Imperial Kenosis as a Political Medicine: An Afro-Wesleyan Public Theology of the Cross

Abstract

This thesis is an African theological ethnography that seeks to make an original contribution to public theological knowledge from the Wesleyan tradition. The research blends the methods of Malinowski’s Participant-Observation and Gluckman’s Manchester School of Anthropology. As such, it accounts for a relationship of co-dependency between nefarious theo-political praxes among evangelicals in the Republic of Bénin and external theologies inherited from Western/Protestant traditions. Consequently, this thesis explores an alternative ethnographically based atonement theology as an anti-imperial discourse in solidarity with African bodies historically positioned to be in the permanent mode of sacrificial victims. Based on ethnographic data gathered in Bénin from December 2012 through July 2017, this research has established three findings about Béninese evangelicals concerning their experience of wielding political power for two decades (April 1996-April 2016) in Bénin. First, evangelicals in Bénin consent to leaving a legacy of unsatisfactory public engagement with the sacrifice of Christ and acknowledge being on a quest for an ideological basis for witness in the context of neo-liberal democracy. Second, contrary to official claims that Bénin is a thriving democracy, several Béninese evangelicals rather see their geopolitical environment as characterised by foreign imperialistic commitment to maintain Africans in a compulsory sacrificial mode of existence. Third, a public theology of the cross emerges from the analysis of the data and leads this research to frame it as Imperial Kenosis envisaged as an Afro-Wesleyan ideological critique of the still operating two root causes of African poverty, namely, historical racism and African self-abasement. John Wesley’s ideological critique of eighteenth-century imperial powers coupled with the African tradition of resistance informs this vision of atonement. This vision of atonement is present in some participants’ critical insights and from a non-imperial appraisal of local religio-political tradition, which together are able to move the evangelical church beyond its externally inherited antagonism between Roman Catholicism and Reformation traditions. This research establishes John (and Charles) Wesley’s historic challenge to European enslavement as a missio Dei witness for African liberty. To this end, the thesis discusses the similarity between Wesley’s England and Béninese neo-liberal contexts as bent on sacrificing African bodies. Based on Wesley’s Thoughts Upon Slavery, letter to William Wilberforce, and the two brothers’ historic theo-political interactions with two African princes (Little Ephraim Robin John and Ancona Robin Robin John), this thesis offers an African-centred interpretation of Wesley’s public theology as a theopolitical rupture. Wesley introduced a unique break from medieval and Protestant Christianities in relation to African experience. As a result, the thesis questions contemporary theopolitical supports for imperial sacrificing of Africans and offers Béninese evangelicals the Wesleys’ line of interpreting atonement as a model of public theology in tune with African endogenous knowledge system and anti-imperialistic Christianity. It suggests a reorientation of evangelical thinking about faith toward an anti-imperial performance in the tradition of New Testament and primitive Christianity.

Date of Award	31 Dec 2019
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	The University of Manchester
Supervisor	RMS UnKnown (Supervisor)