Samuel Daniels

Is Christianity A Western Religion?

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Recently, someone dropped a comment on Facebook regarding one of my blogs, “What makes the Blood of Jesus powerful?“, and his comment was that “fools believe their oppressors’ religion“. I believe this comment stems from the notion that “Christianity is a western religion”. There are many Africans who don’t want to subscribe to anything ‘Christian’ because to them it is a western religion. There is also the group of people I call “unbelieving believers”. These are people who are Christians but at the same time skeptical about some Christian activities and beliefs because they are somewhat influenced by this notion.

Narrow, modern view of history

The notion that Christianity is a western religion surprisingly found its way in Africa, partly due to the teachings of some African theologians and scholars. These scholars have regrettably acquired a persistent habit of assuming that Christianity began in Africa only a couple of centuries ago, strictly imported from “the West” or “the North.” They appear to view Africa as only two or three centuries deep, not two or three millennia. This false start is repeated frequently in some well-intended African theological literature. Even the best of African theologians have been tempted to fall into the stereotype that Christianity came from Europe  [1]. 

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This is a narrow, modern view of history, ignoring Christianity’s first millennium, when African thought shaped and conditioned virtually every diocese in Christianity worldwide. Modern Christianity has been thought to have brought only oppression to Africans, hence to be truly African is to resent Christianity and the West. But what if the West is more deeply indebted to Africa than has been imagined? [2] In this article, I would like to prove unequivocally that Christianity is no religion of the West, and that Africa contributed immensely to the warp and weft that interwove the fabric of Christianity.

African Christian History Retold

Majority of what has come to be known as African Christian History was told by non-Africans, more specifically, Westerners or Europeans. Understandably, it is almost impossible for people who colonised you to narrate historical events and make you superior over them. The African religious history that is predominant is the one told after or during colonialism. Hardly do you hear anything about pre-colonial African Christian history.

There is, however, a pre-colonial African Christianity that does not depend on either Western or European sources. It is a rich and thoroughly African-written intellectual tradition of the highest quality. In the period of its greatest vitality, the first half of the first millennium, the African intellect blossomed so much that it was sought out and widely emulated by Christians of the northern and eastern Mediterranean shores.

There is a general misperception that intellectual leadership typically moved from the north to the south, from Europe to Africa. This rather is the direct opposite. The flow of intellectual leadership demonstrably moved largely from Africa to Europe—south to north. But has this yet been demonstrated? These arguments await explicit unpacking, but the evidence is clearly there. It remains the task of a generation of future scholars, many of them from Africa, to restudy the flow of ideas from Africa to Europe and to better describe their impact [3]. 

The Christian leaders in Africa figured out how best to read the law and prophets meaningfully, to think philosophically, and to teach the ecumenical rule of triune faith cohesively, long before these patterns became normative elsewhere. Talking about Africans’ immense contribution to Christianity, I would like to briefly discuss some important African Church fathers whose impact can never be ignored in the history of Christianity, irrespective of the person doing the narration.

Tertullian

Septimius Tertullianus, affectionately known as Tertullian, is arguably the most misunderstood and yet most influential thinker from the whole Christian tradition. As the first Christian theologian to write in Latin, he veritably invented a new vocabulary that would shape the tradition that came after him. 

Tertullian was one of the early apologists who defended the Christian faith. In his days, Christians were being persecuted, and Tertullian offered multifaceted responses, even including his claim that Christians loved their persecutors and did not wish them to receive divine retribution for their unjust actions. 

Situated at the beginning of Christian Latin thinking, he was even the first to argue for concepts like “human rights [humani iuris]” and religious liberty [4]. Tertullian did remarkable works both inside and outside the church on deep doctrinal issues that helped to revolutionise the church.

Cyprian

Cyprian was a bishop of Carthage and a notable early Christian writer of Berber descent, many of whose Latin works are extant. He is recognised as a saint in the Western and Eastern churches [5]. Cyprian’s works are numerous, and the surviving collection of eighty-two of his letters is unprecedented for this time, so we can find many details in these personal correspondences that would otherwise not be known.  As bishop of Carthage during a decade that witnessed extreme persecution from non-Christians as well as numerous controversies within Christianity, Cyprian spoke to many important issues and thereby provides us with a picture of the North African church at this time [6].

