Introduction
‘Who do people say the Son of Man is?’ Jesus Christ himself posed this fundamental question to stimulate a Christological reflection. He then specifically pointed to Peter, his own follower: ‘Who do you say that I am?’ Peter’s answer to this question was revealed to him, not by flesh and blood, but by the Father who is in heaven, ‘You are the Christ, the Son of the living God’ (Mt. 16.17). It is this same challenging question that led to the ecumenical councils of the Nicene (AD 325) and Chalcedon (AD 451), accepted as ‘an expression of mind of the whole body of the faithful both clerical and lay, the sensus communis of the Church’.Footnote 2
In answering this test-question of Jesus, the councils seek through the history to be faithful to a hundred of Christological ‘pieces’ found in the Scriptures. Timothy Tennent used the image of Jigsaw puzzle to express this Christological reflection through history. According to him, ecumenical councils and the three historic creeds and many others found the proper puzzle piece that provided an exact fit. But there are people like ‘Arius’, ‘Nestorius’ and ‘Eutyches’ who added the pieces that did not fit the Christological puzzle. They tried to force pieces into the wrong space.Footnote 3
Anglican Communion has been tested by difficult theological tensions, which in many of its parts have not only caused alienation and pain, but have also affected mission in different contexts. There is still continuing deep difference and disrupted relationships in the Anglican Communion. Others even wonder whether the Anglican Communion has the necessary theological, structural and cultural foundations to sustain the life of the Communion. As ever, the question the Communion is facing is: ‘Who is Jesus Christ for Anglicans?’ The entire Christian faith stands on the person and work of Jesus Christ. The denial of the full deity of Jesus Christ can only lead to a new ‘Anglican-Christianity’, which would be a projection of relativism hiding beneath the language of devotion and piety. When I came back from Lambeth Conference, the first question that the Congolese immigration officer asked me was whether Anglicans had agreed on Jesus’ identity, and why he could not hear African voices. He was right because the issue was on local and international radios. ‘Anglican’ Christians in our area felt humiliated both by non-Christians and Christians of other Christian denominations over the current issues the Anglican Communion is facing. In fact, how did the Lambeth Conference 2008 answer this fundamental and endless question? Of course, I admire the fact that, despite the tension, the Conference discussed different issues in a spirit of open and respectful dialogue. It is the same with the Primates who met in Egypt in February 2009 and discussed not only church politics, but also the spiritual health and well-being of the Communion in a respectful dialogue. During the conference, many challenging issues that are important for continents such as Africa: poverty, environment, social justice and so on, were discussed and the London-march was a great witness of the Anglican commitment to the Millennium goals.
However, the Christological question remained. Some who attended Lambeth 2008 would say they were busy considering process more than content. Others even think that unity was put before truth as Anglicans are a profoundly diverse community who nonetheless live tolerantly with each other. My concern in this paper is whether Africans can make a contribution to the question: ‘Who is Jesus Christ for Anglicans?’ How can we listen to what the Spirit is saying to the Anglican Communion through Africans? I shall begin by the importance of African contribution, and then I shall consider the Lordship of Jesus and Jesus’ ministry of healing and liberation.
African Contribution
It has become common to say that African Christianity is too superficial and its leaders and theologians ‘literally’ interpret the Bible. Was Andrew Walls right when he predicted in 1976, ‘If current trends continue, African Christianity will become the representative Christianity of the twenty-first century’.Footnote 4 We are aware of the fact that Western Christianity is increasingly becoming secularized, nominal and even hostile to historic Christian confessions. Tennent speaks of a massive spiritual crisis in the West and a numerical percentage of Christians, which is haemorrhaging away at an alarming rate.Footnote 5 This does not mean that the church is ‘dead’ in the West. But the spiritual centre of Christianity has already shifted to the church in the Majority World. There is a dramatic and vibrant expansion of Christianity in history taking place in Africa. Their Christianity is vibrant, supernaturalist and largely orthodox. It is an ‘evangelistic and reproducible faith’. The church in Africa preaches the Gospel of Jesus Christ, baptizes new believers and plants churches.
