Dr. Platypus

More people need to know the story of Clarence Jordan, a genuine Baptist saint:

Southern Baptist Theological Seminary had hosted many people before Clarence and would host many after him but Clarence Jordan was something different. In 1938, Clarence had just received his Ph.D. in New Testament and felt equipped to do whatever it was that God was calling him to. The challenge, of course, is that what had seemed so clear for so many years was suddenly cloudier. This further calling had descended upon Clarence as he studied the scripture and would not let him go. He was challenged by what he read and translated and would not allow himself to rationalize away its scandal and strength. Clarence was challenged and rebuked by the stories he enveloped himself in and found his increasing discomfort with the status quo a powerful witness to the possibility of redemption.

At first I debated lumping the last two chapters of Peter J. Paris’s The Spirituality of African Peoples together, but then decided the final chapter, “Ethics: African and African American Social Ethics” really needed to stand alone as a kind of summary of much that has come before.

According to Paris, the summum bonum in African culture is the well-being of the community: “The preservation and promotion of community is the paramount goal of African peoples in all spheres of life. It is a practical goal that is deeply rooted in their cosmological thought and constitutive of all personal and public life” (130-31). This “highest good” is the same at every level: “from the supreme God, through the subdivinities, ancestral spirits, communal and familial leaders, to the youngest child” (131).

African cosmological thought is anthropocentric and holistic, and thus implies a sacramental view of life—the material and the spiritual impinge upon each other reciprocally. Even so, African anthropocentrism

does not imply either the superiority of humans over other forms of life or a denial of the supremacy of the deity over all existence. Nor does it constitute a rationale justifying wanton exploitation of humans over natural resources. It merely means that humans are at the center of a sacred cosmos in which they are expected to assume immense responsibilities for the preservation of its unity. (131)

In describing this sacramental view of life, Paris elaborates a bit on what he introduced in the previous chapter about personal destiny. In particular, he identifies the idea of original sin as something foreign to African world views:

African cosmologies have nothing comparable to a doctrine of original sin that condemns the whole of humanity. This does not mean that Africans view all humans as morally good. Nothing could be further from the truth, and evidence to the contrary is quite abundant. Rather, in contrast to those who are born with good destinies, it is widely believed that some people are bearers of various types of bad destinies. Some of them are capable of modification; others not. In either case, with the combined help of professional diviners and much concentrated effort on their own part, humans may, to a certain extent, overcome many aspects of a bad destiny. Thus the notion of destiny, whether good or bad, does not imply human passivity. Instead it informs persons about the possibilities that they are either capable or incapable or realizing. (132)

I will simply note in passing the paradox that the doctrine of original sin was most vigorously promoted—some would say invented—by an ethnic North African, Augustine of Hippo.

Among African peoples, good moral character “constitutes the nature of the moral life.” It is through such character development that Africans seek to promote the well-being of the community and authentically live out their sacramental understanding of human existence.

But first he gives a few more words about the cosmological grounding of African ethics in “a cosmological spirituality that unites three interdependent realms of life, which are usually ranked in hierarchical order—spirit, history, and nature” (135). He continues,

Thus, all life is sacred. This is a fundamental principle for all African peoples. Unlike most Western thought, the sacred is not separated from human and natural life but permeates both. As a consequence, the function of human life is a sacred vocation, namely, to preserve and promote the life of the community and each of its individual members. (135)

Paris concludes this chapter with a summary of some specific aspects of African moral excellence. African ethics aims at “enabling individual persons to become good so that they will also become good leaders in their respective communities. In the section that follows, he draws on the lives of Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King Jr. as examples of an African and an African American leader of laudable moral character.

Certain specific virtues are highly praised in African cultures. I’ll conclude my summary by listing these and providing Paris’s definitions.

Beneficence is closely tied to hospitality and prioritizing the needs of others over one’s own good.

Symptoms of beneficence are many. They include hospitality, generosity, liberality, benevolence, magnanimity, and love. All are expressive of practices undertaken by persons whose character is shaped by those practices. The beneficent person is a person of good will, one who joyfully extends hospitality to all alike. In this respect the beneficent person respects all persons. Though morally superior to ordinary people, the beneficent person is quite unaware of his or her moral goodness. Like all moral virtues, beneficence functions as a second nature for the one who is beneficent. (138)

Forbearance is an important moral virtue given Africa’s tragic history. Both Africans and, later, African Americans have had to “endure a long-term dehumanizing plight of racial oppression, economic injustice, political  disfranchisement, and social ostracism” (141). These experiences were not foreign to the early African Christians, who endured not only the persecutions instigated by imperial Rome but also found themselves on the losing side in a number of ecclesiastical conflicts that might also be interpreted (at least in part) in political terms: the Donatists in Latin North Africa and the Egyptians Copts (and later Ethiopian Orthodox) in the Nile Valley during the christological controversies of the fifth century. (For the Donatists, see ch. 6 of John Driver’s Radical Faith [Pandora, 1999]. For the political aspects of Coptic origins, see chs. 4–5 of The First Seven Ecumenical Councils (325–787) [Liturgical Press, 1983] by Leo Donald Davis.)

