John William Colenso set foot on the shores of Durban at Port Natal, in what is now South Africa, on Monday, January 30, 1854. This newly minted bishop of the Anglican Church was about to begin one of the most important odysseys of a missionary bishop in the history of the Christian church. The world of Bishop Colenso was far removed from that of José de Acosta. Colenso was an Anglican bishop of the nineteenth century, shaped by a Protestant church and an England still feeling the effects of the French Revolution, immersed in the industrial revolution and in the intellectual revolution that was the Enlightenment. Acosta was a Jesuit of the late fifteenth century, shaped by a Roman Catholic Church and a Spain being transformed by the discoveries of new worlds and troubled by the overturning of ecclesial life brought about under the Protestant Reformation. Yet both were missionaries at the emergence of two nation-states, successive global world powers, and both entered new worlds as those worlds were being radically transformed.
The forty-year-old man who came to Natal as its first Anglican bishop in 1854 had not had an easy life. The untimely death of his mother and the financial collapse of his father’s business meant that young John had been largely responsible for raising his younger siblings. His early life was defined by unrelenting hard work, but also by an innate intelligence and abiding academic ambition. At St. John’s College, Cambridge, he distinguished himself as a brilliant student, particularly in mathematics, and as an extremely overworked student owing to his chronic financial situation. Yet John was from the beginning a very serious Christian, and his commitment to his faith and the church deepened as he progressed through his education.1
Colenso’s intellectual vision was shaped by the theological romanticism of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Frederick Denison Maurice. These two thinkers, introduced to him by the young woman who would become his lifelong companion, Sarah Frances Colenso (née Bunyon), drew his vision out from the Protestant evangelicalism of his early years into a wider theological imagination characterized by Enlightenment sensibilities.
Coleridge introduced him to the idea of a universal religious consciousness that only needs to be accessed inwardly to establish its validity. In this regard, Coleridge’s views had much in common with the thought of the great German Romantic theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher. The Christian God articulated by Coleridge was not dependent on proofs, evidence, or demonstrations. As Coleridge says in his famous text Aids to Reflection, “All the (so called) demonstrations of a God either prove too little, as that from the order and apparent purpose in Nature; or too much, namely, that the World is itself God.”2 Coleridge offered Colenso an intuitive faith that gently but firmly drew space between itself and the Scriptures, releasing the Bible from service as the basis of Christian faith itself.3
In a telling passage that presages much of Colenso’s intellectual journey, Coleridge comments on the meaning of the well-known text “There is no other name under heaven by which a man can be saved, but the name of Jesus” and offers a view of the moral Bible, a Bible freed from literalist interpretation and drawn into a wider pedagogical vision:
It is true and obligatory for every Christian community and for every individual believer, wherever the opportunity is afforded of spreading the Light of the Gospel, and making known the name of the only Saviour and Redeemer. For even though the uninformed Heathens should not perish, the guilt of their perishing will attach to those who not only had no certainty of their safety, but who are commanded to act on the supposition of the contrary. But if, on the other hand, a theological dogmatist should attempt to persuade me, that this text was intended to give us an historical knowledge of God’s future actions and dealings—and for the gratification of our curiosity to inform us, that Socrates and Phocion, together with all the savages in the woods and wilds of Africa and America, will be sent to keep company with the Devil and his angels in everlasting torments—I should remind him, that the purpose of Scripture was to teach us our duty, not to enable us to sit in judgment on the souls of our fellow creatures.4
Coleridge inserts the peoples of Africa and America as tropes for those at the farthest edge of soteriological possibility. They are the “uninformed Heathens” who, along with Socrates and Phocion, had been relegated in the dominant theological systems of his day to damnation and tormenting hell. Coleridge had little patience for such an inadequate idea of the reality of the divine. His compelling intellectual vision grew out of his deep and abiding involvement with the thought of Immanuel Kant and the German Idealist tradition articulated in the works of Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Friedrich Schelling, and Schleiermacher. Kant’s profound reformulation of what constituted adequate theological speech found exciting articulation in Coleridge, who channeled the sensibilities of German Romanticism into English. Most notably, Coleridge not only enabled religious consciousness and Enlightenment reason to happily coexist but also suggested that reason properly understood manifests religious consciousness. Unlike pre-Kantian visions of religious truth based on objective metaphysical truth, Coleridge echoed Kant’s critique of such thinking and invited people to turn inward in order to locate the source of the truth of religion. Colenso will carry forward this Coleridgean critique of the older (pre-Kantian) theological vision as well as the deployment of Africans as tropes of damnation to indicate a kind of theological vulgarity.
Maurice offered Colenso a breathtaking vision of a loving Father-God, one whose power flows through indefatigable love. For Maurice, the divine presence in the world was already a saving presence: “The truth is that every man is in Christ; the condemnation of every man is, that he will not own the truth; he will not act as if this were true, he will not believe that which is the truth, that, except he were joined to Christ, he could not think, breath, live a single hour.”5 From Maurice, Colenso inherited this christological universalism, which greatly shaped his powerful humanitarian sensibilities. He also gained from Maurice, himself a disciple of Coleridge, a vision of theology and Christian doctrines driven by an overarching moralist hermeneutic. All theological statements and doctrinal axioms, if they are rooted in universal truth, issue really only in lessons for the moral life.6 The goal of theological statements is to deepen one’s understanding of the moral structure of human existence. In this way, doctrinal statements in the powerful construal of Maurice drew attention to humans’ life together and the formation of their character. Much in line with German Romanticism, Maurice envisioned religion and religious language’s central purpose to more clearly express the authentic human person in his or her individuality and universality. Thus Christian doctrine functioned inside a kind of circularity. That is, theology and doctrine, as the articulations of universal moral truth, only completed what was already possible to know, even if in embryonic form, through nature. Colenso seized on this moralist hermeneutic and explicated a vision of God that did not require doctrine with any metaphysical density for the formation of Christian identity.
Colenso, however, arrived in Natal not simply a budding theologian; he was also a translator come to Africa to convert and educate. He came to the colony of Natal, nestled on the eastern seaboard of southern Africa between the majestic Drakensberg Mountains to the west and the Indian Ocean to the east and between the Thukela River to the north and the Mzimkhulu River to the south. It was home to many peoples, including the Zulu people. In the face of the ubiquitous presence of Europeans, the many peoples that traditionally inhabited that region had seen and were seeing their ancient worlds collapse and reemerge fundamentally changed.
The peoples of this region were being squeezed on all sides by Europeans. The Portuguese presence to the northeast and especially at Delagoa Bay had for decades before Colenso’s arrival disrupted life by drawing native peoples into detrimental trading practices involving ivory, hides, maize, and slaves. The Portuguese inserted their hunting and trading practices into an already fragile ecological system that saw, in the years prior to Colenso’s arrival, environmental strain through drought and famine. Portuguese hunting and trading also affected sociopolitical systems easily manipulated through trade. These capitalist operations resulted in stimulation of tribal conflict and reconfiguration and ultimately in the disruption and displacement of peoples.7 The British presence in the southeast and the Boer/Voortrekker presence in the south-southwest created an unrelenting appetite for land and laborers that drove ever-increasing patterns of deception, subterfuge, manipulation, injustice, and violence. Armed with weapons given to them by the British and Dutch, and often in collusion with them, the Griqua, Kora peoples and other armed horsemen based on the southwest middle Orange and lower Vaal rivers descended upon unsuspecting peoples, raiding and killing and taking prisoners who would become laborers for the British and Boer colonialists.8 Chiefs, tribes, and individuals were also being placed in a moral universe controlled by white opinion displayed in print media. The morality or immorality of every African was determined by how much he supported white interests, accepted European culture, and yielded land, labor, and life to European control.9
Furthermore, by the time of Colenso’s arrival, settler and merchant interests were beginning to narrate their presence as salvific, bringing order to chaos and cultivation to empty, uninhabited lands. They attributed the chaos to the legacy of a Zulu chief, Shaka Senzangakhona, and his terrorist behavior. What would soon come to be designated as the Mfecane, “the crushing, the destroying,” in which Shaka and the Zulus were interpreted as the central cause of disruption, disorder, displacement, and death in the region, had its beginning in European discursive control of the multiple narratives Africans themselves told of intertribal conflict and war. Shaka was only one of many excuses used by the white settlers for aggressively seizing lands and pulling peoples from the hands of “despotic chiefs” and into labor systems.10 African agency was intact; there were intertribal conflicts, war, violence, and death as chiefs constantly sought to consolidate power, establish stability, and ensure the peace and prosperity of their peoples. However, African agency was always articulated ultimately by settlers and settler-merchants, who made sure that the grand narrative performed in England and in other communication centers of the Old World juxtaposed African despotism to white benevolence.
The colony of Natal was saturated with two interrelated forms of desire: the merchant and the missionary. Settler existence began in 1824 with the entrepreneurial interests of traders from the Cape colony to the southwest. Francis Farewell and Henry Francis Fynn, along with other merchants, came in search of trade agreements with Shaka, the Zulu king. The Boer gained control of the colony and the surrounding area after a bloody conflict with the Zulu and the defeat of the Zulu king, Dingane kaSenzangakhona, son of Shaka. They had named the spoils of their war the Republic of Natalia. But the Boer victory was short-lived. The colony became property of the British crown in 1842 after the British pushed out the Boer/Voortrekker. British involvement in this area was at first less than enthusiastic because Natal was not considered an area brimming with lucrative possibilities. But the British believed that Boer expansion was a threat that merited their military intervention. Natal, however, struggled to fully integrate itself into the imperial economy.11
Caught in the middle of all this were the many native peoples. The attempt to reestablish and refashion themselves became a permanent characteristic of their existence. On the one hand people were trying to maintain precolonial African institutions with chiefs, indunas, headmen or chiefly councilors, and ibutho, age-grouped men or women who served the chief by carrying out various duties. Indigenes, who functioned without that kind of institution, wished to remain free of chiefs while maintaining common traditions and practices. On the other hand, the white settler presence had brought the entire region into a capitalist system such that no native agricultural practice or tradition involving the land would go untouched or unaltered. All the land and animals, especially the cattle, came steadily under settler influence or control.
The settlers exploited Natal as a significant entrepôt. Because of the linkages between farming efforts and trade, native inhabitants’ lives were steadily woven into ever-expanding commercial networks. White settlers’ aggressive desire to make life profitable in Natal was matched only by their impatience with indigenous landowners as their direct competition in trade and farming. Moreover, white settlers’ need for laborers was feverish, and Africans outside of their control were a source of deep frustration. These Africans, for their part, were increasingly displaced even on their own ancestral lands. Pursued by land speculation companies such as the London-based Natal and Colonization Company, which allegedly owned hundreds of thousands of acres, many displaced peoples found themselves living the lives of squatters and tenants. Many contracted as labor tenants for white farmers, or they rented land and were subject to arbitrary rules, laws, and evictions.12
The land and native life were also steadily woven into missionary networks. Between 1835 and 1880, there were at least seventy-five mission stations covering the Natal, Zululand, and Mpondoland, missions representing a host of denominations, including Methodist, Scottish Presbyterian, Roman Catholic, Lutheran, Church of England, Congregational, and American Presbyterian. German, Swedish, Portuguese, English, Dutch, and American missionaries spread across the Natal landscape building churches and schools and proselytizing Africans.13 Some societies worked closely with colonization and land companies such as the Joseph Byrne Emigration and Colonization Company, establishing enterprising settlers and planting missionaries in one single operation. This is the world that John Colenso, bishop and translator, entered.
It would be impossible to understand the life and actions of Bishop Colenso in his new world without considering the one man who had the single greatest effect on his life and that world, Theophilus Shepstone. There were others who were important in Colenso’s life—his fiercely intelligent wife, Frances Colenso; the presiding bishop of Cape Town, Robert Gray, with whom Colenso was to wage the theological struggle that was to define his public image in England; and William Ngidi, with whom he studied the Zulu language and who was to become a crucial figure in Colenso’s theological program. All were crucial, yet in truth, Shepstone is the necessary hermeneutical horizon upon which to grasp the theological vision Colenso enacted in the new world of Africa. Indeed it would be quite appropriate to characterize the young bishop’s early years in Natal as the Colenso-Shepstone years. Upon Colenso’s arrival in Natal, the two men quickly became close and began what looked to be a deep and abiding friendship.
