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3. Postcolonial Shona Christianity
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3 Postcolonial Shona Christianity What then shall we say about Abraham, our ancestor according to the flesh? –Romans 4:1 The Discourse of Pauline Christianity The subject of ancestry and descent from a powerful ancestor or founder holds a central place in politics, religion, and social life.1 The Romans and Greeks of the Augustan era (fourth century bce) claimed a powerful pedigree from Aeneas.2 The apostle Paul, who represented the religious-social world of Palestine, claimed descent from Abraham (Gal. 1:13-16). While the Shona people have tribal ancestors, the period between 1890 and 1980 saw an amalgamation of tribes and ethnic groups into one distinctive nation who for the first time claimed Mbuya Nehanda as the ancestress of all Shona people.3 Nehanda had a great deal of religious and political influence in many regions of Zimbabwe, as did Aeneas and Abraham in their regions of the world. The histories of these ancient nations demonstrate to modern-day readers the mythological underpinnings of all peoples, races, and nations.4 People have stories to tell about their gods, their male and female ancestors, and the achievements of their cities and villages. Ancestors, or maiores, are held as models of virtue and wisdom, whose distinctive identity the present generation is to emulate. To invoke an ancestor is to invoke a stable model of legitimacy: and indeed, ancestors are most invoked when legitimacy is most at stake. Ancestors are also invoked for purposes of a coordinate, measuring time in generations. Thus the acceptance of Nehanda resonated well with the African conception of what constituted an African. With the British flag flying in the heart of Harare, which the colonial government renamed Fort Salisbury, 45 in honor of the imperialist British prime minister, the name of the spiritual ancestress Nehanda needed to be invoked. Invoking and naming ancestors was one of the cardinal virtues about Greco-Roman history; and failure to do so meant betrayal of tradition, culture, and religion. Therefore, invoking Nehanda during and after the colonial period is analogous to the Roman tradition—a tradition that Paul utilized to reconstruct Abraham in a worldview that upheld allegiance, loyalty, and value to founding ancestors.5 Paul’s reconstruction of Abraham is beyond politics, religion, and social concerns; he presents Abraham as the “spiritual and faith ancestor” of all nations who would believe in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ (Rom. 3:21-26). Few theologians have yet discovered the importance of biblical genealogies for twenty-first-century Christian believers. Two of the gospels, Matthew and Luke, provide long genealogies of Jesus Christ. The Pauline notion of Jesus Christ as the Son of God and the language of Abrahamic ancestry resonated deeply with Shona spirituality and led to a contextualization of Paul’s gospel and theology within African Christianity.6 Throughout this book, I claim that we, the Shona people, during the colonial missionary period, felt a strong affinity for Paul’s idea of ancestry, and we creatively appropriated selected aspects of Euro-American Christianity into our African Christianity. At the same time, Euro-American missionaries introduced a Paul who was largely Western in orientation. Their reading and interpretation of Paul was shaped by a Western view of individualism and exclusivism. But the Paul whom Africans read in the vernacular Bible was a cross-cultural apostle who claimed to have become “all things to all people” in order to win them to the gospel (1 Cor. 9:19-23). Africans also resonated with Paul because his gospel was about the “impartial righteousness of God,” whereby cultural superiority was confronted with the power of God’s grace (Rom. 1:18—4:25).7 This Shona reading of Paul can be labeled as identification by association: one in which their condition of being colonized stirred the consciousness of Shona religious leaders, driving them to a transformed plane of religious-cultural awareness, awakening, and renewal. Paul did the same thing in his Greco-Roman context, a view that Western New Testament scholarship has not yet discovered possibly because the concept of ancestry is associated with colonial domination. Or could it be that Western culture is focused more on individualism and individual rights? The Western worldview emphasizes the nuclear family, whereas postcolonial Christians place great emphasis on the common bond of all human beings. But could it also be that colonially oriented cultures have difficulty understanding Paul because of not wanting to acknowledge the spirituality of 46 | Abraham Our Father [44.199.241...