The Ghanaian God vs Jesus as God

In SimplyChrist we say that we are a Jesus-centered movement. Let us be upfront by saying that we are not the only Jesus-centered movement, church or organization in Ghana. But saying that we are “Jesus-centered” can seem redundant, as many Ghanaian Christians assume that they are centred on Jesus. In addition, when we say “the Ghanaian God” we don’t mean that this is how every Ghanaian – not to talk of every Christian Ghanaian – thinks of God. We are simply saying this is the dominant way that MOST Ghanaians who are Christians think about God. So, let us help people understand what we mean by Jesus-centered, and why the difference is important.

What Did Jesus Come to Do?
It starts with answering this question well. Now the default answer you will get from many Christians in Ghana is that “Jesus came to die to save us from our sins”. Whiles we at SimplyChrist do not dispute that forgiveness of sins is one of the benefits of Jesus’s coming, we don’t think that says all there is to say about why Jesus took on flesh and dwelt amongst men – what the historic orthodox Christianity calls “the incarnation”. So, in pitting what we believe to be the “Ghanaian conception of God” with Jesus, who is God in the flesh, I’ll like this comparison to be made around 1 provocative statement by an important thinker of our time. “Jesus did not come to change God's mind about humanity. Jesus came to change the mind of humanity about God” – Father Richard Rohr. We do this comparison by asking 4 questions. There are more, but there’s only so much we can cover here.

What is the Nature of God?
What Jesus shows us – God is love. Not God is loving, or God is love and … (put in anything you want here). Jesus shows that at the core of what God is, God is eternal love. Which is why even though the Trinity is never mentioned in the Bible, the only way that the leaders of the church could make sense of what the early disciples taught and wrote about God AFTER JESUS CAME (not before, but after) was to speak of God as subsisting in 3 persons, forever giving and sharing love with each other and yet existing as one. Almost everything about this comparison we are making here is hinged on understanding the depth of how different this way of thinking about God is. No religion before or after has centred its understanding of God in this way. Not even Judaism, the precursor to Christianity. Note, I didn’t start by saying “God is Trinity”. I said, “God is love”. It is the latter that explains the former.

What the Ghanaian God shows us – The Ghanaian God is a single, all-powerful being. Here the starting point is about how powerful and unique this god is over everything in the world.
Because the starting point is “power”, the God that results becomes increasingly unlike Jesus the more you pay attention, something that you will realize as we go along. Note that this is also the same view that most Hebrews of the Old Testament had about Yahweh, which is why the Old Testament is written the way it is. And while many of the nations that surrounded the Hebrew people believed in more than one god, they also tended to speak of their gods in the same “power” language. They just had more gods, whiles the Hebrew people largely believed in only one god. But the differences between their conceptions are very few. Now whiles Jesus does reveal God to be all-powerful, he dwells more on the love of God than on his power. It will become evident why he dwells less on God’s power as we go along.

Who are We Humans?
What Jesus shows us – The reason why the incarnation is so critical to understanding Jesus becomes evident at this point. God entered this world as a fully human being not just because he needed to die (which is the default answer I get when I talk to many Christians), but because the only way God can show us who we really are meant to be is to become one of us. All humans (no exceptions by gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, social class, spirituality etc) are created as image-bearers – that is, we are God’s representatives on this earth, caring for it in the same loving way that Father, Son and Holy Spirit care for each other. We are not powerless robots whom God remotely controls, but neither are we free to come up with our own purpose of existence. And so, God becomes human to show us what he is like – a God defined by love, and what we are to be like – a people defined by love.

When we are acting in love towards one another and creation, we are allowing the Holy Spirit (the 3 rd person of the Trinity) to lead us according to the Model Human (Jesus the 2 nd person of the Trinity) to the pleasure of the Father (the 1 st person of the Trinity). Without this understanding of our human identity, we become slaves to sin and death. What the Ghanaian God shows us – The Ghanaian God reveals to us that humans are simply spiritual beings with a human body. We are here to seek the best opportunities for the advancement of our individual selves, and God is there to help us to achieve those self- made goals. These goals may be couched religiously – we need to build God a new house (despite the obvious fact that he doesn’t live in houses); or they may be social in nature – without God, my marriage will be a failure. To the Ghanaian God, humans define their purpose, and then find a God that will support that agenda (or a “powerful” preacher who says he knows how to get God to support that agenda). Our spiritual goal then is to seek a level of “spiritual holiness/faith/righteousness/you name it” that will enable us to get God to easily do what we want. What are the Limits of God’s Care?

