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Apologia Report 12:25
July 14, 2007
Subject: Word-Faith in Africa, growing cause for concern
In this issue:
HISTORY - lessons from conflict between apologists and historians
WORD-FAITH MOVEMENT - mildly critical overview of movement's influence in Africa offers premonitions of potential disaster
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HISTORY
"'I'm Just Making a Point': Francis Schaeffer and the Irony of Christian Scholarship" by Barry Hankins -- an instructive overview of the protracted and very public disagreement between the Schaeffers (Francis and his son, Franky) and various evangelical historians.
Hankins begins with an illustration of what was at the root of the debate. "In the 1970s, Christian philosopher and Wheaton professor Arthur Holmes attended a Francis Schaeffer lecture during which Schaeffer gave his rather standard critique of existentialism, stressing how it was the antithesis of Christianity. ...
"Taken aback by Schaeffer's oversimplified portrayal of existentialism, Holmes caught up with Schaeffer outside the lecture hall and asked if he were aware of the more positive existentialist philosophers such as Martin Buber or Gabriel Marcel, or some philosophy of language that dealt with classical philosophical questions, as opposed to just defining words, as Schaeffer had characterized the philosophy of language. Schaeffer answered, 'Oh yes, but I'm just making a point.'"
Hankins asks "what kind of model of Christian intellectual life did Schaeffer provide, and how did he react when some of the Christian scholars he had inspired took issue with him? In the early 1980s we get a glimpse of this...."
After a concise biographical sketch of Francis Schaeffer's life, Hankins explains how Schaeffer "became known popularly as the most influential evangelical intellectual of the [1970s] era. ...
"In an era when evangelical denominations and colleges were still under the fundamentalist influence of cultural separatism, Schaeffer spoke a message of cultural and intellectual engagement that was unlike anything most college-age young people had heard, and it was invigorating. He became an inspiration for many evangelical college kids to go to graduate school and become Christian scholars, and that is when some of the trouble began for Schaeffer. ... Few who studied philosophy, to take a primary example from Schaeffer's line of thinking, could accept his view that the move toward secular humanism began with Aquinas and was completed by Kierkegaard. And this is to say nothing of Schaeffer's pitting the Renaissance and Reformation against each other, as if the former were the complete antithesis of the latter."
Hankins tells how the debate began in conjunction with Schaeffer's final book, A Christian Manifesto [1]. Christian legal expert John Whitehead's substantial involvement in co-authoring the text is described. Hankins notes that "Both Schaeffer and Whitehead had been influenced on this issue [Christian influences on the founding of America] by the Christian Reconstructionist founder, Rousas John Rushdoony. ... [W]hile Whitehead and Schaeffer were both enamored with Rushdoony's argument for a Christian-based America, neither accepted Rushdoony's call for the reinstitution of the Old Testament as the law of the land in America. Schaeffer, for his part, saw this as part of Rushdoony's postmillennialism, which as a fundamentalist Schaeffer rejected."
As Hankins details, the response of Schaeffer to the criticism of historians regarding Christian Manifesto begins with correspondence from George Marsden. This blows up when Kenneth Woodward gets wind of the conflict and writes it up in Newsweek and others get involved as a result. A lengthy description of the communication meltdown between the Schaeffers and Marsden as well as historian Mark Noll follows.
The next verbal bomb to explode was Franky's book, Bad News for Modern Man [2], "lambasting Christian colleges, evangelical publishers, and Christian scholars, Marsden and Ronald Wells by name, attacking their motives as well as their interpretations. ...
"The degree to which the Schaeffers found Noll's and Marsden's interpretation of American history disconcerting paled when compared to their reaction to Ronald Wells's interpretation of the Reformation. Wells published in the Reformed Journal a review of Christian Manifesto entitled, 'Francis Schaeffer's Jeremiad,' and a year later followed with an article called, 'Whatever Happened to Francis Schaeffer?,' a clear play on Schaeffer's Whatever Happened to the Human Race? [3]. Having spent time at L'Abri [Schaeffer's intellectually focused youth ministry in Switzerland] in the 1960s, Wells was put off by Schaeffer's seeming move to the Christian Right [in his promoting political activism]. Like most Christian scholars, Wells had deep reservations about the details of Schaeffer's interpretation of western intellectual history, and he called parts of Manifesto 'sophomoric bombast and careless simplicity.' Wells critiqued Schaeffer's argument that pitted the Renaissance and Reformation against each other and Schaeffer's contention that humanism was a product of the Renaissance but had no part in the Reformation. ...