African Christians are in the ‘bright sunrise’ of a great movement of God across the continent of Africa and they can bring renewal and revitalization back to the Western church. It means the Anglican Communion can learn from Africans and Africans can learn from Anglican heritage and history. Walls once said: ‘What happens within the African churches in the next generation will determine the whole shape of church history for centuries to come; what sort of theology is more characteristic of Christianity in the twenty-first century may well depend on what has happened in the minds of African Christians’.Footnote 6 It is true that Africa suffered from a ‘prefabricated theology’, what John Pobee called ‘the North Atlantic captivity of the church’.Footnote 7 While there are still signs of Africa’s ‘theological captivity’, we must truly aspire to think and live as globally oriented Christians. As the centre of Christianity has moved significantly, and that Western Christians are now in the minority, then we should expect this to be reflected in Christian theology as the methodological interpretation of the Christian faith. It should no longer be possible to do Christian theology adequately today, without taking into account the reflections and insights of Africans concerning Jesus Christ. Africa, known as Christ’s place of refuge, must make a significant contribution in healing the Anglican Communion from its current struggle.
African Holistic Christology
Missionaries brought into Africa the types of Christianity emphasizing the human redemption, justification, sanctification and personal salvation. Jesus Christ was therefore seen as a spiritual, intellectual or philosophical entity. This alien character of Christianity has been the concern of many African theologians such Appiah Kubi, John Mbiti, John Pobee and others. Africans are concerned with the practical effects of belief in Christ. Africans preach a Jesus Christ who is a dynamic personal reality in all situations. African Christology is more holistic in the way it integrates the person and work of Christ. Its view of the person of Christ is constantly informed by what Christ has accomplished in history and what he continues to do in the world. Christ is seen as no stranger to the practical realities of poverty, illiteracy, ethnic tensions, colonialism, dictatorship and suffering. It is what John Pobee called ‘multiheaded hydra’.Footnote 8 It means African Christology takes seriously the physical, socio-political, cultural and economic realities of the African context. It is how the person and the work of Christ apply to the whole of African life. Therefore, for Africans, God as the supreme deity is alone the guarantor of life and coherence in the human community and the cosmos. Cosmos and nature are both taken into consideration. This is why Jesus has a cosmological significance in the relationship of Jesus to creation and redemptive significance in his relationship to humankind. It shows the lordship of Christ.
Jesus, the Lord
Our Gospel is that Jesus, the crucified and risen Messiah, is the true Lord of the World, and that at his name every knee shall bow in heaven and on earth and under the earth. We gladly proclaim and submit to the unique and universal Lordship of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, humanity’s only Saviour from sin, judgement and hell. He lived the life we could not live and died the death that we deserve. By his atoning death and glorious resurrection, he secured the redemption of all who come to him in repentance and faith. In him, heaven has come to earth and his life has overcome death so that God’s transforming power may heal and restore the creation itself. Jesus is alive today; he is our Saviour and Lord. In his resurrection, the Kingdom of God has decisively invaded the kingdom of the world. The bodily resurrection of Jesus is, therefore, the centre and foundation of our faith. The denial of the resurrection leads to the denial of Jesus’ uniqueness and a denial of the importance of bodily holiness.
The new creation has begun with Jesus, bringing true justice and peace to God’s world in place of the ‘justice’ and ‘peace’, which our cultures claim to provide. We announce this Jesus, in the power of the Spirit, with our own life sustained by the scriptures and the breaking of bread, our own fellowship enriched and strengthened, our own teaching clear and forthright, that we may bring his rule to bear our own lives, the life of the church and the life of the world. So, repentance and forgiveness of sins are to be announced in word and deed, and be proclaimed not just as good advice but as good news. We should be equipped for it and find where in our own lives we still need that same repentance and forgiveness. As Tom Wright said, ‘The Lord Jesus must set our hearts on fire at the opening of the Holy Bible and open our eyes in the breaking of the bread, so that we may be loyal to him and to one another, and may in our own day be clothed with power from on high to bear witness to him and his resurrection, and to proclaim, and to live repentance and forgiveness of sins’.Footnote 9 Jesus is truly the Lord of the world as though the ‘world’ does not like to recognize him.
Jesus, the Lord of Cultures
Jesus Christ is the Lord of cultures. The relationship of the Gospel to the various cultures to which people belong is a significant issue. The creation history in Genesis is immediately followed by an account of the wilful disobedience and its consequences for the individual, for human relationships, for work and for the world as it is affected by human sin (Gen. 3.8-20). This is why there is a great disruption in the creation: human conflict, cruelty, the oppression of the weak, the exploitation of the poor, and the distortion of marriage and the family, environmental degradation, corruption.
