Five hundred years ago today, a 33 year old
German philosopher, monk, law school dropout, theology PhD and Chair of the
Department of Theology at the University of Wittenberg, and whose name was
Martin Luther, sent a letter to his bishop, Albrecht von Brandenburg. He was
protesting what he saw as the increasing corruption of the church, and its
deviation from proper scripture. His letter was in the form of a list of ninety
five points (known to history from then on as the Ninety Five Theses).
The church he described would be familiar
to us in Kenya and much of Africa (actually, much of the world): Luther spoke
of a church in which the wealthy were treated with a great deal of deference,
purely because their wealth could be tapped into by the church. Again, just
like present-day Kenya, the wealthy contributed to harambees, especially to
build church edifices, and were thus treated by the clergy as holier than the
rest of the congregation. Worst was that the church, led by the Pope, sold
'indulgences' - in effect, promising forgiveness of sin for self and relatives
(and an easier time in purgatory) in exchange for money. Luther disputed all
these, and over the course of the next four years, the dispute reached its
denouement, and Luther was excommunicated from the church. He might have
remained a marginal figure, except for three reasons, in my thinking. First,
the printing press, invented by another German, Johann Gutenberg, made it
possible for ideas to be printed and distributed cheaply and widely. Thus the
ninety five theses were spread all over Germany and the rest of Europe. Second,
Luther insisted on translating the Bible into German, making it far more
accessible, and lending credence to his insistence that there was no need for a
priestly class to interpose itself between believers and God. Third, as in
present-day Africa, the church had grown complacent and too enamoured of
temporal money and power, and Luther's message struck a chord among ordinary
Germans and Europeans.
You know the rest of the story - the schism
deepened until the church split asunder, with some remaining aligned to Rome
and others establishing the Protestant churches. In the half-millennium since
31 October 1517, there have been terrible, bloody wars fought over the interpretation
of Christianity (mostly among Europeans, of course, but the Catholic/
Protestant divide is present in the politics of, of all places, Uganda).
A postscript: it is fascinating to read
about the theological arguments undertaken by (and in the name of) Martin
Luther in Germany to the present day. Germans are an intellectual people (which
I envy greatly), and thus philosophical arguments about the nature of man, and man's
relationship to God still resonate with the general populace until today. One
of the most consequential in recent times was between Hans Kung (whose two-part
autobiography I'm slowly reading) and Joseph Ratzinger. The argument became all
the more important when Ratzinger ascended to the papacy in 2005.
A postscript to the postscript: where then,
is the African in this philosophical and theological argument? We claim some of
the fastest-growing populations of Christians, yet have contributed little to
the intellectual corpus of the faith. We informally try to reconcile our
Africanness to the demands of the faith, yet except for some brave attempts at
syncretism in the early 20th century, we have been stuck with Christianity as
received wisdom (typically as received from thinkers and practitioners in the
West, who have no more hold on knowledge than we do). We have built no enduring
understanding of Christianity (analogous to the Orthodox church), with the
important exception of the Coptic church in Egypt and Ethiopia. Our major
contestations are about style (is Pentecostalism a good or a bad thing), or
about the place of crass materialism (the prosperity 'gospel'), which neatly
brings us back to Martin Luther.
Happy quincentenary.
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