SPIRIT-FILLED WWOORRLD

Religious Dis/Continuity in African Pentecostalism

AAAllllaaannn HHHeeaaatttoon AAnnddeerrssoonn

Series EditorsWolfgang Vondey

University of Birmingham Birmingham, UK

Amos Yong School of Intercultural Studies Fuller Theological Seminary

Pasadena, CA, USA

Christianity and Renewal - Interdisciplinary Studies

Christianity and Renewal - Interdisciplinary Studies provides a forum for scholars from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, various global loca-tions, and a range of Christian ecumenical and religious traditions to explore issues at the intersection of the pentecostal, charismatic, and other renewal movements and related phenomena, including: the trans-forming and renewing work of the Holy Spirit in Christian traditions, cultures, and creation; the traditions, beliefs, interpretation of sacred texts, and scholarship of the renewal movements; the religious life, including the spirituality, ethics, history, and liturgical and other prac-tices, and spirituality of the renewal movements; the social, economic, political, transnational, and global implications of renewal movements; methodological, analytical, and theoretical concerns at the intersection of Christianity and renewal; intra-Christian and interreligious comparative studies of renewal and revitalization movements; other topics connect-ing to the theme of Christianity and renewal. Authors are encouraged to examine the broad scope of religious phenomena and their interpre-tation through the methodological, hermeneutical, and historiographical lens of renewal in contemporary Christianity. Under the general topic of thoughtful reflection on Christianity and renewal, the series includes two different kinds of books: (1) monographs that allow for in-depth pursuit, carefully argued, and meticulously documented research on a particular topic that explores issues in Christianity and renewal; and (2) edited col-lections that allow scholars from a variety of disciplines to interact under a broad theme related to Christianity and renewal. In both kinds, the series encourages discussion of traditional pentecostal and charismatic studies, reexamination of established religious doctrine and practice, and explorations into new fields of study related to renewal movements. Interdisciplinarity will feature in the series both in terms of two or more disciplinary approaches deployed in any single volume and in terms of a wide range of disciplinary perspectives found cumulatively in the series.

More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14894

Allan Heaton Anderson

Spirit-Filled WorldReligious Dis/Continuity in African Pentecostalism

Allan Heaton AndersonUniversity of BirminghamBirmingham, UK

Christianity and Renewal - Interdisciplinary StudiesISBN 978-3-319-73729-4 ISBN 978-3-319-73730-0 (eBook)https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73730-0

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017964133

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer International Publishing AG, part of Springer Nature 2018This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed.The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

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Praise for Spirit-Filled World

“This book is a penetrating analysis of the characteristics and manifestations of an African pneumatology. I have great respect for Allan Anderson’s approach. We share methodological commitments to empirical research that contributes toward a depth perspective sometimes lacking in studies based on theory rather than experience and observations of the people themselves. Taking seriously the deeper experience and beliefs of the actual people studied results in challenging and valuable insights. Anderson has an identification with and understanding of the interaction among the Spirit, power concepts, and the African spirit world. This interaction inspires increasing receptivity towards the movement of God’s Spirit.”

—M. L. (Inus) Daneel, Boston University, USA

“Working both as an insider and an outsider whose personal experience and academic writing represent ‘continuity and discontinuity’ with the subject of this book, Anderson is a reliable and persuasive exponent of Pentecostalism. In his latest book he marshals field evidence to explore issues of convergence and divergence with African ideas of the spirit world, which he doesn’t reduce to mysticism or immobilize in material objects. The Christian framework captures the dynamic nature of reception and appropriation as a general feature of the Christian movement, with African Pentecostalism a vivid manifestation of it. The book is an instructive model of interpretation anchored in real life situations and conveyed in clear, lively prose. It deserves to be welcomed.”

—Lamin Sanneh, Yale University, USA

“When dealing with the study of Pentecostalism as a global movement, the depth and breadth of knowledge that Allan Anderson brings remains unparalleled. In this new volume, Spirit-Filled World, he tackles deftly the delicate balance in the

vi PRAISE FOR SPIRIT-FILLED WORLD

intersection—continuity/discontinuity—between Pentecostalism and African traditional cultures. In doing this, Anderson relies on decades of teaching and experiencing Pentecostalism across cultures to beat for us a new path that will inspire innovative ways in which to encounter, experience, understand and teach Pentecostalism as, currently, the defining religious player in what counts as World Christianity.”

—J. Kwabena Asamoah-Gyadu, Trinity Theological Seminary, Accra, Ghana

vii

acknowledgements

This book is dedicated to my doctoral promoter (supervisor) formerly at the University of South Africa, M. L. (Inus) Daneel, whose many years of research in Zimbabwe inspired this project in the first place. I con-sider my forty-three years of immersion in African Christianity a distinct privilege that very few Westerners have, and I would not have written this book without that experience. So thanks go to my departed parents, who took me to Africa at the age of four, Brigadiers Keith and Gwen Anderson in the Salvation Army in Zimbabwe and Zambia. In South Africa, I had the privilege of working in various pentecostal and charis-matic organisations from 1973 to 1995. So this book has taken many years to complete, and many people have been involved in its pro-duction. I want to thank them all immensely. Without the support I received, delayed by three surgeries on my ankles since 2014 and almost a year of radiotherapy and associated treatment in 2015, this study would never have been completed.