In his address to the Lambeth Conference 2008, Cardinal Ivan Dias said that the world was beset by Satanic groups and New-age movements, and the ‘many ugly heads of the hideous anti-God monster’, including secularism, spiritual indifference and relativism. He then underlined that all of these seek to efface any reference to God or to things supernatural, and to supplant it with mundane values and behaviour patterns, which purposely ignore the transcendental and the divine. They foster a culture of death and do not satisfy the deep yearnings of the human heart.Footnote 10 He suggested that Christians must be encouraged to give witness to the hope, which is in them to make all Christians God-fearing, peace-loving and law-abiding. The world today needs Christian apologists, not apologizers.Footnote 11 Of course, the world needs the credible witness of Christians who live in the world, but are not of the world.Footnote 12
Africans understand that each one of us stands within a line of descent from our ancestors, and has inherited from them certain cultural forms and values. This inherited culture remains part of our experience. Our ‘world-view’ is then characterized by the accumulation of technology and science, morals and behaviour, ideas and values. It means that cultures are formed by the technologies they use to sustain life, they are determined by behaviour patterns, relationships within the family, clan or wider community of outsiders, also shaped by ideas concerning God, the supernatural world, right and wrong, the nature and destiny of mankind and so on. So, as underlined by Ibadan colloquium of 1965, ‘African culture had a genuine value and therefore should play a vital role in rendering the Christian faith relevant to Africans’.Footnote 13
However, Africans understand that culture is dynamic and subject to change from within as well as from outside. When there is interaction of one culture with another one, or when knowledge within a culture develops, new views and new ideas take shape. As a result, new forms of culture come into being and are added to, or perhaps replace, the deposit of the original culture. This modified culture is then passed on to the next generation. In this sense, some African theologians fought to bring out the real value of African culture, while at the same time subjecting it to penetrating criticism in the light of the Bible as the fundamental source of Christian revelation. For African theologians such John Pobee, some elements of African cultures have to be purified and others may have to be rejected outright. What is needed is for African theology to be couched as far as possible in African terms and categories, without thereby losing anything of its authentic and essential Christian character.Footnote 14 Therefore, any theology that claims the name Christian needs to be rooted in the traditionally accepted bases of Christian theology that is in the Bible and in the historical dogmas of the church.
The above approach to culture is not only African, but also of theologians such Michael Ali Nazir who said, ‘Culture is God-given and is grounded in the story of creation where men and women are together created in God’s image and given a common mission of stewardship in God’s world’.Footnote 15 Culture is, thus, to be regarded as part of God’s creative work, of which human creativity is a result. Culture is given by God for the sake of human flourishing, but all cultures must take the human fallenness into consideration. The Gospel judges and evangelizes the cultures, but also the Gospel needs to be inculturated. So, the Christian faith can be exposed brilliantly without compromise if there is inculturation. Inculturation is the process by which the Gospel message is incarnated into cultures and local contexts, so that it is meaningful to the members of a given Christian community and is easily understood by those outside it. Inculturation here has a sense of ‘enculturation’, which consists of placing the Gospel within the culture rather than making it more substantially part of the culture. Hearing the Gospel can lead to a purifying of cultures, while different cultural expressions can enrich the proclamation of the Gospel message. Therefore, the Gospel can redeem culture as well as individuals. As Nazir said, ‘The inculturation is a slow journey and the expression of the good news in terms of a particular culture has to be in harmony with its expressions in other cultures and at other times’.Footnote 16 As the Christian faith provides the basis for a civilization’s values, institutions and laws, we need continually to seek those elements in any culture that can be affirmed and fulfilled by the Gospel.
It is again as John Paul II warned us, ‘The whole Counsel of God, in terms of God’s love and how that has been manifested in the story of God’s people and particularly in Jesus-Christ, the objective nature of Christ’s reconciling work and the new life released by the resurrection and the coming of the Holy Spirit, cannot be compromised in relationship to any culture’.Footnote 17 We must take our responsibility to keep the integrity of the apostolic teaching in its passing on across cultures and down the ages. In doing so, we need to take into account the local and the global in order to remain in communion with others. In his addresses at Lambeth 2008, the Archbishop Rowan warned us that the global horizon of the Church matters because churches without this are always in danger of slowly surrendering to the culture around them and losing sight of their calling to challenge that culture.Footnote 18 Of course, communion is seeking a deeper entry into the place where Christ stands to find its unity there. It is also true that we secure our place before God by Jesus Christ, but we become his friends when we love him and keep his commandments. Jesus Christ remains the one unique centre. But from the centre who is Christ, we should avoid to move to the direction of our own will. To be where Christ is involves not only a generous love, but also a sacrifice on the cross. It is only when we come to Jesus in repentance and dwells in him that we are able to see what he sees, know what he knows and are healed by him (Jn 1.35-39). Thus, ‘Christ as the Lord demands one’s commitment over the opinions of the media information or any theories of science for they are not the highest authority’.Footnote 19 Christ stands above all cultures and nations, and the Lordship of Christ in the life of the Christian is not negotiable. To submit to this true Lord is to discover the spiritual, moral, cultural and political renewal that our wounded nations long for.
