More Things in Heaven and Earth

Esther Acolatse frames the problem well: a hermeneutical gap between the church in the global South and the modern church in the West. The African church, with its animist cultural heritage and the influence of divination found in African traditional religions, lives in an enchanted world where the conflicts of angels and demons affect the details of everyday life. Supernatural forces not only manipulate the environment and social system, but also the enter into individual consciousness to wreak havoc and harm. While this seems close to the Biblical worldview, it can be too dualistic, distracting from Christ’s victory at the cross and missing the joy of living in tune with the Holy Spirit. It is an over-reading and over-emphasis of the spirit world as found in the New Testament.

Acolatse describes the situation in the West as the opposite – a church disenchanted by the modern turn to the rational as the real and the material as what matters. She takes Rudolf Bultmann as her prime example, who famously wrote that “We cannot use electric lights and radios and, in the event of illness, avail ourselves of modern medical and clinical means and at the same time believe in the spirit and wonder world of the New Testament” (New Testament and Mythology, 1984:4). Bultmann’s project was to demythologize the Bible, to subtract the mythology (fables) from it to make it credible to his imagined modern audience, so that only the essential truth of the message was left – often reduced to political or psychological powers and principalities

This is a dense theological book written by an academic raised in Ghana, trained at Princeton and Harvard, and now at Knox College, Toronto. Some new-Pentecostals may find it vindicating, but its really intended for mainline leaders who have lost their imagination for the spirit world and Biblical realism. It’s a refreshing reminder that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our (naturalist) philosophies.