Shepstone was in many ways the ideal companion for a missionary translator come to a strange new world. He was the son of a Wesleyan missionary, John William Shepstone, who shared the same first and middle names as his new-found friend. Theophilus grew up in Methodist itinerancy in the Cape colony. This meant that home for him and his siblings had been in Bathurst, Theopolis, Grahamstown, Wesleyville, Morley, and a host of other places on the Cape. It also meant that Theophilus’s gift of language acquisition was to become quite useful as he mastered the Nguni languages, that family of languages spoken by the many groups that inhabit what is now southern Africa. By the age of fourteen, Theophilus was already aiding missionaries in translation work.14 He was also to serve with distinction as an interpreter for colonial officials and the military. A deeply devout Christian man, Shepstone understood missionary life and what was necessary for it to thrive. Moreover, he had gained intimate knowledge of native practices, cultural logics, and belief systems that he used to great effect. So when Colenso found Shepstone in Pietermaritzburg at the beginning of his first visit to Natal in 1854, he thought he had discovered a gift set in place for him by God.
One must understand Colenso and Shepstone as two translators. Although it would be several years before Colenso gained mastery of the Zulu language and Nguni language systems, the work of translation was mirrored in the lives of these two men, with one significant difference: Shepstone translated much more than Christianity into native worlds. He stood at the center of the translation of native worlds into European hegemony. Shepstone was in charge in Natal. Colenso’s early years in Natal were just the opposite of the period of very strained relationship between the theologian Acosta and the Christian colonial ruling agent Viceroy Toledo. Colenso and Shepstone were two sides of the same coin, joined in the same process, translation. Colenso brought Christianity into vernacular languages, and Shepstone used vernacular languages to bring the natives into colonial existence. Colenso had willingly and with great joy stepped into the Shepstone system.
In 1846, at the age of twenty-eight, Theophilus Shepstone (whose first name means “lover of God” in Greek) became the diplomatic agent to the native tribes of Natal. Later named secretary for native affairs, Shepstone ruled the colony for thirty years. His Nguni name, Somtsewu, means “Father of Whiteness.”15 And as the great white power, Shepstone put in place a system of control, masterful in its use of native logics. The historian Jeff Guy suggests that the reason Colenso and Shepstone became fast friends was not only because they were close in age and personality, but also because they shared a vision of how to move African society forward:
Shepstone and Colenso held that the proper answers to the challenges created in a rapidly changing social situation should be found in the utilisation of older social forms. Shepstone argued that it was necessary to retain and develop those aspects of African life which did not conflict with civilised standards and that care had to be taken not to provoke the African into resistance by violently changing his way of life. From Maurice, Colenso had learnt that the good worked by the presence of God could be discovered in all men, and that the missionary had to identify this and build upon it—not destroy everything in an attempt to rout that which was abominable.16
Guy surmises that Colenso and Shepstone shared a native anthropology: “Colenso had rejected the idea of hopelessly fallen man, Shepstone the totally barbarous one. It was upon this that their friendship was founded.”17 While this sunny summation of their comparable conceptual dispositions may be true, it also points toward the deeper strategies of paternalistic manipulation that will characterize the Shepstone system and mark South African life right up to and through the apartheid years.
Shepstone bore a reputation as an expert on the native mind, a reputation he endlessly cultivated through his administrative machinations. One sees in Shepstone the outcome of linking language mastery to whiteness. In one way, his mastery of native dialects joined the work of the missionary and that of the colonial agent in the colonization of language. Yet in another way, his language mastery shows the growth of colonialist operations from missionary roots. It would certainly be unfair to paint these missionaries as nothing more than colonialists. However, one must not miss the point of the unintended consequences of language acquisition and the cultivation of intimate relations. Personal (missionary) knowledge is put to colonialist use. As he transitioned from a missionary translator and helper to colonial interpreter to colonial agent to the central power running the colony, Shepstone was poised to build the colonialist system on top of existing native networks. This was the heart of his system.
Shepstone’s deepest impulse was to gain full control of the African. His initial plan, which was rejected by the colonial office for its cost, was to place all Africans on reservations under the strict control of white magistrates.18 What Shepstone ultimately managed to do was place a canopy of British administrative and judicial structure on top of precolonial African institutions.19 What this meant was that Shepstone himself would become the (operational) chief of chiefs, with everyone under him—resident magistrates, administrators of native law, chiefs, indunas, and headmen. On the surface this system appeared to respect context, indigenous life and custom. In truth it was a system of profound control. Africans would be governed by native law administered by indunas, under the guidance of chiefs. Above the chiefs, overseeing the administration of native law, were the white magistrates and administrators, and over them all was Shepstone, the lieutenant-governor (the supreme chief), and the Legislative Council. Shepstone ensured loyalty throughout the system by returning a portion of the fees, fines, and in-kind penalties (for example, cattle) to chiefs and indunas as payment for administering justice. But the demonic genius of the system lay in its taxation schema.
Many white settlers and farmers, especially those from inland farms and villages, despised Shepstone and his system of distributing land to Africans. They believed he favored the Africans by granting land rights, allowing them to live on tribal lands as well as on land owned by land companies, and by allowing them to participate in the emerging market economy. All of which meant that Shepstone’s policies created a small, stagnant pool of black labor. On the surface, his policies did give the appearance of leaving the Africans’ ways of life intact, but in truth Shepstone had chained African ways of life tightly to capitalism. He taxed almost everything associated with the everyday practices of indigenous life. Chiefs had to pay a hut tax calibrated to the number of huts in their villages; an increase in the number of huts through population growth meant increased taxes. There were fees for marriage and divorce, and fines for violations of policies and laws. But the greatest revenue scheme involved the custom duties on imported goods. Through the Legislative Council, Shepstone was able to place charges on goods that were used exclusively by Africans, while goods used by white settlers carried slight charges or were duty free. Goods bound for inland Africans also were priced higher.
On the one hand, Africans earned money by supplying food to the markets through backbreaking labor on their land, by trading within a trading system unfair to them, and by working for white employers under conditions that matched and exceeded the harshness of life in England during the emergence of industrial capitalism. Furthermore, they were taxed far more than the white settlers. As the historian Norman Etherington notes, “Whenever more revenue was needed, new charges were levied on African consumer goods.”20 Indeed, the government was paid for on the backs of Africans.21
The powerful coastal farmers and merchants, overseas businessmen, and colonial companies in England all appreciated Shepstone and his policies. They understood he had achieved a remarkable level of social stability and financial solvency through his operations. Indeed, Shepstone ambitiously promoted his system as a model transferable to other parts of Africa.
It is not clear whether Bishop Colenso could see at the beginning of his life in Natal the devil in the details of the Shepstone system. What is clear is that Colenso agreed in principle with Shepstone’s policies because he was at heart, like Shepstone, a British citizen deeply committed to the colonialist civilizing project in Africa, and he was shaped to read African societies through white paternalism. Yet from the very beginning of his time in Natal, Colenso demonstrated that he was not perfectly aligned with the Shepstone way of treating the native peoples. During his first ten-week journey in Natal, Bishop Colenso recounted the events of February 10. On that day he went with Shepstone and his aide to survey the land a few miles outside of Pietermaritzburg where he would build his episcopal residence, Bishopstowe. Upon his return to the city, he learned that a native worker had been crushed by a stone. Bishop Colenso was moved as he observed the grief of the dead man’s brother and found the bond between himself and the Africans growing closer. It was after this event that Ngoza, one of Shepstone’s native headmen, wanted to pay his respects to Colenso. The event of their meeting typifies the colonial operation as well as Colenso’s ambiguous relationship to it. Colenso had been advised to “keep the Kafir waiting.” After he dressed, he stepped into the courtyard where Ngoza was waiting:
In due time, I stepped out to him, and there stood Ngoza, dressed neatly enough as an European, with his attendant Kafir waiting beside him. I said nothing (as I was advised) until he spoke, and, in answer to a question from Mr. Green, said that he was come to salute the in Kos’. “Sakubona,” I said; and with all my heart would have grasped the great black hand, and given it a good brotherly shake: but my dignity would have been essentially compromised in his own eyes by any such proceeding. I confess it went very much against the grain; but the advice of all true Philo-Kafirs, Mr. Shepstone among the rest, was to the same effect—viz. that too ready familiarity, and especially shaking hands with them upon slight acquaintance … did great mischief in making them pert and presuming. Accordingly, I looked aside with a grand indifference as long as I could, (which was not very long,) and talked to Mr. G., instead of paying attention to the Kafir’s presence.22
Colenso entered the courtyard in the colonialist persona. Ngoza in European dress stood in front of Colenso, while Colenso, by instruction, minimized his presence by ignoring him. Silence, indifference, and indirect speech all performed the colonialist relation, and the bishop enacted it perfectly, except that the actions did not quite fit him. He wanted to shake Ngoza’s hand, he could not sustain the look of indifference for long, and in the end he spoke directly to him, in benediction, as he left, “hamba kahle—walk pleasantly,” to which Ngoza replied, “tsala kahle—sit pleasantly.”23
After his initial reconnaissance tour of Natal, Colenso returned to England to gather his mission party. In May of 1855, Bishop John William Colenso returned to his new home. He made his way to Pietermaritzburg and then to Bishopstowe, where his historic tenure officially began. The colony held about six thousand whites and over one hundred thousand Africans. Given that the colony had two major cities, the port city of Durban and, fifty miles away, Pietermaritzburg, the seat of the government, and comprised thousands of square miles, the bishop had his work cut out for him. At Bishopstowe, Colenso began his ambitious project to establish the mission station, Ekukhanyeni (meaning the Place or Home of Light or Enlightenment). He envisioned that Ekukhanyeni would impart the best of European civilization. It would offer training in agriculture and mechanics, which would form farmers and artisans with skills vital to the colony. It would teach reading and writing and cultivate intellectual excellence.24
It was no accident that Bishopstowe stood in the shadow of the magnificent Table Mountain. John and Frances Colenso fell deeply in love with the area, the view of the mountain, the slopes and hills of the land, the sounds of the land, and the breathtaking beauty of its sunrises and sunsets. The beauty and power of Bishopstowe and the view of the mountain, which Frances called “that majestic altar,” centered Colenso’s dreams and work.25 Also central to the bishop’s dreams and work was the translation of the Bible into the language of the people. To this he turned considerable energy. One of the first structures erected at Bishopstowe was a hexagonal summer house, which was lined inside with bookshelves. There Colenso would sit with his native informants, that is, his language teachers, and do the difficult, painstaking work of learning the language and translating. The bishop carried on a full slate of pastoral duties: teaching, preaching every Sunday, visiting, church administration, missionary fundraising, and looking for and cultivating priests. But he understood the center of his mission to be translation.
Colenso strongly believed that the gospel must be preached and presented to the natives in their own language. This was the hallmark of the Protestant Reformation and the central energy behind the translation endeavor of every Protestant mission. Ministry must be in the vernacular of the common people. Everything revolved around understanding native words and presenting a Christian world in those words. Colenso’s insight was far deeper than he realized. Indeed, his intuition was going to place him in unimaginable difficulty and unanticipated suffering. Yet his work of translation exposed an unbroken thread that tied his life together, from his early days as the principal caretaker of his younger siblings, through his years of struggle at Cambridge, to the summer house: unrelenting hard work.26
Showing frustration with those who did not understand the hard work, necessary patience, and great urgency of translating, Colenso wrote, “I have no special gift for languages, but what is shared by most educated men of fair ability. What I have done, I have done by hard work—by sitting with my natives day after day …—conversing with them as well as I could, and listening to them conversing,—writing down what I could of their talk from their own lips…. [P]icture to yourself what it is to have the whole Diocese waiting for books in the Native Language, which I must personally not only make and write, but make as correct as possible in the minutest detail, and be as careful to the printing as I must to the writing, (to say nothing of the cares of a household of some 70 souls).”27 Colenso gained through struggle what Shepstone had through birth, namely, access to the everyday speech of the native peoples. Colenso also gained access to a space in which his nascent theological vision would encounter the thoughts and hopes, the pain and suffering of Africans. This was a place where the possibilities of “resistance and new consciousness may emerge.”28 It was also a place where the subterranean cracks in his synthesis of the British colonial project, his theological vision, his ecclesial identity and commitments, and his commitment to the implementation of Shepstone’s colonial system began to show.
As he began his work of translation, Colenso was still greatly enamored of Shepstone’s vision of managing African flesh. He was wholly convinced that Shepstone’s pipe dream of setting up an African colony in Zululand with himself as chief and Colenso as spiritual director was an urgently needed plan of action to address the “overcrowding” of Natal with native refugees. This “black kingdom” would be a model city displaying the civilizing and Christianizing effects of careful planning and engineering of native lives.29 If the massive contradictions in the Shepstone system were concealed to Colenso when he began his translation work, it is because his mind was preoccupied with the theological revolution that was forming in his thinking. As he shared space with black bodies, space born in speaking and listening, the theological seeds planted by Coleridge and Maurice began to grow and take new shape. Fully a man of his time, he was also in many ways ahead of his time.