What Jesus shows us – Because of God’s essence as shown by Jesus – that God is love – Jesus makes certain provocative statements that many Christians are quick to gloss over. In Jesus’s most famous sermon – the sermon on the Mount – Jesus says that the Father “causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good and sends rain on the unrighteous and the righteous” (Mt 5:45b-46). This is contrary to so much of what the Jewish people of Jesus’s day believed, even though the evidence was clear before them as they were under subjugation by an “evil” people during the time – the Roman empire. And it is because God’s care is not limited to only those who “do good” or are “righteous” that he goes on to state that we should “Love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us, that you may be children of your Father” (Mt 5:44-45a). God the Father can only be this way if love defines who he is at the core.

What the Ghanaian God shows us – The Ghanaian God cares more (or sometimes only) for those who do good (or do what is right). This is a fundamental logic that exists within Ghanaian Christianity that is extremely difficult to challenge and for good reason. Not only is this how Hebrew people of the Old Testament and their neighbours thought about their gods, but this is also how many modern people, even highly educated ones and even many Christian scholars no less, think about God. Because their conception of God has God’s power sitting in the driving seat, they believe that God must use that power in support of those who do what they perceive to be right and punish those they perceive to be wrong. This is also why enemy love is very difficult for many Ghanaian Christians to process. This posture of the limits of God’s care brings to mind a song we used to sing when I was very young in my Pentecostal church, and which is still sung today in many churches. “Se me bo obra pa, ehotew a, na me gyae bone ye, na me ye papa a, me nim se Awurade, be bue kwan bi, ama mi”. (Twi song) “If I live a good life, that is holy, if I stop sinning, and I do good, I know that Awurade (God), will open a way for me (for my success)” (English Translation) Notice how “my success” becomes the definition of the purpose of “doing good” and “living a good life?

What Pleases God (aka Worship)?
What Jesus shows us – Because of who the Trinitarian God is – love; who we are – image-bearers; and the limits of God’s love – limitless; what pleases God is not what many religious people of Jesus’s day, and I believe of today’s Ghanaian days, think it is. Jesus tells Nicodemus that true worship is worshipping “in Spirit and truth”. Unfortunately, our friends in the Penteco-Charismatic wing have colonized this, misinterpreting it to mean “worshipping in tongues” or doing some other activity they label “spiritual”. They couldn’t be further from the truth. The answer to what worship in “spirit and truth” really means is to be found in Jesus’s answers to the 3 questions mentioned above. I’ll refer to them as Ans 1, Ans 2 and Ans 3. The essence of the Trinitarian God is love, and Jesus shows the depth of the love existing in the Trinity by sacrificing himself for humans (Ans 1.).

Because we are made in the image of that God, our purpose is to look to the self-sacrificial example of this Trinitarian God (Ans 2) and extend his limitless love to all whom this Trinitarian God has created – his human and non-human creation (Ans 3). That is what it means to “worship in the spirit”. Do you know how I know? Because if God the Holy Spirit’s essence is love, then love is what defines who is “worshipping in Spirit” i.e. who is aligned with the Holy Spirit. In fact, the author of 1 John says that “love comes from God” (1 Jn 4:7). Because that is who the Trinitarian God is, and therefore that is how we connect with him. This is why Jesus says the most important command of the Law and Prophets is summarized as “Love God, Love Neighbor” (Mt 22:36-40). Paul summarizes that one further by saying that the commandments are “summed up in this word: You shall love your neighbour as yourself” (Rom 13:9). He even removes the “Love God” bit, because fulfilling the latter fulfils the former.