My initial research project fell under the Research Institute for Theology and Religion at the University of South Africa back in the early 1990s, where I worked part-time for almost five years and completed my doctorate. The department of Theology and Religion at the University of Birmingham, where I have been for the past twenty-two years, gave me time, funding, and space during study leave and research trips. I have always been encouraged to pursue excellence in research by my col-leagues here. My five months as a visiting scholar at Yale in early 2016 organized by Lamin Sanneh and the Overseas Ministries Study Center

viii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

in New Haven, Connecticut, was a wonderful place to reflect after some turbulent times in my life. Thanks to Sarah Gilbert, now a postgraduate researcher, who spent many hours in 2015 sifting, annotating and tran-scribing recorded interviews from scores of MP3 files. I was given useful comments on drafts by academic colleagues and friends, including Ben Crace, Raphael Idialu, Martin Lindhardt, Stephen Pattison, and Michael Wilkinson. The series editors Amos Yong and Wolfgang Vondey, the lat-ter now a colleague in Birmingham, offered me a publication place and made helpful suggestions.

I am particularly grateful for the many residents of Soshanguve involved in this project over the years with their comments and participation, back in the early 1990s and during my last research trip in 2016. Special thanks are owing to my former church home, Praise Tabernacle Church and its members, whose pastor, Victor Mokgotlhoa, has been a friend for over thirty years. Several research assistants were involved, including Jan Mathibela, who also helped facilitate trips to Winterveld and Mabopane in 2016, and Sam Otwang, my main research assistant and translator in 1991–1992. Undergraduate students at Tshwane Theological College helped with the initial quantitative survey in 1991. I am also grate-ful for being able to sound out some of the ideas of this research at vari-ous stages during seminars in 2016–2017 at Boston University, OMSC, the University of South Africa, and at the University of Birmingham: the Department of African Studies and Anthropology, and the postgraduate researchers of our Centre for Pentecostal and Charismatic Studies. All of you have been wonderful in your support. Thank you!

Birmingham, UKNovember 2017

ix

contents

Part I African Pentecostalism in Context

1 The Spirit of Dis/Continuity 3

2 Pentecostalism in the Sub-Sahara 23

3 Pentecostalism in a South African Township 51

Part II A Spirit-Filled World

4 The Ambiguity of Ancestors 81

5 Witchcraft, Spirits, and Misfortune 113

6 Divination, Healing, and Deliverance 143

Part III The Spirit in a Spirit World

7 Translating the Spirit World 175

x CONTENTS

8 The Power of the Spirit 213

9 The Spirit World in Global Perspective 251

Glossary 259

References 261

Index 271

xi

abbreviations

AFM Apostolic Faith Mission of South AfricaAICs African Independent/Initiated ChurchesAoG Assemblies of GodPTC Praise Tabernacle ChurchSt. John St. John Apostolic Faith MissionZCC Zion Christian Church

PART I

African Pentecostalism in Context

3

Pentecostalism and the continuity debate

Pentecostalism was the fastest growing sector of Christianity in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries and could be the fastest grow-ing religion in the contemporary world. There is no sign that its growth has abated, especially in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, where at least three quarters of Pentecostals and Charismatics are found. One estimate put the number of “Pentecostals/Charismatics” worldwide at 669 mil-lion in 2017, which is over a quarter of the world’s Christian popula-tion.1 This figure, however, really needs to be unpacked into the many different forms of “Pentecostals/Charismatics,” including many millions of Catholic Charismatics and independent churches included in this fig-ure.2 The scholarly studies about the rapid expansion of Pentecostalism in different regions worldwide have not explored thoroughly what I consider to be a principle reason for its popularity—the extent to which Pentecostalism, through its experience of the Spirit, often unconsciously taps into deep-seated religious and cultural beliefs. Pentecostalism draws from these ancient sources in continuity with them, while also simultane-ously confronting them in discontinuity. In doing so, it uses a biblical rationale for its beliefs and practices. This book explains the popularity of Pentecostalism from this perspective, unravelling the debates con-cerning the tension between continuity and discontinuity. By empirical observations, I demonstrate that Pentecostalism makes a “radical break

CHAPTER 1

The Spirit of Dis/Continuity

© The Author(s) 2018 A. H. Anderson, Spirit-Filled World, Christianity and Renewal - Interdisciplinary Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73730-0_1

4 A. H. ANDERSON

with the past,” but that in southern Africa at least, it is not an either/or situation. What often appears as continuity is often actually discontinu-ity because of the interpretation and meaning given to the phenomenon. The reverse is also the case, where practices found throughout global Pentecostalism are invested with new meanings through the encounter with a local religious and cultural context.