"Noll, Marsden, and fellow Christian historian Nathan Hatch believed the interpretation of America's Christian past sufficiently important to warrant their co-authoring The Search for Christian America [4], which was a book-length response to Schaeffer's, Whitehead's, and the Christian Right's views."
Hankins makes some interesting observations in his concluding remarks: "The argument that twentieth-century American culture was nearly monolithic in its secular humanistic base leaves too much unexplained to be helpful; interpreting America's founding as Christian-based does likewise. Still, for all the criticism of Schaeffer's Christian Right activism and the interpretation of American history that facilitated it, Noll to this day believes that on balance Schaeffer's influence has been mostly positive within evangelicalism, because he called people to think in Christian ways about all of life and culture. ...
"Schaeffer's training and early career in [Carl] McIntire's brand of militant fundamentalism had left him ill-prepared to deal with complexity and nuance and to acknowledge the ways in which Christian influence can be mixed together with, and diluted by, secular forces that are rather friendly to the faith. ...
"Most Christian historians readily appropriate Schaeffer's call to take matters of mind and culture seriously, and to do so from a Christian perspective. At the same time, however, they reject his call to use their scholarship to make a point in the culture wars. Instead, Christian historians seem to believe they are called to a form of faithful scholarship that, rather than making a point, seeks to tell a story that is often riddled with complexity and paradox. Such scholarship may be of only marginal value in winning a culture war, but we are called to be faithful, not victorious." Fides et Historia, 39:1 - 2007, pp15-34.
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WORD-FAITH MOVEMENT
"Gospel Riches: Africa's rapid embrace of prosperity Pentecostalism provokes concern - and hope" by Isaac Phiri and Joe Maxwell -- focuses on "sub-Saharan Africa, where prosperity-tinged Pentecostalism is growing faster not just than other strands of Christianity, but than all religious groups, including Islam. Of Africa's 890 million people, 147 million are now 'renewalists' (a term that includes both Pentecostals and charismatics), according to a 2006 Pew Forum on Religion and Public life study. They make up more than a fourth of Nigeria's population, more than a third of South Africa's, and a whopping 56 percent of Kenya's."
Phiri and Maxwell believe that "wholesale dismissals of African renewalism as a gospel of materialism - one made possible by Elmer GantryÐstyle hucksterism and backwater superstition, perhaps - are short-sighted, says J. Lee Grady, editor of Charisma magazine. 'Many of the renewalist leaders in Nigeria preach prosperity as a biblical concept based on the promises of Deuteronomy,' he says, 'proclaiming that when people serve Jesus Christ and renounce other gods, God blesses their nation and economy.' ...
"The worst brand of African prosperity teaching is, perhaps unsurprisingly, an American export. Experts cite various reasons for the spread of this kind of renewalism, better known as health-and-wealth, including:
* - American lifestyles have led African believers to equate Christian faith with wealth.
* - Traditional African values often link material success and spiritual success.
* - The African 'Big Man' ideal honors rich, powerful leaders such as prosperity preachers.
"And then there is television. ...
"In Zambia, only three stations click on: MUVI TZ, which airs reruns of U.S. shows and old movies; ZNBC, the Zambian National Broadcasting Company; and TBN [Trinity Broadcasting Network]. ...
"'People turn it on and assume that TBN is American Christianity, and Americans know everything, so why not listen to it?' says Bonnie Dolan, founder and director of Zambia's Center for Christian Missions, a Reformed school for pastors. '[W]e have Zambians looking to the West for direction, and they associate TBN with the West. And it's killing our churches.' ...
