Indecision

False Teaching and Conspiracy Theories – The Perfect Bedfellows

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Many have died, and until a solution is found on a global scale to deal with this pandemic, many more deaths are bound to be recorded. There is uncertainty. Jobs have been lost; incomes devastated; money is harder to come by. Families are going hungry, and a passenger sitting next to you in trotro who dares to cough receives a very suspicious glare. These are the days of Covid-19. The question on almost everybody’s mind is “why Covid-19”? Why now? Why this generation? Maybe even “why me?”, as you ponder it’s impact on you personally and/or your family. It is only human to seek answers, to seek for explanations and most importantly, to feel in control of your own destiny in times of uncertainty.

Therefore, it is only human to seek to tap into these fears to portray oneself as the one with answers, the one who knows the secrets of the times. And no such people are experts at this than religious folks. Which is why our so-called “prophets”, “men of God”, “bishops” and “archbishops” are falling over each other to promote one theory or the other about the Covid-19 pandemic and what is driving it. Not only does this posturing betray their ignorance of history of the world in general and that of the faith they claim to be representatives of, but it exposes them for who they are – men deluded by their desire for power and control than by anything else. And so, we will look at some of the typical tactics adopted by power-hungry religious leaders as compared to leaders seeking to be faithful to Jesus Christ.

But before we talk about these tactics, let’s discern the 1 motivation behind these tactics.

Preachers of Comfort, Not Suffering

Throughout the history of Christianity, one of the hallmarks of false teaching has been the tendency to preach messages that make Christians seem invincible to suffering, especially if they exhibit the right levels of something religious – be it “faith” or “confession”, repentance, church attendance, giving, prayer etc. Their focus is on the individual’s own self-preservation and advancement, instead of what Jesus clearly laid down for us with his own life – suffering for one another’s advancement.

 

Instead of what Peter said – “because Christ suffered for you, leaving you an example that you should follow in his steps.” (1 Peter 2:21), their preaching can be summed up as “Christ suffered for you, so that if you exercise the right level of religiosity, you will not suffer”.

 

However if Jesus left us example that we should “follow in his steps”, then caring for one another – enduring some suffering for the sake of not just a fellow Christian but all of humanity – just as God cared for and therefore died for us is at the center of what it means to be a Christian.

 

This denial of suffering (not just any kind of suffering but self-sacrifice for one another) is at the heart of almost every form of heresy that the church has known for its 2000-year history. This motivation is what then informs the following tactics deployed by such confused leaders.

Make Their Members Believe this is Unprecedented

The first thing such confused leaders engage in is to make Christians believe that such epidemics and pandemics have never happened before. They do this by pretending that Christianity only began when they (or their favorite past Christian leader) began practicing Christianity. This is easy for them to do, because 99% of the time even before this pandemic, they never preached about church history and the fact that Christianity is 2000 years old, blissfully ignoring the fact their church today is just a blip on the map of the Christian spectrum.

 

But if they were not so ignorant of history, they would know that the early Church faced its fair share of pandemics, most popular of which was named after a leader of the church in the 3rd century – Cyprian of Carthage. No, Cyprian didn’t cause the pandemic, neither did he curse the Roman empire with it. The Plague of Cyprian is named after him because he lived through it and documented it. But more significantly, his leadership during this period when the Roman empire was crumbling makes naming it after him even more appropriate. To that leadership, we will return later.

 

Many more epidemics and pandemics have followed the church beyond Cyprian’s plague, such as the Bubonic Plague of the 16th century, right in the middle of the Protestant Reformation, and yet the church continues to this day.

 

But if that pandemic was too far in history for today’s “men of God” to be aware of, I would have at least expected them to be aware and learn from the most recent one in world history – the Spanish Flu of 1918. But alas, if Christianity began with the founding of the churches of these “bishops” and “men of God”, perhaps their ignorance can be excused.

Divert Attention from their Failed Teaching

Having preached comfort for so long, any self-aware follower of such preachers would immediately ask questions about what these preachers have been preaching. Why has the “devourer” devoured my job, when I expected God to protect my job because I have been paying my tithes religiously? Why has my father (or another beloved family member) died from Covid-19 or it’s complications, when I exercised faith and prayed profusely for healing? Doesn’t God “know his own” anymore? Why has God allowed this Covid-19 to bring my business to its knees, such that I can’t even feed my family 3 square meals a day?

 

In difficult times like these, preachers of comfort need a means to divert the attention of their followers from these questions, and so are quick to fall for the next most comforting thing – conspiracy theories and “end of days” prophecies. Cue the likes of Chris Oyakhilome and his love affair with 5G conspiracy theories or American evangelicals and their beloved “rapture” teachings fused with biblical misinterpretations around “666 and the mark of the beast” as exemplified by people like John Hagee.

 

Such preachers make you think that Christians have always been waiting for some beast to dish out some form of “666” mark, ignoring to tell their followers that this teaching misreading of the book of Revelation only began with the Plymouth Brethren in the 19th century, especially during World War I. Please note, for 1800 years of Christianity, most Christians didn’t give a hoot about an “Antichrist” or “the beast” or 666 and a coming end of age. Most Christians awaited Jesus’ second coming, and that was the end of the matter.

 

But when comfort Christianity fails, diversions are needed to keep church members from devouring their leadership, and so a new (or old) enemy will always be found. And most of the gullible flock are ever desirous to believe, instead of asking deep questions. After all, asking questions is equal to not having faith in these circles of Christianity.

 

Preserve the System, at the Cost of the People

And so, we come to one of the most glaring aspects of false teaching – a need to “keep the system going”, instead of pausing for reflection about the effects the pandemic is having on people. Such preachers care more about the opening of church for “normal service” than they care about the lives of people. They will present themselves as the people with “faith” who are not allowing a pandemic to tell them how to “worship their God”, and will label the wisdom of scientists as evil, in so far as it prevents their “system” from going on as usual.

 

And it is here that we look to the leadership of Cyprian of Carthage. When the Plague of Cyprian hit the Roman empires, the rich were abandoning the cities in their droves to their comfortable country homes, leaving the poor to suffer. And yet Cyprian the bishop encouraged Christians to stand their ground and rather care for the sick and dying. Whiles some of the Christians inevitably succumbed to the disease and died in the process, some also survived and became important in the care for the poor and sick in this pandemic. By this single act of leadership alone, Christianity grew massively after the pandemic subsided simply because the church, led by Cyprian and other such leaders, focused on meeting the actual needs of those affected by the pandemic, not blame games and diversionary tactics.

 

It is this kind of leadership that is required of our teachers in these times. Yes, today we have science, showing us how to avoid the coronavirus as well as ways to stop it’s spread, and we should heed that advice. But beyond that, livelihoods have been destroyed, businesses have collapsed, children are going hungry, and poverty is on the rise as a result of Covid-19. And this is happening to both churchgoers and non-churchgoers alike. We know better not to be in close contact with people without the proper precautions, but there’s so much more that can be done to help whiles the medical people do their bit.

What we Don’t Need

What we don’t need are sermons castigating people for lower church attendance and giving.

What we don’t need are 5G lies and deceit, or nonsense about “mark of the beast via vaccines”.

What we don’t need are pontifications about a coming “New World Order” or a coming “rapture”.

What we need are leaders who will remind us of that is important – what historic, faithful, and true Christianity has always focused on – the simple commands of Jesus Christ, especially his command to “love your neighbor as yourself” (Mt 22:37-20). We need leaders who will rally us around working to mitigate the impact of this pandemic on the lives of actual church members, and then beyond that, our neighbors in the public square.

In Ghana, the Covid-19 Private Sector Fund has been able to put together money to build an infectious diseases center. That is worth commending, but those are the kinds of initiatives that I can expect of private sector businessmen. Given the amounts of money that sit in the bank accounts of some of our church denominations, Ghanaian churches could easily have done this and more, especially if they put their heads together.

But I’m less worried about what we do at the national scale than I am what we do at the local church communities.

“For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.’” (Matt 25:35-36).

How many times did Jesus in the Gospels refuse to feed people because they didn’t “go to the synagogue or temple to worship on a Sabbath”?

How many times did Jesus in the Gospels say, “you are poor because you refused to pay tithes”?

How many times did Jesus in the Gospels say, “you lost your job because you didn’t have faith”?

Can our church leaders spend less time guilting us on coming to church and spend more time being obedient to Jesus – caring for actual real needs? Can we create structures that enable us to easily detect when people are “suffering in silence” in this pandemic?

Let us remember that we are not going to be judged by how well we knew 666, or how we quickly deciphered a New World Order via so called 5G or when “rapture” and “tribulation”. We will be judged by our deeds of love for fellow human beings, and that is the end of the matter.

The Gospel: How Vocation Follows Redemption

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Over a number of posts, I will be exploring the wider dimensions of the Gospel as articulated by the New Testament, helping us fill in gaps that Ghanaian Christianity tends to ignore, so we can work towards better discipleship. This is part 1. Stick around.

And they sang a new song, saying: “You are worthy to take the scroll and to open its seals because you were slain, and with your blood, you purchased for God persons from every tribe and language and people and nation. You have made them to be a kingdom and priests to serve our God, and they will reign on the earth.” (Rev 5:9-10 NIV)

If you have been around Ghanaian Christianity for any length of time, you are bound to have heard “the Gospel” expressed in various ways, but mostly summarized as follows.

“God loves you. But you are a sinner and cut off from God (and at risk of hellfire). God has sent Jesus to come and die for your sins. If you accept Jesus, all your sins will be forgiven, and you will have a place in heaven”.

