Church History Does Not End with the Reformation

Church history is often told as though its decisive story were largely a Western one: the early Church, the Fathers, the Medieval period, the Reformation, and finally the modern Church. Such a framework is useful for tracing important developments in Western Christianity, but it becomes inadequate when its categories are treated as though they exhaust the history of Christ’s Church. The gospel did not remain within the geographical and cultural boundaries of Europe. It crossed seas and continents, taking root among people who received it, confessed it, participated in it and transmitted it within their own context (Paas, 2016, 26). This is particularly important for the history of the Church in Africa. African Christians were not merely recipients of a religion produced elsewhere, nor did the history of the Church in African begin and end with the missionary movements associated with European colonialism. Africans became participants in the Church’s confession, worship, mission, theological reflection and controversies. Their history, therefore, belongs within the history of the one, holy and catholic Church (Bediako, 1995, 109-125 & 126-151).

This raises a further question. If African Christianity belongs to the history of the universal Church, how should its relationship to Western Christianity and the colonial history of Christian mission be understood? Acknowledging the failures and abuses associated with colonial Christianity is necessary, but rejecting those abuses cannot require abandoning the biblical faith itself or replacing the catholic Church with an essentially ethnic conception of Christianity. This paper therefore argues that church history does not end with the Reformation, nor can it be reduced to the history of Western Christianity. African Christianity belongs properly within the history of Christ’s catholic Church, while its forms and developments – like those of every Christian context – must ultimately be evaluated by the authority of Scripture. The task is neither to make African Christianity a footnote to the West nor to construct an alternative African gospel, but to recognize the work of God’s Word and Spirit among African peoples while testing all Christian expressions by the apostolic faith. But before we get there, let us define our terms.

Church history is the study of the development and progress of the Church of Christ through the preaching of the Word and the illuminating work of the Spirit (Paas, 2016, 20-21). It considers the new ideas, conditions, and dispositions produced by the Word in the elect, as well as the ways in which these are expressed in the life of the Church. Because these developments arise within particular historical contexts, church history necessarily involves comparing them across different times and places. In this way, the study of church history extends into the realms of politics, sociology and culture, examining how the Church both shapes and is shaped by the world in which she lives (Elphick, 1997, 1-15).

Secular yet theological: Steven Paas (2016, 21), in his definition of church history, argues that “church history belongs to secular history”, identifying three elements of secular church history to be historical events themselves, the communication of those events and historiography (21-23). Yet, while church history belongs to the sphere of secular history, it is not itself a secular discipline. Rather, it is fundamentally theological and therefore belongs equally to the discipline of theology (24). To further establish his point, Pass introduces the doctrine of the Church – ecclesiology. Following the classical understanding of the Church, Paas identifies three of the Church’s essential marks: one, holy and catholic. One refers to the spiritual unity of the Church under Christ’s headship. Holy refers to her being “set apart”. Although she might be in the world, she does not belong to the world. Catholic refers to her universality; although she might be represented by autonomous local churches, she remains a universal entity. These three characteristics provides us the theological framework within which the history of the Church is to be understood. A further question we are now faced with is: how has this history been understood? Or rather, what are the major divisions of church history?

Here we are entering dangerous ground. Two thousand years is far too much history to be adequately summarized in a paragraph or two. Any brief account inevitably risks becoming overly simplistic or reducing complex historical, social and theological developments to convenient categories. Nevertheless, recounting the development of the Church is a task before us, and it must therefore be undertaken albeit with great care and caution.

In Western scholarship, church history is commonly divided into four broad periods: the Apostolic & Patristic Age, the Medieval Age, the Reformation and the Modern & Contemporary period. This division is present in varying degrees in Berkhof’s “The History of Christian Doctrine” by Gregg R. Allison. This is also present in Needham’s “2000 Years of Christ’s Power” creating the unfortunate impression that Christ’s power was limited to the Western world for the past 2000 years. (Though we recognise that Western Christianity itself owes much of its theological foundation to the early African church fathers.) Regardless of my rather distaste for such periodization, these divisions are useful as broad chronological markers, but they should not be treated as rigid boundaries. The development of the Church was neither uniform nor confined to the Western world, and each period contains significant diversity, continuity and overlap. When these divisions are treated as rigid and exhaustive, however, we rob ourselves of a fuller and a catholic account of the work of God’s Word and Spirit in building Christ’s Church. The Church becomes, in effect, a predominantly Western story, while everything outside the Western experience is reduced to a footnote. But, good friends, the gospel crossed seas and continents. And as it spread across the world, it reached Africa, and Africans did not become spectators of the Church’s gospel. Some rejected while others embraced it as God’s eternal gift. And having accepted it, they became participants in it – receiving, confessing, defending, transmitting, and in their own contexts, expressed the faith once delivered to the saints. A comprehensive history of the Church must therefore account not only for what God has done in the West, but for His work among His people across the nations, including Africa. Take for example the hymns Zulus, Sotho and Xhosa Christians produced after accepting the free offer of the gospel.

