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PDF hosted at the Radboud Repository of the Radboud University Nijmegen The following full text is a publisher's version. For additional information about this publication click this link. http://hdl.handle.net/2066/43560 Please be advised that this information was generated on 2021-09-23 and may be subject to change. Jnl of Ecclesiastical History, Vol. 57, No. 1, January 2006. Printed in the United Kingdom 86 f 2006 Cambridge University Press Reviews Jahrbuch fu¨r Antike und Christentum, 46 – 2003. Edited by Georg Scho¨llgen and others. Pp. 209 incl. 22 ills+22 black-and-white and colour plates. Mu¨nster: Aschendorff, 2004. E74. 3 402 08137 7; 0075 2541 JEH (57) 2006; doi:10.1017/S0022046905216214 This rather belated issue of the Jahrbuch is dedicated to the distinguished student of early Christianity in the Middle East, Albrecht Dihle, on his eightieth birthday. There are nine articles and seventeen learned reviews, the former being almost equally divided between literary studies and archaeology. An interesting article by Bruno Bleckmann seeks to identify the anonymous Vita BHG 365 with a missing fragment of Philostorgius’ Church history relating to the first conflict between Constantine and Licinius in 315–16. Altay Coskun provides a detailed account of the long-running and blood-stained conflict between Pope Damasus and his rival Ursinus in 366–73, and analyses the motives and actions of successive praefecti Viventius and Maximinus in supporting Damasus. Zahi Hawass and Gawdat Gabra describe the excavation of a Coptic hermitage at Mansouria, in an extension of the western desert, 25 km north of the Giza pyramids. The excavators regret the apparent lack of care by the authorities of the fine sixth–seventh-century Coptic frescos found in the course of the excavation. Two further pieces of archaeological research, on the reliquaries of Nicolas of Myra, by Philipp Niewo¨hner, and a survey of six churches in Pednelissos in Pisidia between the fourth and seventh centuries AD, by Ulrike Karas and Sebastian Ristow, complete a well-balanced, and well- produced, issue. Of the reviews, two by Winrich Lo¨hr on Henry Chadwick’s The Church in ancient society, and Wucherpfennig’s study of Heracleon, are outstanding. There is, however, a tendency among reviewers to write mini theses, which sometimes obscure the character of the work under review. As usual, the editors have produced a faultless, scholarly, volume. GONVILLE AND CAIUS COLLEGE, #W. H. C. FREND CAMBRIDGE Behind locked doors. A history of the papal elections. By Frederic J. Baumgartner. Pp. xv+272. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. £19.99. 0 312 29463 8 JEH (57) 2006; doi:10.1017/S0022046905226210 The papal election, the conclave, retains its mystique and was seen in action for the first time in over a quarter of a century in April 2005 with the swift election of Josef REVIEWS 87 Ratzinger as Pope Benedict XVI. The protracted end of John Paul II’s pontificate, the perceived divisions in the Roman Catholic Church between conservatives and progressives and the vogue for conspiracy theories all contributed to a burgeoning industry of books and articles on ‘the next pope’. Baumgartner’s timely volume largely avoids speculation about the future and concentrates on past conclaves. It provides a useful potted history of the papacy and the college of cardinals, a survey of individual conclaves, and a commentary on the development of the mechanics of the conclave up to John Paul II’s instructions of 1996 which kept the pope’s election within the college of cardinals as it has been since the eleventh century. Outside political influences emerge as a constant problem: first the Roman nobles and later the Catholic powers, notably France, with the last veto of a papal candidate by a European state, Austria, coming as late at 1903. Baumgartner writes lucidly and with an appealing lightness of touch; his book is particularly useful in dismissing notions of false antiquarianism and clearing the ‘holy smoke’ which too often obscures the papal sede vacante and conceals the effectiveness of what is a tried and humane process. DOWNSIDE ABBEY AIDAN BELLENGER African Christianity. An African story. Edited by Ogbu U. Kalu. (Perspectives on Christianity. Ser. 5, 3.) Pp. xv+631 incl. 10 maps. Pretoria: University of Pretoria, 2005. R215 ( paper). 