One of the most influential people in my academic life, Marthinus L. (Inus) Daneel, was the supervisor of my two research degrees from 1986 to 1992. I became familiar with his extensive writings, which con-stantly strove to rid the study of African Christianity and in particular his own specialisation from ill-informed suppositions. His three-volume Old and New in Southern Shona Independent Churches is a rich ethno-graphic tapestry of independent church life in Zimbabwe and well illustrates the continuity/discontinuity debate.3 In brief, Daneel’s argu-ment in these and many other publications is that despite critics who denounce African Spirit independent churches (Zionist and Apostolic) as continuous with pre-Christian religions, these churches succeeded in effecting a transformation of the old views—in other words, they achieved a discontinuous relationship with the past religion. His influ-ence was reflected in my research, but in particular, my first book, Moya: The Holy Spirit in an African Context.4 I now return to this subject, my “first love,” here. Daneel has lived among African churches for much of his life and has done substantially more research and writing on the subject than anyone I know. Although his thick descriptive ethnogra-phy was written many years ago in a different world, his pursuit of accu-racy in the studies he has made of independent churches in Zimbabwe, where both he and I were raised, has been a constant source of inspira-tion. I have since moved from southern African themes into the study of global Pentecostalism in the rare atmosphere of British academia. But I have kept throughout my academic life a keen interest in African Pentecostalism and am returning to these roots. I describe and evaluate the tension between the Holy Spirit and the spiritual world in African Pentecostalism in the hope that this will also help explain the continuing growth of Pentecostalism worldwide—for there are striking parallels to be found elsewhere.

I am not suggesting that the continuity/discontinuity tension in Pentecostalism has never been studied. In a landmark article, anthro-pologist Joel Robbins remarks that his discipline tends to be a “science of continuity” and that anthropologists use “foundational arguments

1 THE SPIRIT OF DIS/CONTINUITY 5

about the inability of people to view the world except through their received categories.”5 Therefore, anthropologists who study religion see the introduction of new religions like Pentecostalism as taking on the ideas and characteristics of the old religion. He argues that to understand global Pentecostalism properly, anthropologists need as robust a science of discontinuity as one of continuity. He shows how Pentecostalism has two paradoxes that make it both and at the same time continuous and discontinuous with the host culture. The first para-dox is that “in attacking local cultures, Pentecostalism tends to accept their ontologies—including their ontologies of spirits and witches and other occult powers—and to take the spiritual beings these ontologies posit as paramount among the forces it struggles against.”6 The second paradox refers to the characteristics that make Pentecostalism distinc-tive in Christianity: the practices of spiritual gifts like healing, exorcism, prophecy, and speaking in tongues or glossolalia—practices found in Pentecostalism throughout the world. Anthropologists have also tended to observe the continuity of these practices with pre-Christian religions or their similarities, without giving attention to their widespread use in many different cultural settings throughout the world—in other words, their differences with local religions. In another essay, Robbins argues for the same idea from the perspective of globalisation that Pentecostalism “appears to weigh in both for theories that stress processes of Western cultural domination and homogenization and those that emphasise the transformative power of indigenous appropriation and differentiation.”7 In other words, this is illustrative of the tension between globalisation or westernisation, and the localisation that occurs when outside ideas are appropriated by a given culture. Martin Lindhardt, another anthropolo-gist, also notes that the “most fruitful work” results from a non-dualistic approach to African Pentecostalism by exploring “the complex ways in which rupture and continuity, modernity and tradition or the global and the local are combined in the production of cultural forms.”8

The theme of continuity has also dominated theological and reli-gious studies. The architect of contemporary Pentecostal studies, Walter J. Hollenweger, wrote that Pentecostalism is based on its “black roots,” mediated through its African American founders at Azusa Street, Los Angeles. These aspects of African religion cause it to flourish in simi-lar cultures where “orality” is the dominant feature.9 Harvey Cox takes this a step further in his book Fire from Heaven, where he states that the rapid spread of Pentecostalism is because of its “heady and spontaneous

6 A. H. ANDERSON

spirituality,” which he calls “primal spirituality.” Pentecostalism’s empha-sis on experience is spread through testimony and personal contact.10 In one of his most telling paragraphs, Cox suggests that for any religion to grow, it must include two underlying factors: “be able to include and transform at least certain elements of pre-existing religions which still retain a strong grip on the cultural subconscious,” and “also equip peo-ple to live in rapidly changing societies.” He sees these two “key ingre-dients” in Pentecostalism, which helps “people recover vital elements in their culture that are threatened by modernization.”11 What Cox hinted at when referring to “pre-existing religions” with “a strong grip on the cultural subconscious” is the theological equivalent of a stress on con-tinuity, which emphasis—because he wants a more balanced perspec-tive—Robbins is keen to avoid. Robbins thinks that ideas like these “skate close to a kind of generic primitivism,” an outdated anthropologi-cal viewpoint.12 According to Cox’s view, many of the beliefs and prac-tices found in, say, Korean Pentecostalism can be traced back to Korean ancient shamanistic religion. So he describes Korean Pentecostalism as “a massive importation of shamanic practice into a Christian ritual.”13 Cox gleaned this idea from Hollenweger, whose only Korean Ph.D. student’s thesis on “Korean Pentecostalism” was aimed at charismatic practices in the Presbyterian Church, which he considered to be a resurgence of sha-manism. He did not study Korean Pentecostalism itself.14

