Failure of the northern fathers

For believers the statement; God works in mysterious ways is used sometimes rather flippantly. Yet anyone who walks with Him long enough in truth and in spirit soon discovers how true this really is. While God’s providence is a regular feature of the true believers life, the amazement that accompanies it never seems to wear out. I have had one of those moments recently.

In my quest to ascertain the means by which man can obtain a maximization of his existence, I have come to the conclusion after over 10 years of research, that the Christian worldview is the only way. My experiment with new age ideas, philosophy and psychology has failed quite woefully. But the Christian worldview had some challenges I was struggling to resolve. Chief among them: its “European face”.

My sojourn through theology and its history brought me face to face with the master theologians of the African continent. The likes of Alexandria’s titan; Origen, Hippo’s maestro; Augustine, Tertullian, Athanasius and their acolytes have made such startlingly profound contributions to the faith; it is shocking some would refer to Christianity as a European religion. Lurking behind the complex veil of African ingenuity, I detected a failure that grieved my heart deeply. As an African, I felt that these theologians had failed us by not undertaking south-bound missions that would have brought the much needed light to the rest of the continent. The Christianity that flourished in the north would have reached the west and south at least a thousand years before the first European ever set foot on the shores of the Atlantic. It is a real tragedy when one considers that, it is about the only commandment Christ handed down before His departure.

 

“And he said unto them, Go ye into the entire world, and preach the gospel to every creature.¹⁶ 

He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved; but he that believeth not shall be damned”.

- Mark 16:15-16 

It is that command that brought the faith to North Africa and Syria and Persia and later India and China. Men did their duty, why not our African fathers who by their writing alone have showed such dexterity with the word. Have we not failed the Lord? Is the arrival of the Whiteman not a punishment then?

Only yesterday I had resorted to writing an article expressing my thought on this seeming failure. There are too many people claiming that the Christian faith is the white man’s religion and it’s God, the Whiteman’s God. My planned article was going to show them how the faith reached us first before Europe. But then I would have to explain why it did not spread to the rest of the continent. These thoughts had populated my mind when I chanced upon a video on Facebook. It was an Afrocentric complaining about African American Christian Apologists calling them liars. He mentioned names and I went goog-ling. The surprise that waited would solve a problem I have been living with for years. That surprised will change the direction of this article. 

Read part two here >>