Again, these may not be the exact words, and some details may be more emphasized than others or phrased differently. But if you are honest, you can identify this message in many evangelistic tracts, sermons, “crusades” and the like on the Ghanaian Christian landscape.

But over the years, as I have compared popular renditions of “the Gospel” with the version summarized by Rev 5:9-10 quoted above, I notice a wide gap between what the New Testament says the Gospel is, versus what tends to pertain in Ghanaian Christianity. And in these series of posts, I will explore certain dimensions that I feel this passage brings to light that is usually ignored by much the Christianity that dominates Ghanaian circles. The key to the discomfort lies in v 10.

They Will Reign On Earth?

Permit me to deal with the end of that verse before we get to the beginning. Isn’t it weird that, contrary to popular opinions, v 10 says that the people from different tribes and nations purchased by the Lamb are made to “reign on earth”, and not in heaven?

I mean I was born and bred a Pentecostal, and the idea that the goal of my life was to “make it to heaven” was pretty well drummed into my head. I remember the many revivals where I was warned to look into my heart and be sure whether my final destination would be heaven or hell assuming Jesus’ second coming was to be in a few minutes. Basically, I had to be “rapture-ready”, as Jesus could come at any moment. So, what does it mean when those purchased by the Lamb are destined not for rule in heaven, but for a “reign on earth”?  Were my well-beloved elders, deacons, and pastors selling me snake oil? Perhaps the answer may be closer than we think if we dig a little deeper.

A Kingdom and Priests

So, apparently this purchased group of diverse individuals are then made into a “kingdom and priests to serve our God”. What does that also mean? Perhaps the earliest usage of that phrase may give us some clues. 

When God called Israel out of Egypt, he required them to keep his covenant, and if they did so, then he would make them his treasured possession and they will be for him “a kingdom of priests and a holy nation”. (Ex 19:5-6).

This would suggest that the goals that God had for choosing Israel (descendants of only 1 nation), are the same goals that he had for choosing this diverse group from many nations, languages, and cultures by virtue of the shedding of the lamb’s blood. So, if the goal was the same whether with ancient Israel or with the church after Jesus, then why the language of “kingdom of/and priests” to serve him?

The Imago Dei

An important point to remember is John H. Walton’s dictum – the bible was not written to us, but it was written for us. So, to understand biblical language, we need to immerse ourselves in the world of the people to whom the text was first written, and not look to our modern interpretations of what words mean.

In the Ancient Near Eastern (ANE) world of ancient Israel, it was the kings and their priests who were the intermediaries between the gods and ordinary people, much like we have in our Ghanaian cultural settings today. In this regard, our Nananom and our Wulomei were not very different from the culture that existed in ancient Israel, Babylon, Egypt or Canaan at the time of the Old Testament. In the ANE world, everybody was a slave of the gods, and only the kings and priests were “made in the image” of the gods. Hence the absolute power and almost “godlike” status afforded kings and their priests not only in the ANE world but even here and now, in Ghanaian traditional culture. It was and is a class system, pure and simple.

However, right from the beginning when the Creator God of Israel chooses to create, he breaks the chain of class systems by making all human beings “in his image”.

“So, God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them. (Gen 1:27 NIV)

Which raises a question. If God made all humans in his image, then why would he choose a certain subset of those humans (Israel) and give them the task to be “kings and priests” aka be image-bearers again? Isn’t he going against his own classless ideal?

Well, if there is one thing that has been established about human beings is that we are mimetic – we learn best from one another. And the 2nd thing that one can establish about human beings is that the way we treat each other and the world around us is very dependent on the mental pictures of god/gods (conception) that we have acquired throughout our lives. To address this 2 fold behavior of human beings, God’ choice of the people of Israel (and by extension, the diverse people called the church paid for by the blood of the lamb) is so that he will reveal himself to these people (changing their conception of God), and through them (applying mimesis), open the eyes of the rest of the world as to their real identity – people made in the image of a particular type of god.

In this respect, the choosing of the people of God is not so they feel privileged, singing “I’m walking in power, I’m walking in miracles”, but so they serve God by serving the world. 

Wrapping up

All of this is work that is to be done not in heaven, but here on earth, extending into a “new heaven and a new earth”. To be a “kingdom and priests to serve our God and to rule on the earth” is to be a people who serve God by showing who God is to the rest of the world, both by deed and action, and not just in the spiritual sense, but in every sphere of life. It is in that way that we are truly “ruling on the earth”.

But since Ghanaian Christianity has largely sold itself a Gospel that is more about preparing us to go to heaven, we have lost a sense of vocation. We pile up the pews with more people waiting to go to heaven and make them of no earthly use. 

What if we developed a different imagination for what the purpose of being saved was for? Then maybe, the incarnation of God in the person of Jesus might help us understand the particular kind of God we are dealing with, a subject we will broach in the next post.

How We (Simply Christ) Choose our Theological Mentors

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We at SimplyChrist get asked very often this question in one form or the other.

“How do you know that this teacher/theologian’s teaching is to be trusted? Why should I listen to these people you recommend over (or in addition to) my pastor?”

And so, this post sets out to answer that question. But before we go ahead, some clarifications are important.

Humans are Mimetic

We are human beings, and human beings are inherently mimetic. That is, we are designed to learn from each other. You are reading this because at some point in your life, someone taught you the alphabet of the English language, and others built on it until you developed the ability to read and understand things written in the English language. Because learning from others is inevitable, it is better to be intentional about how or from whom one learns, than to pretend that every form of knowledge is equal, or that you yourself (or your pastor) is the originator of one’s own thoughts or opinions. The real question Christians need to ask themselves is this.

“What are the criteria by which I choose to learn from one supposed Christian leader over the other”?

And so in this post, we will set about describing our criteria for learning from certain Christian teachers and scholars, and hopefully help you establish a good criteria for yourself when evaluating teachers, especially the myriad of pastors you will come across in your life as a Christian in Ghana.

1.    Their love for Jesus is obvious and central to their work.

It may sound obvious that everyone who “teaches the bible” has Jesus at the center of their teaching, but that can be far from the truth. And this doesn’t apply only to what many self-respecting Ghanaians might call “quack” preachers like the Obinims and the Obofours, but to more “regular” pastors that one might even respect.

You see, Jesus’s life and teaching is very demanding and uncomfortable if one takes him seriously. So, the further the church grew from its origins, the more Christians leaders explained away the difficulties of what Jesus teaches by appealing to other parts of the Bible, especially the Old Testament, to smoothen over the things he says. This then enables many Christians to live their own comfortable lives pursuing their own agenda, using Jesus as an enabler of their own ambition. Instead of teaching people to take up their crosses and follow Jesus, a lot of “Christian” teachers teach people that Jesus has taken up the cross, so they don’t have to.

The teachers and scholars we recommend are people who don’t attempt to dumb down the difficulty of being a follower of Jesus. And so in their teachings and books, one can see a relentless focus on Jesus and on the Gospels (Mathew, Mark, Luke & John), a deep understanding of the real-life difficulties that Jesus presented to his disciples then, and what he presents to us now. With this deep understanding of Jesus’s mission, they then expound on the rest of the New Testament, especially the letters of Paul. It is also with this same deep understanding of Jesus’s mission that they then do what the early Church did – read the Old Testament with a focus on discovering Jesus hidden in there, not a focus on “applying life principles” from there.

2.    They understand and communicate the complexity of the Bible.

The general tendency within Ghanaian Christianity is to teach the same level of faith to both Sunday School children as they do to an Adult’s service (save for the nice children’s pictures used to teach Sunday School Children).

There is a reason why a child is taught in Sunday school that God created the world in 6 literal days, and then as an adult they are then exposed to the difficulties that Genesis 1 poses when one reads it literalistically, especially when in that creation story, day and night were created before the Sun (how does one have day and night if we use light to mark off day and night?).

The Bible is not a rule book, nor a manufacturer’s manual, nor the “Basic Instructions Before Leaving Earth”. It is not 1 single book, but a collection of books of different genre – poetry, wisdom, history, teaching (the word sometimes translated as “laws” or “traditions”), letters and visions/dreams. Each book therefore needs to be handled appropriately. The choice of which books appeared in this collection called the Bible involved humans, and each book has human input. All of this needs to be acknowledged, not ignored.

The teachers we recommend are people who are aware of these difficulties and teach an adult way to read the Bible to derive the maximum intention of it – as a guide that teaches us the way of righteousness.

3.    They love the church but are honest about its historical failures.

The church is the people whom Jesus has called to serve him by virtue of his empowerment of it through the Holy Spirit at Pentecost in Acts 2. It is the means by which Jesus chooses to work out his kingdom goals in this world, despite all its grievous flaws. In Ghanaian Christianity however, Christian leaders generally are either ignorant of the history of the church, or do not even bother to teach church members any history beyond the formation of their own denominations. They pretend as if every other church before theirs or their contemporaries are some dead forms of faith, whiles they are the true church.

As a result, many Ghanaian Christians are ignorant of the deception, greed, violence, enslavement and outright mass murders that the church in its 2000 years of history has either condoned, or actively participated in. Whenever such Christians meet skeptics who bring up some of these atrocities that the church has historically participated, they get surprised and defensive.

The teachers and scholars we recommend don’t pretend these events of Christian history didn’t happen. They are not afraid to speak of these failures of the church, and how we may learn lessons from them. They understand that God has worked with broken institutions before with the people of Israel and is capable of doing so with our broken history. However, they will not settle for these failures, and continue to goad us on to the perfect way – the way of Jesus himself.