Similarly, many who have written on African Pentecostalism and African Independent Churches have attributed their success to their continuation of an “enchanted worldview” that retains ideas from pre-Christian African religion—as Swedish missionary Bishop Bengt Sundkler famously put it, creating a “bridge back to the past”—in other words, continuity. Sundkler later almost retracted this view, and insid-ers to Pentecostalism are quick to point out that Pentecostals confront, rather than accommodate the spirit world, so they would almost invari-ably point to a radical discontinuity. The result is two contrasting views of insiders and outsiders—and seemingly, never shall the twain meet! An exception to this is Nigerian Pentecostal scholar Nimi Wariboko, whose philosophical study describes the ability of Nigerian Pentecostals to be simultaneously “inside and outside African traditional religions,” representing “both continuity and rupture in the same Nigerian reli-gious landscape.”15 This inside/outside tension, though not developed in an explicit way, remains an underlying theme of his significant work. What Robbins and Lindhardt have argued for the social sciences and

1 THE SPIRIT OF DIS/CONTINUITY 7

Wariboko hints at philosophically, I want to argue empirically for theology and religious studies. This is what this book hopes to achieve: to provide an answer to this seeming contradiction. I make assumptions that are influenced by years of immersion in Pentecostalism in eight countries in southern Africa. Now in Britain since 1995, I interact with other African Christians, both Pentecostal and others, especially from Ghana and Nigeria, some of whom have completed doctoral studies under my supervision. I discovered common threads in their ideas and practices that resonated with what I am familiar with in southern Africa.

The Holy Spirit occupies an important place in charismatic Christianity in Africa, whether it be the beliefs of Pentecostal or new charismatic churches, Charismatics in older churches, or older African Independent Spirit Churches. At the same time, this becomes more meaningful when placed in the context of the spirit world that permeates most aspects of African life. While recognising that the ideas concerning the spirit world are by no means homogeneous throughout sub-Saharan Africa, certain foundational similarities exist that can also be shown in other local religions outside Africa. When referring to “Africa,” the sub-Sahara is intended. Here, it is important not to make generalisations, just as “European Pentecostalism” will not be the same in Portugal and Poland. In southern Africa, like the rest of the continent, Pentecostalism has become one of the most prominent forms of Christianity. It perme-ates every historic denomination and independent church. It has not only contributed to the reshaping of the nature of Christianity but has also left an indelible mark on popular religion and culture. The ordinary adherents of Pentecostalism and related independent churches are usu-ally on the cutting edge of encounters with the dynamic, popular reli-gion that has existed for generations and still permeates African societies, albeit in interaction with a constantly changing context with globalising tendencies.

Christianity on the whole is affected by and affects religious beliefs in many fundamental ways. Both in its similarities and in its differences with local beliefs and rituals, Pentecostalism has succeeded in remark-able ways to integrate these throughout the sub-Sahara. This book is about that integration, but its findings are by no means only applicable to Africa. The African experiences discussed in this book have parallels in places where a holistic, spiritual universe is central to human experi-ence and beliefs. As Adam Ashforth points out, “For most humans … the ultimate source of security is to be found in relations with spiritual

8 A. H. ANDERSON

powers of various sorts.”16 “Most humans” also live “in a world with a lively appreciation of invisible agencies,” he went on.17 My aim is to comprehensively describe and analyse important ideas of popular Pentecostalism in relation to the continuing prevalence of a pervasive spiritual world. This world of ancestors, witchcraft, evil spirits, witch familiars, and demonic forces is believed to be responsible for all kinds of events—including misfortune, illness, poverty, and a host of other social, economic, and political problems bringing spiritual insecurity. These beliefs are in continuity with the past. In its encounter with this spirit world, Pentecostalism offers radical, discontinuous solutions to all these problems through its emphasis on the power of the Spirit and the exercise of “spiritual gifts.” But in confronting this pervasive spirit world, Pentecostalism also helps preserve it.

