The Holy Spirit in the Lutheran and Reformation history: An African perspective
Kenneth Mtata
Abstract
The reformation traditions have been reshaped in the process of transmission and reception. The Lutheran and Protestant reformation traditions were transmitted by missionaries mainly from pietistic tradition in dialogue with the Enlightenment spirit. The same Reformation traditions were received among the African peoples whose traditional religious inclination and the context of colonialism further reshaped the content of these traditions. Specifically, the Lutheran Christological thrust of the reformation was given a stronger pneumatological emphasis upon reception. How did this change the content of the received traditional theology itself? What are the implications of such a change for the future of global Christianity? What does this mean for Lutherans and Protestants as they prepare to celebrate 500 years of the Reformation in 2017? On the basis of the work of one African Lutheran theologian, Manas Buthelezi, I seek to explore some of these questions.
Introduction
The place of the Holy Spirit in the 16th Reformation is an ambivalent one. While one would have expected the prominence of the Holy Spirit to be associated with such an epochal highlight in the ongoing renewal of the church, the Spirit became one of the controversies of the Reformation. Yet when one tries to map out how the reformation faith found roots in the African continent, it is neither God the father nor the Son that have prominence, but the Holy Spirit. It would therefore be profitable, if one seeks to know the significance of the Reformation to Africa, to begin with the Holy Spirit. It will also be appropriate to look at the ecclesial, socio-economic, and political implications of such a pneumatological perspective to the commemoration and celebration of the 500 years of the Reformation. After a brief overview of the Holy Spirit before and after the Reformation periods, I give some considerable space to look at the work of Manas Buthelezi on the Holy Spirit. The purpose is to demonstrate how the reformation tradition was reshaped from a Christological to a more pneumatological inclination due to the African religious and material milieu.
The Holy Spirit and the Reformation
While the previous ecumenical councils had addressed the person of the Holy Spirit in the context of the trinity debate, the 16th century Reformation provided a new dimension to the discussion. The new focus was the place of the Holy Spirit in the salvation of the believer and in the practices of the church. The leading reformers’ strong Christology was encountered by the strong pneumatology of the left-wing reformers. Of course this dichotomy does not fully account for the detailed nuances that blurred the boundaries since both groups took the trinity seriously.
The main reformers pejoratively presented the left-wing reformers as Schwärmer or “enthusiasts”, as “people with wild, highly emotional ideas.”[1] This was because of the emphasis these groups gave to the “inner religious experience” and inspiration of the Holy Spirit. One such a typical group comprised of the three “plebeian prophets” from the mining town of Zwickau where there had been the previous Hussite influence.[2] These prophets and their followers claimed “direct inspiration from the Holy Spirit”, “denounced infant baptism, called for the elimination of the clergy, and predicted the imminent end of the world.”[3]
Andreas Karlstadt was also sympathetic and a leading figure of this movement. He sought, in addition to Germanising the liturgy, to address the socio-political and economic grievances of his people in his sermons through the power of the Spirit.[4] Also Thomas Müntzer is alleged to have pointed to the superiority of the Holy Spirit to the Holy Scriptures; that “God’s direct speaking to the soul was a more certain witness of the truth than the plain scriptural text: the letter killed but the spirit quickened.”[5] It is well-known however that some exaggerations tended to characterize each other’s views and to paint the left-wing reformers with one brush. For instance, there were many left wing reformers for whom the emphasis on the experience of the Holy Spirit did not exclude the validity of the Holy Scriptures. Instead, the Spirit was seen as behind both the initial inspiration and the subsequent illumination of the scriptures.[6]
Luther disagreed with the left-wing reformers, not because he did not believe in the experiential aspect of faith. He rejected the emphasis on internal experience as the basis for faith because, for him, human beings encountered God through the means outside themselves (extra nos), through the scripture, the word of preaching and the sacraments. It was not only Martin Luther who believed and taught that faith was not a result of free will but the gift that God gave by the Holy Spirit through the Word. “God grants his Spirit or grace to no one except through or with the preceding outward Word”, he said.[7] The three main means through which the Holy Spirit came to human beings were the “sermonic words, baptism, and the Lord’s supper.”[8]
There is a shift from questions regarding the nature and identity to concerns of function of the Holy Spirit during and after the Reformation. The Holy Spirit was presupposed as the initiator of rebirth and renewal of both the individual and the church from the beginning of the church. The early church fathers recognized the ministry of the Spirit as the active involvement of the Godhead from the time of creation. Martin Luther and the magisterial reformers saw the Spirit as necessary force behind the birth of faith and the energy of all subsequent transformation of the believer though the Word and the sacraments. Even though these reformers rejected claims that exalted personal experience of the Spirit, they did not deny the immediate operation of the Spirit in the individual and the church for the on-going vitality of the church.
It was this understanding of the Holy Spirit as creator of faith that influenced mission theology of the 19th century Europe compelling the sending of missionaries to the African continent.
