New Christendom?

Bediako, Mbiti, and Lamin Sanneh are all African theologians who reject Christendom. By “Christendom” they mean a system where the Christianity is domesticated and put into the service of state or imperial interests. While this has been a reality within the West, and it is bad. But it is simplistic to describe Christendom as nothing more than this. Christendom is as much about the church vigorously challenging imperial policy as it is about the church supporting it.

Though these theologians reject what they see as “Christendom,” they all advocate a vision of the African future that sees Christianity permeating social, cultural, and political life. As Bediako says, churches “will have to continue learning to worship God and his Christ, witness to the Gospel, survive in joy, and strive for peace and justice and democratic freedom for all. Christian evangelisation and nurture, and hence the Church, are essential elements in the process whereby a society’s outlook, value-systems, thought-patterns and social and political arrangements become permeated with the mind of Jesus.”

Bediako crisply summarizes what was surely the vision of many of the players of Western Christendom: “the Church must manifest the victory of the Cross in the concrete realities of her existence in society.”