Zulu: Lifikile iVangeli

The gospel arrived among the sons of uZulu kaMalandela and the Lord stirred their hearts to believe the gospel. Having received it, not as a foreign tradition, but as a good heritage from the Lord, they confessed it in their own language and passed it on through song. Lifikile ivangeli esizweni sakwaZulu this was their anthem. Furthermore, they understood themselves to be both recipients of and participants in the Great Christian Tradition.

Sotho: Jehovah Modimo oa Iseraele

Likewise, the sons of Moshoeshoe were no spectators of the Christian faith, but active participants in it. This is demonstrated in what they did once the gospel landed: they evangelized tirelessly, planted churches wherever they went and taught Christian doctrine faithfully. They gloried in Jehovah, the God of Israel, who had redeemed them from their former ignorance. They marveled at the peace brought by the gospel: peace between God and man, and the long-sought-after peace between man and man. They marveled further that those who had been scattered were returning to their homes, and that those who had been in the fortresses were receiving the gospel with joy. And as those returning to their heavenly Father, they rejoiced in the loved of Christ and longed to see Him establish His kingdom among them. Their response was therefore not merely to receive the gospel, but to bless the Lord who had brought them home and to pray for the further establishment of His Kingdom among His people.

The Xhosa: Sinelizwi likaThixo, Lizalis’ idinga laKho

In the same way, the sons of Nkos’yamntu were not passive recipients of the Gospel but participated in the grace revealed in it. They were conscious of their sin and looked to the only remedy: the Lord Jesus Christ as He was revealed in the pages of Scripture. Their faith was founded upon the Word of God and on His Word alone. With faith-filled confidence, they sang with thankful hearts: Sinelizwi likaThixo. And in that Word, their sin is exposed; alongside the way of salvation through Christ, their Redeemer. This Word-centered faith produced a missionary-minded people. They understood that the Word has already traversed great distances and would continue travelling to faraway lands that had yet to hear of the Redeemer. Through this same Word God’s enemies are overcome, and the knowledge of God will fill the earth. As people who experience ravenous land wars against the English and Afrikaans, they existentially know that nations will remain restless and impoverished apart from this Word, for it is the Word alone brings true joy and spiritual wealth. Thus, the Xhosa did not merely receive the Christian tradition; they confessed it, sang it, and looked beyond themselves to its advance among the nations.

I hope I have demonstrated this one fact: the gospel did not arrive in Africa merely to create spectators of a Christianity formed elsewhere. As the gospel crossed seas and continents, it took root among African peoples, and those who received it became participants of the Great Christian Tradition. They confessed the faith, sang its truths, planted churches, taught Christian doctrine, evangelized their neighbors and prayed for the advancement of Christ’s kingdom in their own contexts – signs of the existence of a Christian community. The examples listed above demonstrate that African Christians received the same apostolic gospel, confessed the same Christ, submitted to the same Word, and participated in the same mission of the Church. The African church therefore belongs within the history of Christianity – not as an appendix to Western Church history, but as part of the one Church that Christ is building among the nations.

Yet acknowledging this history does not require we romanticize it. African Christianity has also been marked by serious error and compromise. Among the Xhosa, figures such as Nxele and Nongqawuse loom over as examples of distortions of the Christian faith, particularly relating to the resurrection of the dead. Syncretism has found a home in many churches, while liberal theology has exerted considerable influence. These realities do not invalidate the history of African Christianity; rather, they demonstrate the very tensions that have characterized the Church throughout history. Where the gospel advances, it encounters both opposition and imitation from Christ’s arch-enemy - Satan. The history of the African church therefore contains both genuine expressions of Christian faith and serious distortions of it.

What does this, then, teach us? This: Once we look past the colonial degradation of African thought and spirituality, we discover a distinctly African Christian history: its own churches, hymns, theological controversies, heroes and villains. Yet these Christians did not understand themselves as an isolated church. They saw themselves as a part of the wider Christian communion and remained in conversation with the Christianity they encountered around them.