4.    They work towards Christian unity, and are not afraid of self-criticism

Because of our ignorance of history, many Christian leaders in Ghana do not take Jesus’s prayer for Christian unity in John 17 seriously at all. Whatever allows their denomination/church to look better in the eyes of their members is amplified, to the detriment of seeing one another as people laboring in the same field for the same master. In this pursuit then, even pointing out mistakes that one’s own church/denomination or church leaders may be making is deemed “disloyalty”, since it will affect the “brand” of such churches/denominations.

The teachers and scholars we recommend are however not so ignorant of history, especially the history of Christian division and its futility. Hence, they are not afraid to cross carpet to learn from other traditions different from their own church traditions. They may mostly be Protestant, but they are not afraid to integrate the best of Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodoxy or Pentecostalism into their teaching to foster unity between Christians of different traditions. In fact, these teachers are well respected across many denominations divides worldwide, not just in their own home countries or their own denominations. And when they feel their own church denominations have adopted flawed theology, they are not afraid to raise it, sometimes to the discomfort of some of their own denominational leaders. Their goal is not to become popular nor rich, nor to grow their own churches at the expense of others.

5.    They take Judaism seriously as the seedbed for Christianity

The ignorance of world history coupled with the lack of attention to the background and culture of the people of ancient Israel as well as 1st century Israel (Israel at the time of Jesus) means that many Ghanaian preachers seriously misinterpret the Bible. However, this ignorance is so deep-rooted that many do not even realize their flawed interpretations, even when they are genuine preachers who are only doing their best at teaching Christians from the Bible. Their teaching is full of repeated clichés, ripping Bible verses out of context to teach what they want to teach, not what the text actually meant to the original audience nor what it should mean to us in light of Jesus.

The teachers and scholars we recommend are aware of this flaw that has existed within Christianity for centuries since Christianity moved from a Jewish setting to a Gentile world that didn’t understand Jewish customs. They are careful to bring the best research that historians have done to their interpretations of the Bible, so that Christians understand, appreciate and respect Judaism better. In this way, they help us avoid the previous errors of either insulting and denigrating Judaism, or the dogged worship that some Christians give Jews due to our misunderstanding of Jesus’s mission

6.    They teach that the Spirit is at work in the world to shape disciples, not just heaven goers.

The general goal of Ghanaian evangelism is to “save souls” from going to hell, so they could go to heaven. This means that Ghanaian preachers generally do not pay attention to how Jesus has taught us to follow in his life and example, but how to avoid hell and go to heaven. And in response to the “prosperity gospel”, after saving souls, the next focus area for many Ghanaian churches (even those traditionally non-penteco-charismatic ones) has been on how to God to meet one’s needs by faith, or in modern parlance – “by fire by force”.

 

The teachers and scholars we recommend show the flaws of this thinking, reminding us that Jesus’s instruction was to “go make disciples” (a disciple being one who follows in the footsteps of their master) and not mere believers. Their teachings and writings center the Christian life on membership into a body of disciples (called local churches) who are learning to support each other in the difficult work of following in Jesus’s footsteps and bearing bodily witness to his kingdom. They remind Christians that the goal of Christianity is not for us to make it to heaven, but for heaven to be made manifest on the earth.

7.    They emphasize the human vocation to serve the world in the love that Jesus displayed.

Because of the previous limitations expressed above of much Ghanaian Christian teaching, Jesu’s statement that to “love our neighbor as ourselves” is the most important command of God’s commands is almost totally ignored. Typically, Ghanaian preachers have a very limited understanding of why God had to dwell amongst men as the divine and human Jesus, and what that means for us made in the image of such a God.

The teachers and scholars we recommend emphasize the human vocation bequeathed to us in Genesis 1 which is manifested in the incarnation of God through Jesus – that humans were created in the image of a loving, self-sacrificial God. As Jesus left his glory, took on human nature and endured the most shameful death that a 1st century Jew could experience – death by crucifixion – we see these teachers and preachers consistently emphasizing Paul the apostle’s admonition to “have the same mind” of self-sacrifice as Jesus as we go about the work of caring for creation and for one another.

 

8.    They articulate the importance of ethnic, racial and gender reconciliation in Jesus

Ghanaian Christianity has largely absorbed the patriarchal behavior that exists within Ghanaian culture into its modus operandi. Hence, not only is gender abuse rife within Ghanaian churches, but the Bible is freely employed as a means to “keep a woman in her place”. Added to this is continued domination and exclusion of each other on ethnic basis, with preachers openly perpetuating the ethnic biases that different Ghanaian ethnic groups have against each other.

The teachers and scholars that we recommend, being people who are aware of the history of harm that the church has done not just to people of African descent, but also to women, are careful to highlight ways in which Christianity has become slaves to the biases in our culture. They help us see the ways in which Jesus meant to and actually liberated the oppressed class from the clutches of those in power. They openly acknowledge ways in which the church failed to follow Jesus example, and are people well known for advocating for gender, ethnic and racial integration.

9.    They don’t pretend to be the source of previously unknown revelation.

It is the modus operandi of many Ghanaian preachers, especially those of the Penteco-Charismatic lineage, to style themselves as people who have received what they themselves call a “mandate” that is hidden to everyone else but revealed only to them. This allows them to propound their own interpretations of scripture and call for “loyalty” to their “mandate” or face ostracization if one attempts to question them. They therefore tend to appeal to “what they have done” and how large their followership is to shut down criticism.

The teachers and scholars we recommend to you are people who make no such claim. Their goal is to equip us to “contend for the faith that was once for all entrusted to God’s holy people” i.e. the church of old who died to preserve the faith for us to access today. Their goal is to point us to Jesus, and to remove the barriers of bad reading habits, ignorance of history, ignorance of context that prevent us from seeing the beauty of Jesus and living Christ-like lives.

10.   They have no time for conspiracy theories and are not afraid to name false teaching.

Because of the many deficiencies mentioned above within much of Ghanaian Christianity, it has proven very difficult for genuine Ghanaian preachers to be able to refute false teaching. They tend to take a “wait and see” attitude, being afraid to point out false teaching because they feel “unqualified” to do so. This then further leads them to be impotent in the face of misinformation, so-called “prophecies” and outright conspiracy theories.

The teachers and scholars we recommend to you, because of their depth of understanding of the kingdom of God and Jesus’s mission on the earth through years of study in world respected seminaries alongside leading faithful church communities, are able to quickly discern falsehood. This is due to the fact that a lot of the false teaching that we experience today is not new. 90% of the falsehoods that exist in the church today can be discerned simply by a knowledge of heresies that the church has fought in historical times before this day. The remaining 10% requires a combination of reflection on Jesus and his kingdom via scripture, coupled with the input of brothers and sisters in your church community who are faithfully following Jesus as led by the Holy Spirit.

So here are our best reasons. There are more, but they will likely be related to one or 2 of the above. We will encourage you to make sure you know the reasons you listen to your “teachers. You are welcome to use our guidelines for yourself, as it could save you a lifetime of confusion and hurt in this Ghanaian Christian landscape.

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In Defense of Modern Translations (or Why the NIV Hating is Getting Old)

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We live in an age of a deluge of information. Blogs, news sites, propaganda outlets, and internet professors abound in the billions. Social media now enables the spread of information at a speed previously unimaginable, and the ability to sift falsehood from truth has become critical now more than ever. This was brought home to me this Sunday morning, when I received a message on WhatsApp from some friends concerning the NIV translation.

The message began by linking the publishers of the NIV, Zondervan, to Harper Collins as publishers of “The Joy of Gay Sex” and “The Satanic Bible”. This then, is an attempt to already prejudice the mind of the reader about a supposedly evil agenda of the NIV. It then goes on to list the removal of many words (Jehovah, Calvary, Holy Ghost et al) and then the disappearance of 45 verses from the NIV. All of this is juxtaposed against the KJV as a standard of judgement.

This tactic is not new at all. In the earlier days of Christianity, the only version of the Old Testament used by the church was the Septuagint (Greek translation of the Old Testament done around the time of the Babylonian exile). Along came Jerome, who translated into Latin from some manuscripts of Hebrew, a new version of the Old Testament called the Latin Vulgate. You should have seen the consternation it caused, even causing St Augustine to warn Jerome about it in no uncertain terms. Of course, the Latin Vulgate prevailed, and become the standard text of the church for a long time, and is still the standard for the Roman Catholic church today.

The Process of Bible Translations

Firstly, the English bibles we have today are obtained by a process of translating from collections of Hebrew, Greek and Aramaic manuscripts. This is normally done by scholars who have in-depth knowledge of these languages. Christians therefore have to first get used to the idea that God didn’t speak to his people in English. A set of human beings always have to do the work of translation.

Secondly, the only way one could have copies of these manuscripts before the invention of the printing press in the 16th century was to manually copy them. This always had a tendency to introduce errors, whether intentional or not. In addition, some of the copyists made decisions to include passages which didn’t previously exist in the manuscript they were copying, and the resultant copy then had words that didn’t exist in its older source manuscript. The reason for these additional inserts is cause for another blog post in its own right. Suffice to say that, as a result of these 2 problems (copyist errors and intentional insertions), it only makes senses that the older a manuscript is, the “cleaner” it will be. This is not rocket science, it’s simple logic.

