In
that class I interviewed Bishop Cosmo Moenga of Botswana and his wife Jennifer.
During that interview one of them said, “Understand that Christianity is not
new to Africa, after all Jesus spent his Childhood in Africa.” Which seems an
obvious statement now, but in the moment I was blown away, especially regarding
the wider implications of this, that some social paradigms native to Africa fit
Near Eastern culture much more closely than those of Europe.
Additionally
I interrogated the assumptions of famed Christian Historian Jaroslav Pelikan
about the origins of Gandhi and Martin Luther King’s commitments to
non-violence. Jaroslav claims King read Howard Thurman, who read Gandhi, who
read Tolstoy. A non-gracious interpretation would be that two non-European
civil rights leaders got their most coveted ideas about non-violence from a
European, instead of from their own cultural/religious contexts and/or directly
from Jesus’ messages about non-violence.
Finally,
I ended up writing a parable about loving God and neighbor while in this class—take
from it what you will:
“There was
once a naïve man and a huckster, they were driving across a bridge to a
seminary, when an earthquake occurred. The bridge cracked underneath the car
and the car was caught in such a way that there was only time for one man to
climb out of the sunroof before the car fell into a watery chasm.
The huckster
told the naïve man, “I know the will of God, and he wants me to survive.”
The naïve
man responded, “Well, my family always talked about pre-destination, so if I’m
a Bible believing man I have to trust you.”
And with
that the huckster wriggled out of the sunroof, and the naïve man plunged to his
death. There was a Seminarian sitting in a grassy spot next to the bridge, she
did not notice any of this, because she was reading about loving God and
neighbor.”
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