African Pentecostalism and World Christianity. Группа авторов

African Pentecostalism and World Christianity - Группа авторов


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Christianity and African Pentecostalism intersects, this volume becomes a distinct contribution to the discourse about the nature of these two Christian formations, or rather, one complex formation with multiple sides. The dynamics and practices of this complexity have done a lot to re-inscribe our understanding of the evolution of Christianity especially within the African context. In this particular context, multiplicity of historical circumstances (mediated by coloniality and postcoloniality) and sociocultural disarticulations have not only facilitated the penetration of Christianity as a religious system, but also the transformation of Christian practices into diverse forms and formations. How has World Christianity affected the condition of the African continent? How has African Pentecostalism mediated the theological assumptions of World Christianity? What are the specific African elements of Pentecostalism? The scholarship of Professor Johnson Kwabena Asamoah-Gyadu, the President Trinity Theological Seminary, Legon-Accra, Ghana helps us to tackle these questions, and many more.

      Asamoah-Gyadu and African Pentecostalism

      We have discerned three basic ways of interpreting African Pentecostalism in the course of our studies. More precisely, we can say that there are three regnant regimes of discourse. There are those (such as theologian Amos Yong and Frank Macchia) who interpret Pentecostalism at its strongest theological perspective. There are others (such as Ruth Marshall and Nimi Wariboko) who read it at its theoretically most accessible point. There is yet another group (including Matthews Ojo and Allan Anderson) which interprets it at its contextually most engaged corner. Professor Johnson Kwabena Asamoah-Gyadu institutes a fourth regime, which we are naming for the first time here as the “Legon” discourse (Legon is the capital city of Ghana, from where Asamoah-Gyadu operates). He does this by making a diagonal cut through the three other forms of discourse. He accomplishes his objective by adopting a wide-angled lens which sees African Pentecostalism more deeply, more perceptively, and more sympathetically at the dense intersection of the “theologically strongest” and the “contextually most keen” than any scholar today. He brings theology and context together in brilliant analyses and discussions that are theoretically inflected. In his works, theology, theory, and context interact dialogically to shed ample light on African Pentecostal situations.

      In the quotation, above we see his scholarly temperament of “Yes-and-No” to the practices and ideas of African Pentecostals on display. In his writings there are no easy or cheap resolution of the contemporary tension between the distortions and achievements of Pentecostalism in Africa. He both affirms and criticizes, fully living into the tension and in this way, he forges his own stance.

      All this is not saying that Asamoah-Gyadu is a dialectical theologian or philosopher. He does not proceed by arguing that the affirmative is always fissured by negation, and from which another positive is engendered. Though the “Yes and No” are included in all his analyses and discussions—the sense of the novelty of Pentecostalism conserving and sublating the traditional context contoured by African Traditional Religions—he goes beyond simple dialectical movement. The “Yes” and “No” are two distinct movements, one does not inevitably entail the other. The good accomplishments of African Pentecostalism are not stated to merely balance the negatives. They come from a careful and sympathetic understanding of what God’s Spirit is doing in Africa; they come from a sense of mission. In a sense the accomplishments are “subtractive”; they represent irruption of new meanings that names the void that exists in historic mission-church Christianity. Pentecostalism is an affirmative subtraction of Christianity in Africa from the path of irrelevance.

      In this book eighteen scholars delineate the contours of his scholarship, highlighting how it deeply reflects his African context and how it celebrates the universal truths of Christianity as a religion, practice, and a thought system—and they join him to tell beautiful stories of what God is doing in Africa. In the pages ahead we will see how Asamoah-Gyadu’s work has become very influential in the global academy, how he has become one of the best interpreters of African Pentecostalism, and, indeed, one of the fiercest critics of its excesses.

      Chapter Outline

      The volume is divided into three distinct parts that allow the contributors to address different dimensions of Asamoah-Gyadu’s work. In the first part—Christianity in History—six essays take a historical critical look at the trajectory of Christianity in Africa. These chapters are significant because they provide the theological and historical understanding of what Christianity has become; essentially, a non-western religion. This is what Opoku Onyinah did in chapter 1. He attempts to tease out Asamoah-Gyadu’s definitive role in the Pentecostalization of Christianity in Africa, as different from the American Evangelical Pentecostal Christianity. The new direction charted in Africa seeks “a direct, victorious, supernatural encounter with God, who transforms all aspects of their lives.” In chapter 2, Harvey Kwiyani further pursues the theological contours of this “enthusiastic Christianity” in Africa. An enthusiastic Christianity, emerging through what Kwiyani calls the “charismatization of the Christian experience” is fundamentally one that engages “the spirit world just like the old African traditional religions did.” And it is in this enthusiastic form that African Christianity makes a unique contribution


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