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The Anthropology of Christianity
A Problem of Presence: Beyond Scripture in an African Church (The Anthropology of Christianity)
The Friday Masowe apostolics of Zimbabwe refer to themselves as “the Christians who don’t read the Bible.” They claim they do not need the Bible because they receive the Word of God “live and direct” from the Holy Spirit. In this insightful and sensitive historical ethnography, Matthew Engelke documents how this rejection of scripture speaks to longstanding concerns within Christianity over mediation and authority. The Bible, of course, has been a key medium through which Christians have recognized God’s presence. But the apostolics perceive scripture as an unnecessary, even dangerous, mediator. For them, the materiality of the Bible marks a distance from the divine and prohibits the realization of a live and direct faith.
Situating the Masowe case within a broad comparative framework, Engelke shows how their rejection of textual authority poses a problem of presence—which is to say, how the religious subject defines, and claims to construct, a relationship with the spiritual world through the semiotic potentials of language, actions, and objects. Written in a lively and accessible style, A Problem of Presence makes important contributions to the anthropology of Christianity, the history of religions in Africa, semiotics, and material culture studies.
Situating the Masowe case within a broad comparative framework, Engelke shows how their rejection of textual authority poses a problem of presence—which is to say, how the religious subject defines, and claims to construct, a relationship with the spiritual world through the semiotic potentials of language, actions, and objects. Written in a lively and accessible style, A Problem of Presence makes important contributions to the anthropology of Christianity, the history of religions in Africa, semiotics, and material culture studies.
322 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2007
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About the author
Matthew Engelke
10 books24 followersMatthew Engelke is professor of anthropology at the London School of Economics and Political Science. An award-winning author and teacher, he is also a former editor of the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute.
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November 2, 2019
The Masowe weChishanu Church of Zimbabwe, inspired by the prophetic mission of Johane Masowe just before the Second World War, rejects the Bible. For the Masowe weChishanu, also known as Friday apostolics, the Bible participates in materiality and consequently prevents what the Friday apostolics call a live and direct encounter with the divine. Their Sabbath services, which commence on Fridays in accordance with Johane Masowe’s initial testimony (other Masowe followers observe the Sabbath on Saturdays), occur outside, beyond the confines of a more typical church structure, which for them is similarly material. The apostolics also wear white robes, which while in some sense material, represent immateriality insofar as they are simple, pure, and modest. Yet what separates the Friday apostolics from other apostolic Christian traditions in Africa and elsewhere, some of which also celebrate the Sabbath outdoors and wear white robes, is their rejection of biblical revelation. For the weChishanu, the Bible is irrelevant because it is static and fixed—it narrates what happened in Palestine to a particular community who once had a live and direct encounter with the divine, yet whose story, insofar as it now survives as written, material text, presents an obstacle to live and direct faith. For the weChishanu, Peter, John the Baptist, and other prophetic biblical characters are, in fact, divine spirits who inhabit particular historical persons for specific periods of time, and therefore likewise inhabit their modern prophets just as they previously inhabited fishermen from Galilee. A Problem of Presence, the most extensive academic treatment of the weChishanu Church to date, explores the history, beliefs, and practices of this idiosyncratic Christian community and situates their attitude toward materiality and immateriality in relation to semiotics, biblical hermeneutics, and broader trends in Western Christianity.
For my part, I am most struck by the notion that the Friday apostolics of Zimbabwe participate in an interpretive tradition with respect to biblical truth incipient in Spinoza’s ideas about revelation and reason, later manifest in liberal Christianity’s biblical hermeneutics. In some ways, the Friday apostolics’ approach toward Christian truth parallels Spinoza’s hermeneutical approach toward the Hebrew Scriptures (Hans Frei, cited in Chapter Five, claims that Spinoza helped instantiate a split between the essential truth communicated by biblical texts and its literal words, cf. 173). More specifically, I discern a potential link between the Spinozan notion that reasonable reflection on morality will lead one to affirm the moral truths communicated by the Hebrew Scriptures, which ultimately renders the Bible superfluous (or of extremely relative importance, at least for a certain class of people committed to reasonable reflection), and the Friday apostolics’ commitment to the True Bible, disclosed by the Holy Spirit via prophets. That is, both Spinoza (and early modern thinkers of his ilk) and the Friday apostolics claim to have recourse to other routes to (biblical) truth—reason and inspiration by the Holy Spirit, respectively—that supersede the priority of the text, which itself may in certain respects present serious interpretive issues. For Spinoza, the Hebrew Scriptures are neither philosophical nor scientific texts and one should not interpret them either philosophically or scientifically. Even the “prophets held different, or even incompatible, beliefs from one another and had different preconceptions,” he writes in the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (II.12). They were not necessarily learned, and prophecy itself “never made the prophets more learned, but left them with their preconceived beliefs.” For this reason, Spinoza asserts, one should in no way feel compelled to believe them in philosophical or scientific matters (ibid). If Joshua (or the author who wrote his history) believed that the sun revolved around the earth, so be it; Joshua was not a scientist, and there is no reason to take his scientific ideas seriously. One should not make extraordinary interpretive efforts to excuse Joshua, or Isaiah, or any other biblical writer of patently erroneous beliefs about the universe. Moreover, the most basic, universal truth that the biblical text evidently does reveal (for Spinoza)—to know and love God and others—is a conclusion at which deductive efforts led by reason could also arrive.
