The Human Condition , livre ebook

Global Christian Library Series

The Human Condition
Christian Perspectives Through African Eyes
Joe M. Kapolyo
Series Editor: David Smith
Consulting Editor: Joe M. Kapolyo

© Joe M Kapolyo, 2005
Published 2013 by Langham Global Library
an imprint of Langham Creative Projects
Langham Partnership
PO Box 296, Carlisle, Cumbria, CA3 9WZ, UK
www.langham.org
ISBNs:
978-1-907713-04-0 print
978-1-907713-56-9 Mobi
978-1-907713-55-2 ePub
Joe M Kapolyo has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher or the Copyright Licensing Agency.
Scripture quotations are taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 by International Bible Society. First published in Great Britain in 1979. Used by permission of Hodder & Stoughton, a division of Hodder Headline Ltd. All rights reserved. ‘NIV’ is a trade mark of International Bible Society. UK trade mark number 1448790.
First published 2005 by Inter-Varsity Press, ISBN: 1-84474-064-1
This edition 2013 by Langham Global Library
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
Kapolyo, Joe M.
The human condition : Christian perspectives through African eyes.
1. Theological anthropology--Christianity. 2. Theology, Doctrinal--Africa, Sub-Saharan.
I. Title
233’.0967-dc23
ISBN-13: 9781907713040
Cover & typesetting: projectluz.com

Converted to eBook by EasyEPUB

To my wife Anne for her love and companionship
Contents

Cover


Acknowledgments


Introduction


Selected Bemba Glossary


1 Concepts of Humankind: Old and New


The Christian vision of human beings


Darwin’s vision of human beings


The Marxist vision of human beings


Ubuntu : an African vision of human nature


The primacy of community


2 Biblical Perspectives on the Human Condition


The human condition


Jesus: the image of God


3 The Descent of Man


Sin: a definition


The origins of sin


The consequences of sin


The universal scope of sin


The ways of this world


4 A Traditional African Anthropology


Deep and surface cultures


When two cultures meet


Some core or foundational cultural values of the Bemba


Ukulilapo


5 The Human Condition in the Light of the Gospel


Integrating biblical teaching and African culture


Three biblical examples: covenant, kingship and justification


Bibliography


About Langham Partnership
Acknowledgments
The Global Christian Library is largely a continuation of John R. W. Stott’s efforts in encouraging Christian leadership from the churches of the developing world. I want to express my gratitude to Uncle John, as he is affectionately called in many parts of Africa.
The day-to-day or rather year-to-year work of encouraging writers to keep at it and of organizing writers’ workshops has fallen to the series editor, David Smith. Many times I have said to David that as he is better able to express the things I was struggling to say, he really ought to have written the book. But David kept on encouraging me and I am deeply grateful for his friendship, ready listening ear and firmness in dealing with less than helpful text or ideas. David is a true encourager and without his persistence this book might never have seen the light of day.
At IVP, Phil Duce and the editorial staff have been excellent and very professional in their work and I am deeply grateful to them for their friendliness, thoroughness and encouragement.
Anne, my wife, and my two daughters, Patricia and Laura, have had to live with this project for some time now. Their comments and interest in the work have spurred me on. My colleagues on the staff of All Nations Christian College have given me tremendous encouragement to keep at it. I also want to thank the many people who have inspired me through their writings, lectures and conversations. Many of their thoughts are reflected in the text of my work, I hope faithfully and fairly.
Above all I want to thank the Lord who at the right time brought me into a saving knowledge of Jesus Christ his son, whom I now serve and have done for the past thirty years in youth work, a couple of pastorates and now in theological/missions training.
Moreover, in acknowledging my debt of gratitude I do not thereby transfer any responsibility to others for the inadequacies of the finished product. I bear sole responsibility for the whole work.
Joe M Kapolyo
All Nations Christian College , July 2004
Introduction
The task of writing about human beings is near impossible. A writer can only authoritatively make specific and subjective statements limited to his or her experience. Beyond that one is almost totally reliant on what others have said about human beings. So I am very aware of my personal limitations in this attempt. But in the end I suppose I am simply exploring a subject that fascinates me. In doing so, I am using my personal ‘lived in’ experience and my understanding of God’s Word to put forward some thoughts about the nature of human beings and their cultural environments.
My interests lie in general in the interface between the Word of God and the world of human experience, and in particular Bemba experience. [1] There was a period of my life when I was submerged in an almost purely Bemba cultural context. The only light in the village came from the sun by day and from fires dotted around the village at night. The only running water was in the river half a mile away. Engagement with the world outside was minimal. But that did not last. Christianity and the wider world soon permeated my world and from the late 1950s until relatively recently I have viewed both of these realities largely through the eyes of a ‘borrowed’ cultural milieu. Although I grew up in Zambia, my initial experiences of both Christianity and the wider world were mediated through personal and corporate Zambian experiences of British colonialism and its educational and other social legacies enshrined in present Zambian life and its social structures.
In what I go on to write I make the first faltering steps in exploring my own world and use perspectives from that exploration as lenses through which to view both Christianity and the wider world. I believe strongly that this is imperative not just for my own development but, in a small way, for the church as a whole.
Many commentators, including Andrew Walls, have recognized that there is a massive demographic and cultural shift in the composition of the Christian church. This is borne out by many statistics. What is happening in places like Soweto, Manila and Rio de Janeiro will determine the character of Christianity in fifty years’ time. Making sense of those contexts in the light of the Scriptures will help to clarify and establish the identity of the ‘next Christendom’. Christian students of the Bible and culture from the emerging majority church must give themselves wholly to this task. As Andrew Walls says in his paper ‘Christian Scholarship in Africa in the Twenty-First Century’, given at a missions conference in May 2004:

Cross-cultural diffusion (which is the life blood of historic Christianity) has to go beyond language, the outer skin of culture, into the process of thinking and choosing and all the networks of relationship that lie beneath language, turning them all towards Christ . . . This is deep translation, the appropriation of the Christian Gospel in terms of that culture, down to the roots of identity.
This process will in the end call for a certain rethinking of theological categories. Not a reinvention of historic Christian beliefs but a recasting into more culturally friendly categories. Christianity must make a home in the cultures of the southern hemisphere and thereby lose its foreignness. The task is making Christ Lord in every part of every culture. Failure to follow this through will lead to confusion, uncertainty and a lack of theological leadership in the principal theatres of Christianity in the twenty-first century.
In what follows I am aware that I may well be raising more questions than answers or perhaps only indicating the lines along which further explorations must follow. I trust that a growing volume of work from Africa, Asia and South America will affirm the global nature of Christianity while at the same time remaining deeply rooted at the heart of each host culture, to the honour and glory of Christ our Lord.

1.
. The Bemba are a Zambian tribe that traditionally inhabits parts of the northeast between the Luapula and Luangwa rivers. The word also stands for the language of the Bemba, which without capitalization means ‘a lake’.
Selected Bemba Glossary
Where I have not listed a word here, I have tried to make its meaning clear in the context where it appears.
akaliwa
is in danger of being eaten or will be eaten amano
wisdom ekala
lives with or lives in Lesa
Bemba term for G