African Catholicism/God in South Africa:
Donders, Joseph G.
THE CHURCH IN AFRICA AFRICAN CATHOLICISM Essays in Discovery Adrian Hastings Trinity Press International, $14.95, 208 pp. GOD IN SOUTH AFRICA The Challenge of the Gospel Albert Nolan Wm. B....
...But there are points of light...
...In these twelve essays, he blames the Western-dominated Roman Catholic church for this rejection because of its pastoral, liturgical, sacramental, semantic, and iconographic approach...
...African spirituality directly relates to the material and the communal, to flesh and blood, to food and drink, to bodies, and consequently to struggle...
...Hastings's picture is not a pleasant one...
...profoundly other worldly but profoundly this worldly too...
...He recounts how the South African leader and martyr, Steven Biko, in an interview just Become a 1990 Commonweal Associate THE CONSPIRACY OF TESTING...
...Nor can the church distance itself from the conflict, taking a kind of third position from which to negotiate a reconciliation between the two warring parties...
...One of the most striking features of the African concept of religion, in comparison with Western Christianity, is that there is no separation whatsoever between religion and life...
...It implies that God joins the human struggle to attain this redemption, and that God's church cannot be on the side of those who are causing the suffering, and therefore sinning...
...John Pawli-kowski has written: "One does not have to set Jesus over against the whole of Judaism in his time to retain his revolutionary credentials" (Christ in the Light of the Christian-Jewish Dialogue, Paulist Press...
...Nolan, understandably, is so engaged in the South African crisis that he seems to have lost touch with recent biblical scholarship: his assessment and condemnation of the Pharisees in the time of Jesus, for instance, does not take into consideration recent insights into the Pharisaic position and its influence on Jesus...
...Africans welcomed Christ in a "redemp-tionist" and "incarnationist" model with a "quest for healing and community and the strength to carry on through poverty, riot, and famine...
...Both Hastings and Albert Nolan are concerned to explain how this radical embeddedness of Christianity is both the strength of the African peoples'churches and its cross...
...Sin is causing suffering...
...They did so with a wholeheartedness that the harbingers of the Good News were unaccustomed to...
...Hastings, meanwhile, remains a sympathetic but academic outsider...
...From the beginning Africans received the person of Jesus as the presence of God in their midst...
...Sin is not transgressing a law...
...A renewal our church needs...
...B. Eerdmans, $10.95, 242 pp...
...Hastings was once the only white priest in the first African-run black diocese in modern Africa, was then for some years a professor in Zimbabwe, and is now professor of theology at Leeds (England...
...The Catholic church, Hasting contends, stubbornly clings to a type of ordained priesthood that deprives the small African Christian communities of the Eucharist...
...Albert Nolan, who was elected Master General of the Dominican Order in 1983, immediately resigned to return to the struggle in South Africa...
...Like a well-established TV series in which the actors' roles are predictable, Western Christian theology often follows a familiar pattern...
...Nolan explores how this "God-with-us" interpretation radically changes and de-imperializes all other theological notions...
...Salvation is not getting rid of some personal guilt...
...Yet, the strength of Nolan's message makes up for such shortcomings...
...Like Africa itself, the African church is passing through a dark tunnel...
...He also criticizes Rome's rejection of authentic African church leaders, like exiled Zambian Archbishop Milingo, who is now exercising a healing ministry in Rome...
...Both books are thoroughly readable...
...The church should be like Jesus, engaged in the struggle...
...Joseph G. Donders In just over a century Christianity has become as native to large parts of Africa as maize meal or banana beer...
...Nolan certainly has the advantage of being engaged in the struggle from inside...
...It is when new experiences, like the African ones described in these books, are thrown in and made welcome, that horizons widen, Peter's boat is rocked, and Jesus' emancipatory solidarity is again alive among us...
...It is the change of the whole political, economic, and religious system (Luke 4:18-19...
...Nolan documents the spiritual energy in the black communities of his home country...
...Both positions have their strengths and weaknesses...
...before his arrest, torture, and execution, talked with Malusi Mpumlwana "about the role of God in this situation...
...an intriguing comparison by Adrian Hastings, as neither corn nor bananas are indigenous to Africa...
...The African churches were never allowed to be themselves, neither in the early church in Numidia, Ethiopia, and Nubia, nor in our own day in the sub-Saharan regions of East, West, and South Africa...
Vol. 117 • February 1990 • No. 3