The African spiritual world in popular religious thought is related to the prevalence of poverty, misfortune, and disease throughout this con-tinent. In this popular understanding, these are not primarily social or physical problems, but behind them is the ontological world of spir-its, witchcraft, and manipulating evil forces that need to be encoun-tered and dealt with. This study describes people in a particular South African urban township where people relate their experiences of conflict and encounter with that world. In the process of describing the spiritual world there, I suggest that Pentecostalism and various forms of charis-matic and independent Christianity through their belief in the power of the Holy Spirit provide a solution to this conflict and encounter and introduce radical change. I hope that this also sheds light on processes of religious change in other parts of the world where similar popular beliefs prevail. As Ellis and ter Haar observe, terms like “magic,” the “occult,” and even “witchcraft” are not always helpful, especially when exclusively applied to Africa:

…in approaching the matter of religion, it is desirable to use categories of analysis that are in principle applicable to a wide range of human soci-eties rather than to have recourse to a vocabulary that is applied exclu-sively to Africa, thereby emphasizing the distinctiveness of the continent rather than illuminating similarities it shows to societies in other parts of the world.18

While there are significant differences, it is the similarities of these beliefs with those found worldwide that provide a compelling explanation for

1 THE SPIRIT OF DIS/CONTINUITY 9

the popularity of Pentecostalism outside what has become a rational, largely secularised, western world.

terminology and PresuPPositions

Any serious study of Pentecostalism must deal with terminology to mini-mise confusion.19 Most contemporary scholars take “Pentecostalism” as a broad generic term to apply to a bewildering variety of different churches and movements, and I will follow this established practice. In southern Africa, the terms “Zionist,” “Zionist-type,” and “Apostolic” churches are limited to the subcontinent, where independent churches frequently use the names “Zion” and “Apostolic.”20 Hollenweger referred to South African Zionists as “independent African Pentecostal churches,” a description not usually accepted by the churches them-selves.21 Still, those churches with an emphasis on the power of the Spirit and spiritual, supernatural gifts should be distinguished from those other independent churches such as the “Ethiopian” or “African” churches that have no such emphasis.22 So when I refer generally to these inde-pendent churches, I use their self-designation “Spirit churches” because of their emphasis on spiritual gifts like prophetic revelation and heal-ing. In the South African context, Zionist and Apostolic churches can-not always be described as “pentecostal” without further qualification. They sometimes have historical links with the American healing and pentecostal movements, imported to Africa in the early years of this century but soon led by African leaders. The most obvious example is the Zion movement of John Alexander Dowie with headquarters in Zion City north of Chicago. This movement had links with the thou-sands of Zionist churches in southern Africa and the Faith Tabernacle in Philadelphia, the latter movement also connected with the emer-gence of the first pentecostal and Aladura churches in West Africa. These non-pentecostal American movements were completely transformed by African leaders both through secessions, African revival movements, and through the influence of Pentecostalism. There are also many other inde-pendent churches in Africa that can be called “pentecostal” or “charis-matic.” These tend to be closer to western Pentecostalism in character and practice than to the Spirit churches, and often preach a “prosperity gospel,” but the lines between these various churches today are blurred.

The temptation is to consider western forms of Christianity as the benchmark by which all other movements should be measured. This

10 A. H. ANDERSON

includes the so-called classical Pentecostalism and the newer forms of “prosperity gospel” or “Word of Faith” churches. One might ven-ture to say that most churches in Africa, whether connected with west-ern Christianity or not, have developed an African character which has many parallels to independent Spirit churches, all emphasising the work-ing of the Spirit bringing the confrontation to an African spirit-filled world. This is not to say that some are more “authentic” than others. Pentecostal/charismatic Christians interpret ideas of the Spirit in the light of both a holistic spiritual world and the Bible. This focus on the spiritual world is one of the main reasons for their growth. In other words, the power of the Spirit brings discontinuity to a continuous spirit world. Hollenweger wrote that the basis of early Pentecostalism was “the presence of the living God, the reality of the Holy Spirit, which people looked forward to receiving in conversion, sanctification, the baptism of the Spirit and the gifts of the Spirit.”23 For most Pentecostals today, this central experience involves a belief in the imminence of God (“God is here”) and the power of God’s Spirit. This experience is realised through prayer, worship and gifts of the Spirit. In turn, the empowerment that results bestows the ability to evangelise the whole world, which is one of the reasons for their rapid growth. Evangelism aims at conversion, which means a radical break with the past, and Pentecostals have proclaimed this message for more than a century. Pentecostals are intrinsically and ubiquitously “missionary” by nature.24 Their spiritual experience is the motivation for their mission.