"In the 1930s, Kenneth Hagin added [E. W.] Kenyon's teachings to his Pentecostal beliefs to create what would become the Word-Faith movement." Phiri and Maxwell explain that "health-and-wealth teaching (holding that material blessing is the gospel, or at least a key component of the gospel) and its pernicious Word-Faith cousin (holding that spoken words of faith create such blessing) have now infected African Christianity.
"About 15 years ago, Hagin, his son Kenneth Hagin Jr., and Kenneth Copeland visited AICs in Nigeria. 'They did teaching missions all over Nigeria, teaching the prosperity gospel,' says Vinson Synan, Regent University emeritus professor of theology. 'Churches exploded after that into millions of members.' ...
"'[The prosperity gospel] is the most sweeping movement within the continent of Africa,' says Dolan." Phiri and Maxwell caution that "weighing the movement requires context. 'Prosperity [for most Africans] means to have a roof over their heads and clothes,' says Regent's Synan. Pastors inspire followers with the admirable 'idea that if they serve God, don't throw their money away, and don't live immoral lives, they can and will prosper.'"
As an example of how far out of balance things can get, Phiri and Maxwell present Zambian pastor George Mbulo, who "is building a $320 million campus outside Lusaka, Zambia, for his 700-member church, but does not yet know how he will pay for it. 'I know that God will fund it,' he says.
"If that sounds like a contradiction, it is one that many Africans feel. They want to walk in financial faith, but sense it can be an unclear proposition. They bounce between churches, parsing an array of messages on money and belief."
Phiri and Maxwell conclude: "Africa's young renewalist church is discovering that the line between preaching hope and turning it into an idol can be a fine one. The love of the rest of the body of faith will help it find its way." Christianity Today,ÊJul '07, pp26-33. <http://tinyurl.com/2aqnxt>
To better understand how this plays out on the ground, take a look at Uganda (which in 2007 alone has suffered visits from Morris Cerullo, Benny Hinn, and Creflo Dollar). Cynicism and scandal have set in among the numerous local imitators of American Word-Faith televangelists, as is sadly apparent in articles like The God industry, part 1 of a current investigative series by a leading local newspaper which begins: "THEY promise everything under the sun: visas, jobs, partners, wealth, you name it. All one has to do is donate generously to God, through His middleman - the pastor. It is called 'sowing'. But are people reaping?
"Operating undercover over a period of three months, [our] investigator discovered that hundreds of desperate Ugandans are losing their property to pastors who promise to solve their problems. By the end of the assignment the reporter had parted with sh200,000 and was expected to hand over a car for God to answer her prayers.
"After failing to solve their problems through conventional channels, desperate people infected with HIV/AIDS, childless couples, unemployed youths, and frustrated businesspeople turn to the leaders of born-again churches, popularly called pastors, as a last resort.
"While there are genuine pastors, who restrict their work to praying and counselling, there is a growing number of pastors who take advantage of people's desperation for material gain.
"They insist that in order to catch God's ear, one has to first 'sow' a certain amount of money.
"The bigger the sum, the faster the results. Some people go to the extent of borrowing money from banks or surrendering their homes and cars, only to find themselves in deeper problems than before they appealed to the pastor." Sunday Vision (Uganda), Jun 30 07, n.p. <http://tinyurl.com/2qxx7n>
See also "Are pastors corrupting God?," Sunday Vision, Jul 7 07, n.p. <http://tinyurl.com/36n8sm>
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Sources, Monographs:
1 - A Christian Manifesto by Francis A. Schaeffer (Crossway, 2005, paperback, 160 pages) <http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1581346921/apologiareport>
2 - Bad News for Modern Man, by Franky Schaeffer (Thomas Nelson, 1984, hardcover, 60 pages) <http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0840799047/apologiareport>
3 - Whatever Happened to the Human Race? by C. Everett Koop and Francis A. Schaeffer (Crossway, 1983, paperback, 180 pages) <http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0891072918/apologiareport>
4 - The Search for Christian America by Mark A. Noll, Nathan O. Hatch, and George M. Marsden (Helmers & Howard, 1989, paperback, 200 pages) <http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0939443155/apologiareport>
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