Jesus, the Healer
It is true that the West knows a dramatic rise in health care. This has led many Western churches to de-emphasize the supernatural aspect of Christ’s healing ministry. They also tend to attribute illness to solely physical causes, calling more a physician than a pastor. Africans do not maintain a sharp demarcation between physical healing and spiritual healing. Even in African Traditional Religions, the major ministry of priests was holistic healing. There is spiritual healing from disjointedness between the person and the divinities and the aim is to restore the person to sound health. Illness in African societies is often attributed to the breaking of a taboo, possession by an evil spirit, or caused by witchcraft. But illness is also regarded as a misfortune, which involves the whole person. This has direct bearing on the relationship of the patient with the spiritual or supernatural world and with the members of the society.
Africans understand that Jesus heals not only our sicknesses, but our deeply wounded souls. Jesus Christ is the Lord, but also the very source of life and the beginning of all creation even before there was a creation. He is the one through whom all things in creation were created, who brought and brings salvation, restoration and healing to the cosmos and the human community.
Jesus spent a considerable amount of time in his earthly ministry reaching out to people with various infirmities. He healed a man of an ‘unclean spirit’ in the synagogue in Galilee (Mk 1.21-28). He therefore claimed the faith healing to be a sign of the Kingdom of God. So, when Jesus commissioned his disciples to continue his ministry, healing was to be a constitutive part of it, ‘He gave them authority over unclean spirits, to cast them out, and to heal every disease and every infirmity’ (Mt. 10.1). It means Jesus can heal the ‘infirmities’ of the Anglican Communion.
For Africans, Jesus is the bread of life (Jn 6.35), the living water (Jn 4.10), the light of the world (Jn 8.12) and the resurrection and the life (Jn 11.25). In Jn 10.10, Jesus said, ‘I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full’. Jesus is ‘the author of life’ (Acts 3.15). Peter applies Christ’s healing power to his work in healing sinful hearts (Acts 3.19). This holistic view of Christ’s healing work is central to African Christology. He, therefore, completely heals our broken bodies as we are broken in our sinfulness, broken in our relationships because of that sinfulness.
Furthermore, the spiritual healing brings the rebuilding of a broken community. The work of Christ restores an individual into a right relationship with God, and restores our relationship with one another. The Anglican Communion should recognize the healing power of the Lord Jesus as Jesus extends his healing within the larger context of social reintegration into the community. He saves his people and brings restoration to the community by building his church. Paul said that Jesus gave Himself for our sins, that He might deliver us from this present evil age, according to the will of our God and Father, to whom be glory forever and ever (Gal. 1.4).
Jesus, the Liberator
Liberation is central in the contemporary African theology and it is based on Jesus’ own words: ‘The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to preach the Gospel to the poor; he has sent me to heal the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed’ (Lk. 4.8). Liberation must be understood in its totality, as removal of all that which keeps the human beings in bondage, all that which makes them less than what God intended them to be. It connotes the total idea of liberation from fear, uncertainty, sickness, evil powers, foreign domination and oppression, distortion of his humanity, poverty and so on. It embraces religious, political, socio-economic, spiritual and mystical, personal and societal concerns of the converts. As Desmond Tutu said, ‘Liberation is a serious preoccupation at the present time and it is not seen as being an alternative to personal salvation in Jesus-Christ. No, it is seen in Africa as the inescapable consequence of taking the gospel of Jesus Christ seriously’. Anglican Communion should take the Gospel of Jesus Christ seriously, so its members are liberated from all that keeps them in bondage.
Conclusion
The primary pastoral task of the church is to re-affirm the good news of salvation in Christ, forgiveness of sins, transformation of life and incorporation into the holy fellowship of the church. The Spirit gives us strength and confidence to live as men and women within the created order, finding peace and reconciliation and awaiting the final revelation of the children of God. We should take seriously and put in practice Paul’s words to Titus, ‘For the grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation to all, training us to renounce impiety and worldly passions, and in the present age to live that are self-controlled, upright, and godly, while we wait for the blessed hope and the manifestation of the glory of our great God and Saviour, Jesus-Christ. He it is who gave himself for us that he might redeem us from all iniquity and purify for himself a people of his own who are zealous for good deeds. Declare these things; exhort and reprove with all authority. Let no one look down on you’ (Tit. 2.11-15).
