Africa can teach us something. . .

There are times when we presume that our situation is unique to us today and that because we have such unique circumstances today, there is nothing that we can learn from the past.  This is not simply foolishness but wrong.  The world is not a constant string of new and unique circumstances and situations but often a constant refrain of what was and still is, what was once but has come back again.  We would do well to pay attention to and learn from how the Church dealt with the same challenges and issues we are now facing.

In my reading a while ago, I was pleased to come across this history of the the African Church, only to discover that it fermented into one of the most intellectually formidable areas of the early Church.  Indeed, it is said that had Christians casually walking its streets during the Apostolic age -- even in times of persecution throughout the empire.  Africa provided very fertile soil for early Christianity and gave birth and formation to some of the intellectual giants of our early history -- men like Tertullian and Cyprian.  Yet it did so amid a very cosmopolitan atmosphere which blended conflicting cultural influences that did not exist in other parts of Rome's influence. It was Africa which was home to Augustine, not only a profound figure in Africa but throughout the West.  Although he was bishop of Hippo, his shadow was cast well beyond that domain.  It was here that synods and councils enumerated the Western canon, where formative teaching on original sin, the relationship between the spiritual and temporal estates, monasticism (at least in the West), and moral theology.

By the time of Augustine, North Africa had become a vibrant and deeply Christian community.  With  hundreds of bishoprics and the site of many councils and synods, the Church in Africa was catholic and apostolic, rooted in tradition, and practiced a vibrant sacramental theology.  By the time of Augustine's death in 430, the Vandals created a climate that led many Christians to flee to Italy and southern Gaul.  But the history remains and it shines a light upon our current situation.  Although we have some differences in our society and culture, the Church has tended to decline in the midst of diversity and has not held its own in the public square nor has it flourished in the kind of cosmopolitan shape of modern society in the West.  Clearly, one of the keys might a difference among the leaders today.  Are our bishops, pastors, and members as clearly orthodox and vocal in their public witness as were those of Northern Africa in the earliest days of Christianity?  Can we learn something from the way they gave testimony to and demonstrated their Christian witness within a diverse and cosmopolitan setting which is common to nearly every urban area in the world today?

With the arrival of the Vandals and the beginning of the end of the shining moment of the African Church, we find how things can change with the force of power against Christians.  The Church certainly suffered but so did the rest of the culture and civilization when the conditions caused  Christians to flee.  Indeed, it was Tertullian who first raised the question that haunts us today, “What indeed has Athens to do with Jerusalem?”  To put it another way, what does culture have to do with the Church?  What is revealed is, of course, the fact that the Church and the culture around it are not insulated from each other and deeply entwined on several levels.  Yet at the same time, it also reveals what happens when the Church becomes captive to that culture and how the culture itself suffers with the absence of a vital Christian presence.

Christianity can never simply be reduced to culture.  We all know that on some level.  But what is the relationship between the Church and the world around the Church?  Christianity does not live in a vacuum but neither is the Church a sponge to absorb all that is around it.  When it did flourish, the African Church lived in a flourishing world and it provided a setting in which Christianity could develop, expand, and build upon its witness and draw people into the life of the Church.  When things fell down due to the invasion of the Vandals, the absence of the Christian voice, and the decline of the institutions of the community, it was not simply the Church that suffered.  In the end, those who remained among the Christian community could not preserve what was severely tested by the threats to the civilization and the Church itself suffered by abandoning its former place within the society.

Within the West, we find ourselves as Christians increasingly isolated and insulated, some by threat and force against us and some by our own surrender, choosing to embrace the values and culture more than to stand forth and stand out in testimony to the Biblical witness and in continuity with the catholic tradition.  What is clearly apparent is how the culture itself is suffering without the vibrant presence of a committed Christian community but what is not always apparent is how the Church suffers when we no longer carry forward the banner of Christ's death and resurrection and the yeast of His Gospel into the world around us with the same urgency and lively proclamation.  That is also something to be learned by the African lesson as well.