Postcolonializing God

Emmanuel Y. Lartey

Description

Postcolonializing God examines how African Christianity can be truly a postcolonial reality and explores how people who were colonial subjects may practice a spirituality that bears the hallmarks of their authentic cultural heritage, even if that makes them distinctly different from Christians from the colonizing nations.

Informations

• Publié par: Hymns Ancient & Modern
• Date de parution: 21 avril 2015
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780334051541
• Langue: English

Extrait

Postcolonializing God
Postcolonializing God
New Perspectives on Pastoral and Practical Theology
Emmanuel Yartekwei Amugi Lartey
© Emmanuel Yartekwei Amugi Lartey 2013

Published in 2013 by SCM Press Editorial office 3rd Floor, Invicta House 108–114 Golden Lane, London ec 1 y 0 tg

SCM Press is an imprint of Hymns Ancient & Modern Ltd (a registered charity) 13A Hellesdon Park Road Norwich nr 6 5 dr , UK
www.scmpress.co.uk

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
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the publisher, SCM Press.

Unless otherwise indicated, all Scripture quotations are from The Holy Bible, English Standard version, published by HarperCollins Publishers © 2001 by Crossway Bibles, a division of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

The Author has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the Author of this Work


British Library Cataloguing in Publication data

A catalogue record for this book is available
from the British Library

978 0 334 02982 3


Typeset by Manila Typesetting Company
Printed and bound by
Lightning Source
Contents
Introduction