Based on this logic, it shouldn’t surprise us that modern translations like the NIV, NRSV, ESV etc are different from the venerated KJV. The KJV was translated in 1611, at the time of which the scholars only had access to manuscripts dated back to the 10th century. Since those days we now have manuscripts dating all the way back to the 2nd century at the least, and a comparison of those manuscripts to the ones used for the KJV shows clearly where mistakes have been made and where additional texts have been inserted. Therefore, the modern scholars are bound by the requirements of their own craft to revise and remove what is obviously an insertion, hence the missing passages in these versions. At least they make the effort to put footnotes on these passages so that one can see that these have been removed for good reason.

Thirdly, as scholars learn more about the history and background of the people about whom a book of the bible is written and/or the audience to whom it is written, they gain more information as to what the Hebrew or Greek words meant in their historical context and therefore how they should be translated into English (or any other language). This then causes revisions to change how certain verses were translated, much to the chagrin of some Biblicists.

Examples of Revisions In Translation

Here is an example from the NIV of changes resulting from this third class of revisions.

“The Lord will fulfill his purpose for me” (Ps 138:8 NIV 1984)

“The Lord will vindicate me” (Ps 138:8, NIV 2011)

Just reading the whole Psalm in context, it is very obvious that the second one is the more appropriate one. Since the Psalmist seems to be relying on God against the anger of his enemies in the previous verse, vindication is obviously what the Psalmist will expect. But since this translation choice might not be comfortable with some (especially the name-it-claim-it individualists), this change will not go down well with that crowd.

Another example is the oft repeated 2 Cor 5:17. My ears have grown tired of hearing it being bandied about during sermons, in crusades and bible tracts.

“Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come!” (2 Cor 5:17 NIV 1984)

“Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here!”(2 Cor 5:17 NIV 2011)

Of course a footnote shows the old alternate translation, but there must be good reason why this one is preferred by the translators now. Might it be that the focus of the text is not on the individual who receives Christ? Could it be that Paul in context is talking of God’s cosmic work of reconciliation of the world to himself through the process of launching a new reality – a new people of God (in Christ) determined by faith in Christ – and that this work he has entrusted to his apostles like Paul to execute?

It might seem that words never stand alone. They mean what they mean from the surrounding background of sentences and words, but even more importantly from the life and experience of the one speaking it, and digging deep into that is a process that Christians cannot ignore if we are to be people who take the bible seriously.

Conclusion

There are 2 classes of people who tend to be caught off guard by such attempts to denigrate modern bibles. The first class is many innocent Christians who are not familiar with how the bible is translated into modern languages, and why the process of bible translation will continue to be an evolving process till kingdom comes. To those I say, don’t let such propaganda frighten you off modern bible translations. No bible is perfect, not even the modern ones like NIV or NRSV. But no matter what,  you are safer with MOST (emphasis) modern translations like these than staying at the KJV.

The second class of people are those who either intentionally have beef with anything that doesn’t sound like Victorian English (because they actually pray in “thous” and “thees”) , or whose churches have actually invested themselves in the KJV so much that they find the need to validate their usage of it by denigrating modern bibles. Some such churches have gone so far as to print their own bibles, which have their own commentaries alongside each page, mostly based on the KJV.

To this second class of people, I’ll encourage that they not get caught up in such propaganda out of ignorance. But if they still swear by their KJVs, then please be graceful to the rest of us who don’t understand Victorian English and let’s learn to live in peace.

Because in so far as the process of receiving the text of God involved human beings (including human beings during the KJV translation as well), we must acknowledge the finiteness of human efforts, come at the bible with a bit more humility and place the emphasis where it should be – following Jesus.

 

 

 

The will of God. Credit: http://holyspiritrevolution.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/The-Will-Of-God.jpg

Finding the will of God

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If there is one thing that a lot Christians seem to be confused about, it is the question “what is the will of God?”. As a reflection of the times in which we live, this has been further honed into the individualized form “what is the will of God for me”, leading to variations such as “God will fulfill his purpose for my life” and so on and so forth. All of these then presuppose that there is a will of God for each person, and that if one lives one’s life according to God’s plan, then they will somehow discover this “will”. In fact the word “destiny” has now taken on a life of its own in some circles of Christianity to denote this concept, and pastors spend enormous amounts of preaching time trying to distill how to achieve this in their sermons.

However, we may need to pause and reflect deeper on what the New Testament actually says about the will of God before we run ahead of ourselves. This must be done in keeping with the important rule that Jesus must be the key to understanding God’s revelation of himself in scripture, it is important to first look at what Jesus himself had to say on the subject of “the will of God”.

Jesus

When Jesus came to the world, there was one thing he kept announcing – the Kingdom of God. Within the Gospels alone, there are 50 occurrences of the kingdom of God/Heaven metaphor, with Jesus continuously stressing that this kingdom that the 1st century Jews had been waiting for had somehow come through him. And so he set out what many scholars have called his “manifesto” in the Sermon on the Mount as recorded in Matt 5:1-8:1, and in Luke 6. It is important to note that Matthew’s record links everything that Jesus said from Matt 5:1 all the way to 8:1 as part of that one sermon, and any serious student of the Bible needs to pay attention to this particularity. Although our modern bibles have nice chapter and verse divisions and sometimes headings for different “sections” of this sermon, Matthew says all this was said by Jesus at one sitting.

That being the case, it is important to note the following points

  1. Jesus seemed to be behaving like Moses, receiving a new Torah on the mountain and delivering it to his people.
  2. Jesus actually changed some of the provisions in the Torah, laying out a new way for those who will follow him. Compare what Jesus said in Mt 5:38-42 with what Moses wrote in Deut 19:21.
  3. Jesus was touching on 2 very important things in 1st century Judaism – election (who are the people of God, or the “blessed”) and Torah (what should be the way of life of these people). You will find all over the psalms who the people of ancient Israel called “blessed”(e.g. Ps 1, 16,32,112,119,128). Essentially this was anyone who was a descendant of Abraham or non-descendant who worships Yahweh, and who in addition followed Yahweh’s Torah given to Moses. Jesus turned this election around and said the poor, the peacemakers, the humble, those persecuted for his sake etc. who actually follow him are the “blessed” people, and gave his own Torah as to how they must live if they want to be part of his elect people.

In concluding his speech, Jesus ends with warnings related to all the things he had said. He warned about false prophets turning them away from what he has laid out, then warned that those who “do the will of God”, which he has laid down in this discourse, are those fit for the kingdom. He finally ended by saying those who take his words seriously are those who build on the rock, while those who don’t are those who build on the sand. Not only did he undermine the sacred Torah, he elevated his own words above it by using the formula “you have heard/Moses said” and “I say”.

It is no wonder then that when he finished this sermon of his, “the crowds were amazed at his teaching (Mt 7:28)”. Unlike the Pharisees and Scribes of their time, or pastors and teachers of our time, Jesus didn’t expound the Torah. Jesus actually created new laws and invalidated old ones, behaving more like Moses or like Yahweh himself.

All of this put together should lead us to realize that those who were listening to Jesus at the time would have gotten the following picture, which many rejected because it was contrary to what they knew about Yahweh:

  1. Jesus was not just behaving like a prophet, he was also behaving like God.
  2. Jesus was changing the rules as to who was in and who was out. Being a Jew by birth (or proselyte) and following the Torah was no longer enough.
  3. The will of God was to follow this messiah called Jesus, and not to just call him “Lord, Lord”.
  4. Following this will of God was going to lead to even more suffering than they were already under, and yet that was the way that this messiah required.
  5. This will of God required them to love their enemies even to the cost of our own lives, to care for the poor, sick and disadvantaged, to seek justice for the weak and be filled with mercy, to be faithful to their spouses till death or be celibate, to speak truth without abundance of swearing, to let their prayers be not long and flowery but to the point, to do their deeds of love without public display, to put away anger against their brethren and so on. To sum all this up, this will of God simply required them to follow this messiah’s words and ways, and to make him alone receive all the glory of everything they did in their lives.

The Epistles

This will is what Paul expounds in Col 1:15-23 in such terms of cosmic glory. God’s will was that “he [Jesus] is before all things, and in him all things hold together … so that in everything he will have the supremacy … For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him” (v 17-19 NIV). And so Paul says that Jesus will present his followers holy and blameless in his sight, if they “continue securely established and steadfast in the faith, without shifting from the hope promised by the gospel that you heard”(v 23 NRSV. The NIV says “continue in YOUR faith”, which falls too close to the trap of individualism for me. Conversely, as pointed out by Ben Witherington, the NRSV also gets Heb 12:2 wrong with “perfector of our faith”, whiles the 2011 NIV gets it right with “perfector of faith”. Sigh …). Here Paul sounds the same warning as Jesus – don’t call him “Lord, Lord” and yet not follow him, but continue to be faithful to him.

We see Paul again reminding the Ephesians that they were saved, so they can serve.

“For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God—  not by works, so that no one can boast. For we are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.” (Eph 2:8-10)

Every other place where the Epistles refer to the will of God is to be understood and framed in what Jesus himself has laid down as “the will of God” – following Jesus, and serving others even at the peril of our own lives.

Conclusion

The will of God is that his followers reject the ways of this world and the world’s unwillingness to submit to Jesus in obedience. The will of God is that his kingdom of justice, peace, mercy and compassion, love and care for one another will be made known to the world through the church, Jesus’ community of followers (Eph 3:10-11). The will of God is that men may see that there is a different way that society can exist, and that to find that way is to find the Anointed One who showed that way by giving himself up for us, and to join the people who are living life that way.

There is no separate “will of God” specially created for you different from what God has already defined “before the foundation of the earth” (Eph 1:4;2 Tim 1:9;1 Pe 1:20). God has no special “purpose for your life” other than that you follow Jesus. There is no “divine destiny” for you other than following the messiah, and working for his kingdom and with his manifesto.

