Christianity Will Extinct Soon: A Reply

The leader of Afrikania Mission, His Holiness Atsu Kove, at the National Youth Congress of the Association at Dzodze in the Volta Region of Ghana, said that Christianity will soon run into extinction. He also claimed that most of the miracles performed by pastors are powered by the gods of African traditional religion. The basis of his assumption is that the Bible cannot perform miracle. With this wild prediction, the leader of Afrikania Mission admitted that African traditional religion has significantly declined, following the advent of Christianity and Islam. Possibly, he should have referred to the mission itself, which fell from the centre in the 1980s (when the Mission reached its apogee during the leadership of its founder Osofo Okomfo Vincent Kwabena Damuah, an erstwhile Catholic priest and a member of the National Provisional Defence Council) to the periphery in a democratic Ghana as evidence of how they are losing and continue to lose grounds. We could see right from the narrative that the leader of Afrikania Mission is either confused or refusing to admit that African traditional religion has given way to other religions, and that all efforts at reviving the religion will be mere atavism that will end in fleeting illusions. The attempt to bring back African traditional religion has correspondingly resulted in some of the leadership of Afrikania Mission taking the frontline role in ensuring the continuity of obsolete practices such Trokosi. Trokosi is not just archaic, it also undermines the fundamental rights of ‘virgin’ girls. In the name of resuscitating outmoded and moribund tradition, young girls are denied fundamental rights such as education. In some cases, they are even raped by some ritual functionaries. Trokosi is nothing short of modern slavery. Disgracefully, Afrikania Mission is at the forefront of defending this barbaric practice!

His Holiness did not provide evidence to show that Christianity will cease to exist. Indeed, a few centuries ago some deists and atheists, like Voltaire [the French philosophe], predicted the demise of Christianity. In fact, Voltaire anticipated that the Bible will fall into disuse. The German philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche, made the audacious claim that God is dead. By postulating the demise of God, Nietzsche was not advancing the Christian theology of the vicarious death of Jesus Christ, the saviour of the elect. He was rather positing that man (used in the generic sense) had outgrown his need of God. Again the Jewish-German philosopher, Karl Marx, said religion was the opium of the masses that thrived on people’s false consciousness about life. In the views of Marx, class struggle will be suffocated because religion numbs people’s consciousness to fight against bourgeois oppression. Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis, argued that the notion of God is a figment of imagination, and that advances in science will diminish the belief in God. Freud maintained that God is a fictive creation of man. He reversed the Christian narrative of God creating man.

In the nineteenth century, many scholars, including Max Weber, James Frazer, Emile Durkheim, and Herbert Spencer, predicted the demise of religion. They argued that religion will become irrelevant and defunct as scientific knowledge advances. It must be stated that all these social thinkers targeted Christianity. Their predictions were against Christianity in particular and religion in general. By the middle of the twentieth century, most of the disciples of these social thinkers began revising their note. The theologian and Harvard academic, Harvey Cox, and the sociologist Peter Berger, who had all predicted the decline in religion, revised their position. They recently argued that the idea of religious recession was the greatest myth of the nineteenth twentieth centuries. The resurgence of religion has exposed the lies in the predictions of the naysayers of Christianity (and religions).

As I have stated, the leader of Afrikania Mission did not adduce any evidence to support his assertion. Obviously, he was on a religious platform and needed to assure the adherents of African traditional religion that all hope was not lost in their efforts to consolidate African traditional religion. But we could glean from his assertion that the Bible is incapable of engineering miracle, and that most miracles are done in the name of the gods of African traditional religion to analyse his prediction. In response to this assertion, I want to say a few things about miracles. First, miracles are important, but Christianity is not necessarily defined by miracles. The linchpin of Christianity is the person and work of Jesus Christ. Who Jesus was/is and what He did/does is what defines the Christian faith. In other words, Christianity thrives on Christology and the vicarious death of Christ. Christians believe that Jesus is God, who took upon Himself the human nature (hypostasis union – Philippians 2:6-11) and died on the cross to save the elect of God. If you take this teaching out of Christianity, the whole edifice of the Christian faith will crumble.

It is interesting that all the enemies of Christianity, including other religions, have attacked this centrality of the Christian faith in order to undermine or discredit the faith. The second thing about miracles is that they do not necessarily prove the credibility of Christianity. In fact, throughout the history of the Church, Christians have used many things, inter alia miracles, to prove the credibility of the faith. But Christians have not made fetish of miracles. Jesus told His disciples that they should glory not in the miracles they perform, but rather that they had been saved (the sinner becoming a friend of God is the greatest miracle in Christianity) [Luke 10:2]. But that said, I do not want to wade into the debate over the continuity or cessation of miracles. I reserve that for another article. But suffice it to be said that while Christianity is not bereft of miracles, miracles do not constitute the centrality of the Christian faith.