1 God Postcolonializes
2 Postcolonializing God in the USA
3 Postcolonializing Liturgical Practice: Rituals of Remembrance, Cleansing, Healing and Re-connection
4 Transcending Colonial Religion: Brother Ishmael Tetteh and the Etherean Mission
5 Postcolonializing Pastoral Care
6 Postcolonializing God: A Theological Imperative
Bibliography
Index
DEDICATED TO
Nunmo Amugi
(Traditional healer and spiritual consultant in the court of Gã Maŋtsɛ (King) Tackie Kome) My paternal grandfather
Acknowledgments
I would like in the first place to give honor and praise to the Creator for grace and strength to complete this book. Additionally, there is a long line of persons to whom I am related who entered the world before me, have gone before me into the unseen realm on whose shoulders I stand, some of whom I do not even know personally. Postcolonializing God is dedicated to my paternal grandfather, an illustrious traditional healer and spiritual consultant, who was long gone before I entered this realm. My maternal grandfather, Christian Agbenyega Doku, who passed away when my mother was still a teenager, was a Methodist lay pastor who planted several churches along the coastal plains surrounding Accra, Ghana. I give thanks to and for each of my ancestors.
Many thanks to African mystic Brother Ishmael Tetteh, whose work the 4 th chapter of this book recounts, for your spectacular contributions towards world peace in our life time. Thanks for your generous permission to cite and quote from your many books, and for your mentorship, teaching, and spiritual guidance. Your courage and creativity are an inspiration to me.
My grateful thanks go to the staff of the Association of Theological Schools (ATS) and especially the members of the Lilly Theological Research Grants Selection panel for the Lilly Theological Research Grant for 2009-10, which enabled me to secure a full year’s sabbatical leave from my teaching at Candler School of Theology, Emory University to work on this book. Dr. (Ing) Emmanuel Lartey Sr., my father, passed away in September 2009 at the very beginning of my sabbatical. Honor and thanks to you, Dad, for your consistent and dedicated hard work for the newly independent nation of Ghana and on through the years. Your scholarship and commitment to our people inspire me. You taught me to think for myself and not merely to depend on convention.
Thanks are due to colleagues and students at the Candler School of Theology and the Graduate Division of Religion at Emory University who have been my dialogue partners as I have honed these thoughts and shaped my ideas into this particular work. Mention must also be made of colleagues and friends of the Society for Pastoral Theology who heard me present a draft of what is the third chapter of the book at their annual Study Conference in 2011. Thanks for your comments, critiques and feedback.
At the publishers I would like to thank Dr. Natalie Watson, Rebecca Goldsmith, Linda Crosby, Christopher Pipe as well as all others whose names I do not know, for your editorial skills and hard work. To my friends, colleagues, students, critics and conversation partners, I am very much aware that without your input, direct as well as indirect, this text would not have appeared at this time. My gratitude and thanks go to you all. My task as a practical theologian is ongoing.
Emmanuel Y. A. Lartey,
Atlanta, 2013
Introduction
Over the last century and particularly in the last 60 years, the world has seen great transformations particularly in the spheres of governance and the political control of peoples. Struggles for and processes of independence and social restructuring of once colonial countries have taken place in several parts of the globe. On the African continent following the seizure of lands and subjugation of peoples to European control in the late nineteenth century, beginning in the 1950s political governance of African countries by European powers largely came to an end, although argu ably the structure of the global economic system has meant that economic control has not totally been ceded to these emergent nations. African lands that Europeans arrogated to themselves and demarcated in Berlin in 1884–5, to supply European nations with particular raw materials that would fuel their economic growth, were returned to the Africans living on those lands. African homelands had now been carved up into nation states (‘countries’) by Europeans. In many African countries the 1970s saw violent overthrows of the neo-colonial civilian governments that came into office at independence, replacing the European colonialists. Decades of military rule followed with attendant mismanagement and dictatorship leaving many African nations on their knees, desperately impoverished and colossally deprived. After being itself divided by differing political and economic ideologies, Germany was re-unified in 1989, when the Berlin Wall was finally torn down. The USSR collapsed as an Empire, leading to sovereignty for several nation states in the former ‘Eastern Bloc’. Recently a wave of protests and agitation for change in many North African nations, dubbed the ‘Arab Spring’, has led to the overthrow and in some cases violent killing of officials of previously unassailable military or military-backed regimes. The Republic of South Sudan emerged in 2011 out of the larger Sudanese state following years of struggle with the northern (predominantly Arab African) people.
On the religious front the emergence of autonomous African churches from the wombs of their colonial mother-denominations was a phenomenon that began in the 1960s following decades of colonial missionary activities which flourished from the 1860s. The phenomenon of African Independent (Indigenous, Initiated or Instituted) Churches, generically referred to as AICs, swept the continent at the end of the twentieth century; practitioners and scholars saw this as evidence of the success of the missionary movement as well as the ingenuity of Africans who transposed the message of European Christianity into their own cultural forms. Debates concerning the nature of the AICs revolved around questions of authenticity, indigeneity, syncretism, inculturation, and acculturation. How does religious transmission occur? How do recipients translate, improvise, or create religious ideas and practices for themselves?
What kind of thinking and action led to the overthrow of European colonialism on the African continent? What has followed this occurrence? What has been the religious significance of autonomy for African churches? Wherein lay the appeal of the AICs? What can be said about the mega-churches which began to spring up across the continent in the 1980s? Has real religious innovation occurred? If so where and how? What does the over used word ‘postcolonial’ really mean, especially in practical strategic terms? In particular, what has been the religious and spiritual state of African peoples and communities through the periods of colonialism and since? How has African spirituality been involved in the experiences of colonialism and postcolonialism? Is there a postcolonial African spirituality? What shape and form does postcolonial African spirituality take? In religious terms, what are the cultural productions that have emanated from postcolonial African subalterns? In practical theological terms how have postcolonial Africans imaged and embodied the divine? What rituals, practices and activities have postcolonial Africans created and embodied? These are the questions that have shaped and influenced the research underlying this book and that have given it its form.
The term postcolonial has been utilized in many different disciplines in an attempt to capture two particular features of the global situation. First, the descriptor has been applied to the an-alysis of the various strategies employed by colonizers to construct images of and to exercise dominance over the colonized. This usage, mostly on the part of colonizing nations and their scholars, has been very sharply criticized. 1 Second, postcolonial criticism has referred to the study of how the colonized made use of and transcended these colonial strategies in order to articulat