Colenso’s time was not a great one for Christian missions in southern Africa. Most missionaries in the colony were moving inextricably toward supporting full-blown British imperialism and the stark segregation of the races. Such movement was due to the fact that few denominations were having overwhelming success in converting large numbers of natives. Most mission stations were modest affairs, and the people who usually came to and inhabited mission stations were the outcasts of African societies—homeless, displaced natives and those seeking refuge from chiefs or clans. Mission stations stood between worlds—Christian and non-Christian, European and African—and created tensions between those worlds. Those Africans who became ikholwa or kholw, Christian converts, were caught between two worlds.
These Christians converts were estranged from and resisted by both worlds, but especially by the white settler world, which saw them as one of their greatest threats. They represented the success of strategies of Western domesticity. Increasingly educated, economically able and savvy, socially and politically ambitious, the kholwa represented the possibility of full inclusion, biracial community, and equality. For the many chiefs within the Shepstone system, the kholwa presented subversive elements, people who resisted the old ways, especially the authority of chiefs to guide their lives. By whites, they were denied full citizenship in the colony, especially the right to vote and freedom from the jurisdiction and demands of chiefdoms. By blacks, they were shunned, ostracized, and held in suspicion.30 The kholwa consequently failed to prosper in the colonial world of Natal, their lives witnessing a system set to deny the very thing it claimed to promote: Christian civilization. If the kholwa exposed the deepest contradiction of the colonialist Christian vision, it was not a contradiction that factored into the missional or pedagogical vision of Bishop Colenso.
For Colenso, Ekukhanyeni was a place of vision. He approached his Zulu students as people who were to be prepared to lead their nation and participate in a universal human society. Drawn to this school were John and William Ngidi and Magema Magwaza Fuze. John and William Ngidi had been converted by an American missionary who employed them as assistants. When that missionary died, John and William looked for new employment and came to Colenso and Ekukhanyeni. William Ngidi and Magema Fuze became Bishop Colenso’s primary assistants, but the term assistant does not capture the impact of their lives on Colenso. He enlisted them as conversation partners who not only were learning how to read and write in both English and isiZulu but who were also publishing their own work.
Bishop Colenso began the education of Africans on a footing that was unprecedented. On a trip to visit the Zulu king, Mpande, Colenso encouraged the students who were accompanying him—Magema Fuze, Ndiane Ngubane, and now assistant teacher William Ngidi—to keep journals of the visitation. Those journals, published in 1860 as Three Native Accounts of the Visit of the Bishop of Natal in September and October, 1859, to Umpande, King of the Zulus, were among the first English/isiZulu texts written by natives.31 Another important text published at Ekukhanyeni was Magema Fuze’s Abantu Abamnyama, Lapa Bavela Ngakona (The Black People and Whence They Came), considered the first book written by a Zulu in his native dialect.32 These fruits of mission labor are crucial because they indicate that the trajectory Colenso’s Africans students were on was toward self-articulation.
Colenso granted the students access to a workbench in the building of European discursive operations, to the literary weapons of warfare and defense, to the tools for engaging in emancipatory politics, and to the building blocks of nationalist existence. Indeed, Colenso could be appropriately construed as the spiritual father of a particular moment and region of African literary consciousness. However, all his efforts were under the canopy of preparing proper colonial subjects. The central plan shaping the educational mission of Ekukhanyeni was Shepstonian in nature. Shepstone convinced him that success at the mission required a top-down approach, which meant that Colenso would seek to educate the first sons (and a few daughters) of chiefs. The philosophy was straightforward: where the British-educated head goes, the native bodies will follow. British education, in the hands of Colenso and Shepstone in these early years, never lost sight of this hegemonic overlay.
Colenso’s missionary vision, however, led him into the ecclesial tensions and theological conflicts that ultimately defined his life. The historic struggles among Bishop Colenso, Metropolitan Robert Gray (bishop of Cape Town), and the Anglican Church, which led to charges of heresy against Colenso and his excommunication, have been well documented, and their complex details need not be recited here.33 However, of crucial import is the theological vision that surfaced through Colenso’s work and his historic struggle for his ecclesial-professional life. For it is precisely that theological vision, along with the full development of the white supremacist state, that destroyed the spectacular trajectory of the Bishopstowe mission station. That theological vision also exposes much of the conceptual architecture of modern-day white, Western theological engagements with non-Western Christians. Equally important, Colenso’s reflections show the ambiguous inner logic of strategies of contextuality. With Colenso one gains a vision strongly rooted in the European Enlightenment, in frustrations with industrial capitalism, and in the exhaustion of an orthodox imagination. Together they created in Colenso a flight to the universal, a flight that illumines both the great riches and tragic dimensions of his theology. Yet most centrally, Bishop Colenso’s thought reveals the deeply contorted ground on which translation of the Christian world had been forced to proceed.
It would be difficult to find a more productive Christian intellectual in the mission field than John William Colenso. His translation output was simply breathtaking. Less than three months after his mission party’s arrival, he produced a massive Zulu dictionary, a Zulu grammar, and a revised Zulu version of the Gospel of St. Matthew. By the end of his first seven years in Natal, he would add the entire New Testament, Genesis, Exodus, and Samuel, all translated into isiZulu. He would also publish a Zulu liturgy, a treatise on the Decalogue, and Zulu readers in astronomy, geography, geology, and history.34 This list does not include the other publications Colenso oversaw through the operation of the station’s printing press. By his side, along with other assistants, was William Ngidi, constantly asking questions, probing Colenso’s theological responses, and suggesting alternative readings and interpretations. In this context one can see both the maturation and alteration of his theology since his arrival in Natal and entry into the everyday practices of translation and mission work. At the heart of that thinking was his commentary on Romans, entitled St. Paul’s Epistle to the Romans: Newly Translated, and Explained from a Missionary Point of View, published at Bishopstowe in June of 1861 and republished in 1863.35
The commentary on Romans, not his more famous and more widely disseminated work The Pentateuch and the Book of Joshua: Critically Examined, led to the charges of heresy brought against Colenso.36 In fact, the text on the Pentateuch only enacts a portion of the theological agenda outlined in the Romans commentary. In writing a Romans commentary, Colenso stands in a historical line of theologians that extends before him to Luther and after him to Karl Barth. Like them, Colenso was compelled to return to the text that elaborates the foundations of the Christian life in order to reestablish Christian existence in this new world, not only the British world but the world of Natal. As Andrew Walls notes, the book of Romans, especially Rom 1 and 2, has played a crucial role in the theological imaginations of missionaries. The Romans epistle was their strongest ally as they sought to articulate a theological vision of their efforts. Missionaries saw in Romans 1 a corrective to Christian arrogance.37
If, as Colenso believed, “the great work of the Christian Teacher of to-day is to translate the language of the devout men of former ages into that of our own,” then he understood his commentary work to read the fundamental aspects of faith from the standpoint of the missionary situation and thereby articulate more precisely the very nature of Christianity.38 Colenso’s commentary comes in the midst of two historic developments. First, he writes within the continuation of the comparativist hermeneutic that we have seen modeled in Acosta. That hermeneutic drew historical and immediate comparison between Christianity and other religions. In contrast to that of the Renaissance Catholic Acosta, Colenso’s work stands in the midst of the modern Protestant recapitulation of that theological operation. That is, Colenso’s thinking reflects the new conceptual arrangement of being able to compare the religious practices of different indigenes from multiple colonialist sites by analyzing side by side the different native religious subjects and their different religious systems. However, in Colenso’s time comparative procedures were being decoupled from their theological moorings and were in effect reinventing the religions of the world through racial and cultural taxonomies.39 This meant that by Colenso’s time native religions were increasingly read outside of such Christian theological frameworks as, for example, manifestations of the demonic. Rather, native religions were read as affirmations of racial character and indicators of civilization and human development.
The modern invention of religion again is, first, a reinvention of the trajectory taken by the Portuguese and the Spanish, who, as we have seen, first drew up the possibilities of (theological) anthropological reflection through descriptions of body differences (for example, skin color, hair texture, manner of dress, and so forth). The need to explain unforeseen, exotic peoples invoked through descriptive practices new ways of creating knowledge. The same questions regarding the status of a religious consciousness among the natives who were present with Acosta and his colleagues were also at work in Colenso’s epoch. That is, these questions grew out of descriptive procedures that bound assessment of religious consciousness to the assessment of the body. It had been argued in Colenso’s time that the tribes of southern Africa lacked religion because they were developmentally deficient. As David Chidester notes in Savage Systems: Colonialism and Comparative Religion in Southern Africa, the comparativist strategy was calibrated to the desire for land accumulation: “Such total denial [of African religions] was a comparative strategy particularly suited for the conditions of a contested frontier. On the battlefield, the enemy had no religion. At the front lines of a contest of religions, Christian missionaries adopted this strategy of denial. However, denial was also a strategy that suited the interests of European settlers who during the 1820s and 1830s had increasingly established their presence, and their claims on land, in the Eastern Cape. In addition to missionary accounts, therefore, the frontier also produced settler theories of religion.”40
Such logic is not new. From the beginning of the age of discovery, Europeans perceived Africans as having the most bestial, debased forms of religious practice. Colenso’s time also saw the continuation of another aspect of the vision of deficient black religion: that lack of religion was bound to a lack of any inherent claim on the land. The designation of native religious practices as superstition rather than religion became an important discursive practice within this stratagem of denial. But the stratagem fell out of direct use in Natal at the time of the Shepstone system. With the land safely in the hands of the colonialists, “the Zulu lost political autonomy but gained the recognition by Europeans commentators that they had an indigenous religious system.”41 Such recognition resulted from the growing awareness that earlier assessments of the religious status of the Zulu were fundamentally incorrect as well as from the fact that such an acknowledgment had no effect on the seizing and transformation of the land. Thus, religion became a signifier within the loss of land control. Religion as a signifier for African identity grew in direct proportion to African alienation from their land, so that by the beginning of the twentieth century African life in Natal reflected a long history of geographic displacement and loss.42
These spatial dimensions are subtextual in Colenso’s commentaries and an important, albeit unrealized, aspect of his critique of the arrogance of the settlers and missionaries. Colenso will draw Zulu religious practice into a positive theological vision. This in and of itself is a powerful and revolutionary act given the prevailing missionary and theological sentiments of his day. Yet he will operate within the emerging ideological use of religion and African religious consciousness displaced from specific claims on space and place. Equally important, Colenso’s theological vision will form yet another strategy of land displacement. This is not to say that Colenso and his European colleagues failed to see Africans’ connection to the land. They simply dismissed that connection as nonessential except in the most basic form of use-value.
The other historic development that intersects with Colenso’s commentary work is the advent of what Jonathan Sheehan has termed the Enlightenment Bible.43 By this Sheehan refers to the transformation of the Bible in modernity through “a complex set of practices whose most sophisticated instruments were scholarship—philological, literary, and historical—and translation.”44 Sheehan’s insightful reading of this history accurately lodges its beginning in the Protestant Reformation (as well as the Renaissance and scientific revolution). Protestantism was from its beginning a movement shaped by the desire for a vernacular Bible in the hands of the people, the Reformation motto of sola scriptura capturing Protestants’ hopes to restore the Bible to its central place in understanding divine authority. As Sheehan notes, however, “If Protestant vernacular translation bridged the gap, once again, between heaven and earth, it also revealed the very human side of the biblical text that the doctrine of sola scriptura could never admit.”45 Protestants encountered the real dilemma of articulating the divine authority of Scripture without the benefit of a magisterium or a canonical process vivified by ecclesial oversight or the proliferation of vernacular translation checked by any overarching priestly authority. The reformers, Sheehan argues, established “a new vernacular biblical canon” as a way to stabilize the authoritative texts and lodge Christian tradition into a single text, the Bible itself, but this process also gave birth to the “tools of biblical decanonization.”46 Thus the “sixteenth-century vernacular Bible represented…both a successful break with tradition and a successful consolidation of a new tradition.”47
That new tradition as it was articulated especially in Germany and England would give rise on the one hand to an explosion of textual scholarship and on the other hand to “the vernacular translation project.”48 As Sheehan notes, both of these endeavors would move the Bible beyond theology. Biblical scholars and translators (often one and the same) perceived theology (here understood as doctrinally disciplined and traditioned reflection on Scripture) as nonessential commentary on the Bible. Sheehan is not suggesting that this development is antitheological in its inception; rather, it established a steady and fundamental distancing from theology.49 Sheehan’s account of the complex, rich history of Reformation and post-Reformation biblical development is sparse but effective. His central point is crucial: “If the Bible had always functioned in Christian Europe as an essentially unified text—indeed, its theological importance depended on this unity—the post-theological Enlightenment Bible would build its authority across a diverse set of domains and disciplines. Its authority had no essential center, but instead coalesced around four fundamental nuclei. Philology, pedagogy, poetry, and history: each offered its own answer to the question of biblical authority, answers that were given literary form in the guise of new translations.”50
The Enlightenment Bible comprised four emanations. The textual emanation, the Bible understood as a set of documents, allowed philological investigation to circumvent theological questions and controversies by cultivating textual criticism. Textual criticism inserted and consequently hid (theological) commentary inside the criticism itself, within the marginalia of textual display, apparatus, and translation. The pedagogical emanation presented the Bible as a distillation of moral truths. The pedagogical Bible instilled a timeless moral vision for all humanity. It was this vision of a morally compelling thrust at the hermeneutic center of the Bible (as well as of other crucial texts) that fueled nineteenth-century romanticism. The poetic emanation viewed the Bible through the lens of the historical and timeless reality of poetic expression that is present among every people. The poetic Bible exhibited the literary heritage of humanity and revealed the Bible’s complete translatability, which makes possible its utter rebirth into diverse national literatures.51 The historical emanation drove the Bible deeply within the historiographic imagination, and it issued as a historical archive. As archive, the Bible became “an infinitely variegated library of human customs and origins. And in this historical Bible, the ideal of a familiar text was abandoned for one perpetually in [historical] translation.”52 The historical Bible was a powerful emanation of Enlightenment mentality in its ability to police theology by enfolding theological reflection with the Bible itself into a broader search for common human imaginings and knowledge.