The Friday apostolics evidence some similar differentiation “between biblical text and biblical truth, and as far as the Friday apostolics are concerned most Christians emphasize the former at the expense of the latter” (174). Insofar as the concept of the True Bible “is based on the separation of Scripture from truth, such that the latter is not dependent on the former” (ibid), the Friday apostolic position coheres well with the Spinozan one vis-à-vis biblical revelation (a view later shared by other early modernists). Yet whereas Spinoza and the early modernists claim to rely on the universal dictates of reason in their extra-biblical reflections on God and truth, the Friday apostolics rely on the Holy Spirit manifest in the ritual speech of prophets, who present the True Bible as that which exists beyond Scripture (181). For the Friday apostolics, a prophet is a mediator via whom the Holy Spirit speaks—the animator, albeit not the author or principal of the truth (182). Apart from this obvious difference, another notable variance in these extra-biblical approaches to truth concerns the apostolics’ relationship with the Bible itself. Recall that for Spinoza, with respect to certain moral norms, the Hebrew Scriptures cohere with rational conclusions. The point of Scripture is to communicate simple truths and induce moral obedience. For the Friday apostolics, on the other hand, the status of the Bible is far more precarious. Given its political history in Africa, the Friday apostolics view it with extreme suspicion, and because of its supposed materiality, it cannot serve a spiritual purpose, let alone re-present the divine (10). Still, its status in the Friday apostolic tradition remains equivocal: mutemo, a set of rules and prescriptions by which apostolics should live, happens to involve strict obedience to the Ten Commandments and also requires the observance of Levitical food taboos (8). The weChishanu position on prophets as inhabited by trans-biblical spirits also presents a similar equivocality: on the one hand, they reject biblical revelation, while on the other, their belief that spirits such as John the Baptist now inhabit modern prophets betrays a familiarity with that spirit’s earlier work in Palestine. In this avowedly non-biblical community, then, certain biblical norms (especially in the case of mutemo) do cohere with extra-biblical moral truth, just as with Spinoza.
The last comparative point I want to make concerns rival claims to authority. Whether one claims to have arrived at extra-biblical truth about God and moral norms via ratiocination or inspiration by the Holy Spirit, competitive claims to alternative truths call into question the authoritativeness of such claims. Whereas interpretive disputes in most other Christian traditions are circumscribed by the fixed content of Scripture—the text says what it says, even if what it means is not immediately apparent and is, on this interpretive level, unstable—one must discern true and false claims in extra-biblical contexts with recourse to other, non-text-based standards. In the Friday apostolic tradition, the mumiriri wemweya plays a central role in this respect, insofar as the presence of this “interpreter of the spirit” testifies to the Spirit’s work in the prophet (185-186). Now, I think it is notable that the materiality of the prophet—a real, flesh and blood person via whom the Spirit communicates—is not so much a problem for the Friday apostolics, whereas the materiality of the Bible is. In effect, the prophet filled with the Holy Spirit resembles the Bible as most Christians traditionally apprehend it: just as most Christian readers must interpret Scripture, the mumiriri wemweya must also interpret the prophet (in whatever limited sense, cf. 186) in his efforts to communicate to listeners the Word of God, live and direct. A Problem of Presence calls attention to this point and proposes that immateriality for the Friday apostolics necessarily depends on some notion of materiality—that is, what constitutes live and direct faith for the weChishanu relies on a concept of materiality that excludes material entities—such as robes, certain medicines, and even prophets—from the material realm.