I must point out that in African traditional religion, the deities are not existentially important. In fact, traditionalists are pragmatic and utilitarian in offering cultic attention to the deities. A deity who fails to serve the needs of devotees is thrown away. It is for this reason that many deities in traditional African societies have ceased to be important in the religious sphere of traditionalists. Decades ago, some deities like Tigari and Antoa were very important in the Ghanaian religious sphere. Today, these deities have lost their stint. They are not as popular as they used to be. It is either they have lost their prowess in mitigating the affairs of men or they have all together become irrelevant in the schemes of the modern world. In my own village, Assin Bosomadwe, the tutelary deity, Bosomadwe Akwasi, once powerful, has lost his prowess. He has actually been forced out of the village. Whatever it is, deities in African traditional religions depend on their devotees to survive. On the contrary, Christ remains the fount and foundation of Christianity. The power of Christ remains efficacious as it was over 2000 years ago. Many people, including myself, continue to attest to the saving and ever abiding power of Jesus Christ. He is the same yesterday, today and forever (Hebrews 13:8).

The last issue I want to address is the supposed ‘foreigness’ of Christianity in Africa. I have addressed this issue elsewhere, but for the purposes of some of my readers, I will just scratch the surface of it. First, Christianity is foreign to all cultures, including the Jewish culture. There is no denying that Christianity used Jewish cultural ethos to present the message of Christ, but the centrality of Christianity – which is the virgin birth (incarnation of God), death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus – was foreign to the Jews. No wonder the Jews attacked Jesus Christ and His disciples. Till date, the central message of Jesus Christ remains strange to the ears of many Jews. The Greeks found the message of Christianity to be inane. In Europe, Christianity was foreign to European culture. From this perspective, Christianity was foreign to Africans as well. But in terms of the historicity of the development of the faith, it will be wrong and ahistorical to assert that Christianity is foreign to Africans. In fact, Jesus Himself was in Africa. He was salvaged by Africa when His life as a child was under threat (I guess God the Father was communicating to Africa); the person who carried the cross of Christ, as Christ headed to the place of crucifixion was Simon from Cyrenaica (present day Libya); on the day of Pentecost, when the Church was formally birthed, there were Africans around, and finally, the Ethiopian eunuch had stint with the gospel in the first century.

The Old Testament, which forms the first part of the Christian scripture, was first translated from Hebrew to Greek in Egypt (Alexandria, Africa). Many of the early ‘doctors’ and theologians of the Christian faith, who shaped Christian dogmas were Africans. The names of Augustine, Tertulian Clement, Athanasius, and Origen, readily come to mind. Christianity in short was in Africa before it was in many European countries. It was in the fifteenth century that European missionaries decided to carry the Gospel to the hinterlands of Africa. But it was in the nineteenth century that they made major impact. Even so, Africans were not passive recipients of the faith. Historians of the Church in Africa, including Sundkler Bengt G.M. Kalu Ogbu, Adriaan Hastings, John Kofi Agbeti, John Samuel Pobee, Elizabeth Issichei, Lamin Sanneh, and Kwame Bediako have rightly pointed out the instrumentality of Africans in planting the Gospel in Africa. In fact, where the missionaries failed to make any impact, Africans succeeded. The works of Simon Kimbangu, William Wade Harris, Sampson Oppong and John Swatson made Christianity more relevant to the African religio-cultural milieu than the European missionaries. The contributions of these Africans to the missionary enterprise has been acknowledged by many other scholars in Church history. But for these Africans, Christianity would not have survived in the hinterlands of Africa.

The case of the so-called demise of Christianity in the Global North has been used as evidence to support the supposed decline or future death of Christianity. Yes, it is true that institutional religious practices, such as church attendance, are in decline, but it is not true that Christianity has lost its value in the Global North. In fact, the idea that Christianity has lost its influence on many Euro-Americans was part of the package of propaganda that predicted the demise of Christianity. But many Euro-Americans, though may not belong to an institutionalised church, do claim that they owe their values to the Christian faith. I will argue that secular ethics is nothing but de-Christianisation of Christian ethics. I must also state that Christianity has never had successful Christendom. There has never been a time in history where ninety percent of the members of a particular country accepted Christianity. In fact, even in the early nineteenth century when Christianity was said to be the predominant religion in Western Europe, the assertion revolved around quantitative statistics as opposed to qualitative analysis. I don’t think that Christianity is really in decline in the Global North. I must also point out that Christianity grows when the faith appears to be in recession!

From my analysis, it is clear that Christianity will never cease to make impact on the lives of people until the second advent of Christ. Christendom is a myth that when depended upon would make us oblivious to the nature of the Christian faith. The assumption that Christianity was in decline constituted part of Christian propaganda in the Global North to inspire religious revivalism. The Church of Jesus Christ will march on, and the gate of hell shall not prevail against it!

Satyagraha
Charles Prempeh ([email protected]), African University College of Communications, Accra