These Enlightenment emanations converge and coalesce around what Sheehan calls the cultural Bible. In Germany and England, the cultural Bible becomes the sacred text of a nation and a people. The cultural Bible is fruitful for the cultivation of society and the formation of civilization; the Bible becomes, especially in Germany, the Ur-text of civilization. Central to the creation of a cultural Bible was the dismissal of Judaism and Jewish people from any claim, not only to the Bible, but to any cultural heritage which might undermine the articulation of the Bible as Christian literature. The presence of Jewish people was hermeneutically sealed off from the vision of the Bible as a national treasure, as the cultural expression of the national spirit, and, in the case of Germany, the German soul.
There was great fear in England over the transformation of the Bible into the Enlightenment Bible. As Sheehan puts it, “English theologians and critics abandoned the thorny paths of historical criticism for the smooth highways of orthodoxy.”53 Yet the transformation was happening with the increasing intellectual concourse between Germany and England. The publication in 1860 of Essays and Reviews (one year before Colenso published his Romans commentary), a collection of seven essays, six of which were written by Anglican churchmen, acknowledged the demand for a new Enlightenment vision of the Bible.54 That demand also presented the Bible as foundational to civilization; that is to say, the Bible emerged in England, as in Germany, as culture-constituting. The idea of culture evolved as an abstraction and as an absolute.55 As Raymond Williams notes in his powerful account of the development of the idea in England in the nineteenth century, the idea of culture was turned against the dehumanizing effects of the Industrial Revolution.56 This is not the idea of culture as it will be articulated within the social sciences and modern anthropology and ethnography, that is, as a descriptor of particular ways of life, rooted in language, rituals, and everyday practices. Rather, this is a vision of culture which captures the humanizing, spiritual essence of a people; here “culture represented that ‘heritage of an accumulated ineluctable racial memory’ that undergirded the essential qualities of ‘western civilization.’”57
The Bible thus emerged in England in Colenso’s time as the epicenter of two points of crisis and conflict. On the one hand, the Bible stood between the forces of Enlightenment change and a recalcitrant and fearful orthodoxy. On the other hand, the Bible stood between unrelenting forces of societal change bound to the Industrial Revolution and capitalism and the romanticist voices pressing for cultivation of the cultural and national spirit of a people in order to assert or reestablish as an imaginative act its moral center. The Industrial Revolution was reducing human beings to elements in the mechanization and routinization of processes of production. The romantic impulse responded to these reductive processes by proclaiming the infinite worth of the human spirit and the need to attend to exaltation through education. A third point of crisis and conflict, though lacking the Bible as its epicenter, informs Colenso’s life and work: the conflict between low church and high church, between a Protestantism pushing further away from its Roman Catholic past and a Protestantism that was retrieving a catholic identity rooted in Christian antiquity and turned toward the formation of a national church. Colenso for his part thought near the epicenter of these points of crisis and conflict. He was an evangelical Pietist who became a centrist Anglican bishop influenced by intellectual figures deeply implicated in his country’s Enlightenment movement. He was in many ways an expression of the Enlightenment Bible; yet Colenso was unable to grasp the dangers of thinking near this epicenter.
Sheehan’s account does not map cleanly onto Colenso because Colenso carries forward a genuinely theological agenda, though that theology exists under strained conditions articulated through the Enlightenment Bible. One must, however, hold together the Enlightenment markings of Colenso’s scholarship and his normalization of the spatial disruptions of Africans in his thought. The transformation of the Bible and the transformation of space play against each other in his thought. Neither becomes an articulated theme, yet each enables the other. Together they display the modern abandonment of place-centered identity, an abandonment rooted in a particular theological vision. Colenso offers a highly refined vision of the whiteness hermeneutic, the interpretative practice of dislodging particular identities from particular places by means of a soteriological vision that discerns all people on the horizon of theological identities. This discernment in and of itself is not the problem. The problem is the racialization of that soteriological vision such that racial existence is enfolded inside the displacement operation and emerges as a parasite on theological identity. But here that hermeneutic is in service, he believes, to the greater good of the African and the integrity of the mission church.
Colenso’s commentary opens quite tellingly with heartfelt dedicatory thanks to Shepstone. Colenso conversed with Shepstone about the very ideas he works out in the commentary. In fact, Colenso hoped a commentary on Romans written from the perspective of “some questions, which daily arise in Missionary labours among the heathen” would serve as the theological foundation for the great work Shepstone planned in Zululand.58 The Zululand project, as noted, was Shepstone’s plan to move tens of thousands of so-called surplus Africans from Natal to another place, where he would reside as their chief. Colenso’s commentary on Romans would serve as a kind of theological charter for the governmental operations in this new site. Even as he wrote his commentary, he was still convinced of the symmetry between his work and Shepstone’s efforts at “advancing the civilisation of [native] tribes” of the colony.59 He would match his theological reflections to Shepstone’s God-given ability “for influencing the native mind.”60 He envisioned that they would together create a humane, Christianized domesticity for the Africans. In this way, Colenso joins theological work to the advancement of civilization. He was, however, unaware that the theological vision outlined in his commentary would be at great odds with both that civilizing vision and the Shepstone system.
Colenso’s Romans commentary is in some ways a conventional nineteenth-century work. He situates the text in its historical setting, and, as a New Testament scholar would, he posits the identity of the audience for the epistle and then displays his evidence for his contention. Colenso understood the letter to be written to Jewish believers. But unlike conventional New Testament scholars, Colenso has a more pivotal concern in mind than establishing Paul’s audience when he posits Jewish believers as the central addressees in Romans. The Jews in the text stand in for arrogant English Christian settlers in the new world of Africa. The Zulu, by contrast, do not simply stand in for the Gentile/heathen; they are in fact the Gentile/heathen. In schematic form his analogy would look like this:
Colenso is not engaged in straightforward anti-Semitism in his commentary, although he does have a very denigrating vision of Jewish identity.61 What he puts forward is much more complex than a simple derogatory deployment of biblical Jewish identity. Colenso is reading salvation history inside settler-Zulu relations and attempting to render the particularities of identity inconsequential to Christian existence. In order to do this, Colenso must racialize those identities to then transcend them. Key to this interpretive move is the slow construction of the divine character based on his reading of Romans in such a way as to make Jewish particularity of no importance to God. Indeed, God will quickly appear in Colenso’s commentary as being fundamentally opposed to Jewish priority and election. God is ultimately opposed to that priority because God takes no stock in particular (racial) Jewish identity. In this regard, Colenso suggests Nicodemus as a Jewish archetype:
Nicodemus also had no doubt as to his own right, not merely as a true believer in God, but as a true born Jew, a child of Abraham, to have a share in it. What he wanted to know was…how he might best attain a worthy place in that kingdom…. Our Lord throws him back at once in His reply to the only true ground of hope. It is as if He had said,…“You are come to me very confident of your concern in this Kingdom. You are sure, you think, of a place in it. But why are you sure? What ground have you for thinking that you have any place at all in it? Do you imagine that, because you are born of Abraham, your claim will be allowed? But I tell you this will avail you for nothing. Your mere natural descent is no ground at all for any such expectation…. This, then, was an instance of a devout Jew, fully prepossessed with the infatuation of his people, and requiring to have this false ground of hope struck away from under his feet at the very outset, if he would heartily embrace the faith of Jesus.62
Colenso imagines the conversation between Nicodemus and Jesus as a deconstructive one. Jesus removes from Nicodemus any presumption of divine privilege, any connection of divine life with particular human flesh. This statement as an implicit critique of English settler mentality would be a powerful word against that form of Christian hegemony. But it already exposes the problematic equation of white (English) Christian with Jew. That equation demands a deep commitment to a moment of transition, a supersessionism that enables the analogy itself. The transition for Colenso allows one to move from an ethnocentrism to a theocentrism, from imperfect Christian doctrine yet trapped in “Jewish sentiments” to the true spirit of the gospel. That spirit is a universal spirit. Colenso’s first major hermeneutic move is to place all peoples under the fundamental problem, ethnocentrism. The Jews of Paul’s day, like the Romans and Greeks before them, like the settlers and the Zulu, all read the world as being composed of one people with the rest of the world as “foreigners, men of the nations” (for example, Jews and Gentiles, Greeks and barbarians).63
It is precisely this assumed racial supremacy of a people that is “a worm lying at the root of all [the] Christian profession” of so many pious believers in Rome.64 For Colenso, Israel reveals this original mistake. One finds three primary errors in Jewish believers in Rome: birth, messianic expectation, and law. He writes,
1. The Jew said, “I am a favoured creature—a child of Abraham, and therefore a child of God, and an heir of His kingdom, whatever my life may be. What have I to do with a message of salvation? Perhaps, for the heathen it may be needed. But the Kingdom of God is mine, by virtue of the promise made to my great forefather. I have a right to enter it. I claim it as mine.” This error St. Paul must correct by showing that he had no such right, that he, the Jew, needed the free gift of Righteousness, as well as all others of the human race—that he too was “concluded under sin” like others, and had no claim whatever, because of God’s promises to Abraham….65
2. But the Jew might say, “Suppose that I admit this, yet, at all events, the Messiah is to come specially for us. He is to be the carrying out and realization of those promises to our forefathers, which made us the favoured people above others. You do not surely mean to say that we, Jews, the children of Abraham, the chosen family of God, are to be put on an equality with the common Gentile in this respect?” “Yes!” St. Paul would say, “you are to be put on a perfect equality with the meanest Gentile. You will stand no better than they in this respect—not a whit more safe from God’s wrath—not a whit more sure of entering the Kingdom….
3. Still, however, the Jew might persevere and say: “But surely our Law is not to be done way with. At all events, the Gentiles, if they are to partake of the Gospel, and even to be admitted to share on equal terms with us, must conform to our religion, and practise those observances, which have come down to us through fifteen hundred years on the authority of Moses, with the Divine Seal upon them….” “No!” says the Apostle again, “Faith, simple faith, a true, living, childlike faith and trust, that worketh by love, this is all that God seeks of all—no circumcision—no Jewish practices or peculiarities…. These are all now done away in Christ Jesus.
These theological points not only reflect nineteenth-century Protestant theology but also in essence reflect some of the strongest interpretive tendencies in Christian accounts of Israel’s identity in relation to Christian identity. Colenso’s Paul negates any soteriological character to Jewish identity. This also means that messianic expectations geared to the concrete salvation of their people are also meaningless. Israel loses any historic trajectory of liberation, any political hope born in the past that should shape the present. In addition, the negation of the law means that their salvific future requires them to abandon the very practices that have defined them. Colenso thus offered up through his reading of the early chapters of Romans a Jewish people that has nothing of saving importance to offer the world of the Gentiles. They are quite literally the foil to faith, the carrier pigeon of the gospel. Moreover, any attempt to offer anything of particular communal or “racial” substance to the Gentiles that would be in any way binding on the Gentiles would be an exercise in sinful futility. This, according to Colenso, is the heart of Paul’s critique of his Jewish family.
