Reflecting on another summer in East Africa, I am reminded that there are ghettos, and there are ghettos.

Most of the African news that reaches our Western evangelical ghettos is bad - very bad.  In 1994, a million murdered in Rwanda in 100 days - more people slaughtered more rapidly in the Rwandan genocide than at any other time in history.  Forty thousand bodies flowed down the Kagera River into Uganda's Lake Victoria.  In 1983, the Second Sudanese Revolution yielded 2 million Sudanese dead, and another 4 million driven into refuge camps.  Since 2003, according to the Coalition for International Justice, the Darfur region of Western Sudan has seen another 400,000 killed in conflicts.  Numbers are hard to calculate because the dead are dropped down wells, thrown into mass graves, or burned.  Just in recent years, over 2 million Sudanese have been displaced by war.

Most recently, the violence following Kenyan elections killed thousands and has left Kenya balkanized and ready to burst at any time.  Nairobi, Kenya remains the center of the worldwide HIV/AIDS pandemic.  Drought and famine have followed political upheaval, all pressing a faltering Kenyan economy into exhaustion.  Many millions, and growing numbers, live in economic, social, and political ghettos.

Robert Mugabe doesn't look like he's going to give up power in Zimbabwe.

Post-apartheid South Africa looks like a single party version of the same old story - 2010 World Cup or not.

As I write, Christians and Muslims are still fighting in the Middle Belt that cuts Nigeria into the arid Islamic north and the Christian jungle to the south.  Major skirmishes are reported in the north over the last few days.

But the news is not all bad ... there is really good news from Africa.

The really good African news is about Africa's embrace of the good news.

From our Western evangelical ghettos, Americans continue to bemoan the decline of Christianity in the modern (now post-modern) age.  Therein, Americans think that Christianity is primarily a Western European phenomenon.  But American public opinion is parochial in the extreme - ghetto trash talk.

The early church was a Near Eastern rather than a European creation.  Christianity retreated into the ghetto of Western Europe only because of the onslaught of Islam.

The slur evidenced in Western evangelical ghetto trash talk - modern mainstream Protestant public discourse in America - may have been true in 1550, but it ceased to be true long ago, and now bears no resemblance to reality.  Western evangelicals haven't heard, and both conservatives and liberals continue to believe the slur is basically correct.

Here is some really good news.

In the modern era, nowhere has the church's growth been more impressive than in Africa.  Since the de-colonization in the early 1960's, African Christianity has grown spectacularly.  The growth rate has held since the 1980s - an estimated 16,500 Africans have been converted to Christianity each day.

If worldwide growth rates persist, by the year 2050 only about 20 % of the world's Christians will be non-Hispanic Whites.  Soon the phrase "a White Christian" may sound like a curious oxymoron, as mildly surprising as a "Swedish Buddhist."

The really good news is not just that Africa is accepting the good news.  It's not just that Africa is becoming Christian.  It's the kind of Christian that Africa is becoming.

Indeed, Africa is teaching Western evangelical ghetto dwellers how to do Christian theology without the confining restrictions of the Enlightenment.

Western Enlightenment Christianity grew in part from scientific discoveries that challenged the medieval view of the universe, a view essentially based on the Bible.  For example, Dante's cosmology was biblical cosmology, and Copernicus and Galileo not only challenged tradition but revelation itself.

Suspicion of the Bible and a dualism flowed from the Enlightenment.  Dualists used the concepts of "limited scope" and "accommodation" to neutralize Scripture.  Spinoza's work shows that the dualism that entered into biblical interpretation with Galileo had flowered in a more thoroughgoing dualism, a dualism of the Bible versus everything else.  Modern Western Christianity accommodates itself to this dualism, happy to have a cubicle where it can exist in self-absorption without worrying about what's going on in the other cubicles that surround it.

Africans don't believe a word of it.  Africa has never had an Enlightenment.

Many African Christians have suffered intensely for the faith.  Most live in economic and social ghetto conditions that Americans would not, or could not, tolerate.  Africans have much to teach us about the cross, about contentment and joy in deprivation, about sacrifice and firmness in the face of pressure.

African Christians can also teach us theology.

Kenyan theologian John Mbiti attributes the quality of African Christianity in large part to the revolutionary impact of vernacular Bible translations.  Readers check the teaching and practice of religious institutions against the scriptural standard.

Africans read the Bible in a way that is free of the rationalisms of modern method.  They are not content to read the Bible as a source of doctrine, or an account of ancient history, or even as a practical manual that tells them what to do.  For African believers, the Bible is a book to inhabit, a narrative to participate in.  They recognize that they are part of the story the Bible tells.

African pastors preach nearly as much from Old Testament texts as from New, reversing centuries of Western evangelical embarrassment about the primitiveness of the Old Testament.  Africans reach for John or Romans to discuss Christian faith, but they are exuberantly fond of Hebrews and James.  For Africans, Hebrews best integrates the Old Testament with the New.  James imitates the style of the wisdom literature of the Old Testament, which strongly resembles traditional African proverbial wisdom.  "Jewish" Matthew is the most beloved of the Gospels, and Proverbs and Ecclesiastes are very popular books in African Christianity.

Africans are not the least embarrassed by the world picture of the Bible - a world of angels and demons, of miracles and exorcisms, of the virgin birth and life after death, of heaven and hell.  It's their world.  Africans see and hear things in the biblical texts that are lost to jaded post-Christian readers in Western evangelical ghettos.

Africans can teach Western evangelicals the sheer value of Scripture.

For Africans, Jesus is a liberator, a deliverer who delivers his people from real fears and dangers.  Jesus is preeminently Christus Victor, not only on the cross and in his resurrection, but throughout his life.  The Gospels are not Passion narratives with long introductions, but record the triumph of Jesus, culminating in his death and resurrection.

Africans have no use for the pansy Jesus of the Western evangelical ghettos.  They rightfully want a savior with the testosterone to fight for them.  No pale Galileans need apply.

Western evangelicals live a life softened by technological redeemers.  Africans have few technical protections, and in the daily threats of life they turn to Jesus.  Jesus saves the poor, makes the corn grow in the fields, protects the laboring mother, tears down the barriers that divide men and makes them family.  For Africans, the salvation that Jesus brings is thoroughly "this-worldly."

Dualistic Western Christianity cannot answer African questions.  African theology is instinctively, fundamentally, and biblically anti-dualistic.

Salvation is comprehensive, practical, and has a "world-affirming" force.  This truth has been and must be learned from Scripture - not likely from Western missionaries, whose theology, in large measure, continues to focus narrowly on souls to the detriment of total welfare, bodily and spiritual.

African conceptions of faith bear out a broad understanding of Jesus' saving work.  African faith is courage in the face of excruciating circumstances.  Faith is never simply assent to doctrine, but a living active stance toward all of life.

Western evangelical exaltation of man has entailed an essential rejection of the God of Scripture.  For Africans, there is no competition.  The exaltation of God is simultaneously the fulfillment of human aspirations.

African theology is authentic biblical theology in that it is a task of a community who share in a common context committed to bringing the gospel into contact with the questions and issues of their context.

Africa has taught the church before.  Western theology is, in fact, undergirded historically by an African export, as is much of Eastern Christianity.  What would Christianity be without Hippo and Carthage, and, on the other end of the continent, Alexandria?  What would Christianity be without Cyprian and Tertullian, without Augustine and Origen?  Not much ... as is seen today in our Western evangelical ghettos.

Love,

Jamie