Catholicity or Geopolitics?

In a 2006 Pro Ecclesia review of Lamin Sanneh’s Whose Religion Is Christianity? Emmanuel Katongole claims that Sanneh continues to allow geopolitical concerns to shape his understanding of African Christianity: “although Sanneh reads the growth of Christianity in Africa as a blessing to the West, he still shares the same geopolitical preoccupation as those who view the growth in the non-Western churches as a threat to the West” (143).

Katongole continues, “What the West/non-West geopolitical preoccupation in fact betrays is the fact that in spite of the claims being made for world Christianity, the interests that characterize the discussions of the world of Christianity are still very parochial. One then begins to wonder whether we shall ever get beyond the parochialism embedded in such designations as ‘Western’ or ‘non-Western’ Christianity and engage (in my opinion, a more productive) discussion regarding the marks and practices that make Christianity a universal communion of discipleship” (143-4).

The problem, he argues, is that missiology lacks a “radical notion of Catholicity,” which involves “not mere geographic distribution of Christians but the presence of concrete communities and practices that are at once local and global in their very nature and way of life. It is through concrete church communities, made possible through such practices as baptism, that the local and universal can be seen to penetrate each other and to exist as internal one to another” (144).

He cites this wonderful passage from Joseph Ratzinger: “Baptism is a Trinitarian, that is, a thoroughly theological event, and means far more than being socialized into the local church Baptism does not arise from the individual community, rather, in baptism the door to the one church is opened to us; it is the presence of the one church, and it can come only from her—from the Jerusalem that is above, our new mother. In baptism, the universal church continually precedes and creates the local church. On this basis … there are no strangers in the church. Everyone in it is at home everywhere … anyone baptized in the church in Berlin is always at home in the church in Rome or in New York or in Kinshasa or in Bangalore or wherever, as if he or she had been baptized there. He or she does not need to file a change-of-address form; it is one and the same church. Baptism comes out of it and delivers (gives birth to) us into it” (quoted 144).

Katongole adds that an African Christian may well experience racial hatreds as an immigrant, even within the church. But baptism makes the church “the site within which racism might be meaningfully challenged from a specifically Christian perspective.” On this basis a genuine form of catholicity, rooted in local areas but simultaneously global, can take hold: “it is within such communions, located within a particular geography, but whose way of life and practices both reflect and help shape a social reality and imagination in which spatial and temporal geographies are overcome, that the true meaning of world Christianity becomes fleshly embodied” (144).

(Kantagole in Pro Ecclesia 15:1 [2006] 140-5.)