The analogy with the settlers breaks down rather quickly at this point. Unlike Colenso’s Roman Jews, English settlers did indeed believe they had something of saving importance to offer the heathen, even if Colenso’s exegetical reflections denied that belief. Indeed Colenso’s own vision of civilization grants to Britannia what he refuses Israel, namely, the refashioning of a people’s way of life for theological reasons.
The entire commentary builds from this logic and this massive blind spot, but the heart of Colenso’s Romans commentary, the central image he powerfully develops, is that of God the loving and merciful father. In his use of this brilliant image lie both the riches and the poverty of Colenso’s theological vision. If Israel serves any purpose, it is to expose to humankind the God who loves them. Colenso’s twist on the “righteousness of God” exemplifies how a specific history within which righteousness becomes intelligible disappears and becomes a universal sense of divine righteousness: “This ‘righteousness of God,’—this righteousness which comes from God—which is the free gift of God—which…God has given to the whole human race, before and after the coming of Christ,—is being ‘revealed,’ he says, that is, unveiled, in the Gospel. It is there already, in the mind of our Faithful Creator, in the heart of our Loving Father. The whole human race was redeemed from the curse of the Fall, in the counsels of Almighty Wisdom, from all eternity—the Lamb was slain ‘from before the foundations of the world.’…[T]he whole family of man, in the ages gone by…were yet ‘justified,’ made just or righteous, dealt with as children, before any clear revelation was made of the way in which that righteousness was given to them.”66 Colenso here draws on an extremely powerful theological position that will be performed in countless ways by a variety of theologians in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It discerns the saving work of God as a completed act that must govern the ways one thinks about the material enactments of that accomplished work. Colenso came to this radical position from seeing its opposite in the missionary field. Colenso was painfully familiar with the theological position propounded by many missionaries that placed those who had died without Christian faith under damnation in hell and eternally punished. Colenso, in his book describing his first visit to the Natal colony, Ten Weeks in Natal, tells the story of sitting by the Tongaat River having lunch and reading in the Missionary Intelligencer something that greatly disturbed him. He had a section from the paper that an American missionary had used to wrap Colenso’s lunch. He read stories in which natives were told that everyone who dies without the gospel is burning in hell from the moment of death: “I quote these passages, not for a moment wishing it to be supposed, that the good American Missionaries of Natal hold and preach, as a body, these fearful doctrines—God forbid!—but to enter my own solemn protest against them, as utterly contrary to the whole spirit of the Gospel,—as obscuring the Grace of God, and perverting His message of Love and ‘Goodwill to man,’ and operating, with most injurious and deadening effect, both on those who teach, and on those who are taught.”67
A few years after the publication of his Romans commentary, in a speech before the Anthropological Society of London, Bishop Colenso recalled with revulsion a prayer he had seen published by a missionary institution associated with his church. The prayer included the words, “O Eternal God, Creator of all things, mercifully remember that the souls of unbelievers are the work of Thy hands, and that they are created in Thy resemblance. Behold, O Lord, how hell is filled with them, to the dishonor of Thy Holy Name.”68 Colenso rightly discerned a presumption lodged deeply in this position: the ideas of sin, damnation, and punishment are collapsed into divine enactment.
According to this skewed logic, to believe in these tenets is to also believe that they are now temporally in effect. Moreover, the strength of that belief is bound to the surety of one’s ability to discern its realities in humanity, especially in and among the Africans. While the roots of this flawed theological vision were ancient by Colenso’s day, they carry an intensely imperialist character. Essentially, it inserts humanity, and in this case Europeans, in a God-position vis-à-vis decisions of eternal significance. It draws colonialist hubris deeply inside a constellation of theological ideas. It is that hubris that triggers what would become in the late nineteenth century and twentieth a formulaic way of articulating the relation between sin, damnation, and eternal punishment. What is concealed in that formulaic articulation is the centered white subject who discerns moral deficiency, salvific absence, and the eternal state after death. Colonialism is not the cause of this theological problem but, bound to Enlightenment reconfigurations of theological knowledge, surely is its refinement.
Colenso presses against this constricted vision of salvation that says, once I see that you believe in Jesus you are saved, but if I discern disbelief or the absence of belief in you, then upon your death you will be eternally punished in hell. However, he cannot escape its imperialist presumptions. Colenso will offer up its mirror image, an image that will carry an inverted constriction:
Already, side by side with this revelation of God’s wrath for willful sin in the heart of man, there is a revelation of His Mercy—a secret sense that there is forgiveness with our Father in Heaven, in some way or other, possible or actual. The Jews, before the coming of Christ, had their system of sacrifices given them, to remind and assure them of this. The heathen had their various modes of quieting their hearts, with what served to them as a pledge of Divine forgiveness. But all men, everywhere, have had all along, and still have, a belief in such Divine Forgiveness, as well as in such Divine Wrath upon willful sin; they have a feeling that it must exist, it must somehow be provided for them. Nay, coupled with the very sense of sin, there is a dim sense of a righteousness which they already possess.69
Colenso folds all humanity into righteousness, not damnation. Central to this universal affirmation is the leveling of all peoples through their particular religious experiences. Divine righteousness enables religious ethnography, an ability to discern a theological sameness in all people. As Jonathan Draper notes, for Colenso, “God has simply provided a righteousness to the whole human race in Christ, whether they knew it and accepted it by an act of faith on their part or not…. All of us, Christians, Jews, heathen, were dealt with by Creator God as righteous creatures, not only now, but ‘from all eternity’. This was the reason for the universality of human religious experience, which impels people to live moral lives.”70 One can discern the German Idealist tradition in this method of articulating the relation of revelation to salvation. This way of grasping the religious subject enables a benign, even generous posture toward different peoples. Colenso puts the Enlightenment romanticist ideas to powerful use.
Colenso’s way of describing the religious subject, especially the Zulu, is elegant. All people operate in the moral and spiritual light they have been given. Punishment is calibrated by their moral failure or integrity in operating in their inherent sense of sin or righteousness. Christian faith is the revelation of this very fact—that is, of inherent righteousness—and the Zulus are a perfect example. As he says, “We know that they exhibit certain virtues, and are capable of brave and kind and just and generous actions. But we know also that they practise habitually, without any restraint, a certain gross form of vice, that they kill for trivial causes, sometimes, apparently, for none at all.”71 Colenso goes on to say that sin is the disregard for the light they do have. In this way Colenso, like many nineteenth-century theological figures, naturalizes Christianity, domesticating it by making Christianity the architecture of religious experience. What is also crucial is the way he does this in the colonialist mission theater.
Colenso rewrites salvation history as the history of religious consciousness. In this way he is able to name Christian arrogance and misbehavior as a great impediment to the flourishing of that religious consciousness and its possible, but not necessary, movement toward Christianity. In a passage astonishing for its level of insight, given the virulent forms of anti-Semitism of his era, Colenso recognizes that Jewish resistance to Christian faith in his day was due not to a Jewish “reprobate mind” but to Christian behavior: “It is far more likely that the acts of abominable cruelty, injustice, and contemptuous bigotry, with which, in Christian lands and by Christian people—too often, alas! by Christian ministers—they have been so frequently, and are even now, treated, have gone far to fix them in holy and righteous horror of a religion, which taught that such outrages were right. All, surely, that an humble-minded Christian can allow himself to say of the present state of the Jews generally, is that they are not actually incurring great moral guilt—(he cannot judge of that,)—but suffering great moral and spiritual loss from the acts of their forefathers.”72 Colenso makes religious consciousness the given reality within which God is already working out a drama of salvation and conversion. Romans, Jews, and other Gentiles each follow their inherent moral light and will be judged accordingly. So, too, for Zulu and settler alike God has graciously forgiven them and wants them to hear “by means of any one of Earth’s ten thousand voices” the Father’s declaration of righteousness.73 In Colenso’s hands, the message of the gospel becomes one of acceptance and awareness: acceptance of the gracious gift of God’s righteousness and awareness of God’s fatherly love, ultimately revealed in Jesus. Colenso’s theology draws a straight line from biblical Jews and Gentiles/heathen to Christian settlers and Zulu/heathen. What holds them all together in his vision is the fatherly love of the Creator God who has shed light “into their very hearts.”74 Their moral duty—white settler, Zulu, Gentile, Jew—is to move toward the inward light that is also reflected in the Son: “The Apostle does not say that God is reconciled to us by the Death of His Son, but that we are reconciled to God. The difference in the meaning of these two expressions is infinite. It is our unwillingness, fear, distrust, that is taken away by the revelation of God’s Love to us in His Son. There is nothing now to prevent our going, with the prodigal of old, and throwing ourselves at His Feet, and saying, ‘Father, I have sinned; but Thou art Love.’”75
The bishop drew on the biblical story to fill in his description of God the Father and thereby render at times an exquisite picture of divine love. But at the same time, Colenso’s vision evacuated Christian identity of any real substance. All theological identity is essentially the same, Jewish, Christian, or Zulu—an internalized struggle of the religious consciousness to hear the word of love and acceptance from God the Creator-Father and his son, Jesus, and to follow the dictates of the moral universal inherent in all people. What looks like a radical antiracist, antiethnocentric vision of Christian faith is in fact profoundly imperialist. Colenso’s universalism undermines all forms of identity except that of the colonialist.
This reading of Colenso’s theological position in his Romans commentary may seem counterintuitive. It was Colenso who, among others, reversed the idea that the Zulu had no religion and no knowledge of God. He pressed the position that among the Zulus God was known and had been called uNkulunkulu, the Great-Great One, or umVelinqangi, the Supreme Creator. Indeed, Colenso’s deep commitment to recognizing Zulu religious consciousness helped fuel Zulu cultural nationalism. Moreover, Colenso, like Shepstone, believed in building Christian civilization on top of existing native logics, such practices as cattle or property exchange as part of arranged marriages and polygamous family life. Yet in Colenso’s hands, the (religious) cultural particular says nothing productive. In fact, he already knows what is the telos of all religious consciousness. Jeff Guy summarizes Colenso’s geographic teleology:
Colenso’s role as a missionary bishop in Natal was to promote commodity production and capital accumulation through the propagation of the standards and expectations of the Christian way of life—the Christian way of life as perceived by the Victorian middle class, of course. The purpose of his mission was to produce the scrubbed, well-dressed, properly trained African family, living in a square house, separated from other households, faithful to the precepts of individualism, hard work and the Bible, the husband selling his labour, spending his income wisely, and thereby advancing the economic progress of the colony and his own social status, his wife in the home, his daughters in service, and his sons in training and preparing to marry monogamously, to reinforce and repeat the process.76
Colenso’s flight to the universal carried forward colonialism’s reconfiguration of the earth. It was precisely this deep connection that Colenso could not see. As Guy correctly captures, Bishop Colenso wanted the Christian way of life described above without its consequences: “that men and women be driven off the land and into wage labour, the dispossession of families and the dismantling of the polygamous household, together with the laws, customs and beliefs associated with it.”77 The moral resonance of Colenso’s theological vision was incompatible not only with the Shepstone system of exploitation, but also with the telos of his mission, the complete transformation of Zulu life into mid-Victorian domesticity. However, much more is at play here than a missionary who brought his cultural baggage along with the gospel he preached. Such common culture and gospel analyses are tragically superficial and miss the wider problematic.
First, Colenso’s universalism was the other side of his colonialism. His ability to conceptualize a God who is not only beyond but in some sense opposed to the strictures of Jewish identity draws life from colonialist abilities to universalize the earth, that is, to free it from the strictures of particular ways of life. Of course, missionary life is by its proper nature boundary crossing, but his universalist vision reduces the power and presence of the very things it claims to grasp, the particularities of African peoples. He resolves those particularities into signposts for potential development. Crucially his universalism made Christianity the landscape of religious consciousness while all identities are drawn toward sublime futility. For instance, while Colenso beautifully captures the humanity of Jesus as the ground for redemption, that humanity is merely symbolic: “And at last He sent His own dear Son, to make more plain than ever the beauty of Holiness, and the excellence of the Law, with the full message also of His Fatherly Love to all the world, that as sin had reigned and revelled, as it were, through the death which it had brought on all the race, so now might grace reign through the righteousness, which it would give to all the race, unto Life Eternal, through Jesus Christ our Lord.”78 True to his Enlightenment sensibilities, Colenso would quickly affirm the historical realities of Jesus, just as he affirmed the historical limitations of all biblical figures. Jesus as a speaking Jew does not matter soteriologically. Although Colenso’s universalism did not deny cultural particularity, it denied that it mattered theologically. Particular identities had no prescriptive authority, only descriptive utility.
