2. Bible in African Christian Religion: Hearing the Word
Given the limited scope of this essay, I wish to highlight the significant dimensions of this informal multiple channels of theological education and communication today in Africa especially the use the Bible. One of the significant findings of the Bible in Africa Project of 1991-1994 is the striking relationship between African reading of the Bible, and the performance of the biblical texts in worship and in the formation of African Christian consciousness. The Bible remains the most important and most widely circulated Christian literature in Africa. Lamin Sanneh, Kwame Bediako, Justine Ukpong and Andrew Walls are some of the scholars who have studied the impact of bible translation in the successful transmission of the Christian in Africa in both missionary and post-missionary era. Philip Jenkins reports on the diffusion of the Bible in Africa, “Today, at least one book of the Bible is available for approximately 650 of Africa’s 2000 languages, and 150 languages have complete Bibles. And a translated Bible defies conventional images of missionary imperialism. Once the Bible is in a vernacular, it becomes the property of that people.”[4] Why has the Bible become so popular in Africa?
There are five reasons which I identify through my own pastoral work, social ministry, research, and ethnographic study on why the Bible is the most important Christian literature in Africa today: first, the biblical words spread rather quickly among Africans because the Bible was translated into indigenous languages so they are attracted to the Word of life which they could hear in their own language and profess in their own voices. Second, the biblical words and images captured the imagination of Africans because the stories especially from the OT and the Gospels and the Acts have multiple parallels with Africa’s own cultural, religious and spiritual imagination and ritual processes. Third, the narrative techniques employed in the biblical account—parables, metaphors, stories, genealogies, hagiographies, biographies, communal experience, appeal to the natural world as sites for divine encounter and channels for the miraculous and sublime (eg. Mountains, trees, rivers, streams, animals etc) applied also to Africa’s own religious experience, grammar of assent, and plausibility structure. Fourth, is the use of memory as a channel for the transition and retention of the biblical texts which leveraged Africa’s own memorial culture and orality in communication in most African traditional societies.
However, by far the most important factor in the importance of the Bible for the momentum of Christian expansion in Africa, beyond the inner power of the Word as inspired by the Holy Spirit, is as Jenkins points out that, “biblical ideas and texts spread by the methods appropriate to oral cultures.”[5] Most African Christians still receive the Word of God not as a written text, but a proclaimed Word mediated through preaching, songs, and liturgical dance. The missionary mandate ‘go and proclaim the good news’ which emphasizes oral communication and transmission according to this research is still the primary form of sharing the Word of God in Africa. In most instances, hearing the Word in oral communication for non-literal respondents, who were interviewed in the Bible in Africa Research, produced greater passion and purpose in their faith journey than reading the biblical text. This is because oral communication was seen as having a direct and immediate pneumatic impact, relating more to the spiritual power of God’s word as conveyed and received through hearing. It is by hearing the Word of God that people are inspired to prayer, praise, and praxis in most African churches. How this Word operates in the lives of the Christian in bringing about faith and its fruits seem to me very important as a phenomenological data for doing theology.
The Word was power not because it was written but because African auditors were moved by the power of the Word which was received through proclamation, preaching, performance and ritualization of the Word in Christian worship. Here researchers noted the importance of the spoken word in African culture and how it plays an important part in the direct connection Africans make with the Word of God and its power for blessing and curse. The revealed Word was powerful not because it is written but because it was heard, performed, and lived. Oral communication is valid in the church as a form of witnessing because it is the aesthetics of action, which is credible because its evidential import in performance.
When applied to the biblical text, as Paul Bere argues, we notice that the oral finality of the biblical text imposed some formal constraints upon the written text. In this regard, rendition in textual form does not nullify the value of memory or orality. This is why Christians speak of ‘Word of God’ rather than ‘text of God or literature of God or book of God.’ What this means for African Christians and theologians, following Bere’s argument, is that the authorial audience is made up of readers who are first hearers. Both the readers of the written text or hearers of the Word proclaimed orally rely on the memory bank of traditions and witnesses or doers of the Word in order to harvest the message communicated by God. Both must hear and respond to God’s Word proclaimed, spoken to their souls and written on the hearts in order to enter into the kingdom of God. This is why traditionally the concern of Christians has always been to hear God’s word; to listen to God. In this regard, Bere notes, when it comes to the biblical tradition, orality and aurality cannot be separated in both written and unwritten communication of God’s Word.[6] This is particularly significant in many non-literate contexts in Africa where many elderly women for instance who never read the Bible can reproduce the texts, stories, parables and important events in the Bible because they have retained these stories in their memories and live it in their lives, and read their world through these texts.