If Christians thought this way, they would not be so easily swayed by all the winds of deception and confusion blowing about. They would not need the multitude of conferences and “divine encounters” that are being sold to them everyday. They won’t be worried about consulting “prophets” about whether to marry Kofi or Kwame, or the other important decisions we make in life. We won’t be worried about whether a decision about our lives is “in the will of God”, simply because it will all be reduced to a simple matter of whether it will enable one to continue to be faithful in following Jesus with one’s brethren or not.

If Christians thought this way, they will be less worried about themselves, and more worried about their neighbour. Because the kingdom of God is about what you are doing for others as Jesus did, not how you are grabbing for yourself. And what was it that Jesus said about neighbours?

Is The Bible A Reliable Historical Document?

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People who dismiss the Bible as unreliable and unworthy of attention often challenge its historical credibility. The average Christian usually does not know how to adequately respond to the sophisticated form of this challenge. For instance a critic might submit as a historical fact, an issue like the council of Nicaea during the fourth century to say that this was the point at which Christians met to change things in the Bible to suit their erroneous teachings. For the skeptic this is a good strategy because if you can prove the historical unreliability of the Bible, then Christianity, which is perhaps the world’s most spiritually and morally disturbing faith (i.e. its teachings hunts the human conscience with the issue of sin in the heart), becomes minced meat. Truth be told, most Ghanaian Christians do not know much about Christian Church history; they hardly look beyond their denominations. Skeptics often argue against the Bible’s reliability with reasons ranging from the Bible being a myth to having contradictions and also to being textually unreliable. Of course, the implication of Christians hinging their beliefs and way of life on a historically unreliable document is very serious; the oft-repeated charge that Christianity goes against reason or intellect will become valid if this is the case.

In fact, there is a growing number of Christian youngsters in Ghana today who are questioning their beliefs about the Bible in the face of some scientific theories, challenges from the popular New Atheists in the West and sadly the irrational behaviour and practices of the present popular Christianity in the country. Christianity in Ghana, in the past, has not faced much intellectual attacks and as a result most present day Ghanaian Christians honestly do not know how to deal with challenges to the credibility of the Bible as a reliable historical document. This is understandable. But Ghanaian Christians need to understand that the times have changed. An increasing number of young people who were brought up on Christian teachings are now rejecting the faith because they are not getting reasonable or intellectually satisfying answers to their nagging questions. Their present number may be relatively small in Ghana, since we have historically not been a very questioning culture. But with more Ghanaians being educated to higher levels, and having easy access to information around the globe, the questions that their curious minds are raising should not be ignored. They must be addressed head-on.

I am aware that there are huge volumes of books that have responded to claims of the Bible’s unreliability so I will not pretend that this short article will exhaustively address the challenges mentioned above. What I want to do here is to whet the appetite of honest skeptics, critics and seekers for embarking on an honest investigation of the Bible’s reliability as a historical document. I use the word ‘honest’ because there are those who, in their rhetoric, give the impression that they are intellectually honest in their search for answers yet who have actually already made up their minds not to seriously consider any evidence or argument that will go in favour of the Bible or Christianity. Such people are not my target readership because I am convinced of the words of the sage who once observed that, “To give truth to him who loves it not is but to give him plentiful material for misinterpretation.” And let me also clarify that when I use the word “Bible,” I am limiting it to the mainstream translations in the public domain which have not been customized for the theologies of any particular church or fringe group. Also this article defends only the historical reliability of the Bible and not the truthfulness of its doctrines, which is a subject for another article.

 

Myth or History

Christianity would not be so disturbing had it not been for its claim that Jesus is the Son of God and that he is the only way to God and also that these claims are recorded in the Bible. For some these claims are uncomfortably exclusive and they find it easier to believe the hypothesis that Christians in later generations actually invented these ideas which the early disciples of Jesus (if there ever were any) never thought of. But the fact is that this is simply not true! If Jesus’ divinity and claim of exclusivity are myths invented by later generations then there must have been at least two or three generations between the original eyewitnesses of the historical Jesus and the universal belief in the mythic, divinized and exclusive Jesus. Why? In the absence of this condition, the myth could not have been believed as fact since it would have been refuted by eyewitnesses of the real historical Jesus. Both his disciples and his enemies would have had reasons to oppose this new myth. Incidentally, we find no such evidence at all of anyone ever opposing the so-called myth of the divine Jesus in the name of an earlier merely human Jesus. The New testament manuscripts from first century show that this idea of a divine Jesus originated from the very disciples and followers of Christ right in the first century and no competent scholar today denies the first-century dating of virtually all of the New Testament.

Further, the claim of Jesus to be God makes sense of his trial and the Jewish leaders’ desire for his crucifixion. You see, the Jewish sensitivity to blasphemy was a unique thing in the Roman world. No sympathizers of any of the pagan religions at that time would have so fanatically insisted on the death penalty as punishment for claiming divinity because the prevailing attitude in the Roman world toward the gods was “the more, the merrier.” For instance, a city like Athens had many altars for the several gods yet just to make sure that they had not missed any god, they made an altar “to an Unknown God” (Acts 17:23). Now if we still want to maintain that the divine Jesus of the Gospels is a myth, then the question begging to be answered is: who invented it? Whether it was Jesus’ first disciples or some later generation, no credible motive can account for this invention. Why do I say this? Until the Edict of Milan in AD 313, Christians were subject to serious persecution. They were often tortured and killed, and hated and oppressed for their beliefs. No one, especially a skeptical first century Jew, would invent an elaborate practical joke in order to be crucified, stoned or beheaded for it!

Textual Reliability

While some people who may have done some research on the Bible love to point out what they believe to be inaccuracies in modern Bibles as compared to earlier manuscripts, others who have done no study on the subject will often use such purported inaccuracies as valid reasons for not having anything to do with the teachings of the book. Can we trust the Bible as we have it today?

When you take the story about Jesus for instance, we have four Gospels rather than one. Matthew, Mark, Luke and John were written by four different writers, at four different times, and with four somewhat different purposes and emphasis. This makes cross-checking possible. Through a textual comparison, we can fix the facts with far greater assurance here than with any other ancient series of events about a historical figure. Like some historians have observed, “The only inconsistencies are in chronology (only Luke’s Gospel claims to be in exact order) and accidentals like numbers (e.g. did the women see one angel or two at the empty tomb?)” Further, Historians evaluate the textual reliability of ancient literature according to two standards: (1) What he time interval is between the original and the earliest copy available and (2) how many manuscripts are available.

Knowledge of Julius Caesar’s exploits in the Gallic Wars are available today because of ten manuscript copies, the earliest of which dates to within 1,000 years of the time it was written by Caesar, somewhere 100-44 BC. Plato’s writings took place around 400 BC and there are seven manuscripts available today, the earliest of which dates to within 1,300 years after Plato’s death. Homer’s ‘Iliad’ is much more reliable in terms of time gap because the time gap between the date of its composition and the date of the earliest copies available to us for examination today is 400 years. It was composed in 800 BC and the earliest manuscript copy dates around 400 BC. It is worthy to note that all we know about Socrates today is known through his student Plato’s writings yet nobody doubts that Socrates ever existed. Isn’t it interesting then to see people expressing unease or trying to discredit the Gospels just because the disciples of Jesus wrote them?

When we use these same standards above which historians typically use, the New Testament stands impressively tall and without equal when compared to other ancient documents. There are nearly 25,000 manuscript copies of the New Testament books available in Libraries and universities around the world today. John’s gospel has the earliest manuscript copies available to us today in the form of fragments (located in the John Rylands Library, Manchester, England) dating to within 50 years from when the apostle John authored the original between AD 50-100. Which ancient document comes close to this? Further, the earliest Greek manuscript copies available today of the Complete New Testament dates to 225 years from the original writing. This is about half the time gap for manuscript copies of Homer’s Iliad, which is the most historically reliable ancient secular document. This is simply impressive. People who accuse Christians of adulterating and falsifying the current Bible need only to go to the Libraries to do the comparisons. But of course it is easier to claim intellectual honesty while making sweeping statements, perpetuating myths and accusing Christians of rejecting their intellect since most unsophisticated Christians will not be able to put up any formidable defence, isn’t it? Even more interesting is that those who accuse Christians of doctoring the current Bible are hard-pressed to produce any originals with which to compare. In essence, the critic is really saying, “I don’t have any evidence but just take my word for it, your Bible has been corrupted.” Quite sad!

 

As far as the Old Testament (The Jewish Scriptures) is concerned, the standards for making copies were incredibly strict. The Jewish scribes saw the discipline as a high spiritual calling. And the accuracy of their copying has been confirmed by the discovery of the ‘Dead Sea Scrolls’ in 1947. Prior to 1947 the oldest complete Hebrew manuscript dated to AD 900. With the discovery of 223 manuscripts in caves on the west side of the Dead Sea, we now have Old Testament manuscripts that palaeographers have dated around 125 BC. These are 1000 years older than the previously known manuscripts. After the translation of the Dead Sea Scrolls, it has been discovered that the text of the modern version of the Hebrew Bible is 95% identical, with the 5% variation consisting mainly of spelling variations. This is nothing short of impressive. And religiously speaking, this remarkably shows how the Sovereign and All-powerful God, even while working with and through fallible men, has preserved his teachings throughout the ages for the World so that we may all get to know him as he is.

