains the origins of species better than evolution (36%)
8. “Scientists only have the present—they do not have the past,” ruling out the possibility of science to theorize the history of origins (17%).
9. The apparent age of the universe can be explained by reckoning that God created the universe with apparent age (18%).
10. The gap theory explains the fossil record (6%)
11. The framework hypothesis does not harmonize with evolution (7%)
12. None of the above. I can accept the theory of theistic evolution (46%)
    

659 Evangelical professors visited Waltke’s (Zoomerang “radio button”) survey site, but only 264 completed it. (I wonder why the other 60% chose not to participate.) You might find Waltke’s  survey details and conclusions interesting; he notes some definitional problems.

I’d be interested to see more surveys of this kind distinguish the opinions of different types of evangelical scholars. For example, I’m guessing that there might be a significant difference of opinion between Old Testament scholars and systematic theologians. Environment–the  kinds of people they generally interact with–likely makes a big difference too.

Some of you might also be interested in this paper from the BioLogos foundation:

• “Adventist Origins of Young Earth Creationism” by Karl Giberson
  Download full PDF
  Many evangelicals believe that young-earth creationism is the only authentic and Biblical way for Christians to understand origins, and that until the advent of Darwin’s theory of evolution, young-earth creationism was the only view held by Christians. However, in this excerpt from his book, Saving Darwin, Karl Giberson explains that young-earth creationism is a relatively new phenomenon that stemmed from the 20th century fundamentalist movement.

HT: Thanks to Karyn Traphagen via Twitter. Karyn’s Boulders 2 Bits blog has had a lot of fun posts lately including Shewa fight (for you Hebrew scholars) and 21 Reasons why the English language is so hard to learn (for the rest of us).

Evangelical polarization between social action and evangelism—some historical perspective (Ralph Winter)

I was downloading an article for a contextualization of Acts class I will be teaching Friday, when I came across this gem by Ralph Winter: Understanding the Polarization Between Fundamentalist and Modernist Mission. In this article, Winter gives some historical perspective on the tension between social action and evangelism-only thinking among evangelicals. His most interesting insight may be that Evangelical emphasis on evangelism over social action may have been more the result of massive conversions among uneducated working-class—who were powerless to change society—than any theological reason. [All emphasis added.]

They weren’t up for social action or social change. They didn’t have the potential for doing that. And neither did the working-class masses of Evangelicals in the 1920s. As a result they sub-consciously or deliberately chose a theology originating mainly from J. N. Darby, which described the world as getting worse and worse until Christ would return. Darby’s thinking was no recipe for challenging worldly problems in the name of mission. But it fit in with their limited capabilities as workingclass people.

Thus, you can see the cause and effect between social status and choice of theology. Very often philosophers and theologians boast that their thinking changed history, when actually, much more often, turns of history changed their thinking.

Back to the beginning of the article.

We often hear about the “Great Reversal.” The phrase refers to the early 20th century reduction of 19th century broad evangelism (including good deeds in this world) to narrow personal evangelism. In this regard we have talked about the tension between social action and evangelism. [Several more excerpts below.]

African American Theology Reconsidered; a reformed critique (Bacote B&C)

In light of some of my reflections on theologies from different cultural perspectives, my eye caught this review from Vincent Bacote in the latest issue of Books and Culture: African American Theology Reconsidered: A Reformed Critique

Recently a friend told me about an experience he and his wife had as students at a flagship evangelical seminary in the early 1980s. "The black church," one of their professors explained, "is not really a church because it does not have its own theology. Rather it’s a social organization." Presumably he was basing his judgment on the absence of systematic theology articles and books produced by historically African American denominations. My friend didn’t say whether the professor, in a moment of notable self-reflection, went on to add " … and every day when I look in the mirror I ask myself how the tradition of which I am a part effectively guaranteed that this would be the case, especially in evangelicalism," or "of course, since our theological task is to winsomely deliver the faith once delivered across all contexts, I suppose having their ‘own’ theology is not the goal for a genuinely catholic church." I doubt that is how the conversation continued at that moment or in many other places where the same assumption has reigned as "a simple matter of historical fact."