Forbearance is often developed by attending to activities “that serve the pragmatic goal of survival” (141), among which Paris notes in particular compromise and nonviolent resistance.

Practical Wisdom is “excellence of thought that guides good action” (144). According to Paris,

This virtue pertains to the measure of cognitive discernment necessary for determining what hinders good action and what enables it. It is the fully developed capacity of a free moral agent for making reasonable judgments about the best means for the attainment of penultimate goals as well as the determination of their commensurability with the ultimate goal of the good life. (144)

In practical terms, it is grounding in the wisdom of experience passed down from one’s elders, which provides the reasoning underlying all of the other virtues (145).

Improvisation, the next moral virtue Paris names, is the creative use of received tradition, applying old wisdom to new challenges. Like the arts, moral virtues are formed by habitual practice. But for moral people, as for great artists, practice has made the virtue or the art like a second nature in which individuality shines through (146).

Improvisation comprises unpredictable variations on a theme. It brings novelty to bear on the familiar, not for the sake of destroying the latter, but for the purpose of heightening the individuality and uniqueness of the agent and his or her creative ability. Improvisation expresses not only the agent’s creativity and spontaneity but also his or her spirit of perceptive wholeness. By keeping the old and new close at hand, the virtue of improvisation embraces and enhances the whole and thus serves to promote and preserve the goal of community. (147)

Forgiveness is, of course, a well-known biblical virtue. Paris writes,

African peoples have always known the great toll that hatred takes on both the personality of individuals and the life of the community. In the interest of their highest goal, community, they have shunned hatred by cultivating the virtue of forgiveness through the habitual exercise of kindness. (149)

Justice is, according to Paris, the supreme virtue “because it is the sum of all the virtues”:

On the one hand, it inheres in each of them by determining the moral impact of their practices on others. On the other hand, it is the totality of the moral quality contained in all the virtues. In other words, one cannot be just without possessing all the other virtues because complete justice would be diminished by the lack of any one of them. (152)

African peoples are concerned primarily with two forms of justice: (1) the individual’s obligations to the community, and (2) the community’s obligations to its members and itself. In Aristotelian terms, these deal respectively with civil law and the common good; commutative and distributive justice (152).

This concludes my summary of the parts of Paris’s book that are most germane to an investigation of whether Thomas Oden’s contention is true that Africa shaped the Christian mind. Next, I’ll take one post to summarize Osadolor Imasogie’s Guidelines for Christian Theology in Africa. Then I think I’ll need to see if a case can be made that the same broad cultural patterns are present in more northerly parts of Africa, in the Nile Valley or further west in regions colonized by Phoenicians many centuries before the birth of Christianity.

The fifth chapter of Peter J. Paris’s The Spirituality of African Peoples is titled “Person: The Embodiment of Virtue.” In it, Paris describes the dyadic personality structure in traditional African cultures. Although he doesn’t use that specific terminology, it is clearly what he is getting at with quotations such as the following, with which he begins the chapter:

An African is never regarded as a loose entity to be dealt with strictly individually. His being is based on or coupled with that of others. Next to—or behind—or in front of him there is always someone through whom he is seen or with whom he is associated. The concepts of plurality and belonging to is always present, e.g., a person is always viewed as: “Motho wa batho” (person of persons or belonging to persons). “Motho weso” (Our person or person that is ours). (101, quoting Elia Tema, “Pastoral Counseling Encounter with African Traditional Values and the Acculturation Process,” unpublished Th.M. thesis, University of South Africa, February 1979, 21)

In short, traditional Africans see themselves and others in the context of the social groupings win which they are embedded. “Though difficult for Western minds to grasp,” Paris writes, “Africans have no conception of person apart from the community” (111).

Personal Destiny

In this context, in which “personhood is socially generated and culturally defined” (105, quoting Meyer Fortes, Religion, Morality and the Person [Cambridge University Press, 1987] 250) what does it mean to speak of one’s “personal destiny”? Paris argues that the African view of destiny bears striking similarities to the Calvinist doctrine of predestination. Again citing Fortes,

Destiny is thought of as a component of a person’s personhood. It is supposed to be chosen by himself or herself pre-natally (while he was still “with Heaven above”) and therefore to be already effective from his birth. Destiny distinguishes and indeed creates him as an individual encapsulated in his social being but endowed with a personal variant of the normal career pattern for someone of his status, as individual as his physical appearance and personality yet, equally, like every other man or woman in his society. (105)

This precludes any radical individual autonomy in human action. At the same time, one’s destiny is not set in stone: Africans accept that one can modify one’s destiny (for good or ill) through the quality of one’s character. Therefore, moral training is of great importance.