Presuppositions and assumptions are common weaknesses, and we all have them. The challenge facing many western observers of major-ity world Christianity today, especially when African religiosity reappears in western countries in the form of the so-called migrant churches, is to understand the emphasis on the spirit world. Anglican bishop and for-mer missionary in Africa, John V. Taylor, rightly observed in his still most readable and prosaic classic on African religions, The Primal Vision, that the Christianity exported to Africa was a “too-cerebral religion… the white man’s religion… a classroom religion.”25 In contrast, African religions were essentially “spiritual” religions, by which Africans are essentially united with their holistic environment of spiritual and natu-ral forces.26 Taylor warned that in trying to understand African religious symbolism, western observers should be careful not to be “too precisely analytical, for that would transpose the imagery back into European

1 THE SPIRIT OF DIS/CONTINUITY 11

symbols and destroy its meaning.”27 He has accurately described this religious world as having a certain “sense of cosmic oneness”:

… Fundamentally all things share the same nature, and the same interac-tion one upon another… a hierarchy of power but not of being, for all are one, all are here, all are now… No distinction can be made between sacred and secular, between natural and supernatural, for Nature, [Humanity] and the Unseen are inseparably involved in one another in a total community.28

This observation applies to most things “non-western.” In our increas-ingly globalising world, it is too easy to assume that what we are most familiar with is the grid with which to interpret the less familiar or strange. The “global” and the “local,” however, often do collide. Before we can comprehensively understand anything outside this interpretative grid, we should first acknowledge the western tendency to have binary presuppositions that separate “secular” from “sacred,” “religious” or “spiritual,” and so on. When referring to the spirit world of Africans, or a supernatural, irrational, ahistorical religion, then this is usually being described over against the opposites: natural, rational, historical, secular, and so on. This is rarely done outside the western world, except when there needs to be an orientation to a western audience. People through-out the world would much rather emphasise how things belong to each other and that there are common elements in things and events. Wariboko describes how the “ethical vision” of Nigerian Pentecostals contributes to society and politics. Pentecostalism closes the space between the thing-in-itself (the experience of the noumenal) and phe-nomenal knowledge. He states that “the mundane becomes miraculous; the ordinary becomes magical and extraordinary; everything, every event is receptive to divine interpellation.”29 Indeed, the religious world of much of humanity is holistic; everything is simultaneously given “spir-itual” and “secular” meaning without being dichotomised or separated. In the religious world of most societies, all that exists is a present, mate-rial-spiritual, or holistic unity, and in this religious world, the “spirit” (or the “Spirit”) pervades everything. There is even the danger of making a dichotomy between continuity and discontinuity in academic discourse, which I will try to avoid.

Because of the propensity of western observers to filter ecstatic reli-gious phenomena through their own cultural and theological grids,

12 A. H. ANDERSON

they often do not fully understand the thought world behind these beliefs and practices. Fifty years ago, the pioneering Nigerian scholar Bolaji Idowu made the remark that “those who seek to communicate and inculcate the Gospel in Africa” have an important assignment “of understanding Africa and appreciating the fact that they must learn to address Africans as Africans.”30 Grasping this at the beginning of this book is necessary for all that follows. Adam Ashforth, himself a self-con-fessed agnostic and social scientist, brilliantly describes his dilemma in writing about his Soweto friend’s experiences:

There is no pristine vocabulary of difference available to Madumo to describe his experiences with witchcraft that I could translate and then pre-sent to the world in terms familiar to the West; no language to make the words seem unique, or the effort of translation worthwhile. The words, like the worlds, are already pre-translated. And yet there remains some-thing radically and irreducibly different in his experience of these matters from mine, a difference which is not just our peculiar preferences and dis-positions as two particular individuals, nor is it systematizable into some uniform scheme of difference between, say, Africa and the West.31

In some ways, I feel just like this. There is a profound difference between what I write in this book and the experiences related by the people who tell their stories of the African spirit world. I am always disadvantaged by who I am and how I think. I can never reproduce these stories objec-tively or completely accurately and can only hope that a better under-standing of the world that makes the Pentecostal message so attractive and powerful will emerge. In many ways, I am writing about the ways in which people seek after and find God. The human-divine encounter is so complex and dynamic that any attempt to describe and analyse it will be inadequate. Nevertheless, in attempting to delve into the spiritual world that dominates the lives of many Africans and people worldwide, the experiences recounted here must be our starting point. A theology that takes a context seriously also has to take the human experiences in that context seriously, no matter how “different” they may be to the researcher’s own experience. As Swinton and Mowat observe, “The questions that emerge in the light of the human experience of God are often different from those which emerge from the solitude of the aca-demic’s office.”32 It is hoped that this book will illuminate those “differ-ent” kinds of questions.

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sPiritual Power and sPirituality

Because Pentecostals believe that they are solidly “biblical,” most of them resist the idea that there are any pre-Christian religious ideas or “syncretism” in their beliefs and practices. Indeed, they reject such prac-tices as divination, witchcraft, and shamanism while acknowledging the spiritual power behind them that needs to be overcome. Because a spirit-filled world pervades African social consciousness and underlies almost all religious expressions, Pentecostalism acknowledges and addresses needs arising from that spiritual world, often without realising it. It can be con-sidered a culturally and religiously contextual form of Christianity both interacting with and confronting the spiritual world. Culture and religion are intrinsically linked. Both continuity and discontinuity with the old religion are kept in creative tension. Pentecostalism also provides places of spiritual security and personal communities for people unsettled by rapid social and cultural changes, as in the case of the mass urbanisation that has occurred all over Africa. In Pentecostalism, the all-encompassing Spirit is involved in every aspect of life—everything in individual, com-munity, city, or national life has “spiritual” meaning. Canadian theolo-gian Gary Badcock writes of the role of the Spirit in African Christianity. The Spirit is closely related to the “theme of wholeness, in terms of the perception and realisation of the vitalist principle that ultimately binds the whole of society and world together, in the normal expectation of healing and visions, in the simple celebration of life.”33

