Sin and Sovereignty in the Lives of Urban Baptists in Zimbabwe

ABSTRACT

What is the relation between divine and human action in the world? To understand how a certain group of Christians reckon human capacity and divine authority, I explore articulations of two theological concepts – sin and sovereignty – as they played out in the concerns of a congregation of Baptists in Zimbabwe’s capital city. This paper is situated within emerging conversations between anthropologists and theologians, and from my ethnographic case I argue that contemporary readings of Calvin and of Augustinian notions of original sin offer the anthropologist alternatives to the analytic category of ‘agency’. Beliefs about the limits of human capacity and about God’s control among urban Zimbabwean Baptists shape their engagement with the political realm, and their case contributes to ethnographic explorations of theological and political conceptions of sovereignty.

KEYWORDS:

• Christian theology
• Calvinism
• agency
• sovereignty
• Africa

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to J. Derrick Lemons, and participants of the Center for Theologically Engaged Anthropology conference in Atlanta for helpful workshop interactions. I particularly thank Brian M. Howell, Joel Robbins, Francis X. Clooney, S.J., Don Seeman, Martyn Percy, and Alister E. McGrath for their charitable comments and critical feedback. Thanks also to Haleema Welji. I am grateful for the interventions of three anonymous reviewers for Ethnos. All errors are my own.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Morreira (2015) discusses potential origins for the adoption of the phrase ‘make a plan’ in contemporary Zimbabwe.

2 Little scholarly work exists on this movement but see Hansen (2006). Chow (2014) also includes a discussion of how a simultaneously rising influence of Calvinism in urban China is focused on theological concerns that are distinct from those of so-called New Calvinism.

3 Oftentimes this disagreement has taken the form of a discussion on predestination, that is, the degree to which God has predetermined those humans who will be saved, thus downplaying the role of humans in their own salvation.

4 All names given here are pseudonyms.

5 When I surveyed the group on their ‘first language’, a number of respondents who indicated ‘Shona’ also pencilled in that English was their preferred language.

6 These churches are all registered with the global Baptist organising body, the Baptist World Alliance. Of the 678 churches and 73,000 members listed for all Baptist denominations in Zimbabwe, the BUZ accounts for only 68 churches and 5000 members, according to the Baptist World Alliance website statistics (www.bwanet.org). I heard the comparatively small and slow growth in the BUZ lamented by church leaders who were aware of the 68-church count in comparison to other Baptist denominations in the region. In the Harare region, there are six Baptist Union churches, having existed as an autonomous denomination for more than 60 years. The Baptist Union of South Africa, which started the churches in Zimbabwe, began with the arrival of British settlers to the Cape Colony in the early 20th century.

7 The Pew Global Religious Futures measured 87% of Zimbabwe’s population were professing Christians in 2010. Of these, 67% were Protestants (http://www.globalreligiousfutures.org/countries/zimbabwe).

8 The more mainline denominations belong to the other dominant church alliance: the Zimbabwe Council of Churches. This includes Methodists, Anglicans and Lutherans. Membership is not generally shared between the Zimbabwe Council of Churches and the EFZ; generally, churches belong to one or the other (Mukonyora 2008).

9 Vapastori refers to a collection of Southern African churches who follow a prophetic leader. They are not members of the EFZ, although, for example, Mukonyora (2008) has included them under a broad umbrella of ‘evangelical’.

10 By some estimates, in the 70–80% range. See newspaper articles by Moyo (2013) and Chiumia (2014).

11 See Hammar et al. (2010) and Jones (2010).

12 For a robust discussion of Christian notions of sin and sinfulness in a different cultural context, see Robbins (2004).

13 For example, see Robbins (2010) and Daswani (2013).

14 Engel (1988) makes sense of the seeming contradictions in Calvin’s thought by speaking of the ‘perspectivalism’ evident in the God-human relation. From God’s perspective, the dynamics of the situation can appear one way, while from a human perspective they can appear in opposing terms. Both perspectives can operate simultaneously in relation to one another within Calvin’s system.

15 The ‘coup that was not a coup’ which ousted Mugabe as the country’s leader occurred some 9 months after my fieldwork ended.

16 As one anonymous reviewer of this paper pointed out, Saint Augustine himself was also from the African continent, and living in the ‘failing state’ of Rome. The context in which his influential theology was developed bears interesting parallels with some of the current political situation in Zimbabwe. I thank the reviewer for pointing out this interesting connection.

17 China Scherz sees a similar kind of affirmation play out in how Catholic sisters in Uganda understand their own action: they

feel they are working within God’s divine plan [but] they do not see themselves as able to bring about social change without divine intervention. They believe that only God can complete and perfect their imperfect works, which are always broken and always partial, as they believe themselves to be. (2014: 133)

While the ethnographic similarities between these Catholic nuns and Zimbabwean Baptists are striking, the theological imperative for Zimbabweans is different.

18 For a contrasting and also complimentary case, see Greenhouse’s (1986) discussion of Southern Baptist approaches to ‘civil religion’ and the Moral Majority.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Wenner-Gren Foundation under Wenner-Gren Dissertation Research Grant 8876.