 

Contradictions

Contradiction is a serious thing anytime truth is in question and since Christians claim that Christianity is a religion based on truth, it is crucial that the charges of contradictions in the Bible be looked at carefully. I am sure the critics have a tall list of what is believed to be contradictions that are enough to bury the Bible. But like I indicated in the beginning, this article is meant to whet the appetite of the honest skeptics for investigating the historical reliability of the Bible. For this article I have chosen to look at just a few regarding the story of Jesus Christ in the gospels, in particular, the resurrection of Jesus Christ which is the linchpin on which all of Christianity hangs. Christianity stands or falls on the truthfulness of this story, and thus if the eyewitness accounts are essentially contradictory, then there is a big problem – their story cannot be relied upon. One critic has complained that:

 

“In Matthew, when Mary Magdalene and the other Mary arrived toward dawn at the tomb there is a rock in front of it, there is a violent earthquake, and an angel descends and rolls back the stone. In Mark, the women arrive at the tomb at sunrise and the stone had been rolled back. In Luke, when the women arrive at early dawn they find the stone had already been rolled back. In Matthew, an angel is sitting on the rock outside the tomb and in Mark a youth is inside the tomb. In Luke, two men are inside. In Matthew, the women present at the tomb are Mary Magdalene and the other Mary. In Mark, the women present at the tomb are the two Marys and Salome. In Luke, Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, Joanna, and the other women are present at the tomb.”

 

On the surface, this seems like a combination of hopeless contradictions which should severely damage the narrative about Jesus’ empty tomb. But hold on a moment! Take a closer look at the each of the narratives in the gospels and you will realize that the differences are in the secondary details. There is actually a historical core to the story that can be relied upon – that Jesus’ body was placed in a tomb and sealed with a rock, the tomb was visited by a small group of women followers of Jesus early on Sunday morning and they found it empty but they saw a vision of angel(s) saying that Jesus had risen from the dead. The differences in the names of the women, their number, the exact time of the morning etc do not disturb the core of the story. Besides the differences in the empty tomb narratives actually informs us that we have multiple independent confirmation of the story. Indeed if all four gospels were identical in the smallest details, it would raise suspicion of plagiarism.

 

We must also note how history was recorded back then and how different it is from our ‘journalist reports’ today. The oral transmission of history focused on the major issues of the hero’s life, not the excruciating details of our 21st century style of reportage. Historical documents of that age typically followed this principle and it is not unique to the Bible. “We have two narratives of Hannibal crossing the Alps to attack Rome, and they’re incompatible and irreconcilable. Yet no classical historian doubts the fact that Hannibal did mount such a campaign. That’s a non-biblical illustration of discrepancies in secondary details failing to undermine the historical core of a historical story,” quipped Dr. Lane Craig, a Christian Historian and Philosopher, in an interview with former investigative journalist (also an Atheist-turned-Christian) Lee Strobel. Most of what seem like contradictions in the Bible could actually be resolved easily with some background knowledge and an open-minded reading of the text. It is fascinating to watch people who usually would boast of open-mindedness suddenly switching to closed-mindedness mode when it comes to the Bible.

 

Conclusion

Those who reject the Bible on the grounds of historical unreliability do so not because of the absence of evidence but because of the suppression of evidence or unwillingness to pursue the evidence wherever it may lead. Like I have indicated twice already, my hope is that this piece whets the appetite of honest skeptics who probably thought the Bible was not historically reliable, to embark on an investigative adventure. I also hope that young Christians who may be doubting the historical reliability of the Bible will find some confidence to keep studying about the Bible and come to the point of wanting to study the Bible’s contents and rightly applying them to their lives. The beauty about the Bible is that it stands up to scrutiny. Many have tried to argue against it, destroy it, bury it, and falsify its contents by claiming things it never claimed but the authentic Word of God continues to live on long after its opponents are dead. If God is indeed sovereign and all-powerful God (which he is) then this is exactly what we should expect – he keeps his Word from being lost, adulterated or destroyed. I have little doubt that skeptics who will take my challenge to do an honest investigation of the Bible’s credibility will find that not only is the Bible historically reliable, but its ultimate Author – God – is very trustworthy also.

Hope In The Shadow of Death

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On any ordinary day, death is not a subject most of us would like to occupy our minds with. It is that dark spot in human experience which we all wish was not there. In Ghana, posters with the words “What A Shock!” and “Gone Too Soon” often express how we feel about the death of loved ones. Even when euphemisms like “Home Call” and “Call To Glory” are used, they still do not sit comfortably with many of us. We cannot think of death without feeling uneasy. But I am convinced that the thought of death would not be as frightening, as crippling and as devastating as it is in our experience if we were on good terms with the Giver of life – God. This is a bold statement, yes, but I think facing the truth is a wise thing to do.

We fear death because we are not sure what will happen after death. And the reason we are concerned about what will happen after death is because somehow we know deep within us that physical death is really not the end of our story. We have this profound sense that there is something beyond making a descent living, being good to others and having our bodies decomposed. “Life can’t be that simple!” we reason in the quietness of our minds. Whatever or Whoever was the cause of our existence surely did not fill us with such intricate design and information just to last for three score years and ten or at the most one hundred and twenty years. Even without any exposure to the Bible, many people around the world believe that there has to be something more beyond the grave for this world to make sense. Perhaps justice? Or a better life to make up for the harsh one they had down here?

C.S. Lewis once made the brilliant observation that our repeated astonishment at time as demonstrated in our exclamations like “How he’s grown!” and “How time flies!” actually go to show how little reconciled we are to time. He notes that our surprise is as strange as the case would be if we found a fish that was always surprised at the wetness of water. Such a fish would be really strange unless that fish was destined to become a land animal one day. Similarly, our souls were not made for time but for eternity. This is why we are uncomfortable in this space-time dimension. The Bible teaches that the original intent of God was for human life to go on and on but sin has interrupted this plan.

Our fear of death

When you have rebelliously run away from home against your parents’ wishes, the thought of returning home can fill you with an overwhelming fear because you know deep down that you did not do the right thing. We all feel a sense of guilt; we feel we have missed the mark somehow. “All we like sheep have gone astray” declared the prophet Isaiah. A prominent theme in the Bible is that we have all rebelled against our Creator in one way or another. Paul the apostle of Christ wrote:

“God’s anger is revealed from heaven against all the sin and evil of the people whose evil ways prevent the truth from being known.  God punishes them, because what can be known about God is plain to them, for God himself made it plain. Ever since God created the world, his invisible qualities, both his eternal power and his divine nature, have been clearly seen; they are perceived in the things that God has made. So those people have no excuse at all!  They know God, but they do not give him the honour that belongs to him, nor do they thank him. Instead, their thoughts have become complete nonsense, and their empty minds are filled with darkness.  They say they are wise, but they are fools; … Because those people refuse to keep in mind the true knowledge about God, he has given them over to corrupted minds, so that they do the things that they should not do. They are filled with all kinds of wickedness, evil, greed, and vice; they are full of jealousy, murder, fighting, deceit, and malice. They gossip and speak evil of one another; they are hateful to God, insolent, proud, and boastful; they think of more ways to do evil; they disobey their parents; they have no conscience; they do not keep their promises, and they show no kindness or pity for others. They know that God’s law says that people who live in this way deserve death. Yet, not only do they continue to do these very things, but they even approve of others who do them.” – Romans 1:18-22; 28-32 GNB

Which of us does not need forgiveness? In the history of the world and in the various religions men have always cried for atonement – something to be sacrificed to appease the higher powers whom we believe we have offended. Jesus Christ, God in human flesh, has offered himself a sacrifice for our sins and as the resurrected Lord of Lords, he extends forgiveness to all who believe in him. This is the heart of the Christian gospel – God’s act of reconciling all mankind to himself. And the Apostle Paul, after converting to follow Jesus, declared to the church in Rome saying, “I have complete confidence in the gospel; it is God’s power to save all who believe, first the Jews and also the Gentiles. For the gospel reveals how God puts people right with himself: it is through faith from beginning to end. .. ” Romans 1:16&17 GNB.

Unlike any other religious teaching, the teaching of Jesus Christ on sin is at once the most challenged yet also the most empirically verifiable truth about humanity. We are all depraved, if not in our deeds then it is in our thoughts. At the same time that we are publicly crying out and fighting for justice and human rights, we find that we are also privately lying, cheating, deceiving others, being adulterous at heart and hating some people. Jesus’ teaching about the wickedness of the human heart has pinpoint accuracy. But in all honesty, if this is all that Jesus did or was able to do then I must confess that he has not helped mankind in any extraordinary terms compared to all the other founders of the world religions. For they also had some useful teachings for mankind, even if some of their teachings were wrong.

What makes Jesus unique in the history of the world is that he did not only correctly diagnose our fundamental problem, he also provided the solution in himself. He offered himself as a sacrificial lamb to atone for our wrong doing. He did not give us guidelines for preparing our own medicine, he prepared the medicine himself and said to us “here it is, take it and you’ll be cured.” This is a major difference between Jesus Christ and the other teachers and prophets. They gave us tall lists of things to do to cure ourselves but they could not grant us the power to do them because after all they themselves did not even have the power. They had to depend on God’s power and mercy. But Jesus Christ says things like, “he who believes in me shall live,” “I will come and live with him,” “I will not leave you comfortless,” “Lo, I am with you till the end of age,” and “I am the resurrection and the life.” Jesus never intended to leave us in doubt about his divine status. He told those who could not believe in him because of his teachings to at least believe because of his miracles. The Bible says Jesus is the son of God and that whoever believes in him will have his soul reunited with his resurrected and glorified body and live in a heavenly city – the new earth devoid of evil, sadness, sickness and death – after the judgement day.