I am left with a set of questions for the Friday apostolics with respect to their beliefs about Christ. For most Christians—and, historically, what individuates Christianity as such—Jesus Christ is fully God and fully human, the Incarnation of the Word of God, the second person of the Trinity. As fully human, Jesus of Nazareth was fully material. As fully divine, Jesus as God transcends his incarnate materiality. Christ, therefore, seems to present a knotty problem for the Friday apostolics: if materiality is an obstacle to live and direct faith, yet God became fully human, then materiality does not appear to foreclose an encounter with the divine. On the contrary, on one plausible Christian view, God has redeemed materiality in Jesus, and the Incarnation heavily implies that materiality is the condition for the possibility of the closest possible encounter with the divine for finite humans. Now, the Friday apostolics invoke the Trinity in their ritual practices. Moreover, many weChishanu criticize one of their earliest prophets, Emmanuel, because he started to call himself Jesus (as if he were inhabited by the spirit Jesus like John the Baptist inhabited Johane Masowe). So the Incarnation does seem central to their faith, in one way or another. Which leaves me to wonder: what do the Friday apostolics think of Jesus? For them, does the Incarnation problematize their attitude toward materiality? How can they know of Jesus, his ministry, or his role in their salvation if they reject the New Testament and its claims about Jesus as Christ? Unfortunately, A Problem of Presence does not address these questions, which is one of its only flaws. It is, however, somewhat of a major omission, since one would probably learn quite a lot about the weChishanu notion of live and direct faith in relation to materiality and immateriality from their views on the Incarnation.
For my part, I am most struck by the notion that the Friday apostolics of Zimbabwe participate in an interpretive tradition with respect to biblical truth incipient in Spinoza’s ideas about revelation and reason, later manifest in liberal Christianity’s biblical hermeneutics. In some ways, the Friday apostolics’ approach toward Christian truth parallels Spinoza’s hermeneutical approach toward the Hebrew Scriptures (Hans Frei, cited in Chapter Five, claims that Spinoza helped instantiate a split between the essential truth communicated by biblical texts and its literal words, cf. 173). More specifically, I discern a potential link between the Spinozan notion that reasonable reflection on morality will lead one to affirm the moral truths communicated by the Hebrew Scriptures, which ultimately renders the Bible superfluous (or of extremely relative importance, at least for a certain class of people committed to reasonable reflection), and the Friday apostolics’ commitment to the True Bible, disclosed by the Holy Spirit via prophets. That is, both Spinoza (and early modern thinkers of his ilk) and the Friday apostolics claim to have recourse to other routes to (biblical) truth—reason and inspiration by the Holy Spirit, respectively—that supersede the priority of the text, which itself may in certain respects present serious interpretive issues. For Spinoza, the Hebrew Scriptures are neither philosophical nor scientific texts and one should not interpret them either philosophically or scientifically. Even the “prophets held different, or even incompatible, beliefs from one another and had different preconceptions,” he writes in the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (II.12). They were not necessarily learned, and prophecy itself “never made the prophets more learned, but left them with their preconceived beliefs.” For this reason, Spinoza asserts, one should in no way feel compelled to believe them in philosophical or scientific matters (ibid). If Joshua (or the author who wrote his history) believed that the sun revolved around the earth, so be it; Joshua was not a scientist, and there is no reason to take his scientific ideas seriously. One should not make extraordinary interpretive efforts to excuse Joshua, or Isaiah, or any other biblical writer of patently erroneous beliefs about the universe. Moreover, the most basic, universal truth that the biblical text evidently does reveal (for Spinoza)—to know and love God and others—is a conclusion at which deductive efforts led by reason could also arrive.
