Page 1 of
2 BOOK
REVIEW A new Jerusalem in sub-Saharan
Africa The New Faces of
Christianity: Believing the Bible in the Global
South by Philip Jenkins
Reviewed by
Spengler
Westerners
have spent the past 400 years in a grand effort to
make the world seem orderly and reasonable
without, however, quite suppressing the
strangeness and wonder of life. Now come the new
Christians of the Southern Hemisphere, who
confound enlightened Western prejudice.
The Bible, and above all the Hebrew Bible,
speaks immediately to
the
new Christians of the global South precisely
because their lives are fragile and fraught with
danger, Philip Jenkins argues in his most recent
book, unlike the complacent and secure
Euro-American Christians who find disturbing the
actual Bible of blood and redemption. Southern
Christians will dominate the religion within a
generation or two and, if Jenkins is right, will
bring it closer to its original purpose and
character.
This observation makes
Professor Jenkins' new volume indispensable not
only for its understanding of global change, but
also for its understanding of what Christianity
implies. Southern
Christians hold to biblical authority not because
they are backward, but because they have embraced
the Bible for what it really is. Euro-American
Christians who interpret Scripture to suit their
evolved cultural tastes are
soon-to-be-ex-Christians.
Jenkins
chronicled the shift in the Christian center of
gravity to the Southern Hemisphere in a justly
celebrated 2002 volume, The Next
Christendom. Here he addresses the content of
Southern Christianity, with a reportorial
brilliance that maddens as much as it informs. His
acute powers of observation run ahead of his
sagacity as a theologian.
For example, he
appears to believe that the uncertainty of African
life makes the Bible more credible. But it cannot
be the fragility of individual life that
leads Africans to the Bible - for their lives
always have been fragile - but rather the death of
tribal existence. The intrusion of the global
marketplace upon traditional cultures makes
individual life less uncertain, most obviously
through the introduction of antibiotics. The
child-mortality rate in sub-Saharan Africa has
fallen by a third in the past generation, for
example, despite the AIDS epidemic. [1] But the
same global forces that make individual existence
more secure destroy the basis of tribal existence.
Most irksome among Jenkins' omissions is a
failure to explain the often brutal antagonism
between Christianity and Islam throughout Africa.
Where he compares the two religions, Jenkins
invariably sees common features rather than
fundamental differences - yet the vast amounts of
Christian blood shed by African Muslims suggest
that a great gulf is fixed between the two faiths.
Before addressing the issue of Islam, though, it
is helpful to begin with the strange African
affinity for ancient Israel.
The collapse
of Africa's tribal existence explains the
improbable fact that Africans of such disparate
ethnicities embrace the Hebrew Bible, that
is, Israel itself. Western Christians tend "to
associate the Old Testament with those aspects of
Christianity that they find uncongenial, including
the stories of Creation and the Fall, the vision
of God as angry judge rather than loving parent,
the justification of war and ethnic cleansing, and
the pervasive legalism", as Jenkins describes the
"popular stereotypes" of the Hebrew Bible. Western
liberals, Jenkins notes shrewdly, make concessions
to Jewish sensibilities in defense to the
continuing presence of Jews, but intensely dislike
the Jewish Bible.
African Christians have
no reason at all to placate the Jewish community,
for there is none in most African countries, but
love the Hebrew Bible. "Cultural affinities with
the biblical world lead African and Asian
Christians to a deep affection for the Old
Testament as their story, their book ... While the
vast majority of modern Africans have no direct
experience of nomadism or polygamy, at least they
can relate to the kind of society in which such
practices were commonplace," Jenkins writes. This
is invidious condescension, presuming that
backward and ignorant Africans like the Bible
because of merely contingent similarities with
their own lives - exactly what the liberal critics
of African "fundamentalism" maintain.
A
more convincing explanation of African
identification with the Old Testament is that
African Christians identify with ancient Israel
because they desire to become part of the People
of God, as tribal society disintegrates. This is
all the more remarkable given the prevailing
anti-colonialist sentiment in Africa, which
sympathizes with the Palestinian cause against the
present State of Israel. The Book of Joshua,
recounting ancient Israel's violent conquest of
Canaan, is the most problematic book of the Bible
for some African Christians.
The
disintegration of tribal society provides part of
the explanation. Another, and more profound,
reason for African affinity to the Old Testament
may be the influence of North American evangelical
currents in African conversion. The missionaries
sent by colonial powers - Catholic, Anglican, and
to a lesser extent Lutheran - have been overtaken
by denominations of North American origin, notably
the Pentecostals, who now number 350 million
worldwide. US evangelical Christianity, I have
tried to show, is unique in its identification
with Israel, for Americans selected themselves out
from among the nations, and crossed the oceans to
come to a New Land in emulation of the Tribes of
Israel crossing the Jordan into Canaan.
Evangelical Christianity centers on the rebirth of
the individual out of his sinful, Gentile origin
into Israel, into the People of God, by the
miracle of Christ's blood. The prestige of
mplies. Southern
Christians hold to biblical authority not because
they are backward, but because they have embraced
the Bible for what it really is. Euro-American
Christians who interpret Scripture to suit their
evolved cultural tastes are
soon-to-be-ex-Christians. 