Taken together, his universalizing of the earth and his denial of cultural particularities’ prescriptive authority, all inside the canopy of a loving Father Creator-God, meant that Christian theology in the bishop’s hands could offer no compelling vision of a genuinely new way of life for anybody. As noted earlier, Colenso lived in the midst of a depleted orthodoxy. In nineteenth-century England, theological orthodoxy was desperately looking to establish its identity in the face of the cataclysmic shifts in society, namely, the creation of industrial capitalism, which was rabidly bringing the New World into global capital processes. That orthodoxy was also unsure of its identity vis-à-vis Catholicism and a burgeoning nationalism and so was engaged in an obsessive theological retrieval of the theological and liturgical sensibilities of the early church. That orthodoxy was also under pressure to articulate itself in the face of a growing number of intellectually agile voices expansive enough to incorporate orthodox ideas within wider streams of thought that were in effect corrosive to orthodoxy itself. The orthodoxy of his day left Colenso with few options in envisioning the mission situation.
Colenso is in fact a theologian-in-colonialism, and he is also a theologian with a spent orthodox imagination. His account of the kind of missionary he needed in Natal to support his mission operation is exemplary: “Men with large hearts, cultivated minds, and generous views, fit to be entrusted with such work. Of course, if the object aimed at is chiefly to multiply the professors of Church doctrine,—if men are wanted merely to cram the native mind with creeds and catechisms, and raise a number of human parrots, repeating dogmatic phrases and formularies,—it might not be so difficult to find suitable instruments; more especially as the income and position of a missionary are far superior to what such teachers would probably be likely ever to attain at home.”79 Given the overturning, securing, and accumulating of space within imperialist economies, orthodoxy and piety in the mission situation were performing a single theological option. But in order to see this, one must keep in view the long dilemma of nineteenth-century orthodoxy. That dilemma had its roots in the transformation of the world wrought by colonialism itself, the expansion of the world beyond the ability of theology to grasp that world and the destruction of a vision of creation with the advent of discovery. The consequences of Colenso’s theological vision follow the route taken by Acosta. Colenso offers a theology that lacks indigenous cultural prescription.80 No vision of cultural engagement or joining is forthcoming, and certainly no possible vision of missional cultural submission.81
The act of translating is the unrelenting submission to another people’s voices for the sake of speaking with them. Yet it is precisely this submission that is denied in the overarching colonialist process of translation. There was, however, a form of submission. The submission that was initially concealed from Colenso’s theological reflections was in fact submission to white settlers’ ways of life and spatial reconfigurations. It is exactly this form of forced Christian submission that would beget a tortured Christian cultural nationalism among nonwhite peoples and would also reduce theology to a level of uselessness that theologians have yet to comprehend.
Colenso’s universalist thought brought him into deep conflict with his church. In 1863, his nemesis Bishop Robert Gray, lord bishop of Cape Town and metropolitan, brought charges of heresy against Bishop Colenso for “false, strange and erroneous doctrine and teaching.”82 As a sign of protest against Bishop Gray’s right to remove him on account of his scholarly positions, Colenso never attended the trial, which began on November 16, 1863. The details of the trial are beyond my concern here; however, the charges brought against Colenso are important because they capture the level of engagement his church had with his thought:
1. That he denied that our Lord died in man’s stead, or to bear the punishment or penalty for our sins, and that God is reconciled to us by the death of his Son.
2. That he taught that justification is a consciousness of being counted righteous, and that all men, even without such a consciousness, are treated by God as righteous, and that all men are already dead unto sin and risen again unto righteousness.
3. That he taught that all men are born into righteousness when born into the world; that all men are at all times partaking of the body and blood of Christ; denying that the holy sacraments are generally necessary to salvation, and that they convey any special grace, and that faith is the means whereby the body and blood of Christ are received.
4. That he denied the endlessness of future punishments.
5. That he maintained that the Bible contained but was not the word of God.
6. That he treated the Scriptures as a merely human book, only inspired as any other book might be inspired.
7. That he denied the authenticity, genuineness and truth of certain books of the Bible.
8. That, by imputing errors in knowledge to our Lord, he denied He is God and Man in one person.
9. That he brought parts of the Book of Common Prayer into disrepute (e.g. the Athanasian Creed and the vow at the ordination of deacons which spoke of “unfeigned belief” in the Scriptures).83
Absent from every official engagement and assessment of Colenso’s thought by his initial accusers was any consideration of why he came to his theological positions. In his Romans commentary he describes the situation of having to answer complex theological questions for which he had not worked out his own thinking, questions that facilitated the refashioning of his theology: “Such questions as these have been brought again and again before my mind in the intimate converse which I have had, as a Missionary, with Christian converts and Heathens. To teach the truths of our holy religion to intelligent adult natives, who have the simplicity of children, but withal the earnestness and thoughtfulness of men,—to whom these things are new and startling, whose minds are not prepared by long familiarity to acquiesce in, if not receive them,—is a sifting process for the opinions of any teacher, who feels the deep moral obligation of answering truly, and faithfully, and unreservedly, his fellow-man, looking up to him for light and guidance, and asking, ‘Are you sure of this?’ ‘Do you know this to be true?’ ‘Do you really believe that?’”84
Colenso was in fact an overwhelmed theological teacher caught in the middle of the intensely challenging situation of a translator.85 Not only was he trying to translate Christian Scripture into another language and thereby bring that native world into a Christian discursive universe, but he was also trying to respond to the questions raised by indigenes. Those questions focused light on precisely the fit of that Christian discursive world with native logics. In so doing, those questions pressed Colenso into grasping both the inner logics of Christian theology and inner native logics. This was beyond his ability.
The questioning itself, by revealing the exhaustion of his orthodoxy, exposed the poverty of his theology. Colenso was not an unimaginative thinker, as some have suggested, not at heart still just a mathematician working out of his depth.86 His scholarship shows great familiarity with the theological currents, ideas, and challenges of his day, and his literary output shows his ability to understand the theological tradition that had been given him, albeit a tradition that in his mind was in need of strong renovation. Rather, Colenso, like many of his contemporaries, was unable to perceive what was being asked of him as a theological teacher in the new world of Africa. Grasping the inner logics of both worlds required a depth of intimacy with both that Colenso lacked. His theology dismissed the Jewish realities of Christian existence, and his colonialist sensibilities joined with the reformation of African geography made his Shepstone-influenced account of the African mind little more than a white construction. That is to say, the very patterns of indigenous life Colenso was observing were being drastically altered not only as he watched but because he and other settlers were watching. They altered African worlds even as they observed them. They transformed those worlds as they sought to understand and control them.
Colenso’s theology in effect retreated from intimacy and advanced toward a kind of didactic use of the native.87 The (non-Western) world comes to have a central educative function for the West. We saw in Acosta how the Indian came to signify an educational opportunity for the Spaniards to learn about themselves through the native. By the nineteenth century, as John Willinsky observes, travel and living abroad not only carried this educative weight but became the path to greater self-knowledge.88 Colenso turned native questions into occasions for theological self-absorption. It was as though he heard their questions, turned away from them, turned toward England, and began to theologize.
Fundamentally misdirected, Colenso turns away from the African in order to gather what for him is a more compelling concern, theology’s renovation. In fact, his accompanying habit is equally decisive—he draws the African into his own theological struggle, positioning the African’s voice as a tool in that struggle. Colenso did not invent this colonialist habit of mind, but in him one sees a particular kind of refinement. His work, especially his accounts of how “native questioning” drove him toward theological reassessment, represents a trajectory that continues today. That is, Colenso exhibits a pattern of turning away from indigenous theological questions, shunning the necessary intimacy needed for serious grappling with those questions, and drawing indigenous voices into forms of utility not only in Western theological struggles over orthodoxy or heterodoxy, both also in the project of nation building.
In March of 1865, at the height of the controversy that surrounded him, he was asked to give a lecture at the Anthropological Society of London, a response to W. Winwood Reade’s racist lecture “Efforts of Missionaries among the Savages,” in which Reade contended that missionary efforts among Africans were futile.
According to Reade, Africans had no aptitude for Christianity and lacked any sustainable Christian moral conscience.89 Colenso’s response to Reade was a limpidly contextual one.
Colenso suggested that Reade’s visit to West Africa was probably too brief for him to capture a full picture of the situation. Furthermore, Colenso reminded his listeners that West Africa had been deeply shaped by the slave trade. To him this meant that if in fact Reade’s description of African behavior was accurate, it was due in large measure to the bad example of white settlers. With this less than thunderous response to Reade’s derogatory comments as the preface to his thoughts, Colenso goes on to recount the arguments he made in his Romans commentary regarding hell, punishment, missionary preaching, theology, and so on. His goal was to situate missionary work on surer footing. Colenso offered a candid assessment of the failures and efforts of missionary enterprises but pressed the continued importance of the endeavor, using his own work at Bishopstowe as the example. Toward the end of the lecture Colenso offered proof of his positive missional effect by quoting from a letter written by William Ngidi, his native informant. As the bishop stood before the learned gentlemen of the society, he translated the letter from Zulu. The letter affirmed the ministry of Bishop Colenso and confirmed some of his theological positions:
But sir, there is a thing which I was wishing to tell you clearly, to wit, that in fact as to the doing of the people, I don’t wish to worry myself to no purpose, with the plentiful talk which comes from the people, white and black, of ours. “Sobantu has gone astray; he is condemned; he has no truth.” About these matters, sir, they make my heart sink…. But in all that I am looking for your return, because truly I put all my trust in all your teaching of me. It was that which gave me strength to know thoroughly our Father Unkulunkulu, who is over all. Sir, I supplicate blessing for you from our Father above; may He confirm you in that truth in which you confirm (others). And I too myself still hold fast that truth which I received from you, to wit, we are Unkulunkulu’s,—He knows us. All that I received from you, that is what I stand by—I mean to know Him,—I mean to trust in Him,—everything of that kind.90
Colenso used these comments to suggest to Reade that here was some good evidence of positive results from missionary efforts.91 After years of learning Zulu, translating the Christian world into Nguni languages, and building his mission station, Colenso is able to offer up an African speaking his mind. What is central is that this is an act of translation. That is, Colenso conjures the translated African, symbolizing the building of a Christian people. It is precisely this question of whether Colenso’s work is in fact aiding in the building of a Christian people that fuels the controversy surrounding his commentary on the Pentateuch and draws the figure of William Ngidi deeply inside English ecclesial/nationalist concerns.
The lecture was not the only time Ngidi appears in England in discursive presence. He is the African who troubles Colenso’s Pentateuch commentary. He is, in Colenso’s rendering, the “native mind,” reflecting childlike simplicity but with thoughtfulness and intelligence. It was Ngidi who asked the bishop many of the haunting questions regarding the flood, creation, and so forth. It was not only concern over the historical facticity of biblical narratives that drew Ngidi’s unyielding questions, but the moral implications of those narratives. Ngidi’s reaction to Colenso’s quotation of Exod 21:20–21 captures this challenge for the bishop:
If a man smite his servant, or his maid, with a rod, and he die under his hand, he shall be surely punished. Notwithstanding, if he continue a day or two, he shall not be punished, for he is his money. (Exod 21: 20–21)
I shall never forget the revulsion of feeling, with which a very intelligent Christian native, with whose help I was translating these words into the Zulu tongue, first heard them as words said to be uttered by the same great and gracious Being, whom I was teaching him to trust in and adore. His whole soul revolted against the notion, that the Great and Blessed God, the Merciful Father of all mankind, would speak of a servant or maid as mere “money,” and allow a horrible crime to go unpunished, because the victim of the brutal usage had survived a few hours. My own heart and conscience at the time fully sympathised with his.92
Ngidi takes the role of the intellectual provocateur in Colenso’s theological project. It is noteworthy that the African becomes an intellectual dialogue partner, someone whose thoughts, even if expressed only as questions, make real his humanity. Unfortunately, it was William Ngidi who received unflattering implicit acknowledgment in Matthew Arnold’s devastating critique of Bishop Colenso’s Pentateuch commentary.93 Jeff Guy is right to discern in Arnold’s critique of Colenso a manipulation of the assumptions of white supremacy that would revolt against the idea that “an Englishman and a bishop could find, in a Zulu’s questions, an intelligent critique of contemporary religious belief.”94 Arnold’s biting sarcasm echoes the famous derogatory poem published in Natal regarding the bishop and William Ngidi:
A Bishop there was of Natal,
Who had a Zulu for a Pal,
Said the native “Look here,
“Ain’t the Pentateuch queer?”
