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Reflections on a Report
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 July 2024
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Fr Hastings has touched on many very serious problems in his report, now published as Christian Marriage in Africa, and in the previous article, with a compassion and sincerity that draw on wide reading and long reflection. Yet I feel myself out of sympathy with much that he has to say. This may be more to my discredit than to Fr Hastings’; at any rate, let me throw down a few words to suggest that at any rate such differences may be permissible.
First of all, on a relatively secondary point, Fr Hastings takes a view of polygamy which, while he is not the first to suggest it, is still very much a minority view among both Catholics and Anglicans. The direction of the New Testament is monogamous, not so much in an explicit command, as in defining marriage by the image of the union of Christ and His Church in the New Covenant. For the baptized Christian, therefore, polygamy is not an option. For the non-Christian, however, polygamous unions, when they are in accord with the traditions of his society, cannot simply be written off as ‘immoral’; to force the disruption of such unions as the price of baptism is much more immoral. Polygamists might therefore be admitted to baptism; and while Christians should regard monogamous marriage as the norm, there are cases where a Christian who has taken more than one wife may be admitted to the Eucharist. Fr Hastings claims that this is the only policy which will be consistent with the ‘central precepts of the Gospel’.
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- Copyright © 1973 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers
References
page 261 note 1 See Turner, H. W., African Independent Church (O.U.P. 1967), Vol. II, pp. 247–250Google Scholar.
page 261 note 2 Wilson, Monica, Communal Rituals of the)<(yakyusa (O.U.P. for international African Institute, 1959) p. 198Google Scholar.
page 262 note 1 For some accounts of African conversion see Baeta, C. G. (ed.), Christianity in Tropical Africa (O.U.P. for International African Institute 1968)Google Scholar, particularly pp. 123–199, and, for a mature assessment which apt. lies to Islam as well as Christianity, see Humphrey J. Fisher, ‘Conversion Reconsidered: Some Historical Aspects of Religious Conversion in Black Africa’ in Africa, January 1973, pp. 27–40. My ‘Low Church’ view of Christianity in Africa largely follows Fisher.
page 263 note 1 The best account of a group of African Christians is still John V. Taylor's The Growth of the Church in Buganda, S.G.M. 1958Google Scholar. For outspoken criticism of African neglect of the Eucharist, see John Mbiti in Baeta, op. tit., pp. 340‐1; for the situation in an independent Church, see H. W. Turner, op. tit., pp. 200–220. Although polygamists were admitted to full church membership, the proportion of communicants to total membesrhip was extremely small; statistics for the Sierra Leone‐Ghana diocese of dlis Church showed only forty‐five communicants as against 2,483 members in 1958‐9.
page 263 note 2 For an interesting study of a south Indian Christian community see Luke, P. Y. and Carman, John B., Village Christians and Hindu Culture, Lutterworth Press, 1968.Google Scholar