Early in the 250s, a major plague occurred in Carthage and elsewhere in the empire. The event left countless people dying in the streets and numerous bodies unburied because everyone “fled to avoid contagion” – that is, everyone but the Christians, whom Cyprian instructed to care for those in need, even non-Christians.

Cyprian wrote numerous tracts. Although some appear to be pastoral advice applicable for any place and time, many of these can be shown to have been responses to events in North Africa, such as the persecution and the schisms. The majority of his works directly address ecclesiology, since the definition of the church and its practices had come into question from these events.

Saint Augustine

You may have encountered this name in the history of the Church. One thing you probably don’t know is that he was a fully fletched African, born and bred on the African soil.

One cannot overstate the influence of Augustine. His thought affects virtually all fields of western thought, ranging from philosophy to psychology, from music to poetry, and from prayer to sexuality. Some of his works, like the Confessions and The City of God, remain best sellers today, and through them, he continues to influence contemporary thought and practice [7].

Augustine’s influence truly transcended his North African context, and yet he should not be read entirely apart from his context.

He abandoned his career as a professor and set out on a course that would eventually make him one of the most influential figures in the entire history of Christianity [8].

 Augustine helped to simplify what otherwise would have been extremely difficult concepts to grasp. For example, he is the one who propounded the theory of “the fall of man”. He used this concept to explain the status of humankind after they sinned against God in the garden. “The fall of man” has come to be one of the most frequently used phrases by millions of Christians worldwide.

Tares Among The Wheat

In addition to the political and religious threats outside the Christian fold, some teachings developed within the Church which threatened to turn Christianity into something different from what it was from the beginning. These teachings did not come from enemies trying to destroy Christianity, but from dedicated Christians. Some of such teachings were Marcionism, Arianism, Montanism, Ebionism, Gnosticism, Donatism, etc. Some of these teachings and controversies almost ripped the Church apart.

Toward the end of the second century, the challenge of Marcion and the Gnostics required a different response. The heretics had created their own systems of doctrine, and to this, the church at large had to respond by having some of its teachers offer equally cogent expositions of orthodox belief. Precisely because the speculations of the heretics were vast in scope, the response of Christian teachers was equally vast. This gave rise to the first writings in which one can find a fairly complete exposition of Christian truth. These are the works of Athanasius, Clement of Alexandria, Tertullian, and Origen.

Danger in the Church

Arguably, the most devastating among the heresies that developed in the Church was Arianism. Also known as the Arian controversy. Its proponent was Arius (c.250-c.336), a priest in one of the larger churches in the great Egyptian city of Alexandria. Arius’ teachings are traditionally summarized in three basic statements:

1. 1. The Son and the Father do not have the same essence.
   2. The Son is a created being even though he is to be recognized as first and foremost among them, in terms of origination and rank.
   3. Although the Son was the creator of the worlds, and must therefore have existed before them and before all time, there was nevertheless a time when the Son did not exist.

The most fundamental Arian belief was that Jesus Christ was not divine in any meaningful sense of the term. He was “first among the creatures”; that is, pre-eminent in rank, yet unquestionably a creature rather than divine. Christ, as Logos, was indeed the agent of the creation of the world, as stated in the Prologue to John’s gospel. Yet the Logos was itself created by God for this purpose. The Father is thus to be regarded as existing before the Son. ”There was a time when He was not.” This statement places Father and Son on different levels, and is consistent with Arius’s rigorous insistence that the Son is a creature. Only the Father is “unbegotten”; the Son, like all other creatures, derives from this one source of being.

First Among All Creation

Arius is careful to emphasize that the Son is not to be thought of as identical to every other creature. There is a distinction of rank between the Son and other creatures, including human beings. The Son, he argued, is “a perfect creature, yet not as one among other creatures; a begotten being, yet not as one among other begotten beings.” The implication seems to be that the Son outranks other creatures, while sharing their essentially created and begotten nature.

Athanasius Showed Up

Arius’ leading critic was Athanasius, a native of Alexandria of Egypt. Athanasius reports him as making the following statements on this point:

God was not always a father. There was a time when God was all alone, and was not yet a father; only later did he become a ‘Father’. The Son did not always exist. Everything created is out of nothing, so the Logos of God came into existence out of nothing. There was a time when He was not. Before He was brought into being, He did not exist. He also had a beginning to His created existence.

