Evangelical Faith & (Postmodern) Others — Kenzo Mabiala.

Postmodernism is susceptible to many constructions. As an epistemic alternative it embodies belief in the vernacular, “with pluralism, borders and multiple perspectives being highlighted as a means of disrupting the centralizing impulse of any system.”[4] Hence the resulting postmodern condition defines itself in terms of “hybridity,” “incoherence,” “indetermination,” “plurality,” “contextuality,” and “lack of one single organizing principle.” Its ethos wages war on totality and the hegemony of any single perspective, while encouraging and celebrating the regional, the local, the particular, and indeed the vernacular. It is as such that many non-Western thinkers embrace postmodernism as a way of liberation from “the extraordinary hubris of modernism,”[5] which seeks to master being by forcing it into a binary opposition of “same/other, spirit/matter, subject/object, inside/outside, pure/impure, rational/chaotic.”[6] Two additional features of postmodernism justify its attraction to non-Westerners. First, instead of the stability of the universal rule of reason that the Enlightenment paradigm promises, postmodernism encourages and celebrates hybridity, pastiche, mimicry, and bricolage, which are familiar notions to non-Western intellectual traditions. Second, against the modernist contempt for anything traditional, postmodernism, which has been defined as a recuperative strategy of the past,[7] encourages and celebrates the traditional that it recuperates in its own construal of reality.

Yet non-Westerners have not embraced postmodernism uncritically. In fact, some non-Westerners warn against the dangers of postmodernism, pointing out that constitutes “the condition of knowledge in the most highly developed societies.”[8] To embrace it would therefore lend to the most extreme form of alienation. Moreover, even where postmodernism seems to critique the universalist pretensions of the Western episteme, it still surreptitiously serves its cause in that it ends up “not with its dispersal into local vernaculars but with a return to another First World language with universalist epistemological pretensions.”[9]

Finally, by deconstructing the subject by causing it to peter out in an endless dissemination of meaning, postmodernism seals the death of the very subjects it seeks to liberate.

Yet, despite these strong objections, postmodernism continues to hold sway over non-Westerners. The reason, in my view, resides in the fact that the non-Westerners have almost no credible alternative to postmodernism. Of course, they might be tempted either to fall back on the modern representation of the non-Western in “the colonial library”[10] or to appeal to their pre-modern and pre-colonial past. Unfortunately, the first alternative is falls short because modern discourse on the non-Western world is not innocent. Despite the scientific mantle with which it wraps itself, colonial discourse is nothing but “European” constructions intended to maintain power over non-Europeans.[11] As V. Y. Mudimbe and Edward Said argue, the West invented Africa or the Orient to serve as the Other of the West.[12] The second alternative, which consists in reclaiming the pre-modern or pre-colonial past of Africa, is also futile, for one cannot underestimate the extent to which the global south has been impacted by the colonial experience. The gap that stands between the present and the pre-colonial past is unbridgeable.

Given the difficulties that these alternatives represent, it is no wonder that postmodernism is embraced as an ally in the struggle for local and vernacular identities throughout the non-Western world. To be sure, one does not necessarily encounter the influence of postmodernism on non-Westerners under that name. In fact, most non-Westerners seem to prefer to use the term postcolonialism to describe the struggle for identity in the non-Western cultural context today. Those non-Western thinkers who have embraced the notion of postcolonialism join hands with all those who, wherever they may be found, are seeking to come to terms with the experience of colonization and its aftermath. Postmodernism turns out to be an ally of postcolonialism in that those who are seeking to come to terms with the experience of colonization and its long-term effects see in postmodernism not only the possibility of an alternative discourse that affirms and celebrates otherness, but also a strategy for the “deconstruction of the concept, the authority, and assumed primacy of the category of ‘the West.’“[13] Hence, despite the risks involved, the appeal to postmodernism has become a necessity for non-Westerners. It is no longer a luxury but a matter of “to be or not to be.”

Postmodern strategies have also made their way into non-Western theological practices through postcolonial theologies. These theologies, which are essentially discourses of otherness, embody the desire on the part of those who produce them to exercise what Tite Ti ©nou calls “the right to difference.”[14] As theologies of otherness and difference, they embody “agonistic,” (that is, primarily negative) relations of competition, opposition, and even repression with respect to Western Christian theologies. They constitute themselves as voices of otherness and seek to articulate the margins or what has been projected as marginal; they take “hold not only of actual power, but also of the languages, systems of metaphors and regimes of images that seem designed to silence those whom they embody in representation.”[15] Theology in a postcolonial context is a highly political affair. Postcolonial theologies will not settle for a position at the margins of their Western counterparts. Rather, they surreptitiously seek to turn the margin into the centre, thereby disrupting the serenity grounded on the assumption that Western formulations are self-evident. In so doing they display a great deal of creativity, a creativity whose theoretical framework is the postmodern concepts of pastiche, bricolage, mimicry, hybridity, and play. One catches a glimpse of this creativity in theological projects that have recently come out of Africa, in which classical Christological categories inherited from Chalcedon are reopened to make room for African ones. The result is hybridized Christology where Christ is worshipped as “Chief” (Kabasele), “Ancestor” (Pobee, Bujo, Bediako, and Nyamiti), “Master of initiation” (Sanon), “Healer” (Koli ©), or Elder Brother (Kabasele).

Evangelical faith encounters in postcolonial theology what it always wanted: a contextual theology for the so-called Third-world. Indeed, for many years, evangelicals have championed the cause of a self-theologizing Church, which they argued is the fourth woefully needed addition to the classical three-selves of the indigenous Church (self-governing, self-supporting, and self-propagating). In postcolonial theologies, their dream has finally come true. The (subaltern) latecomer has finally spoken in her own native idiom. Evangelical faith, which has hitherto been articulated and formulated in the stable idiom of Western rationalism that guaranteed its sameness, suddenly finds itself confronted with other idioms that disturb both the stability of classical formulations and the appeal of sameness. Will evangelical faith break or stretch? Therein lies the question.

[1] D. A. Carson, The Gagging of God: Christianity Confronts Pluralism (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1996), 10.

[2] Charles Jencks, “The Post-Modern Agenda,” in The Post-Modern Reader, ed. Charles Jencks (New York: Saint Martin, 1992), 10-39.

[3] David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Inquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), 9.

[4] Robert Young, Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), 136.

[5] Carson, The Gagging of God, 10.

[6] Catherine Keller, Michael Nausner, and Mayra Rivera, eds., Postcolonial Theologies: Divinity and Empire (Saint Louis: Chalice Press, 2004), 11.

[7] Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction (New York: Routledge, 1988).

[8] Jean-Fran §ois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), xxiii.

[9] Ibid.

[10] Mudimbe uses the expression “colonial library” to identify the body of literature that grew around the modern project of colonization. Cf. Valentin Y. Mudimbe, The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy, and the Order of Knowledge (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1988).

[11] Ania Loomba, Colonialism/Postcolonialism (New York: Routledge, 1998), 43-44.

[12] See Mudimbe, The Invention of Africa and Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, [1978] 1994).

[13] Robert J. C. Young, White Mythologies: Writing History and the West (London: Routledge, 1990), 19.

[14] Tite Ti ©nou, “The Right to Difference: The Common Roots of African Theology and African Philosophy,” African Journal of Evangelical Theology 9 (1990): 24-34.

[15] Steven Connor, Postmodernist Culture: An Introduction to Theories of the Contemporary (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), 232.

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