The historical records tell us, Jesus was crucified and on the third day his tomb was found empty. His enemies, who made sure that his tomb was guarded to prevent the disciples from stealing the body and claiming he is alive, did not have any answers for the missing body. It was inexplicable! Jesus had resurrected! He appeared to several people after his resurrection. His disciples who had become so scared to come out of hiding suddenly were filled with boldness to preach outdoors, and stand before the authorities and claim they were followers of the resurrected Christ. The disciples were rational people who often wanted evidence in order to believe and thus would not have put their lives on the line knowing very well they were preaching a lie. The resurrection of Christ is the bedrock of Christianity and the apostles defended it to their deaths. The Apostle Paul once declared that if Christ did not rise from the death then Christians deserve more pity than anyone else in all the world. This was the level of confidence they had! They saw him with their own eyes and testified of it to the point of death. “… he appeared to Peter and then to all the twelve apostles. Then he appeared to more than 500 of his followers at once, most of whom are still alive, although some have died,” wrote Apostle Paul in 1 Corinthians 15:5-8 GNB. This was a claim which could have been easily cross-checked at the time since he emphasized that, “most of whom are still alive.” No sane person puts his life on the line for what he knows to be a lie. A person may die for a lie when he believes it to be true, but it take insanity to die for a lie when you know it is lie. Throughout the gospels we see that the disciples were not only sane but were also people who did not believe things too easily and Jesus, often frustrated with their unbelief would say things like “you of little faith,” “Have you no faith?” These were people who wanted to have evidence of the resurrection before believing, even when the women from their own number testified that Jesus had resurrected. These are the kind of men who wrote the part of the Bible which is generally called “New Testament.”

Jesus, the Son of God, has been to the world of the dead and come back and is presently alive. He has overcome death’s power and he assures you that all who believe in him will be taken safely through death into a glorious eternity with him, instead of suffering a damning eternity away from God in hell for sins committed.

I once read of a parable about a very wealthy man whose son used to go out to the city street and talk to a particular beggar. The beggar took a liking to the son and one day gave him a portrait he had painted of him. The young man took it to his father who was an art connoisseur. His father thought to himself, “This is not a very good painting, but we’ll hang it up in the gallery because it’s supposed to be of my son.” Several years went by and the young man stopped coming to visit the beggar. One day the beggar went to the gates of the palace where the young man lived and said, “I don’t see that young man anymore.” The palace guards replied, “He died very suddenly.” The beggar was sad to hear this and he said, “Can I see his father?” And they said, “Yes.” The beggar said to the father, “I have done another painting of your son, just like the other one. I want you to have it.” He gave it to the father and he hung it beside the first portrait.

Not long afterwards, the father also passed away and the beggar heard about it. He also heard that all the art works in the palace were going to be auctioned. He asked if he could go in to observe the auction. An auctioneer came in, looked around and saw all the paintings on the walls and the connoisseurs who had come to bid on them. He also noticed that in the middle of the art collection was hanging the two paintings of the wealthy man’s son done by the beggar that were not good at all. So the auctioneer said, “We’re going to have an auction, but the first paintings to go are the ones of the young man here and then we’ll proceed with the rest.“ The connoisseurs said, “We’re not interested in them, just get on with the ….” The Auctioneer insisted, “No, no, we must begin with these.” But nobody bid. So the beggar put his hand in his pocket and took out a handful of pennies to bid. The gavel was sounded and he got the son’s portraits. As the beggar took them and was about to leave, the gavel sounded again and the auctioneer said, “I have some news for you. Behind the paintings of this young man are the words, ‘Whoever bids on these gets the whole gallery.’” The beggar got the son’s portraits and also got everything else that the father had to offer.

Jesus Christ, the very Son of God, gives you all that his Father has to offer: forgiveness, hope, eternal life in God’s glorious presence in the world to come, meaning in this present life and also victory over the fear of death. When you believe in him, he has promised to come to live with you even while in this life. He will walk you through life and guarantee you a safe landing in the next life. The state of the believer in Christ can be summed up in the words of hymnist, Stuart Townend: “No guilt in life, no fear in death; This is the power of Christ in me.”

When you have this assurance, this hope, which extends beyond the grave, it profoundly influences how you view not only death but also trying times, suffering and life in general in this world. The hope of resurrection is what filled the early apostles of Christ with boldness and led to the eventual establishment of the Christian faith. “Because I live, you shall live also,” were the words of Christ to his disciples. Their hope was not baseless, for it was based on the fact of the resurrection of Jesus Christ and his promise to make them have the same experience. Their hope was based on a person who was able to deliver on his word always – Jesus the Son of God. This same Jesus who rose from the dead and is alive today is calling all of us who are tired from carrying heavy loads – including the fear of death – and he will give us rest. In Jesus Christ, man’s finally enemy, death, loses its sting. The Bible says Jesus Christ is the person going to judge the whole world on the Judgement day. And what better hope is there than to know that your eternal destiny has been secured by the very Judge of the world because you have already committed your life into his hands! When you know Jesus, you know the truth and this truth will set you free even from the fear of death.

Death is not a tragic end for the believer in Christ. It is rather the door through which he passes to be with his Lord in his glory. “I can only imagine what it will be like,” sang Mercy Me, “when I walk by your side; I can only imagine; what my eyes will see; when your face Is before me; I can only imagine; surrounded by your glory; what will my heart feel?; will I dance for you Jesus or in awe of you be still?; will I stand in your presence or to my knees will I fall?; will I sing hallelujah?; will I be able to speak at all?; I can only imagine.” Yes! We can only imagine. For meeting the resurrected Christ in his unveiled glory, his thunderous majesty, power and dominion will be an experience like no other that we have ever known! Let us not fear death but rather put our faith in the King of Glory.

The really hard questions of life…

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A brother recently shared this with me: He said, “The hardest questions about life (for Christians) are not the Theological ones (and they can be very difficult) but the existential ones.”

I’m sure by now many of us have seen the video of the Ugandan househelp brutalising the little child left in her care. I’m not yet a parent, but I can tell that any parent in their right mind will not hesitate to rain down fire and brimstone on any person who did 10% of what that househelp did.

This video was the subject of discussion I was having with my friend when he made the point about the hardest questions Christians ask.

When he saw the video, his mind went to his nine month child and he said to me “I told myself there would be no place that girl would go to keep her safe from me”. Of course I’m paraphrasing, but you get the picture. It evokes a strong sense of the need to bring retribution and the worst form of punishment upon this househelp.

And then my friend said his wife sent him a follow up on the video that the househelp was so badly beaten by the child’s father that she was in a wheelchair and had to be fed through a tube. (Now I’m not sure that part of the story is true). But upon hearing it, my friend did say that he felt a sense of calm and peace and some small joy because the right thing had been done. The father had gotten some justice for his helpless child.

And then my friend said he felt this question screaming itself at him, “WHAT WOULD JESUS DO?”

These are the hard questions we ask. The existential ones.

The househelp made in the image of God. A person for whom Christ died. Someone Christ loves and yet, someone whom I, – who likes to call himself a living breathing Christian, filled with the Holy Ghost, – wants to see beaten, punished as brutally as humanely possible (and I would have done it if I was close to her… I would have cast the first stone and proudly done so…) and all this with zero love and compassion in my heart for her.

This is the love and compassion I demand (beg) of Christ when I sin against Him. When I confess my sins. This is the love and compassion I have spoken about when I have taught countless numbers of people about forgiving others as Christ has forgiven us.

After all, all sin is ultimately against God and so her sin is first and foremost against God. And if God, the offended party seeks to bring her to a place of repentance so He bestows her with her forgiveness, using us (Christians) as vessels… then…

But yet, I still want to hit her. Do something to make her hurt as much as she hurt the little child. She sinned against the child, and the family of the child, and me and all of the social media universe. We are all angry!!!

And for many Christians, we are too angry to ask, “What would Jesus do?”.

Jesus wrote on the floor (in the sand) and asked the Pharisees, “Let Him who is without sin cast the first stone”. When they (the raging angry crowd) had all left , He said to her, the adulterous woman, “Neither do I condemn thee: go, and sin no more.”

The hardest questions we ask are the existential ones. How do we establish Christ’s kingdom on earth as it is in heaven as he has so demanded of us?

What would Jesus do? What would He do in this particular case?

I’m sure He (Jesus) would forgive. I’m sure He would forget. I’m sure He would lead the househelp to the knowledge of her sin and to her need for salvation. He’d introduce her to Himself, the living Saviour and give her a hope that would give her everlasting life.

Beyond that, He would come and dwell in her heart and make her a new creation. One whose life would be so devoted to Him it would be a marvel for the world.

He most certainly would not hurt this househelp. NO! He’d reach out to her with His love. He’s always doing this.

“But Jesus isn’t the father of the baby”, I argued with myself. No He isn’t. But can the father of the baby love his child more than Jesus does?

These are the hard questions we ask. The existential ones.

Now I’m not saying that she should not be punished for her deed. I’m not saying that she should be hugged and given warm glass of milk. No. Not at all.

There are laws that govern our society. These laws have punitive measures that enforce some order in our society. Without the laws and their punishments our society will descend into anarchy.

But these laws and their punitive detractors are careful to treat the worst of offenders (criminals) with a dignity and a respect for their humanity they do not provide their victims.

So if the laws of every “civil” society reaches out to protect the humanity of the worst criminal offenders, then how much more the Christian?