Ntsikana provides a striking example of exactly that. Living in the same broad period as figures such as Dyan Tshatshu, the king of amaNtande, and Johannes van der Kemp, he ministered within an emerging African Christian community while remaining conscious of its connection to the wider Church. Even in his final instruction to his community, he directed them toward the mission station, where they would “drink from the same milk sack” from which he fed them. The generation that followed likewise expressed this catholic consciousness in its hymnody. Their hymns were distinctly African in language and expression, yet they often employed melodies drawn from the Western Christian tradition. As Mandisi Dyantyis (video) has recently observes, this was not an abandonment of African identity, but an example of African Christian locating their own confession within the wider song of Christ’s Church.

But recovering this history also raises an important question: how should we respond to the colonial history of Christianity in Africa? If African Christians were genuine participants in the Christian tradition, we must neither romanticize the forms Christianity took in Africa nor dismiss them simply because they were historically connected to the West. This is where the decolonial critique becomes both necessary and contested.

Decolonial scholars are right to criticize aspects of the form in which Christianity was received and institutionalized in Africa, particularly where theology and Christian doctrine were employed to justify domination, cultural subjugation, or the dehumanization of Africa peoples. Such abuses must be confronted rather than defended in the name of Christianity. Where the decolonial project goes astray, however, is when a legitimate critique of the Church’s historical failures becomes a rejection of the Christian faith itself, or an attempt to replace the biblical faith with a syncretistic body of beliefs drawn indiscriminately from Christianity and pre-Christian African religious traditions. The misuse of Christianity by Christians does not establish the falsity of Christianity. As its most problematic, the decolonial narrative can seek to construct an African Christianity in which African becomes the controlling category and Christian becomes secondary. The result is a conception of the African church defined primarily by shared ethnicity, history and experiences of oppression rather than by union with Christ and submission to His Word. In such a framework, the boundaries of the Church can become so broad that African identity and experiences of oppression become prerequisites for church membership, while the biblical marks of the Church – faith in Christ, justification, regeneration, baptism, sanctification and a common confession of faith – are treated as secondary or even exclusionary.

This raises a fundamental question: What makes the Church the Church? If the answer is ultimately ethnicity, culture, or a shared history of oppression, then we have not recovered the biblical Church but replaced one inadequate definition with another. The Church is constituted by Christ and His gospel, not by race or culture. Consequently, an insistence upon the purity of the Church and the faithfulness of her doctrine cannot simply be dismissed as Western coloniality. Such an argument would only hold if these doctrines were demonstrated to be uniquely Western inventions. But the doctrines of Christ, justification, union with Christ, baptism, sanctification and the marks of the Church – in a word, the Apostle’s Creed – do not derive their authority from Western Christianity. Their authority must be tested by the Scriptures. The task, therefore, is neither to defend every form of Christianity introduces into Africa, nor to construct an alternative African gospel. Rather, it is to distinguish the biblical faith from the cultural and colonial forms in which that faith has sometimes been presented, so that African Christians may reject what is contrary to Scripture without surrendering what Scripture requires us to believe.

In conclusion, it must be said with no fear of contradiction that Church history does not end with the Reformation, nor does it end at the borders of Western Christianity. The Church Christ is building in one, holy and catholic and her history therefore extends wherever the gospel has been preached, received, confessed and lived. The story of African Christianity belongs within that history. This also provides a necessary corrective to both Western and decolonial distortions. African Christian need not be reduced to a colonial import, but neither must it be reconstructed as a Christianity whose authority rests upon African identity. The Church is not constituted by geography, ethnicity or culture, but by Christ and His gospel. Her faith is therefore neither Western nor African in its authority. It is apostolic, catholic and biblical. To study African Church history, then, is not merely to recover forgotten names and neglected stories. It is to recognize more fully the breadth of Christ’s work among the nations and to see African Christians as participants in the same Great Tradition into which Christ has gathered His people from every tribe, tongue, people and nation. The task before us is therefore neither to imitate the West nor to reject it wholesale, but to bring every expression of Christianity – including our own – under the searching authority of the Word of God, by which Christ continues to build and purify His Bride, the one, holy, catholic Church.

As we draw an end to the month where we celebrate the Reformation, it is my earnest desire we consider looking within the borders of Africa for signs of revival and reform where the Lord spread and established the truth of His word. Let us examine what the Lord has wrought in our own father’s lands and recall martyrs, whose blood are the cost they paid for faithfulness to the Lord Jesus Christ. Let us sing our hymns in our languages and investigate the occurrence of such hymns and their composers. Brothers and sisters, let us recall the mighty things the Lord has wrought in our land, praise Him for His faithfulness and pass these stories to our children.