From Luther to Africa: The missionary factor
Christianity of the 16th century reformation tradition was introduced to Africa by the missionaries in the 19th century, although earlier sporadic missionary acts by the Catholic Jesuits are also known in East Africa from the late 16th century.[9] Before the arrival of these European missionaries, however, there was Christian presence already as a result of earlier contacts between Africa and the Mediterranean world. As depicted in the Acts of the Apostles (8:26-40), there could have been some Africans at the outpouring of the Holy Spirit and birth of the Church at Pentecost in Jerusalem. Some African theologians would want to go further in seeing the church Fathers like Augustine and Cyril of Alexandria as the flowering of the early planting of Christianity in Africa that dates back to the first century. If they are correct, it means that the earliest African Christian tradition “emerges and matures broadly speaking between 42 and 692 C.E. That is 660 years of African Christianity before the Arab Conquest.”[10] In this understanding therefore, when the western missionaries arrived in Africa, they were not necessarily bringing a new religion. “Christianity has never departed Africa. In some ways, the Church is now returning to its African roots”, Oladipo would say.[11]
Yet, it should be noted that when the large number of missionaries came to Africa around the 19th century, they were not spreading the same Christianity that had been in the isolated parts of the continent before. This was something new. First and foremost, Christianity of the missionaries was now part and parcel of the colonial package. On one hand, missionary theology served, intentionally or unintentionally, to buttress subservience among the colonized masses. Through a literal interpretation of Romans 13:1 which says, “Let every person be subject to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and those that exist have been instituted by God”, this new Christianity was not always the liberating news of the Reformation. For some Lutheran missionaries, the relationship with the colonial system could be understood through a simplistic reading of Martin Luther’s ‘Two Kingdoms’ theory. On the other hand, it was the missionary education, health system and general personal developmental approach that allowed Africans to get connected to the good news of the Reformation. For example, almost all the political movements in Africa were led by Africans who had been educated and mentored by European missionaries.
To come back to our theme, it should be observed that the framework of the passing on and reception of the Reformation evangelical heritage was filtered through the double screen of missionary pietistic tradition and a traditional African spirituality. The missionary outlook was responding to a multiple forces but two main ones, the growing enlightenment influence back home and the wild pagan culture in the missionary field. So while western missionaries felt obliged to exorcise the Africans of their ‘paganism’, they also saw in Africans, an opportunity to preserve the ‘original’ Christian religion not contaminated by shades of growing secularism and industrialization characteristic of their home countries. It is known, for example, that Berlin missionaries in Southern Africa “encouraged a patriarchal society with the missionary taking the place of the chief.” These missionaries welcomed African customs and African spirituality within certain limits.[12] This “dialectics of rejection and incorporation of the African world of spirits and gods”[13] characterized the period of the missionaries that lasted until the end of the first half of the 20th century when Africans begun to claim the right to forge the agenda of Christianity in Africa. It is within this framework one should seek to understand both the Reformation Effects and the trajectory of African Christianity to its contemporary manifestations.
African religiosity before and after the missionaries
As has been indicated above, African religiosity before the arrival of western missionaries, which has also remained the basis for subsequent spirituality was and is based on strong expressive religious experience tied to the socio-political and economic realities of the people. This religiosity was characterized by an understanding that human beings were “not alone in the universe, for there is a spiritual world of powers or beings more powerful and ultimate than” us.[14] It was further believed that human beings could “enter into relationship with the benevolent spirit-world and so share in its powers and blessings and receive protection from evil forces by these transcendent helpers”.[15] The reality of the afterlife and the “important place of the ancestors or the ‘living dead’” who remain “united in affection and in mutual obligations with the ‘living living’”, was taken seriously and serviced through various rituals.[16] The African’s was a “sacramental universe where” “no sharp dichotomy” existed “between the physical and the spiritual.” Instead, the physical acted as a “vehicle for ‘spiritual’ power”, while the physical realm was held to be patterned on the model of the spiritual world beyond” and that such sets of powers, principles and patterns ran “through all things on earth and in the heavens and welds then into a unified cosmic system”.[17] This was the religious field into which the reformation message brought by the missionaries fell. How would it grow?
Initially missionaries made no single Christian convert as theirs and the African universes did not find corresponding categories. Conversion was achieved, at a large scale, through education in the missionary schools and of the Africans who would have run away to seek refuge in mission centers. This rate conversion was not as rapid as when Africans themselves started preaching and communicating the gospel message using their own African worldview as a medium of passing on the message. But even then, the church remained in the hands of the western missionaries both in terms of governance and theological framework. This would not last long.
The beginning of the 1950s saw a steady increase of political independence of the African states from colonialism. This also triggered a growing interest among Africans to take leadership of the churches and redefining the theological agenda of the African church. It should be noted that even before this time, African indigenous churches had sprout out the whole sub-Saharan Africa with their emphasis on the movement of the Holy Spirit. These churches sought to relate their African religious outlook to their Christian faith. These churches, also known as ‘churches of Spirit’, characterized what would define African Christianity to the present day, an emphasis on the Spirit. The late Ogbu Kalu, a leading African theologian observed that this “pneumatic factor in Christianity that resonates with the vibrancy of primal African spirituality” was the reason behind the Pentecostal and charismatic character of Africa in recent years.[18] While many scholars have observed the Holy Spirit as characterizing Africa Christianity, it is surprising that not much work has been committed to investigating this phenomenon.[19]
The Spirit and Lutheran reception in Africa
Initially, the Lutheran churches in Africa mimicked their founding European mother churches, at least in practice. In belief it was a different story. African Lutheran Christians tended to be Lutherans during the day and before the surveillance of their European counterparts but secret members of the African Indigenous or Spirit Churches during the night. The reason was simple to understand; many of these Christians identified with the practices in the Spirit Churches because the later represented the African spirituality better than the Lutheran and other missionary-founded churches. I remember during my days as a pastor in an urban Lutheran church when members of my congregation would disclose how they used to visit a prophet in the African Indigenous church in order to get the service that we in the Lutheran liturgical tradition could not provide. In a sense, the way the Lutheran and Reformation tradition was passed on through the medium of the European missionaries did not fully meet the needs of the African person especially his spiritual inclination.