This is very difficult for religious people of all shades and colours, including millions of Christians, to accept. It sounds so simple but, in its simplicity, lies its unbelievability. And so, we turn to what pleases the Ghanaian God. What the Ghanaian God shows us – The Ghanaian God, just like every other god since religion began, has needs. Of course, most Ghanaians will not put it so bluntly, but in all their practical behaviour, it shows. In the ancient world of the Old Testament, all non-Hebrews believed that the gods actually ate the food sacrificed to them. Hence the food sacrificed needed to be of high quality, with enough fat to burn and cause the smoke to rise up to the nostrils of the gods, so they would come down and eat. Having been satisfied, these gods will then do whatever their worshippers asked of them. Now while the Hebrew people managed to move away from the idea that God needed their food, they still at least maintained the idea that God was pleased with the act of worship – and that the aroma rising to him was pleasing enough. But already prophets like Hosea knew very well that Yahweh wasn’t even interested in these
sacrifices and spoke on Yahweh’s behalf by saying “For I [Yahweh] desire mercy, not sacrifice, and acknowledgement of God rather than burnt offerings.” (Hos 6:6)

But alas, for the Ghanaian God, sacrifices are the way in which we please him. He has an ego that needs to be stroked. That is his need. Hence, huge worship concerts, all-night services,
sowing of seeds, tithes, hours and hours of long-winded prayer, prophetic conferences and meetings, copious attendance of church services are just a few of the things that please him. Don’t be surprised when you hear modern-day Ghanaian Christians in worship services talking about raising a “pleasant aroma before God” via their singing. Unfortunately, all these can be justified by twisting not a few scriptural passages and ignoring Jesus altogether. To make sure we understand, let’s recap what I’ve said about the Ghanaian God. He (masculine singular) is driven by a need to display his power. He has no pre-defined purpose for you except what you desire for yourself. He limits his care to those who “do good”, which means that religious deeds – worship services, tithes, long hours in church etc – are the means by which he receives a pleasant aroma from each one, so he does what we each need for us.

Time to Rethink “God”?
Think about it again. How many of us give gifts to people who hardly ever give us anything back? And how many of us are not quick to jump at an offer to help someone we consider of a higher or same socio-economic rank than us, whiles being reluctant to help those of a poorer social standing, or doing so without drawing attention to it? And if anyone hurts a family member of ours, wouldn’t we want to punish them back by probably withholding whatever would have been due them as punishment if we had the power to? Isn’t that the “normal” thing to do?

So why does Jesus say to throw a party and invite people who can’t invite us back (Mt 14:13-14? Why did Jesus say to love your enemy and pray for them? Why does Jesus say these uncomfortable, upside down, almost senseless things? Because Jesus knows a truth that we don’t want to admit to ourselves – we humans in our sinfulness, like to think that God thinks like us. And in this way, the statements of 2 notable men of history are very relevant. “In the beginning, God created man in His own image, and man has been trying to repay the favour ever since” – Voltaire “God created man, and man returned the favour”. – Thomas Merton To be honest, the Ghanaian God (and the God of many Christians, not just Ghanaian ones) is just how many of us humans behave, multiplied a billion times larger, with snippets of scripture to back it up. The Ghanaian God has very little with the self-sacrificial, love- centred model of God that Jesus shows us. And you can live within the cozy cocoon that Ghanaian Christianity weaves for you from cradle to the grave without realizing that your conception of God is not very different from the conception that ancient Babylonians, Assyrian, Canaanite or even traditional African religions have, with a dash of modernization sprinkled on top.

And don’t be surprised, because you are not the first to not recognize this. Even the Pharisees, despite their diligent study of scriptures, failed to recognize Jesus. He tells them that “These are the scriptures that testify about me, yet you refuse to come to me to have life” (Jn 5:39-40) I hope now you understand what we mean by Jesus-centered. Because there is a difference between what many Christians mean by “God” and what Jesus means by “God”. And we are meant to be conformed to the image of the Son (Jesus), and not the other way around. Otherwise, we are just worshipping ourselves. There’s a word for that. It’s called idolatry. So, let me end by repeating a brilliant Roman Catholic Father, alongside words from a Psalmist.

“Jesus did not come to change God’s mind about humanity. Jesus came to change the mind of humanity about God” – Father Richard Rohr “When you did these things and I kept silent, you thought I [Yahweh] was exactly like you” (Ps 50:21)