The so-called contextual theologies are often articulated within parameters of western theology. It was said of Latin America that while liberation theology opted for the poor, the poor there opted for Pentecostalism. The grassroots beliefs and practices of Pentecostalism consist more of a theology from the underside, or an “ordinary theol-ogy,” but a theology practised rather than articulated in written form. Pentecostal churches have made possible a dialogue between holistic spirit-filled worlds and Christianity at an existential level. This is dif-ficult for Westerners to grasp, shaped as they are by rationalism and secularism, so that they “consign demons and deliverance either to a medieval worldview or to the realms of fantasy literature.”34 The west-ern thought world dominated by secularism assumes, as American “Third Wave” leader John Wimber observed, that life goes on “in a universe closed off from divine intervention, in which truth is arrived at through empirical means and rational thought.” He wrote that this

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western materialism “warps our thinking, softening convictions about the supernatural world.” Westerners live as if “material cause-and-effect explains all of what happens to us.” He continued to observe that ration-alism becomes the “chief guide in all matters of life” and anything that cannot be explained “scientifically” is denied.35 Because of this, direct experience of the spiritual world and the “supernatural” is often missing from written theology. Because God belongs exclusively to “spiritual” and “sacred” realms, people can look after everything else, their so-called secular needs, by increasing their knowledge. When Christianity is entan-gled in this materialistic and rationalistic web, it becomes less meaning-ful for most people. As Badcock observes, “the tendency of the Western institutional churches toward a more rationally definable ecclesial life ordered through ministerial office, the Word, and the sacraments tends to be regarded as culturally alien and religiously undesirable” in many other contexts.36

Africa illustrates the tension that arises when Africans have historically regarded western missionaries with their logical presentations of religion as out of touch with the real world of spiritual forces that people experi-ence daily. Their deepest felt needs are not addressed, and their questions remain unanswered. Because the implications of the questions arising from the African spirit world were not fully engaged with by either mis-sionaries or western-educated church leaders, the ability of Christianity to communicate effectively and provide solutions was often hindered. In part, I think this has to do with the failure to recognise the importance of the continuity of the African religious world and the ways in which Christianity is able to transform and confront that world in discontinuity with it. Pentecostalism purports to provide for much more than “spirit-ual” problems. The important role given to divine healing and exorcism, the particular emphasis on the power of the Spirit, as well as the com-prehensive community projects and significant involvement in political and civic organisations and trade unions represent a vigorous spirituality offering help to human problems.

From its beginnings in the revival movements filled with spiritual presence, Pentecostalism arrived in Africa with enthusiastic promises to meet physical, emotional, and spiritual needs. It offered solutions to life’s problems and ways to survive in a threatening and hostile spirit world, whether or not these solutions were ever realised. Missionaries, pastors, prophets, bishops, and evangelists preached that the God who saves the “soul” also heals the body and is a “good God” interested in

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providing answers to human fears and insecurities. They accepted peo-ple who feared witchcraft and evil spirits as having genuine problems, and they conscientiously tried to find solutions. They proclaimed that the God who forgives sin is also concerned about poverty, sickness, bar-renness, witchcraft, oppression by evil spirits, and liberation from all forms of human affliction and bondage. This all-encompassing message made Pentecostalism attractive to many people. The insight of African Christianity is that life is a totality, that there can be no ultimate separa-tion between sacred and secular, and that Christianity can be brought to bear on all human problems. In this day of transnationalism and increas-ing immigration from Africa to the West, this faith might challenge the religious consciousness of the West in the face of increasing secularisa-tion.37 This is a pragmatic, practical, and this-worldly spirituality rather than an esoteric, reflective, and other-worldly one. It is a spirituality that interacts with a world that includes spirits, ancestors, and witchcraft. “Spirituality” here simply means that which pertains to and describes the spiritual or religious experience of people and all that is affected by or affects it. The operative word in this definition is experience. Spirituality can be described as people’s awareness and lived experience of God. Examples of this understanding are found in the religious traditions of Christian and Jewish mysticism, and Islamic Sufism. Pentecostalism with its accompanying “ecstatic” manifestations of the Spirit is another example.