While a search for tomes of Christian dogmatics written by African American theologians may yield little, Thabiti M. Anyabwile discovered that there is a much richer theology in the history of the African American church than one might expect. In The Decline of African American Theology: From Biblical Faith to Cultural Captivity, Anyabwile introduces us to figures such as Jupiter Hammon, Lemuel Haynes, and Olaudah Equiano and makes us more aware of the theology of the poet Phyllis Wheatley and the theology which was woven throughout slave narratives. Turning the spotlight on these figures presents the opportunity to write African American theology into the story of Christian theology in the United States. This is important, as it is unlikely that most students of theology at evangelical colleges and seminaries will learn that Hammon and Haynes were contemporaries of figures such as George Whitefield and John Wesley. The theology we discover is neither novel nor distinctively African American—that is not the point…

After a serious critique of the book, Bacote adds,

…Anyabwile argues that we must be careful about how we think of the relationship between Christianity and cultural influences. He charges that the trends he deplores have been "shaped more by historical and cultural practice than by Scripture," yet he seems unaware that he must in turn ask himself if he is accepting certain Western (Reformed) cultural norms as biblical.

Finally, when it comes to the reason for the decline itself, I am curious as to why Anyabwile leaves out the biggest culprit of all: America. In a country that has privileged innovation and elevates the individual and weaves the American dream into every possible situation, is it a surprise that not only the African American church but the U.S. church in general is better acquainted with consumerism than with Scripture?

The afterword briefly offers suggestions for reversing the decline. Recentering the Bible, re-exalting God, recovering the gospel, and revitalizing the church are emphases most would champion. Here, however, one finds indications that Anyabwile desires the African American church to become a kind of "truly Reformed" church if it is to find its way. As a neo-Calvinist myself, I am warm to the legacy of Calvin, but I find it dubious to suggest the use of the "regulative principle of worship." Every tradition has had its debates about how the Bible instructs us to worship God, and I am unconvinced that introducing the regulative principle (a subject of ongoing debate within the Reformed tradition) will be much help, especially to those who are self-consciously in other streams of the faith.

My concerns aside, I am thankful to Anyabwile for helping to initiate a much-needed conversation. This book puts African Americans back into the story of Christian theology, and we must continue bringing to light the contributions of those so long disregarded.

Vincent Bacote, African American Theology Reconsidered: A Reformed Critique, Books and Culture (Sept 2009)

Technorati Tags: African American theology

African population density to surpass Europe’s next year (graph)

A graph from Ryan Briggs (using UN data found here). HT: Aid Thoughts

Briggs also posts this wonderful heat map of population density in Africa that he got from Lee at Roving Bandit (probably the best economics blog in Southern Sudan).

Click the picture to see maps from other decades going back to 1960.

Briggs says, “Charles Kenny has a good  explanation of the African population explosion and how it could happen without large amounts of economic growth.” Kenny summarizes his upcoming book on The Success of Development.

Outline:

1. Introduction: Abandon Hope?
2. The Bad News: Diverging Incomes
3. The Worse News: It’s Hard To Raise Growth Rates
4. The Good News: The End Of The Malthusian Trap
5. The Better News: The Great Convergence In Quality Of Life
6. The Great News: The Best Things In Life Are Cheap
7. Drivers Of The Better Life: Innovation, Ideas And Institutions
8. Policies For The Quality Of Life
9. The Global Agenda
10. Conclusion: Realistic Optimism

…and concludes:

Realistic optimism is the right attitude with which to face the issue of development. This is based on a recognition of the challenges still facing the world –significant progress to be made, limits to the likely speed of that progress, and concerns with sustainability. But we should also acknowledge that the rapid and unprecedented improvement in global quality of life over the past fifty years provides some significant grounds for hope about the future. Understanding the causes of this success, and building on existing progress, is a vital part of ensuring that it is sustained.