Pentecostalism in Nigeria and the Example of Nimi Wariboko
The Quest for a Multicultural Philosophical Vision
Part 1
Deeper Life Pentecostal ministry headquarters, Lagos at its opening by Nigeria's Vice-President Yemi Osinbajo, shown at top right
Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju
Comparative Cognitive Processes and Systems
"Exploring Every Corner of the Cosmos in Search of Knowledge"
Abstract
An exploration of the Pentecostal philosophy of Nimi Wariboko as grappling with ideological and existential tensions generated by post-classical African history, integrating the transformative vision at the heart of Pentecostalism with the pluralistic understanding vital for healing fractured societies.
Pentecostalism as Succor or Scam
Pentecostalism in Nigeria is both revered and derided. For its adherents, it is often an ultimate answer to life's inadequacies, particularly in a harsh economic environment bedeviled by brutal social challenges.
In this context, the church serves as as a primary succor. Going to church provides both entertainment through dynamic services and life guidance through powerfully charismatic preaching.
For its critics, Pentecostalism in Nigeria is a hotbed of superstition, a scam for fleecing gullible members through promises of economic well being and spiritual empowerment, feeding on vulnerabilities generated by Nigeria's sluggish economy, exacerbated by anti-people politics.
In rich economies, these sceptics could hold, this scam is primarily inspired by people's hunger for the spiritual. They may see this yearning as also afflicting those in underdeveloped economies, though distorted through its filtering within sustained and pervasive economic challenges.
These critics understand the gullibility of believers, through their donations to their churches, as enabling the stupendous wealth that often defines Nigerian Pentecostal pastors.
This perspective also extends to the less visibly ostentatious, but still distinctively so, among Pentecostal pastors outside Nigeria and Africa, into the US.
A number of these pastors in Nigeria have become more prominent in terms of luxurious life style than members of any professional or social class. The owning of private jets has become a mark of having "arrived" among people so oriented among members of this group.
Thus their pastoral brand is defined by critics as that of "pastorpreneurs" and their practice defined as "pentecostacapitalism" by Nimi Wariboko, the scholar whose work inspires this piece.
The Roots of Nigerian Pentecostalism in the Scripture Union
However, as one observes the corporatisation of Nigerian Pentecostalism, the presence across the commercial capital, Lagos, for example, of huge billboards advertising one Pentecostal Christian event or another in glorious colour and in the blaze of visual and verbal pyrotechnics and large advertising costs that used to be reserved for such entertainment events as films and musical shows, one may recall what may be one of the roots of Nigerian Pentecostalism in the austerity and high mindedness of radically spiritual Christian youth in Nigeria's university campuses in the 70s and 80s.
This ascetic culture was defined for many by the resonance of the term "Scripture Union", often abbreviated to SU. It generated the image of persons who had chosen to alienate themselves from much of the practices of the larger world to live what critics saw as a life devoid of the joy of life, in the name of a rigorously honest Christian asceticism.
Between Spirit and Matter, Money and Faith
What happened to these people?
Did they graduate from school, come into the world, and realize what successive followers of Jesus have realized since he left the world?
Did these hitherto acetic Christians of Nigerian campuses eventually become the phenomenon currently on display?
"Man shall not live on bread alone but on every word that comes from the mouth of God", Jesus is described in the Biblical account as responding to the Devil who challenged him to transform stone to bread through his spiritual powers.
For a person inflamed by the desire to serve God, however, the choice of how to get that bread while feeding on the word of God could require some serious strategising.
This understanding has inspired various responses across the centuries. This begins from Jesus himself, an itinerant preacher with no home of his own and no income, living on the food provided by his fishermen disciples.
It continues with his disciples, after his death instituting a commune where goods were equitably shared.
It is crystallized in the practice of asking donations from members which has been central in sustaining the church up till this point.
These donations, among perhaps other sources, enabled huge wealth in the medieval European church.
The abuses of this economic/spiritual agenda were eventually central to the attack on the church by Martin Luther, the founder of Protestantism, a movement which he spearheaded in breaking away from the Catholic church to live in a manner closer to what Luther saw as the essence of Christianity in the Biblical dictum, "the just shall live by faith."
Even then the struggle was deeply embroiled with secular politics. Max Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism describes Protestant culture as central to the rise of European capitalism, the currently dominant global economic model.
The struggle between matter and spirit, between money and faith, emerges again with rising combustion in the current struggle with this challenge by Pentecostalism, which may be seen as a branch of Protestantism.
Also published on Facebook
Listserv moderated by Toyin Falola, University of Texas at Austin
To post to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue@googlegroups.com
To subscribe to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue+subscribe@googlegroups.com
Current archives at http://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue
Early archives at http://www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa/ads/index.html
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "USA Africa Dialogue Series" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to usaafricadialogue+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/usaafricadialogue/CALUsqTSedVFxh%2B7UqB2foO4LthOfSPjMBB_B2jPiKvM1m2-dHA%40mail.gmail.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
No comments:
Post a Comment