Harvey Cox writes of “the reshaping of religion in the twenty-first century” and “the unanticipated reappearance of primal spirituality in our time.” He describes Pentecostalism as a resurgence of “primal spir-ituality” with three dimensions: (1) primal speech, found in glossolalia (speaking in tongues), “another voice, a language of the heart”; (2) pri-mal piety, found in the resurgence of “trance, vision, healing, dreams, dance, and other archetypal religious expressions”; and (3) primal hope, which he describes as “pentecostalism’s millennial outlook… that a rad-ical new age is about to dawn.” Pentecostalism is “closer to the most sublime forms of mysticism than are the more respectable denominations that sometimes look down on it.” Tongues as a form of “ecstatic utter-ance” are for Cox another example of what links the religions together.38 He admits that instead of the “death of God” and the decline of religion, something quite different was taking place, a “religious renaissance” throughout the world, touching every sort of religious expression, a period of renewed religious vitality. During the 1960s, most western

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scholars missed the fact that not only were people disillusioned with traditional religions, but also disappointed by “the bright promises of science and progress.” Cox remarks that the “kernel of truth” in the “overblown claims” of the “death of God” theologians was that “the abstract deity of western theologies and philosophical systems had come to the end of its run.”39 Cox has rightly described here the continuity that exists between Pentecostalism and the human religious conscious-ness. But in doing so, he runs the risk of advocating an outdated view of religious “primitivism.” He also inadvertently has missed the discontinu-ity that exists simultaneously in the “born again,” radical break with the past that Pentecostalism declares.

Pentecostal spirituality is at an interface between Christianity and other religious worlds, as well as between “historical” and “pentecostal” Christianity. Its worship usually includes a free and spontaneous liturgy that is not hindered by the rigidity that sometimes accompanies older forms of Christian liturgy. This spontaneity also helps remove the sense of foreignness that sometimes accompanies western forms of Christianity in the majority world. A major attraction of Pentecostalism for peo-ple oriented to popular African religiosity is a sympathetic and serious approach by its preachers to African life and culture, fears, and uncer-tainties, and to the world of spirits, magic, and witchcraft. This is a real existential world that is both accepted and confronted. Pentecostalism has a firm commitment to a cohesive community and an offer of full par-ticipation in its community to ordinary people. This study of the rela-tionship between Pentecostal spirituality and the African spirit-filled world is absolutely necessary. Pentecostal theologian Amos Yong writes of the importance of a holistic understanding of human religiosity, and that the Pentecostal and charismatic experience “demands interpretation of the experiential dimension of spirituality over and against an empha-sis on textuality in religious life.”40 Pentecostal spirituality reflects the conviction that God is experienced as real through the Spirit, and this is expressed in liturgies that are primarily oral, narrative, and participa-tory. The Spirit invades all human life. This spirituality and the experien-tial dimension of Pentecostal theology has been amply demonstrated by Wolfgang Vondey.41

The popularity of Pentecostalism in the majority world can also partly be attributed to a particularly contextual spirituality. Pentecostalism pur-ports to provide for much more than “spiritual” problems. Throughout the world, Pentecostalism has been relevant because it has continued

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some pre-Christian religious expressions and ritual symbols and trans-formed them with new meanings. Christianity as a whole has been in both a continuous and discontinuous relationship with other religions for two millennia. This book explores this in a particular African con-text. Yong points out that Pentecostals in the majority world, especially those who are part of Christian minorities, are in constant interaction with other religions. He writes that the experiences of the Holy Spirit common to Pentecostals and Charismatics demonstrate “indubitable similarities across the religious traditions of the world.” This opens up the way to explore “how the Spirit is present and active in other reli-gious traditions.”42 This is what this book aims to do with regard to the presence of the Spirit in the ancient religious beliefs of Africa. In their encounter with African religions, Pentecostals have themselves been chal-lenged and enriched in the content of their proclamation, which without that encounter would have been impoverished and foreign. Pentecostals offer solutions for these problems through the indwelling Spirit; they accept them as real problems, conscientiously attempt to provide expla-nations for them, and expect something to happen to resolve the prob-lems through faith in God. In addition, African beliefs and practices have been transformed so that Christianity is presented as an attractive spir-itual alternative.

Until recently, Pentecostals did not talk about their “spirituality” as it was not part of their religious vocabulary. But “pentecostal spiritu-ality” has become recognised as a distinctive form of Christian spirit-uality that can be described through its various activities and rites.43 A common “pentecostal spirituality,” however, cannot be defended, because Pentecostalism throughout the world is extremely diverse. It is more accurate to say that there are different Pentecostal spirituali-ties with common features, a merging of the “local” with the “global.” Even when scholars describe a singular “pentecostal spirituality” as the experience of God through the Spirit, this transcends cultural bound-aries and provides a genuine and flexible encounter with God that is meaningful in its different cultural expressions. Pentecostal spiritualities are centred on the experience of the Spirit that pervades the whole per-son, makes Jesus Christ more real and relevant to daily life, and inspires testimony, praise, unknown tongues, prophecies, healings, dancing, clapping, joyful singing, and many other expressions that character-ise Pentecostalism worldwide. These spiritualities are expressed in lit-urgies that often take on characteristics of the host culture and are