Which converted my Lord of Natal.95
In his essay “The Bishop and the Philosopher” Arnold used the occasion of reviewing Colenso’s Pentateuch commentary to establish literary criticism as the appropriate judge of the twofold utility of theological works: they must either “edify the uninstructed” (that is, the masses) or “inform the instructed” (that is, the educated elite).96 The bishop’s work, according to Arnold, fails at both tasks. Arnold’s crucial intervention in the Colenso controversy not only highlights theology’s utility in nation building, but also reveals the problematic nature of invoking African presence as somehow helpful in this task.
Ironically, Bishop Colenso would agree with Arnold’s vision of Christian theology’s role in enlightened England, namely, to promote the cultivation of a cultured self. And Arnold for his part shared Colenso’s critical sensibilities regarding the Bible and theology. Arnold’s problem with Colenso’s work is that he believed it would have the reverse effect, that it would upset the dangerous masses that were already primed for revolution and anarchy. For Arnold, Colenso’s work falls short of a proper demythologization of the Scriptures, one that would translate Scripture and doctrine into poetic form for the formation of a nationalistic, politically and socially conservative culture. As Terry Eagleton notes, Arnold believed “the scriptures must be stripped to a suggestive poetic structure for shoring up a conservative social morality.”97 According to Eagleton, Colenso was, in Arnold’s view, “unpoetical and so politically dangerous.”
Arnold’s important essay points to the forest of intellectual issues Colenso wandered into with his scholarship. It also points to the role his African interlocutors would be forced to play in relation to these issues. If Colenso’s body was in Natal during his early years, his mind was in England. He would bring into his mind’s world people such as William Ngidi, whose words would be called on to do battle on Colenso’s theological and ideological side. However, the battle itself would reduce African presence to a single task, to show the markings of civilization taking hold. That task would also reduce the theological voice of the African and theology itself in tragic ways.
Colenso, however well intentioned and considerate of the African, rendered that African through his translation before the Anthropological Society of London a theological novice, one whose thinking will only bring him to the same conclusions reached by white theologians. Surely, he could not have rendered him otherwise. Africans were, for the missionaries and the emerging anthropologists, at the beginning—of civilization, of knowledge, of maturity. Yet the marriage of Darwinian evolutionary thought and white supremacy meant that the African would remain, through representation, theologically infantile. Colenso believed that the African would, like the Englishman, evolve to a civilized state, but the point here is one of representation, of spectacle.98 Colenso’s translation constricts the use-value of the black voice. The African’s theological commodification is complete. That native voice now speaks only to substantiate—an argument, a criticism, a concept, a plan of action, a belief of—white presence. What is lost in translation is the possibility of a theological conversation partner who would significantly affect the outcomes of modes of life. The translated Zulu arrives in England, by means of his letter and in the midst of a lecture and in the midst of a theo-political struggle, a solitary witness to Colenso’s truth.
A common though shortsighted way of interpreting the Colenso-Ngidi collaboration has been as misguided questions that begat misguided answers.99 It betrays the complexity this collaboration signifies to suggest that African Christianity has not been occupied with Ngidi’s kinds of questions or Colenso’s types of answers. There is indeed a distorted joining of worlds taking place in the translators’ relationship. However, that joining cannot be captured through the now-standard dualistic perspective on such collaborations. On the one side is the phenomenon of westernized Christian Africans who exhibit a westernized (false) consciousness, and on the other side are Christianized Africans who carry out a different set of questions and concerns reflecting an African consciousness.
Translation not only leads to textual representation; equally important, it is an invitation to a process of concurrency, not simply linguistic, social, or cultural, but also theological. This process of concurrency describes the possibilities of cultural inner logics being joined together, to the possibility of freedom in the transgression of boundaries. However, the Colenso-Ngidi collaboration displayed a lack of the initial bedrock of concurrency, the Gentile joined to Israel through the body of Jesus. The tragic effect of its absence is a Christian theology that is unable to enter fruitfully into the cultural inner logics of peoples. Thus, in Colenso, Christian theology is not only provincial, locked inside a false universal, but also lacks patterns of communion.
The result was to constitute Christian theology as a matter of nationalistic utility, as a resource for the reiteration of cultural identities. Whether one understands Christian theology as historically situated discursive practices or as ways of life shaped within disparate liturgical, social, and cultural worldviews or simply as doctrines carried forward through the articulation of the practical rationalities of traditions, the result is the same: theology as the catalyst for cultural recapitulation. Theology invites peoples to look culturally inward in search of a theological reiteration of the collective self.100
Colenso’s work illuminates the question of the essential purpose of Christian translation: What is the translation of a Christian world supposed to create? Centrally, translation should beget Christian agency. Even this example of colonial self-absorption does not negate the important developments of African agency and African Christian agency particularly. However, what is at stake here is precisely the character and shape of agency, given the work of translation that is deeply bound up inside colonialist operations. In the previous chapter we saw Christian theology bound up in an evaluative insularity, a pedagogical imperialism. Now I add to that portrait another layer: Christian theology producing through translation isolating and reductive forms of Christian agency. This latter claim puts in a different light the possible positive historical benefits of Christian translation. The positive historical benefits of Christian translation must be seen inside this wider tragedy.
Two of the most powerful accounts of the positive historical benefit of Christian translation come from two eminent historians of Christian missions, Lamin Sanneh and Andrew Walls. A brief consideration of the central theme in each of their visions of translation will show the implications of the colonialist trajectory undertaken by Bishop Colenso. Sanneh, in several groundbreaking texts, has attempted to articulate the unintended consequences of vernacular translation. Indeed, he interprets Christianity itself as a vernacular translation movement.101 He reads colonial history through the unintended consequence of the formation of black agency and cultural being. He in no way denies the mechanisms of colonial control or the history of horror produced by the age of discovery and conquest. However, Sanneh wants to read the history of the colonial moment, especially in Africa, within an ecclesial history. That is to say, he draws the colonial history inside a longer, wider history of missionary activity. He understands vernacular translation as the hermeneutic horizon through which one must see and interpret the actions not only of missionaries but of Christianity itself.102 Sanneh’s reading of translation begins not with colonialism but with Israel.103 Like Colenso, Sanneh theorizes a historical Christianizing process through the idea of a universal humanity that transcended Jewish particularity. Paul is key to this process in that his writings are the embodiment of that process: “Paul’s ambiguous and often very critical relationship to Judaism cannot be isolated from his participation in the Gentile mission, and with good reason. As missionaries of the modern era were to find, encountering the reality of God beyond the inherited terms of one’s culture reduces reliance on that culture as a universal normative pattern…. Contrary to much of the prevailing wisdom in this field of study, mission implies not so much a judgment on the cultural heritage of the convert (although in time the gospel will bring that judgment) as on that of the missionary…. The center of Christianity, Paul perceived, was in the heart and life of the believer without the presumption of conformity to one cultural ideal.”104
The Apostle Paul, for Sanneh, establishes the logic of an internal cultural critique that happens whenever the gospel is presented to another culture. The gospel casts light on the cultural moorings of the carrier culture. The reality of God exposes those connections between a particular culture and the gospel itself, showing the difference between what is indeed simply one cultural vision and another, different cultural vision. Israel, in Sanneh’s reading of Paul, exposes the universal movement of divine activity, which in no way belongs to Israel itself: “That remorseless [divine] consistency drives a sword through the heart of our cultural complacency, and by its thrust we are healed.”105 This providential historical process yields two options for reading the history of Christian missional faithfulness or infidelity.
Missionary culture may make itself “the inseparable carrier of the message.”106 Mission as translation is something very different. It “make[s] the recipient culture the true and final locus of the proclamation.”107 Mission as translation means that cultural rejection is not inherent in Christianity and, most important, “it carries with it a deep theological vocation, which arises as an inevitable stage in the process of reception and adaptation.”108 Sanneh imagines these options woven together in the messiness of Christian history, always showing the possibilities of translation.
In this way the act of translating creates a theological relativism. That relativism means that concepts bound to one language system give way to alteration or eradication when drawn toward another language. For Sanneh, these discursive practices are culturally specific. Equally important, translation necessitates a form of alienation from the original: “The original is assumed to be inadequate, or defective, or inappropriate, but at any rate ineffective for the task at hand. Thus a peripheral role comes to be assigned to the original mode. In addition, translation forces a distinction between the essence of the message, and its cultural presuppositions, with the assumption that such a separation enables us to affirm the primacy of the message over its cultural underpinnings. Thus translation involves some degree of cultural alienation on the part of the translator, though the recipient culture may eventually compensate him or her with the consolation of an adopted member.”109 Sanneh wants to balance the idea of the culturally particular with the universalistic reign of God. He says, “God needs to be close and specific enough to be recognizably real to us, and yet be untrammeled enough by our cultural presuppositions to be searchingly true to the divine self.”110 Sanneh is reading Israel through his analysis of the historical process itself. And he has discerned in his historiographic imagination an animated theological essence that moves through time from one cultural situation to another. Sanneh discerns God at work in history.
Sanneh believes that the practice of translation engaged in by the missionaries opened to them the possibility of repudiating cultural imperialism.111 If the practice of translation disrupted colonialist hegemony, it did so by making room for something else, cultural nationalism: “Mission furnished nationalism with the resources necessary to its rise and success, whereas colonialism came upon it as a conspiracy. At the heart of the nationalist awakening was the cultural pride that missionary translations and the attendant linguistic research stimulated. We might say with justice that mission begot cultural nationalism.”112 Modernity and one of its signature realities, cultural nationalism, and their relation to theology, demand a slower, more studied reflection than Sanneh allows with his vernacular thesis. To become a modernizing agent is a very complex and thorny acknowledgment, one that demands a more ironic historical rendering. Sanneh acknowledges that the notion of mission as “unwarranted interference in other cultures” merits careful consideration, but he wants to attend more earnestly to the possibilities of cultural exchange and change.113 He also holds to a developmental logic that wants to acknowledge the good of modernity with its technological and material advantages. However, Sanneh does not attend carefully to the other form of translation operative in and with vernacular translation, that is, the translating of native worlds into the old worlds of Europe, that is, into colonialist worlds.114
Sanneh relegates the colonial effects to a general understanding of the historic phenomena of colonialism, which for him are less important than what he calls the “theological enfranchisement of mother tongues, and the modern missionary application of it.”115 Sanneh discerns within the cultural imperialism of missions a place for African agency that is a “space for indigenous self-understanding and the basis for resistance.”116 While this is certainly a historical point, it is a far more precise theological point. Sanneh is rehearsing the embodiment of divine freedom in flesh. He is improvising on a christological insight. He discerns a reality of freedom within bondage, victory within defeat and suffering.117
Sanneh’s reflections in this case, however, engender a significant lack of theological specificity. Sanneh envisions a God quickly clothed in multiple discourses and thereby clothed in multiple conceptualities throughout the historical process. His historicism in effect nationalizes theological formation. For Sanneh, vernacular translations, with their concomitant local theologies, indicate an appropriate relativism of all cultures as mediums of the gospel. This cultural relativism, he believes, challenges ethnocentrism, theological and otherwise.