Furthermore, and in keeping with how personality is construed in African cultures, the goal of such moral training is “that every activity should serve the good of the community” (109):

Even casual observance of Africans on the continent will reveal their deep devotion to the community’s well-being as manifested in their willingness and even eagerness to render service to the family and the larger community. In fact, one soon discovers that receiving the community’s praise is for them the highest possible reward. (109-10)

The highest moral good is to serve the common good with whatever resources one may have (111).

Conflicting Views of Liberty and Authority

One of the principle conflicts between Western and African understandings of personhood has to do with the conceptualization of individual rights with respect to higher authorities. Given both the deep commitment to community, the hierarchically structured nature of African social arrangements, and the cultural value of reciprocity of relationships among the various tiers of society, the Western concept of personal autonomy seems strange to African ears. Westerners give moral primacy to the individual and lesser value to the family and the greater community; the situation is exactly reversed for Africans.

Great Debate Series
First Baptist Church of Forsyth, Georgia (all meetings at 6:30 pm, childcare provided)

September 13: Mr. Bill Underwood, President, Mercer University. Issue: The Death Penalty.

September 20: Dr. Mark Douglas, Associate Professor of Christian Ethics, Columbia Theological Seminary. Issue: Stem Cell Research.

September 27: Dr. David Gushee, Distinguished Professor of Christian Ethics, Mercer University. Issue: Torture.

October 4: Dr. Paul Lewis, Associate Professor of Christian Ethics, Mercer University. Issue: Gay Marriage.

October 18: Dr. Stan Saunders, Associate Professor of New Testament, Columbia Theological Seminary. Issue: Climate Change.

October 25: Dr. Kirby Godsey, 17th President, Mercer University, currently Chancellor and University Professor. Issue: God’s Irresistible Grace.

November 1: Dr. Darrell Pursiful, Editor, Smyth & Helwys Publishing, and Adjunct Professor, Mercer University. Issue: Biblical Inerrancy / Authority.

November 15: Mr. David Hudson, Senior Partner in the Law Firm Hull, Towill, Norman, Barrett and Salley, Augusta, Georgia. Issue: Separation of Church and State.

Philip Davies, “Are There Ethics in the Hebrew Bible?”

There are various systems determining human behavior. The best known comprises, the “commandments” or “laws,” supposedly dictated by the invisible god and stipulating that humans should not kill, steal, commit adultery or worship any god but this one, etc. What are the reasons for such behavior? That it is good to obey divine commands—additional motivation being provided by threatened consequences of neglecting to do so. However, “only obeying orders” was summarily dismissed as a defense at the Nuremberg trials and although in some circumstances one can still plead “higher authority” as a defense against charges of misconduct, these pleas do not constitute an assertion of ethical behavior: they are just a get-out where one has clearly behaved unethically.

Peter Enns, “A Thought on the ‘New Atheism’ and Old Testament Morality.”

Rather than protecting the Bible against such criticism by justifying such instances of OT morality, I think Christians would do better to understand the nature of the OT, accept it for what it is, but then do the necessary theological thinking to give a reasonable and sophisticated account of things. Central to that necessary theological thinking is to bring the NT into the discussion….

[The New Atheism] misses this entirely. Christianity is a faith that is not bound to every OT expression of morality. Rather, it has built into it a moral trajectory that goes beyond the culturally informed moral limits of the OT period. Where Christians box themselves into a corner is when they fail to see that moral trajectory and try to maintain the notion that everything in the Bible is of equal ultimacy.

Rodney Stark’s latest book is called God’s Batallions: The Case for the Crusades. According to the Baptist Standard,

Stark balks at the theory, in vogue 30 years ago, that the Crusades were spurred on by the promise of wealth and land. The Crusades were bloody expensive, he argues, and far from being a profitable, colonial enterprise, they made paupers of princes.

Thomas Madden, professor of medieval history at Saint Louis University, agrees that recent analysis reveals the “crusades were a big money pit.” He said it is important to understand the crusaders on their own terms, and like Stark, he sees faith as their primary motivator.

He also makes the case that the Crusades were a defensive military action against a centuries-long Muslim imperialist expansion. In other words, after Muslim incursions into traditionally “Christian” lands like Syria (637, with the fall of Jerusalem in 638), Egypt (639), North Africa (665), Spain (711), southern France (732), Sicily (826), southern Italy (827—sacking Rome in 846), Crete (840), Cilicia (961), Cyprus (965), and ultimately all of Anatolia (1071), the military option seemed to be the only viable course of action. I don’t know of Stark’s book deals as well with the Spanish Reconquista (722–1238, but only finally ending with the recapture of Granada in 1492), Robert Guiscard’s recapture of Calabria in 1057, or the efforts of maritime states like Genoa in combatting Muslim raids along the Mediterranean coast, but those events would certainly help to put the Crusades in their historical context.