The Friday apostolics evidence some similar differentiation “between biblical text and biblical truth, and as far as the Friday apostolics are concerned most Christians emphasize the former at the expense of the latter” (174). Insofar as the concept of the True Bible “is based on the separation of Scripture from truth, such that the latter is not dependent on the former” (ibid), the Friday apostolic position coheres well with the Spinozan one vis-à-vis biblical revelation (a view later shared by other early modernists). Yet whereas Spinoza and the early modernists claim to rely on the universal dictates of reason in their extra-biblical reflections on God and truth, the Friday apostolics rely on the Holy Spirit manifest in the ritual speech of prophets, who present the True Bible as that which exists beyond Scripture (181). For the Friday apostolics, a prophet is a mediator via whom the Holy Spirit speaks—the animator, albeit not the author or principal of the truth (182). Apart from this obvious difference, another notable variance in these extra-biblical approaches to truth concerns the apostolics’ relationship with the Bible itself. Recall that for Spinoza, with respect to certain moral norms, the Hebrew Scriptures cohere with rational conclusions. The point of Scripture is to communicate simple truths and induce moral obedience. For the Friday apostolics, on the other hand, the status of the Bible is far more precarious. Given its political history in Africa, the Friday apostolics view it with extreme suspicion, and because of its supposed materiality, it cannot serve a spiritual purpose, let alone re-present the divine (10). Still, its status in the Friday apostolic tradition remains equivocal: mutemo, a set of rules and prescriptions by which apostolics should live, happens to involve strict obedience to the Ten Commandments and also requires the observance of Levitical food taboos (8). The weChishanu position on prophets as inhabited by trans-biblical spirits also presents a similar equivocality: on the one hand, they reject biblical revelation, while on the other, their belief that spirits such as John the Baptist now inhabit modern prophets betrays a familiarity with that spirit’s earlier work in Palestine. In this avowedly non-biblical community, then, certain biblical norms (especially in the case of mutemo) do cohere with extra-biblical moral truth, just as with Spinoza.
The last comparative point I want to make concerns rival claims to authority. Whether one claims to have arrived at extra-biblical truth about God and moral norms via ratiocination or inspiration by the Holy Spirit, competitive claims to alternative truths call into question the authoritativeness of such claims. Whereas interpretive disputes in most other Christian traditions are circumscribed by the fixed content of Scripture—the text says what it says, even if what it means is not immediately apparent and is, on this interpretive level, unstable—one must discern true and false claims in extra-biblical contexts with recourse to other, non-text-based standards. In the Friday apostolic tradition, the mumiriri wemweya plays a central role in this respect, insofar as the presence of this “interpreter of the spirit” testifies to the Spirit’s work in the prophet (185-186). Now, I think it is notable that the materiality of the prophet—a real, flesh and blood person via whom the Spirit communicates—is not so much a problem for the Friday apostolics, whereas the materiality of the Bible is. In effect, the prophet filled with the Holy Spirit resembles the Bible as most Christians traditionally apprehend it: just as most Christian readers must interpret Scripture, the mumiriri wemweya must also interpret the prophet (in whatever limited sense, cf. 186) in his efforts to communicate to listeners the Word of God, live and direct. A Problem of Presence calls attention to this point and proposes that immateriality for the Friday apostolics necessarily depends on some notion of materiality—that is, what constitutes live and direct faith for the weChishanu relies on a concept of materiality that excludes material entities—such as robes, certain medicines, and even prophets—from the material realm.
I am left with a set of questions for the Friday apostolics with respect to their beliefs about Christ. For most Christians—and, historically, what individuates Christianity as such—Jesus Christ is fully God and fully human, the Incarnation of the Word of God, the second person of the Trinity. As fully human, Jesus of Nazareth was fully material. As fully divine, Jesus as God transcends his incarnate materiality. Christ, therefore, seems to present a knotty problem for the Friday apostolics: if materiality is an obstacle to live and direct faith, yet God became fully human, then materiality does not appear to foreclose an encounter with the divine. On the contrary, on one plausible Christian view, God has redeemed materiality in Jesus, and the Incarnation heavily implies that materiality is the condition for the possibility of the closest possible encounter with the divine for finite humans. Now, the Friday apostolics invoke the Trinity in their ritual practices. Moreover, many weChishanu criticize one of their earliest prophets, Emmanuel, because he started to call himself Jesus (as if he were inhabited by the spirit Jesus like John the Baptist inhabited Johane Masowe). So the Incarnation does seem central to their faith, in one way or another. Which leaves me to wonder: what do the Friday apostolics think of Jesus? For them, does the Incarnation problematize their attitude toward materiality? How can they know of Jesus, his ministry, or his role in their salvation if they reject the New Testament and its claims about Jesus as Christ? Unfortunately, A Problem of Presence does not address these questions, which is one of its only flaws. It is, however, somewhat of a major omission, since one would probably learn quite a lot about the weChishanu notion of live and direct faith in relation to materiality and immateriality from their views on the Incarnation.
December 19, 2008
much easier for me to read than keane. an interesting side of christianity.
April 20, 2016
Great read for those interested in Semiotics and Language Ideologies!
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews