The Language of Faith in Southern Africa Spirit World, Power, Community, Holism
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HTS Religion & Society Series Volume 6 The Language of Faith in Southern Africa Spirit World, Power, Community, Holism Hermen Kroesbergen HTS Religion & Society Series Volume 6 The Language of Faith in Southern Africa Spirit World, Power, Community, Holism Published by AOSIS (Pty) Ltd, 15 Oxford Street, Durbanville 7550, Cape Town, South Africa Postnet Suite #110, Private Bag X19, Durbanville 7551, South Africa Tel: +27 21 975 2602 Fax: +27 21 975 4635 Email: [email protected] Website: https://www.aosis.co.za Copyright © Hermen Kroesbergen. Licensee: AOSIS (Pty) Ltd The moral right of the author has been asserted. Cover image: Design created with an original image by Dr Johanneke Kroesbergen-Kamps. All rights reserved. No unauthorised duplication allowed. Published in 2019 Impression: 1 ISBN: 978-1-928396-92-5 (print) ISBN: 978-1-928396-93-2 (epub) ISBN: 978-1-928396-94-9 (pdf) DOI: https://doi.org/10.4102/aosis.2019.BK117 How to cite this work: Kroesbergen, H., 2019, 'The Language of Faith in Southern Africa: Spirit World, Power, Community, Holism', in HTS Religion & Society Series Volume 6, pp. i–359, AOSIS, Cape Town. HTS Religion & Society Series ISSN: 2617-5819 Series Editor: Andries G. van Aarde Printed and bound in South Africa. Listed in OAPEN (http://www.oapen.org), DOAB (http://www.doabooks.org/) and indexed by Google Scholar. Some rights reserved. This is an open access publication. Except where otherwise noted, this work is distributed under the terms of a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0), a copy of which is available at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc- sa/4.0/. 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HTS Religion & Society Series Volume 6 The Language of Faith in Southern Africa Spirit World, Power, Community, Holism Hermen Kroesbergen Religious Studies domain editorial board at AOSIS Chief Editor Andries van Aarde Post Retirement Professor in the Dean’s Office, Faculty of Theology, University of Pretoria, South Africa Board Members Warren Carter, Professor of New Testament, Brite Divinity School, Fort Worth, United States Christian Danz, Dekan der Evangelisch-Theologischen Fakultät der Universität Wien and Ordentlicher Universität professor für Systematische Theologie und Religionswissenschaft, University of Vienna, Austria Pieter G.R. de Villiers, Associate Editor, Extraordinary Professor in Biblical Spirituality, Faculty of Theology, University of the Free State, South Africa Musa W. Dube, Department of Theology and Religious Studies, Faculty of Humanities, University of Botswana, Botswana David D. Grafton, Professor of Islamic Studies and Christian–Muslim Relations, Duncan Black Macdonald Center for the Study of Islam and Christian–Muslim Relations, Hartford Seminary, Hartford, Connecticut, United States Jens Herzer, Theologische Fakultät der Universität Leipzig, Germany Jeanne Hoeft, Dean of Students and Associate Professor of Pastoral Theology and Pastoral Care, Saint Paul School of Theology, United States Dirk J. Human, Associate Editor, Deputy Dean and Professor of Old Testament Studies, Faculty of Theology, University of Pretoria, South Africa D. Andrew Kille, Former Chair of the SBL Psychology and Bible Section, and Editor of the Bible Workbench, San Jose, United States William R.G. Loader, Emeritus Professor, Murdoch University, Perth, Western Australia Isabel A. Phiri, Associate General Secretary for Public Witness and Diakonia, World Council of Churches, Geneva, Switzerland Marcel Sarot, Emeritus Professor of Fundamental Theology, Tilburg School of Catholic Theology, Tilburg University, the Netherlands Corneliu C. Simut, Professor of Historical and Dogmatic Theology, Emanuel University, Oradea, Bihor, Romania Rothney S. Tshaka, Professor and Head of Department of Philosophy, Practical and Systematic Theology, University of South Africa, Pretoria, South Africa Elaine M. Wainwright, Emeritus Professor, School of Theology, University of Auckland, New Zealand; Executive Leader, Mission and Ministry, McAuley Centre, Australia Gerald West, Associate Editor, School of Religion, Philosophy and Classics in the College of Humanities, University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa Peer review declaration The publisher (AOSIS) endorses the South African ‘National Scholarly Book Publishers Forum Best Practice for Peer Review of Scholarly Books’. The manuscript was subjected to rigorous two-step peer review prior to publication, with the identities of the reviewers not revealed to the author(s). The reviewers were independent of the publisher and/or authors in question. The reviewers commented positively on the scholarly merits of the manuscript and recommended that the manuscript be published. Where the reviewers recommended revision and/or improvements to the manuscript, the authors responded adequately to such recommendations. Research Justification The aim of this book is to provide a way to do justice to an African language of faith. In systematic theology, anthropology and philosophy of religion, similar debates about how to interpret an African language of faith are ongoing. Trying to avoid the ‘othering’ discourses of past generations, scholars are careful to take seriously what people in Africa say without portraying people’s beliefs as weird or backward. Yet, in their desperate attempts to avoid othering, these theologians, anthropologists and philosophers often painfully misconstrue a language of faith in Africa. Understanding the language of faith in Southern Africa is not an easy task. How should we take seriously the form of language that often seems so strange and different? Two schools of interpreting the African language of faith can be found in theology, anthropology and philosophy alike. On the one hand there are ‘critical realists’, who interpret references to the spirit world etc. as metaphors, and on the other hand there are ‘postmodernists’, who interpret these references as straightforwardly describing the reality in which people in Africa live. These two schools are both mistaken in interpreting African references to the spirit world as descriptions of the world. Proper attention to how this language is used shows that references to the spirit world are in fact responses to the world. I demonstrate this using the descriptive parts of African theology, anthropology and my personal experiences in Zambia as source material, and applying to it a Wittgensteinian philosophy of language which pays special attention to the meaning of a language of faith as it is constituted in peoples’ day-to-day lives. I argue that, after African inculturation theology and black liberation theology, a better way to make sense of being a Christian in Southern Africa is to pay close attention to people’s language of faith. The way in which people speak of the spirit world or powers in Africa appears strange to outsiders, and the sense of community and the holistic worldview differentiates the African way of life from its Euro-American counterparts. I show that when proper attention is paid to the use of concepts like spirit world, power, community and holism, language of faith in Southern Africa is neither as strange as it may seem, nor as romantic. By investigating these distinguishing concepts that colour language of faith in Southern Africa, this book contributes to future projects of both fellow theologians who try to construct a contemporary African theology and those who are interested in theology in Africa given the well-known southward shift of the centre of gravity of Christianity. These theologians are the primary target audience of this book. The questions I raise about the nature of faith in the twenty-first century, however, also have implications for wider discussions within systematic theology, anthropology of Africa and philosophy of religion. I declare that this entire study contains original research and no part of the book was plagiarised from another publication or published elsewhere. Hermen Kroesbergen, Department of Dogmatics and Christian Ethics, Faculty of Theology and Religion, University of Pretoria, Pretoria, South Africa Contents List of abbreviations appearing in the text xi Biographical note xiii Acknowledgements xv Chapter 1: The language of faith in Southern Africa 1 Introduction 1 Two common approaches to the language of faith in Africa 4 The language of faith in Southern Africa 9 African theology 13 Methodology 14 Part One 19 Chapter 2: The spirit world: Its reality 21 Introduction 21 One world 24 Adding a thousand qualifications? 27 A different direction 32 Prayer 36 My own context in the Netherlands 38 The African context 41 Not explanation, control and prediction 47 No explanation