There are two points of particular importance that underlie Athanasius’ critique of Arius.

Firstly, Athanasius argues that it is only God who can save. God, and God alone, can break the power of sin, and bring humanity to eternal life. The fundamental characteristic of human nature is that it requires to be redeemed. No creature can save another creature. Only the creator can redeem the creation. If Christ is not God, He is part of the problem, not its solution.

Logical Move Difficult To Counter

Having emphasized that God alone can save, Athanasius then made a logical move which the Arians found difficult to counter. The New Testament and the Christian liturgical tradition alike regard Jesus Christ as Saviour. Yet, as Athanasius emphasized, only God can save. So how are we to make sense of this? The only possible solution, Athanasius argues, is to accept that Jesus is God incarnate. His argument could be summarized as follows:

1. No creature can redeem another creature.
2. According to Arius, Jesus Christ is a creature.
3. Therefore, according to Arius, Jesus Christ cannot redeem humanity. 

Arius was firmly committed to the idea that Christ was the Saviour of humanity; Athanasius’ point was not that Arius denied this, but that he rendered the claim incoherent. Salvation, for Athanasius, involves divine intervention. Athanasius thus argues that the insight that the “Word became flesh” (John 1: 14) means that God entered into our human situation, in order to change it. 

Christians Worship Jesus

The second point that Athanasius makes is that Christians worship and pray to Jesus Christ. This pattern can be traced back to the New Testament itself and is of considerable importance in clarifying early Christian understandings of the significance of Jesus of Nazareth. By the fourth century, prayer to, and adoration of, Christ were standard features of Christian public worship. Athanasius argues that if Jesus Christ were a creature, then Christians were guilty of worshiping a creature instead of God – in other words, they had lapsed into idolatry. Did not the Old Testament law explicitly prohibit the worship of anyone or anything other than God? Arius was not in disagreement with the practice of worshiping Jesus; he refused, however, to draw the same conclusion as Athanasius. Athanasius thus helped to curb the confusion and the indoctrination the Arians started.

This space is not enough to fully exhaust all the contributions of people like Tertullian and Origen, the African Church fathers who first used the terms “Old Testament” and “New Testament”. Origen translated the Hebrew Bible called Hexapla.

Conclusion

When Jesus came to the earth, He was born a Jew, but He said to His disciples “you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you; and you will be My witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth [8].” Before He gave this command, every nation apart the Jews were considered gentiles. However, few years after His ascension, His disciples began to reach out to the world, including us “the gentiles”. Apostle Mark is believed to have come to Africa with the gospel. Africa, like Europe and the West, received the gospel and began a journey of transformation.

There is a wrong perception that the missionaries were the first to bring Christianity Africa. The truth of the matter is that, before they came to Africa, the Africans had a concept of God. For example in Ghana, the Akans  called God “Onyankop)n”, the Gas called Him ‘Ataa-Naa Nyonmo”, the Ewes called Him “Mawu”, the Yuruba of Nigeria called Him “Oludumare”, etc. 

Africa has played tremendous role in bringing Christianity to where it is today!

I am yet to know a theologian or a historian who can construct a legitimate history of Christianity without names such as Turtulion, Origen, Cyprian, Augustine, Clement of Alexandria, and Athanasius, who were all Africans and played tremendous roles in the growth and spread of Christianity.

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References

[1] Thomas C. Oden, “How Africa Shaped The Christian Mind: Rediscovering the African Seedbed of Western Christianity”, (Downers Grove, Illinois: InterVarsity Press, 2007), 25

[2] Thomas, How Africa Shaped The Christian Mind: Rediscovering the African Seedbed of Western Christianity, 25

[3] Thomas, How Africa Shaped The Christian Mind: Rediscovering the African Seedbed of Western Christianity, 29

[4] David E. Wilhite, Ancient African Christianity An Introduction to a Unique Context and Tradition, (New York: Routledge, 2017), 30

[5] Wikipedia, “Cyprian”, accessed on January 31, 2022.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyprian

[6] David,  Ancient African Christianity An Introduction to a Unique Context and Tradition, 152

[7] David,  Ancient African Christianity An Introduction to a Unique Context and Tradition, 151

Justo L. Gonzalez, The Story of Christianity: The Early Church To The Dawn Of The Reformation, (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2010), 259

[8] Acts 1:8

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