The existential questions are hard…

But as hard as our existential questions may be, Jesus models the answers for us in his person and character and this is the character and person we are to emulate, after all, why are we called Christians?

 

When the dead preach

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I am here again in the Dissection Room (DR), the familiar scent of Formalin highlighting the sanctity of its atmosphere. Apart from the incense-saturated atmosphere, and the white-clad ‘catechists’ surrounding their ‘lifeless priests,’ little chants of Latin ‘prayers’ could be heard: “Flexor Digitorum Profundus.” Say Amen to that!

By the way, that is the name of a muscle. Not much has changed since I last visited the DR, at least not the shadow of a man lying supine on dissection table number 12. He is still very dead! With a scalpel in one hand and a pair of forceps in the other, I do my best to skilfully cut my way through skin and fat all in a bid to discover the evidence of what I have been taught in Anatomy 201 by some of the country’s most learned minds. But even these foremost Anatomy Professors cannot fully describe or explain the beauty and sanctity of what I am seeing. It is amazing how the innate are able to articulate to us the beauty of the life we are living! How the dead can talk and the living cannot! More amazing is how the confluence of nerves, veins and arteries and the contours of muscle combine to produce the shadow of a complex organism, an almost complete Homo sapiens. If only he could rise and breathe for a brief moment!

Ironically it took just a brief moment for this gentleman (too gentle for my liking) to prove his mortality. I may never know how he died or how he was born, what his name was or how he came to be lying at the edge of my scalpel. I may never know whether or not he was a good man in his lifetime. But on this side of life, he has proven to be one of the best teachers I have ever met and will ever meet or meat.

A legend is told of a certain three-day old cadaver who chose that particular fate—death—and self-managed to raise himself up! I once tried raising myself up alive o. Try as I would, I only succeeded in discovering new ways to fail. You may want to try too. According to this legend, He was God. That explains why he was able to resuscitate himself right? For who else can do that? Now, in choosing a way to die, if I were in his shoes, I would have chosen the easiest way. Wouldn’t you have done same? After all, he had the power. But the legend says he did the complete opposite. Well, it is just a legend so it cannot be true or can it? Everything and anything is possible in a legend. It need not necessarily be true.

Did this legend really happen? Unfortunately, it did. History corroborates the fact that at one time in the distant past – some two thousand years ago – a man died on a cross on the outskirts of Jerusalem. And his reason for dying was not so ‘wise’: He loved you and I so much so that He chose to die to save us from our imminent ‘death’ (which we very much deserved by the way). They say love is blind, don’t they? But I doubt if God is blind. If God really saw us in our most wretched, unlovable state and still chose to die for us, how shall we call this? Not love? Love which we did not deserve yet which He kindly and willingly gave.

Like the cadaver on my table, Jesus died to show us a way—the way! In His death, He revealed to us something – that the beauty of life lay in the act of dying to the flesh. He taught us that it was only in dying to the flesh that we can rise up. He taught that sinful man had to be born again in order to experience the beauty of life [John 3:3, Romans 8:1-8]. We may try raising ourselves up by ourselves but who would we really be fooling? The Law of gravity is at work in full gear. It will only take the laws of aerodynamics to help us overcome it. The pulley has been set. Jesus is ready and willing to pull you out of the mess you are in. He will do so if only you will hold on to the gift of his rope of hope, of a second chance, of salvation from sin, of grace – if only you will believe!

Back to that glimpse of our fate lying on my concrete table in the DR – the grim picture of our future: we shall all die! [Hebrews 9:27]. No one knows when though, except the All-knowing God. When and when death comes, what happens then? What happens then is a detailed accounting of how we used everything that we were given, even this sermon from an unknown cadaver. How are you going to answer?

 

 

“Obia Nto Ne Collection”: Reflections On Castro and The Ghanaian God

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Author: Edem Morny

It has been a over a month now since the sad disappearance of the celebrated “Castro the Destroyer” and his female friend Janet Bandu whiles taking a ride on the Volta River in Ada. Many are the speculations as to what may have happened to them, and whiles the families of these 2 continue to hold out hope for their reappearance, the rest of the world can only mourn them and go on with life as usual. As is always common with the death/disappearance of any musician, their songs, especially the most recent hits become superhits with much airplay, and Castro’s “Adonai” song with Sarkodie is no exception. Paying more attention to this song vis-a-vis Castro’s demise certainly raises a lot of questions which we can either wish away, or confront somehow, and some of which I want to address here.

The song is indeed a good song melodically, and one can’t help dancing, tapping, nodding or singing along. However, one of the gifts of music is it’s ability to make you enjoy it without paying attention to it’s lyrics, and this song achieves this masterfully. I managed to find the lyrics dutifully written out here, which you can peruse yourself. Paying closer attention to them, one gets the impression that Castro together with his friend Sarkodie are praising God for making them the successful people they are today. In this attempt to praise God, they address their “enemies” or people who they suppose didn’t wish them well in life, and not only openly flaunt their vaunted success at these “enemies”, but also make a few disparaging comments about the inferiority of these “enemies” in comparison to them. All the while, Castro’s chorus continues to hook us in with its praise of God, encouraging us not to “lose guard”. All in all a brilliant musical composition no doubt.

First of all I’m not in the least bit surprised by the words of this song. It is the well established pattern in hip-hop culture to flaunt the “success” you’ve become and “diss” your perceived detractors. Coming from a people who have not only felt but experienced systemic poverty and economic marginalization, black American hip-hop culture has always felt that the music was a means to not only speak of the musician’s credentials as a bona fide “hustler who has made it”, but to rub everyone else’s nose in it, especially their perceived enemy. And so I’d rather have been surprised if Ghanaian hip-hop/hip-life songs like “Adonai” didn’t follow the pattern. In this respect, Sarkodie and Castro can pat themselves on the back for a good job done. But what happens when one says “Me nwuu y3 de3 na Nana Nyame te ase” (i.e. so far as I’m not dead, God is still alive) and dies a few months later? Shall we conclude that God is dead? Or more appropriately, shall we conclude that YOUR GOD is dead?

Ghanaians are known be a very religious people, if not one of the most religious in the world. In a country with over 65% claiming to be Christian, the term “God” tends to evoke the idea of the Christian conception of God. And yet I find that in much of Ghanaian discourse, the “God” we refer to is a god of our own creation, not the God revealed to us through the person of Jesus Christ. And to be frank, everyone worships one god or the other, even if they were atheists. So I don’t have a problem if we are referring to any number of these gods. But if we think we are referring to Jehovah as revealed through the person and ministry of Jesus, then we really need to think again.

Are we referring to the same Jehovah revealed through Jesus the Messiah, who told his disciples not only love their enemies but actually pray for them who persecute them, including the Roman soldiers who were persecuting them then (Mt 5:44)?

Are we referring to the same Jehovah revealed through Jesus the Messiah, who encourages his disciples that if forced (again by a Roman soldier, as they were legally empowered to do so) to carry a load one mile, they should carry it two miles (Mt 5:41)?

Are we talking about the same Jehovah revealed through Jesus the Messiah, who says that in his kingdom, blessed are the poor, those who are hungry, those who weep, those who are outcast (Lk 6:20-22), not because these states are states of bliss, but that in his kingdom now and in the future these people will experience reprieve from their troubles?

Are we talking about the same Jehovah revealed through Jesus the Messiah, who says the one thing that will mark his disciples out for the world to see is if they love one another (Jn 13:34-35)?

Or the same one who says the rich will have it much harder to enter into his kingdom (Mt 19:16-19), not because riches are bad, but can and has become a god that people, including musicians, serve?

Because if we are talking about this Jehovah, then he is not the one I see thanks being made to in Castro and Sarkodie’s song. And like I said, that’s alright, because everyone can create their own god and serve them and sing to them as they wish. But let not those who claim to follow Jehovah as revealed by Jesus the Messiah be fooled. They are talking about a different god. They are talking about the god of Ghanaian culture aka the Ghanaian God, under the cover of the Jewish title “Adonai”. For those who know which god they are referring to, at least they can enjoy their music and put on the appropriate filters when we hear “Nyame” and “Adonai” being mentioned. But for many ignorant ones, therein lies an even greater deception.

Because there is very little difference between songs like  “Adonai” and a host of other “gospel” songs that plague the airwaves today. A large majority of our supposed “gospel musicians” today are so clueless as to what they are singing about, supposing that they are singing about Jehovah as revealed by Jesus. No, they are singing about the Ghanaian God,

The Ghanaian God who is more worried about your enemies and their annihilation than he is about their redemption from sin and death. Who seems to be powerless in the face of “Abeyifuo” , “Kabrekyire” and “Obonsam”. The Ghanaian God who is a genie that exists to satisfy our personal agenda, working only for our personal success, whiles mowing down our enemies. The Ghanaian God who gives us riches so we can spend only on our extravagance, and watch our neighbours go to sleep hungry. The Ghanaian God who delights in tribalism and divisiveness, who doesn’t mind if we are corrupt at work so we can pay big tithes in church. The Ghanaian God who demands all our loyalty to this country only, so that you hardly ever hear Ghanaian Christians thinking, praying or working to alleviate the suffering that other Christians are going through in other countries. And when that Ghanaian God dies as he supposedly has in Castro’s case, we simply pretend nothing has happened and continue with business as usual.

There is definitely a god that most Ghanaian Christians serve, but I’m not sure his real name is Yahweh, whose son is Jesus Christ the King. No, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob left the building a long time ago. We are only feverishly serving a local substitute.