Two weeks ago, Pastor Ntapo preached a short message based on John 17:3, "And this is eternal life, that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent."
The preacher's point was that Jesus came in order that we might know God, and indeed that the purpose of human life on this earth is to know God. Consequently, he admonished his people to know God before they die.
This probably sounds too typical, another example of standard preaching-for-conversion. Except that it wasn't.
The pastor's message was not accompanied by the question "Where will you go when you die?", the stereotypical warning of revivalism, but "What will you confess at the end of your life?"
He said that many of "our people confess when they die that they have killed so and so through witchcraft"; instead of a confession of evil-doing, he urged his people to do good in order that they could confess it in the end.
Obviously, the pastor thought that having nothing good to confess at the end of one's life is punishment enough--and motivation enough for his people to walk now in the way of Jesus, growing in the knowledge of God.
That the pastor might not accomplish the purpose for which he was placed on this earth is, in fact, his greatest fear. I have heard him say on several occasions that "the cemetery is very rich because of all the people buried there who never used up what God deposited in them."
"When I die," he says, "I want to be empty."
And that is why he presses on, amidst formidable obstacles, to teach a young congregation the way of God. "I was born for that," he testifies, citing Jesus' words before Pilate (Jn. 18:37). It will likewise be his "good confession" when he dies (1 Tim. 6:13).
-Joe
Showing posts with label witchcraft. Show all posts
Showing posts with label witchcraft. Show all posts
Saturday, December 5, 2009
Thursday, May 21, 2009
things above
For me, some of the most fascinating features of African spirituality are dreams and visions (North Americans also have them, yet our dominant worldview is largely closed to their reality).
I have recently experienced a close convergence between something I have been reading about in a book about African "religious thought" and an experience as related to me by a pastor friend.
The book was explaining a certain Congolese Christian evangelist's experiences of an "underground world", accessed via water, inhabited by witches and sorcerers who convene to plot evil against the inhabitants of the earth. The authors describe these worlds, as described by the Africans who experience them, as "contain[ing] the same features as the material world, but in malign forms that are inversions or perversions of their visible representations" (Ellis and Ter Haar, 50).
We might recognize this same characterization in the pastor's account.
He described to me the story of a certain man whom he knows. One day, studying in his university's library, the man looked up to notice a number of children from his home, rural village entering the library. He thought the sight most strange, conceiving of no reason why such children should suddenly appear at his institution of study. Suddenly, accompanied by the children, the man found himself in a location "beside the sea". He then witnessed a most gruesome scene: people from all sorts of ethnic groups--"black, white, Indian" [some of the prominent groupings of South African society]--"drinking one another's blood" at the behest of certain witches who held them captive. One of the witches took a knife and, giving it to the man, ordered him to cut out the heart of a white man there hanging by his feet from a tree. The man first refused; yet under duress, he complied. "I will never forget the screams of that white man," the man would later tell the pastor. To make a long story short, the witches also tried to cut the man himself. However, when one thrust the knife into his belly, it bounced back as if repelled by strong rubber. Another witch chided the other, "I told you we are unable to do anything to people who have been washed in the blood of that man." "They [the witches] do not even like to say the name of Jesus," the pastor explained to me. Following this, the man woke up in the hospital in Mthatha.
Just as the authors, in their analyses of certain accounts from the continent, describe an alternative world that "contains the same features of the material world", so we notice that, according to the pastor's telling, the man experienced things more real than we would commonly ascribe to dreams. He really felt himself to be "by the sea"; felt the knife twist into the white man's flesh; heard his screams; felt the knife bounce off his own flesh.
And just as the authors describe that world as an "malign inversion" of the visible world, so the invisible world is dominated by witches, ostracized evildoers in the visible world. The invisible world in the pastor's story, similarly characterized by the authors, is also a "perversion"; the atrocities committed there are the utmost extremities of human discord in the visible world. As such--extremely perverse, extremely painful--the invisible world is, in a sense, more real than the "real" world, for it exposes the pain common to many--yet known by few--in the visible world. Though humans are not often literally seen to consume one another's blood, we actually do whenever we curse, abuse, and kill one another.
