Abraham Our Father: Paul and the Ancestors in Postcolonial Africa

Preface

Preface This book is about ancestry, spirituality, and culture among African Christians in colonial and postcolonial Zimbabwe—and about the surprising role the figure of the apostle Paul played in the colonial and postcolonial periods. The experiences of the colonized, the processes they reinvented or coped with, and how they identified themselves in relation to colonial forces are first on the agenda of postcolonial biblical interpretation. The claim is not that colonialism brought a new religion, but that the two, African traditional religion and colonialism, transformed each other. Beginning with the history of the identity of Shona people and their encounter with British colonialism and Euro-American missionaries, this study focuses on Shona Christianity as a deliberate, evolving, and constructed response born from an encounter with those forces. To say that Shona Christianity evolved invites a theological debate. I wish to center that debate on a comparison with the apostle Paul’s creative construction of Abraham in the midst of the Aeneadae, by which I mean the Romans of the Augustan era whose identity was both politically and religiously grounded in the ancestry of Aeneas. Paul’s Letter to the Romans is arguably the most influential Pauline epistle in the history of Christianity, yet its influence among cultures has not yet been fully explored. In this project, I will examine Paul’s legacy within the context of colonial and postcolonial Zimbabwe. The reading and interpretation of the Bible, especially Paul’s Epistle to the Romans (3:27—4:25), awakened among the colonized Shona people a renewed sense of the role, function, and place of ancestors in religious worldviews. While precolonial Africans were aware of God prior to the introduction of Christianity, their reading and interpretation of Paul was formative and transformative in two ways. First, they discovered Paul to be a theological dialogue partner in matters of culture, ancestry, ethnicity, and spirituality. The gospel of Jesus Christ—which, Paul argues in Rom. 1:16 and 3:31, invites “all” into a right relationship with God through faith—was formative for the African religious worldview. As a religious people, African Christians saw their appropriation of “Father Abraham” not as a universal ancestor, but rather as the ancestor of a remnant. In this case, Abraham’s entry into faith (Gen. 15:6) does not transcend and abolish differences, but rather confirms the diversity of Christian faith. Thus the concept of Abraham’s people as a remnant drawn xi from Jews and non-Jews brings into sharp relief the evolution of Christianity among the Shona people. What is called out in Abraham is not universality, but a remnant. African Christianity is a new appropriation of Christian faith on the basis of the Messiah. Next, the book will contextualize Paul within the worldview of African Christians. As a constructed response, Shona Christianity, which is multiethnic in nature, actively picked and chose what it received from missionaries. This intentional approach transformed colonial African Christianity to what Shona postcolonial critics now call postcolonial Christian faith. Thus encounter between colonialism and African religious systems cannot be separated from the arrival of the Bible. The Bible in Africa has always played a double-edged function: as a tool for colonizing and as an agent of transformation. The latter is what will be discovered as the book progresses. Paul, the apostle to the Gentiles, is indeed a major theological resource in the development of Christianity in postcolonial Zimbabwe. Postcolonial analysis is interested in the relationship between the colonizers and the colonized. Thus, with regard to the first century, I will juxtapose Virgil’s Aeneid, in which Augustus is presented as an advocate of cultural renewal through ancestral veneration, with Paul’s presentation of Abraham as a competing ancestor of the Roman Empire. The story of Aeneas as told under the Julian-Claudian family resonates with the experiences of the African worldview. It is an experience of power, culture, and identity; realities that cultural practitioners will evolve into a new mode of religious existence. Seeing power through the prism of colonialism and missionary efforts provides a vivid means for looking at culture and cultural engagement with the gospel of Jesus Christ. The study will in part engage the historical, literary, and ideological milieu of the Augustan era in the Roman Empire. The elements of prejudice and power toward inferior people seem to be a concern at the center of Paul’s language in Romans. A postcolonial analysis of the legacy of Paul’s Letter to the Romans in Zimbabwe...