I’m sure Stark’s book will be met with wildly different reactions, which will be very good for him and therefore probably for Baylor University.

Here is an observation worthy of careful consideration.

One of the great Prayer Book collects asks God that we may “love the thing which thou commandest, and desire that which thou dost promise”. That is always tough, for all of us. Much easier to ask God to command what we already love, and promise what we already desire. But much less like the challenge of the Gospel.

Every Christian knows that this sentiment is true. We all love and desire things that God forbids—not because God is out to get us but because, if we ever received them, it would be harmful to our relationships with God, others, and/or self. Therefore, the challenge of the gospel is to invite God to change our desires, our loves, to line up with God’s holiness. And we pray for God’s grace beforehand, knowing the road is sometimes hard and we will not always succeed. And we pray as well for patience and a forgiving, welcoming spirit toward our brothers and sisters in Christ, knowing that their battles may be far harder than our own.

Oh, and here’s the statement in context.

Also in the SBL Forum, Frederick L. Downing provides an excellent introduction to Clarence Jordan and the Cotton Patch Gospel. By re-casting the story of Jesus as if it took place in the pre-Civil Rights Movement American South, he found a creative way to raise people’s awareness of the issues of race, violence, and economic injustice.

Jordan introduces John the Baptist and the prelude to the portrayal of Jesus as prophet by saying: “the word of God came to Zack’s boy, John, down on the farm. And he went all around in the rural areas preaching and dipping in the water—a symbol of a changed way of life as a basis for getting things straightened out.” What does John say to the folks in the “rural areas”? “You sons of snakes, who put the heat on you to run from the fury about to break over your heads? You must give some proof that you’ve had a change of heart. And don’t start patting one another on the back with that ‘we-good-white-people’ stuff, because … God … can make white-folks out of … rocks.”

The Cotton Patch Gospel is still in print, by the way, and you can order all four volumes, covering most of the New Testament, here.

One of my two favorite class days when I’m teaching New Testament intro is the Parables. (The other is the Kingdom of God, for many of the same reasons). In that light, and with only a couple of weeks before classes resume at Mercer University, I note that Ben Myers is contemplating How (not) to preach the parables:

It’s a curious thing that pastors often find it so difficult to preach Jesus’ parables. In truth, the only hard thing about the parables is that they are so simple, so straightforward in what they claim and what they demand. They are so simple that we need to make them difficult in order to escape the piercing gaze of Jesus. Or perhaps some pastors feel they need to soften the parables in order to protect the congregation from God. After all, it is God himself who bursts through these stories, coming on the scene with the unaccountable strangeness of a seed in the ground, with the disruptive suddenness of a thief in the night.

Read the whole thing. I guarantee you’ve heard the kinds of sermons he’s talking about, and some of you may have even preached them.

Maybe the “problem” of suffering should be seen not so much as a philosophical puzzle to solve but an actual problem (or, more accurately, a vast array of problems) we are meant to combat. That, at least, is how this piece by Michael Novak struck me.

One of the oldest accusations against God in the Bible and in every generation since has been that there is too much evil in this world for there to be a good God. The pain is so intense. The irrationality and seeming cruelty at times seem unendurable.

Of course, ceasing to be a Jew or a Christian does not wipe these evils away. They continue. They roar on. The rejection of God does not diminish evil in the world by a whit. In fact, the turn of Russia and Germany from more or less Christian regimes to boastfully atheist regimes did not lessen, but increased, the number of humans who have horribly suffered, by nearly 100 million. Even under atheist interpretations of science, the vast suffering under ferocious competition for survival, for a vastly longer era than was known, far exceeds the evils earlier generations knew.

An unusually religious friend of my daughter volunteered for a year’s work among the poor of Haiti. Within weeks, she was so dismayed by the inexplicable suffering of the poor, and their defenselessness, that she abandoned her faith. It demanded too much of her.

This noble young woman’s loss of faith did not lessen the poverty and pain of those she worked with. Besides, the reasons for the overwhelming poverty she encountered were not God-made but man-made. (After all, Haiti is by nature a very rich nation.) The secrets of how humans can create wealth have raised up the poor of many countries; somehow, the secrets passed Haiti by. One remedy the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob did add, moreover, is to touch the heart of this compassionate young woman and many others like her, to bring remedial help and, in some cases, knowledge of how to produce economic transformation.

(H/T: Jim West)