0 620 33647 1 JEH (57) 2006; doi:10.1017/S0022046905236217 The chronology of African church history has long been a matter of political and religious importance. At stake is the authenticity of African Christianity. Is Christianity a nineteenth-century import, brought by European missionaries and irrevocably tied to the colonial project? Or can a history linking Christianity to Africa over the longue dure´e be identified? Missionaries addressed this question by assigning their students biographies of early African Christians to read. In central Kenya, Presbyterian students in the 1940s read, in Swahili, the life stories of Apolo Kivebulya (the famed evangelist of the eastern Congo), King Khama of South Africa, Ghanaian educationalist James Aggrey and other prominent characters of the nineteenth century. African ecclesiastical entrepreneurs looked for inspiration in the more distant reaches of Christian history. The African Orthodox Church, founded in 1920s South Africa by a Garveyite churchman, claimed ecclesiastical authority from the patriarchate of Alexandria. Africa’s contemporary church historians have further deepened the chronology of African Christianity. Adrian Hastings’s monumental The Church in Africa (Oxford 1994) starts in 1450 with a history of medieval Ethiopia. Elizabeth Isichei’s History of Christianity in Africa (Grand Rapids 1995) and Mark Shaw’s The kingdom of God in Africa (Grand Rapids 1996) go even further back, to the earliest years of the Common Era. Ogbu Kalu’s edited collection participates in the ongoing effort to position African Christianity within the longer span of African history. Written for seminary students in Africa, this book aims to show how, over two thousand years, African converts, preachers, chaplains, healers, evangelists, freed slaves and theologians have made their own diverse Christianities. 88 JOURNAL OF ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY The first portion of the book is arranged chronologically, documenting the history of African Christianity from its genesis in Alexandria to its medieval incarnation in Ethiopia. The authors lay emphasis on the centrality of Africa to the cosmopolitan world of the early Church. Kenneth Sawyer and Youhana Youssef describe the pivotal role that Alexandrian theologians played in the formulation of Christian doctrine. William Anderson and Ogbu Kalu reconstruct the history of the kingdom of Nubia, which fought off Arab armies in AD 642 and preserved a Christian culture lasting through the 1300s. David Kpobi reconstructs the biographies of the African chaplains who worked in the Dutch and Portuguese trading settlements of western Africa during the 1700s; and Paul Gundani profiles the African clergy who evangelised the medieval central African kingdoms of Kongo and Mutapa and in Mozambique. The second part of the book is arranged thematically, not chronologically. After Jehu Hanciles’s survey of the links between abolitionism and the missionary movement in nineteenth-century Europe, subsequent essays discuss the different brands of Christianity that Africans developed. J. W. Hofmeyer surveys the politics of mainline Churches, while Kalu himself writes about the ‘Ethiopian’ Churches, which in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries rejected the cultural ensemble that European missionaries imposed on Christian converts. Graham Duncan and Kalu discuss the revival movements of eastern and southern Africa of the 1930s and 40s, and Afe Adogame and Lizo Jafta analyse the ritual practice of the diverse African Instituted Churches. The latter chapters of the book focus on the theological situation of contemporary African Chrisitanity: Kwabena Asamoah- Gyadu surveys the field of Pentecostal Christianity, while Philomena Njeri Mwaura highlights women’s roles in charismatic Churches. The book concludes with three essays from theologians – Nyambura Njoroge, Tinyiko Sam Maluleke and J. N. K. Mugambi – which outline the task of theology in relation to current politics, gender relations and African tradition. This book is a tremendous affirmation of the diversity, vitality and longevity of African Christianity. There is much here to inspire, humble and motivate readers. But African Christianity: an African story is largely a history of institutions. Kalu and his contributors parcel Africa’s intellectual history into different ecclesiastical bundles, obscuring the broader fields of thought and action in which Christian ideas played. The chapter on ‘Islamic challenges in African Christianity’, for example, poses Christianity in opposition to Islam, arguing that Africa is a ‘veritable laboratory for analyzing a host of emerging themes relevant to relations between the two faiths’ ( p. 118). Other contributors compare and contrast Christianity with ‘traditional religion’. Chukwudi Njoki’s essay on mission Churches, for example, argues that there was ‘hardly any serious dialogue initiated between Christian theology and the theology of traditional religions’ ( p. 226). Revivalist Christianity, by contrast, betrays (according to Duncan and Kalu) a ‘certain sense of continuity with the traditional past, embedding African Christianity into the deep structure of all African traditional religions’ ( p. 306). African Instituted