Chidavaenzi goes after false prophets
Chidavaenzi does not elaborate his recovery from Ngugi, but proceeds to chronicle his postconversion serial church-hopping, an experience I also relate with. He looks at his writing as the fulfilment of a prophecy handed to him by an apostle in 2014, that
PHILLIP Chidavaenzi, perhaps one of the most prolific Zimbabwean writers, has taken a break from fiction to dabble in open source mysticism. His latest book, “Walking in the Spirit,” merges elements of spiritual autobiography and biblical exegesis.
On the cover, a group of pilgrims apparently mimick a scene from Leonard Zhakata’s video, “Pakuyambuka,” fired up by the Spirit the same way the 1999 personae enact a love-tipsy, dizzy and distracted way of proceeding.
The book generically handles New Testament themes, but is mainly directed at the charismatic fold of Christianity where novelty sometimes imperceptibly collapses into heresy.
Chidavaenzi is joining the ranks of Lee Strobel, Malcolm Muggeridge and C.S Lewis, journalists and creative writers who surfaced from a secular past into unlikely lay theologians.
His self-confessed iconoclasm, though, is not nearly as bloody and noisy since it is confined to intra-faith, domestic controversies whereas the other members of the evangelical intelligentsia go sparring in the camps of the religiously unaffiliated.
“Walking in the Spirit” (2017) is Chidavaenzi’s second theological title, following “The Gospel of Grace: From the Old to the New Testament” (2016). His critically acclaimed novels also feature, overtly, a theological, redemptive bassline.
Few pages into the book, I marvel how Chidavaenzi’s coming-of-age spiritual odyssey reads unsparingly like my own. “I was very passionate about literature and I was introduced to the writings of a prominent east African author with an international reputation who proudly flagged his anti–Christian philosophy.”
“He described Christianity as a propaganda tool that had been used by Africa’s colonisers to subjugate Africa’s cultures, traditions and peoples. I was caught up in that storm for years. When I left high school after my sixth form in 1999, I was never to step into church for the next 10 years,” Chidavaenzi recalls.
After a decade of negating his native Catholicism, an encounter with high octane Pentecostalism in his daily grind as a journalist prompted Chidavaenzi to hop from church to church in search of an anchor, a pilgrimage that culminated in his current evangelistic endeavours.
I similarly boarded Ngugi waThiongo’s anti-Christianity wagon as a 13-year old, mission-raised Catholic, but at that time I was not asking for the burden of proof. Quotable broadsides by a revered author were enough to sway me over.
In “Homecoming,” Ngugi WaThiongo calls out the contradiction between Christianity’s fundamental doctrine of universal love and equality with its unholy alliance with colonialism.
Colonialism, he contends, was built on “the inequality and hatred between men and the subsequent subjugation of the black race by the white race.” For him, its Christianity that sets in motion the process of social change which requires tribal disintegration and the supplanting of social norms, primitive rites and indigenous gods.
At length he is able to exclaim, “I am not a man of the church, I am not even a Christian!” setting forth that the faith’s complicity with colonialism robbed Africa of its soul. A revised ID replacing James Ngugi with Ngugi waThiongo makes good this disavowal.
In his 2012 memoir, “In the House of the Interpreter,” a teenage Ngugi goes about as a Jesus-is-my-personalsaviour evangelist and Christian apologist, having been convicted by a Billy Graham playback during a crusade.
After Ngugi renouncing the faith, announcing that he is rather at home with the pantheon of indigenous deities, the Bible persists in his work not so much as a spiritual authority, but as a literary style guide.
His Mosaic mantle nevertheless concurs with the Christian understanding of economic justice. He never recovers from scriptural allusiveness though he might argue that, as with the English language, he is using The Bible rather than being used by it.
Unlike Chidavaenzi, I did not remain on Ngugi’s anti-Christian wagon for too long. Two years on, I still fastened on to the core implements of his Afrocentric, iconoclastic arsenal, but found something inconsistent and unsustainable about professing fundamentally contradictory deities in the same breath and subsuming spirituality to geography.
The self-interested appropriation of an ideology by power factions and state actors does not taint it at the source. It would be wrong, for example, to require from Karl Marx’s hands the blood of millions murdered by communist tyrants given that Marx’s own handwriting opposes the idea of revolutionary dictatorship.
St Augustine’s intervention, “Do not condemn a philosophy by its abuse” is true of Marxism as it is true of Christianity. Ngugi’s own affirmation of the prophetic vision of The Bible to shore up economic justice in several of his works, ostensibly on a mythic level, vindicates the North African bishop.
Chidavaenzi does not elaborate his recovery from Ngugi, but proceeds to chronicle his post-conversion serial church-hopping, an experience I also relate with.
He looks at his writing as the fulfilment of a prophecy handed to him by an apostle in 2014, that “the specific mandate of my teaching ministry was ‘to confront, and correct, doctrinal error.’”
Today, attributing disruptive nodes of doctrine to the Holy Spirit to shore up profit and power at the expense of The Bible occurs naturally to many Christian leaders. But Chidavaenzi contends that all spiritual experience must correspond with scriptural instruction. He is up against the profession of the Holy Spirit out sync with The Bible, a way of proceeding that tends to propagate false fire and misdirect well-meaning effort.
Chidavaenzi claims that how an individual relates to their father informs how they relate to God. I am not sure how this plays out in psychology, but am fascinated with accounting for outliers across religions such as Bob Marley, Yon Netanyahu or St Augustine were yearning for a father figure, an independent cast of mind or a picture of maternal piety sparks unusual fervour.
“Walking in the Spirit” is more ambitious than Chidavaenzi first theological offering in several respects. A new commitment to scholarly rigour and a liberal share of personal anecdotes are welcome improvements on the previous book which insistently echoes John Osteen.
The journalist is aware of the operational hazards of his evangelistic posting. In the jargon of political correctness, a Bible-inspired comment is, by default, understood as judgemental, bigoted, opinionated or close-minded.
“I’ve been personally accused of judging. But the Bible is clear that where there is error, where human traditions and cultural practices and beliefs are elevated higher than the faith, we have an obligation to rebuke those responsible,” he defends the call to contend earnestly for the faith.
A man’s opinion would not be his opinion, after all, if he did not believe it is true at the exception of contending opinions, as C.S Lewis says. Beyond opinion, Chidavaenzi, is after the mind of God as outlined in the Christian scriptures.
“Walking in the Spirit” seeks to determine righteous living by the authentic application of The Bible and the infilling of the Holy Spirit. The author affirms Christian liberty outside the corrupting tendency of false doctrine and human traditions.
I will not be able to spar with the writer on finer points in this space but I find that I cannot agree with all the conclusions of his ably argued books, particularly on the obsolescence of Sabbath observance. I wonder if this suggests the impossibility of coming to a universal understanding of The Bible.
Perhaps Christians need to converge on core teachings and progressively find each other where denominational nuances are concerned. This constitutes C.S Lewis’s “mere Christianity” and could be the defining feature of “public” theology.