Yet the malign "underworld" is not the only invisible world; neither is it the most real.
When a certain man named John "was in the Spirit on the Lord's day", he saw, perhaps like the man in the pastor's story, "a great multitude which no one could number from every tribe and people and language." These, however, were not those who drink the blood of one another; "these are those who have come out of the great ordeal; they have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb" (Rev. 1:10, 7:9, 14).
"But I do not like to tell my people such stories," the pastor says to me, closing the book on his acquaintance's encounter with witches. "Jesus is more powerful."
The world below does not determine life on this earth; the world above does (Col. 3:1-4; Eph. 2:1-7).
-Joe
The work cited above is Stephen Ellis and Gerrie Ter Haar, Worlds of Power: Religious Thought and Political Practice in Africa. Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2004.
I have recently experienced a close convergence between something I have been reading about in a book about African "religious thought" and an experience as related to me by a pastor friend.
The book was explaining a certain Congolese Christian evangelist's experiences of an "underground world", accessed via water, inhabited by witches and sorcerers who convene to plot evil against the inhabitants of the earth. The authors describe these worlds, as described by the Africans who experience them, as "contain[ing] the same features as the material world, but in malign forms that are inversions or perversions of their visible representations" (Ellis and Ter Haar, 50).
We might recognize this same characterization in the pastor's account.
He described to me the story of a certain man whom he knows. One day, studying in his university's library, the man looked up to notice a number of children from his home, rural village entering the library. He thought the sight most strange, conceiving of no reason why such children should suddenly appear at his institution of study. Suddenly, accompanied by the children, the man found himself in a location "beside the sea". He then witnessed a most gruesome scene: people from all sorts of ethnic groups--"black, white, Indian" [some of the prominent groupings of South African society]--"drinking one another's blood" at the behest of certain witches who held them captive. One of the witches took a knife and, giving it to the man, ordered him to cut out the heart of a white man there hanging by his feet from a tree. The man first refused; yet under duress, he complied. "I will never forget the screams of that white man," the man would later tell the pastor. To make a long story short, the witches also tried to cut the man himself. However, when one thrust the knife into his belly, it bounced back as if repelled by strong rubber. Another witch chided the other, "I told you we are unable to do anything to people who have been washed in the blood of that man." "They [the witches] do not even like to say the name of Jesus," the pastor explained to me. Following this, the man woke up in the hospital in Mthatha.
Just as the authors, in their analyses of certain accounts from the continent, describe an alternative world that "contains the same features of the material world", so we notice that, according to the pastor's telling, the man experienced things more real than we would commonly ascribe to dreams. He really felt himself to be "by the sea"; felt the knife twist into the white man's flesh; heard his screams; felt the knife bounce off his own flesh.
And just as the authors describe that world as an "malign inversion" of the visible world, so the invisible world is dominated by witches, ostracized evildoers in the visible world. The invisible world in the pastor's story, similarly characterized by the authors, is also a "perversion"; the atrocities committed there are the utmost extremities of human discord in the visible world. As such--extremely perverse, extremely painful--the invisible world is, in a sense, more real than the "real" world, for it exposes the pain common to many--yet known by few--in the visible world. Though humans are not often literally seen to consume one another's blood, we actually do whenever we curse, abuse, and kill one another.
Yet the malign "underworld" is not the only invisible world; neither is it the most real.
When a certain man named John "was in the Spirit on the Lord's day", he saw, perhaps like the man in the pastor's story, "a great multitude which no one could number from every tribe and people and language." These, however, were not those who drink the blood of one another; "these are those who have come out of the great ordeal; they have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb" (Rev. 1:10, 7:9, 14).
"But I do not like to tell my people such stories," the pastor says to me, closing the book on his acquaintance's encounter with witches. "Jesus is more powerful."
The world below does not determine life on this earth; the world above does (Col. 3:1-4; Eph. 2:1-7).
-Joe
The work cited above is Stephen Ellis and Gerrie Ter Haar, Worlds of Power: Religious Thought and Political Practice in Africa. Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2004.
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