David M. Carr in his important work Writing on the Tablet of the Heart: Origins of Scripture and Literature shows how the formation of the biblical canons took place as a movement from oral to written literature and through written literature to oral and daily performance of the Word. There is always a healthy relation between hearing the Word, and the aesthetics of the Word as performance in the life of the community. Car notes, for instance, that even the rabbis felt that documenting the oral traditions into written form might close the ever-expanding revelation of the footprints of God in oral communication which constantly yields new dimensions and new information which cannot be found in a fixed text.[7] Another point brought out by Carr which relates to the African experience is that the use of oral communication in the OT was a form of cultural resistance to hegemonic political and cultural forces especially if the rendition in textual form was done in a foreign language as is the case in Africa before translation into vernacular. Even today in many churches, the Word of God is first proclaimed to the community in English and then translated to the community in vernacular even in rural communities. According to Carr the subsequent rendition into text of the oral tradition in the OT, for instance in Hebrew language, was for the Jews a form of cultural resistance to corruption of the Word if a foreign language is used to retain this divine communication. They thus rejected that the medium for conserving the sacred story of the histories and foundation of God’s people should be a foreign language. Carr argues that the user of oral communication is often forced to resist alien linguistic forms in order to capture original experiences in the form in which they occurred through a return to autochtonous linguistic forms. For many Jewish scholars, he argues, the LXX had been tainted by Hellenistic influence. Thus there was an insistence on the return to the memory bank, the store house of indigenous language and expressions to reinforce the images, forms, and cultural elements of the cultures of ancient Israel.
Oral communication in Biblical reading in Africa and in these informal theological productions is also subversive of methodologies of theology, which follow certain pre-established canons of orthodoxy, Northern epistemology and methodologies of research, logic, styles of writing and standardized ecclesial language. There are challenges of translation and exploitation which may occur if there is a power and social distance in terms of the narrative language between the receptors of the oral text (in mother tongue) and the receptors of the written text in a foreign language. This has been one of the main issues in adopting modern African literary corpus in theology. This has also been identified as a major challenge to African literature by Kenyan novelist, Ngûgî wa Thiong’o.[8]
Thus, despite the emergence of textual documentation, oral communication still is the commonest means of communication Christian faith in Africa because of the following reasons adduced by Irele adduced with regard to African literature in general: (i)‘the oral text is almost never fully determined beforehand, given once and for all as is the case in written literature’; (ii) ‘an oral text is actualized in oral performance and is thus open and mobile’ and can be given new meaning as ‘the verbal content of a written work is perpetually recreated, modified as the occasion demands, and given a new accent’ by different hearers and performers.[9]
[4] Philip Jenkins, The New Faces of Christianity: Believing the Bible in the Global South. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006, 24.
[5] Philip Jenkins, 27.
[6] See Paul Bere, “Auditor in Fabula-La Bible dans son Contexte oral: Le cas du Livre de Ruth” in Journal of the Old Testament Society of South Africa, vol 19, no. 3 ( 2006): 1089-1105.
[7] Writing on the Table of the Heart: Origins of Scripture and Literature, 277. See Birger Gerhardsson, Memory and Manuscript: Oral Tradition and Written Transmission in Rabbinic Judaism and Early Christianity. Grand Rapids, Michigan: W.E.B Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1998, 19-42.
[8] See his “Imperialism of Language: English a Language of the World?” in Ngûgî wa Thiong’o, Moving the Center: The Struggle for Cultural Freedoms. Oxford: James Currey, 1994, 30-41.
[9] Abiola Irele, 80.