Walls, like Sanneh, draws crucial lessons from the historical reality of vernacular translation. Yet for Walls, translation is an even more decisive theological category: “Incarnation is translation. When God in Christ became man, Divinity was translated into humanity, as though humanity were a receptor language. Here was a clear statement of what would otherwise be veiled in obscurity or uncertainty, the statement ‘This is what God is like.”…Bible translation as a process is thus both a reflection of the central act on which the Christian faith depends and a concretization of the commission which Christ gave his disciples. Perhaps no other specific activity more clearly represents the mission of the Church.”118 Translation becomes, in Walls’s vision, the way in which Christianity, when performed correctly, enacts a tentative posture toward one’s culture, people, and nation. Christians are those people who live between the home, or indigenizing principle, and the pilgrim principle. The pilgrim principle tells Christians that they have no abiding city and that they wait for their true home to appear. The home, or indigenizing principle, tells Christians that Christ comes to their home and joins himself to them.119 The Christian life in this vision is always a matter of translation. This Christology of translation in which the Son is always being translated “in terms of every culture where he finds acceptance among its people” establishes the true form of Christian existence.120
Like Sanneh, Walls posits Israel and the Jew-Gentile relation as paradigmatic. The movement out of Israel is the movement toward the universal. The Jewish Christians of the first century reveal the beginnings of what will be the constant overturning of linguistic containment. Gentile believers altered the faith proclaimed by the disciples of Jesus, and this reveals the trajectory for the continuous transformations of Christian faith:
Those Christian Jews in Antioch who realized that Jesus had something to say to their pagan friends took an immense risk. They were prepared to drop the time-honoured word Messiah, knowing that it would mean little to their neighbors, and perhaps mislead them—what concern was the redeemer of Israel, should they grasp the concept, to them? They were prepared to see the title of their national saviour, the fulfillment of the dearest hopes of their people, become attached to the name of Jesus as though it was a sort of surname. They took up the ambiguous and easily misunderstood word “Lord”…. They could not possibly have foreseen where their action would lead; and it would be surprising if someone did not warn them about the disturbing possibilities of confusion and syncretism. But their cross-cultural communication saved Christian faith for the world.121
Walls’s eloquent account of this movement out of Israel focuses on language as the medium of transformation. The entrance into new language, that is, “cross-cultural communication” as he calls it, is entrance into a new world. Such cross-cultural communication places Christian faith into the world. Christian faith then enters the world under the conditions that constitute all knowledge, subject to the limitations of worldview and epistemic situation. For Walls this limitation of perspective is “a necessary feature of our hearing the Gospel at all.”122 Like Sanneh, Walls draws a tight circle around language and culture and nation with the effect that the incarnational reality of God in Christ embodied in translation resolves itself in nation. Christ enters the DNA of a nation by means of its language.123
Walls and Sanneh render translation and, centrally, vernacular translation of the Christian Scriptures the pivotal concept for the promulgation of Christianity. Walls offers a vision of Christianity’s central claim—the incarnation of God—as “a massive act of translation” and proceeds to elaborate the historical mission process as the struggle of translation.124 Sanneh also strongly pulls in this direction, but invites one to see the historical advantages of this development for cultural diversity within Christian unity. However, both Sanneh and Walls (in different ways, to be sure) bypass the deeper concern that shapes the colonialist moment and Christian theology in that moment. That deeper concern has to do with the translation of multiple worlds simultaneously.
While Sanneh and Walls are very familiar with the history of colonialism and do not ignore it, they read the world of translation too narrowly, that is, from within the confines of the modernist problematic established within the colonialist modality itself.125 Historically, they cannot capture the simultaneity that constitutes the Christian world in the new worlds. The multiple levels of translation, that is, of transference, transformation, transliteration of land, animals, space, language, and bodies, mean that worlds overlap and in that overlap they are altered irrevocably, hybridized, and cross-pollinated. Equally important, new forms of racialized Being are coming into play and driving the performance of oral and written systems in new directions and in the service of new purposes. This means that the formation of colonialist and native agency must be seen in terms of their greater tragedies of frustration and confusion as well as of their possibilities for self-emancipation.
Theologically, Sanneh and Walls have imbibed a subtle form of supersessionism that is now lodged deeply inside their historiographic imaginations. To question the matter bluntly: when did we leave Israel’s world? Language creates a kind of mystification in Sanneh’s and Walls’s work in which translation points to the world-constituting realities of language. Yet language is inside the world it constitutes. The worlds of Christian language are inside Israel’s house. Israel’s house is a space where people are joined in worship and where ways of life come into the communion of the common, of eating, sleeping, and living together. And through language Israel’s house indeed covers the entire world. Through Christian faith, new languages and the people who speak them are drawn into that house, as the prophet Isaiah reminds us:
2 In days to come the mountain of the LORD’S house shall be established as the highest of the mountains, and shall be raised above the hills; all the nations shall stream to it.3 Many peoples shall come and say, “Come, let us go up to the mountain of the LORD, to the house of the God of Jacob; that he may teach us his ways and that we may walk in his paths.” For out of Zion shall go forth instruction, and the word of the LORD from Jerusalem.4 He shall judge between the nations, and shall arbitrate for many peoples; they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more. (Isa 2:2–4 NRSV)
It is precisely this house that is forgotten and denied in the Christian theological formation processes of the West. Unfortunately, Sanneh and Walls execute their intellectual programs inside the denial. By drawing the incarnation so tightly inside translation they eclipse a deeper historical movement with its concomitant theological scandal. Christians are, through Jesus the Christ, brought into the story of Israel, which is indeed God’s story. What is at stake is not simply particularity and certainly not the dialectic between the particular and the universal, but rather the scandal of particularity.
The historical process elaborated through the phenomenon of translation as articulated by these two historians presents particularity as examples of a continuous modality of divine-human interaction. In this way translation disarms Christian particularity of its central scandal, the election of Israel and through Israel the election of Jesus. Sanneh and Walls are correct to see that through Jesus, Israel’s particularity does not mean linguistic containment, but neither does it mean linguistic supersessionism.126 Israel’s particularity bound up in Jesus means that his scandalous particularity is the means through which Christian faith acquires its social and political materiality. That social and political materiality draws our imaginations not first to the translation of the gospel message but to the joining of peoples in the struggle to learn each other’s languages in the process of lives joined, lives lived together in new spaces, and constituting a new history for a new people.
The particularity Sanneh and Walls inscribe underwrites cultural nationalisms wedded to theological formation. Unfortunately, they don’t offer a sufficient account of the tragic theological history that lay behind the rise of nationalism. Neither do they see the abiding connection between cultural nationalism and ethnocentrism. Sanneh believes his vision of particularities embraced through the occurrences of vernacular translation actually undermines ethnocentrism by showing the possibility of multiple languages serving as revelatory mediums. Indeed, both authors are less concerned with nationalism than with showing how the gospel may protect and celebrate the cultural integrity of peoples while calling them beyond the mere celebration of their own culture. However, as Colenso shows, the formation of cultural nationalisms is a far thornier problem for Christian identity than either Sanneh or Walls suggests. Equally important, it is precisely at this point of their work that these historians seem strangely ahistorical. As we have seen in this chapter, the rise of cultural nationalism carries unique racial, social, political, and economic signatures that cannot be divorced from ecclesial embodiments or the violence of nation-states.
In one sense, Colenso’s early years in southern Africa divulge a theologian yielding to the temptation to control, a translator reframing native worlds within colonialism. But in another sense, in his later years in southern Africa Colenso gives witness to the destabilization of his world and its colonizing project. Indeed, the full testimony of the life of Colenso in South Africa outstrips his colonizing theological project, outstrips his stratagems for native domestication, and outstrips his fabricated goals of translation and brings him powerfully and painfully to the authentic goal of translation, joining.
If translation is necessary to Christian theology, it is also dangerous. Colenso began his missionary career in the colony of Natal a deeply committed translator of the gospel message to a people previously unknown to him. In those early years, he was joined at the proverbial hip to another translator of worlds, Theophilus Shepstone. The bishop envisioned his work as being inseparable from the work of this colonial administrator and yet, the more he translated Christian words into the isiZulu language the more his ears became attuned to the concerns of native voices. Little did he know that the very act of translation would place him on a path that would end one of his most important friendships in southern Africa. His break with Shepstone was occasioned by Chief Langalibalele, the son of Chief Mtimkhulu of the Hlubi. Seeking asylum from Zulu domination, Langalibalele, his people (the Hlubi within the Zulu kingdom), and the Ngwe people arrived in Natal in 1848.127 Shepstone exercised absolute power over Langalibalele and his peoples, placing these seven thousand displaced souls on land at the foot of the Drakensberg Mountains with the understanding that they would help guard white farm settlements from renegade marauders. By the 1870s, Langalibalele and his peoples, to the searing consternation of white English settlers, were thriving on the land. The settlers saw Langalibalele and the Hlubi and Ngwe peoples both as unwanted competition in the marketplace because of the crops they produced and as much-wanted servile labor untapped because of their flaunted independence. They also saw these natives as a military threat owing to their increased access to guns received in exchange for their work in the diamond fields. Yet it was not their prowess as excellent farmers, or their influence on market prices through their goods and services, or even the presence of weapons among them that led to their tribulations, but the disrespect that Shepstone perceived Langalibalele showed him personally. The Hlubi chief failed to show proper, continuous deference to the great white chief.
It was the idea of Africans with guns that provided the pretext for the powerful display of the Shepstone system. The Natal government demanded that all Africans register their firearms, an order exceedingly difficult to carry out given the wide dispersion of weapons in the colony and the region. In fact, Chief Langalibalele did try to comply but without success. Shepstone ordered the chief to appear before him to explain his actions. Out of fear for his life, the chief refused, preparing the ground for Shepstone to pursue military action. A final envoy was sent in pseudosupplication to the chief, an envoy who, it was claimed, Langalibalele’s men threatened and humiliated. Insulted by this action, Shepstone ordered the people to be captured and “broken up”—land was taken, cattle seized and sold, men were marched from the mountain in chains, the elderly were abandoned destitute, and women and children were turned into “servants” for the settlers.128 In the end, the settlers got exactly what they wanted. Everything.
Langalibalele was captured and paraded in chains through the streets of Pietermaritzburg, surrounded by a hostile white crowd. The chief’s trial was a spectacular example of colonialist injustice. The verdict was never in doubt, and on February 9, 1872, he was found guilty and banished from Natal for life and eventually exiled for a time to Robben Island. Colenso watched these events with great interest and concern for the inconsistencies he saw in the entire affair. He was also greatly troubled by the behavior of his dear friend Shepstone. The truth came to Colenso through Magema Fuze, a former student and the man who ran Colenso’s printer, himself a Hlub, as well as through other Hlubi living on land at Bishopstowe. They revealed to Colenso that the key witness of Langalibalele’s alleged insurrection was lying and that the whole affair was steeped in deception. Colenso confronted Shepstone with this truth, and it was clear Shepstone was not interested in the facts. It also became clear that Shepstone was deeply involved in perpetrating this injustice. At this point, Colenso was faced with a decision the consequences of which would forever change his life in Africa. Guy powerfully captures the unfolding tragedy:
If he did act further in support of Langalibalele it would make his position as Bishop in the colony virtually untenable. First he would alienate the colonists, and although his own income was secure he did not have sufficient funds to maintain his clergy without the support of their congregations. Already ecclesiastically isolated, he would cut himself off from his last body of adherents if he took up Langalibalele’s cause. Furthermore it was already clear that Shepstone had not, as he had previously thought, been dragged into the affair unwillingly, but was deeply implicated. And Shepstone was not only his closest friend, he was also his most influential lay supporter. Their families had grown up together, the Shepstones had helped the Colensos in many ways over the years, and the Bishop had always spoken for Shepstone to those with power and influence in England.129
Colenso chose to listen to his cotranslators: not Shepstone, but Fuze and Ngidi. This choice painfully ended his friendship with Shepstone and turned him from colonialist collaborator to colonialist enemy. Thus began the transformation of Bishop Colenso. From the Langalibalele affair forward all the intellectual, political, social, and ecclesial tools he had honed in defining and defending his theological positions were placed in the service of the black body. His unrelenting advocacy for the chief and his people opened up the world he thought he knew into the world he would now understand. The change was evident upon his return to England to advocate for justice for the chief. Colenso turned down an opportunity to preach at Westminster Abbey to press his theological positions out of concern that it would detract from the Langalibalele situation. Again, Colenso chose the African.
His actions were certainly consistent with his theology. Given what he believed, he saw his advocacy for the Zulus and others as the only option. As is always the case, however, theological beliefs are always more than one imagines. Whether those beliefs are weak or strong, they leave open a door, and through that door came collectors on those beliefs, demanding a life consistent with that confession. For Colenso, the voices he had heard carefully year after year in translating were now speaking to him in a new way, and now that he had chosen the African he had new ears to hear: “As the months, and then years passed, more and more Africans from further and further afield confided in Colenso or turned to him for advice and assistance. And as they did so the Bishop’s understanding of how Natal’s rulers were perceived by those they ruled increased, his antagonism towards the authorities intensified, and his sympathy for the colonised deepened.”130 Colenso the translator, the one who had paid careful attention to the syntactical structures and semantic configurations of native languages, was now seeing practices concealed to most settlers: “The unthinking cruelty of the official announcement, the unconscious distortion in the formal report, and the unperceived injustice in the impartial legal judgement.”131 These were the operations of colonialist administration that settlers had chosen not to see, yet the bishop and his family could now see clearly. Bishop Colenso and his family were to see not only the injustice done to Langalibalele but also the horror of the war brought on the Zulus and their majestic chief, Cetshwayo kaMpande. Shepstone’s old obsession with creating his own black kingdom in Zululand was a central driving force in his manipulation of colonial officials, officials already disposed toward destroying the fantasized Zulu military threat. Colenso watched and learned from the Zulus of Shepstone’s imbecilic and humiliating attempted coronation of Cetshwayo after he ascended to the Zulu throne. Shepstone did this to claim his right and power as the “chief of chiefs” and to continue his efforts to obtain the land for his black kingdom. Colenso watched and learned from the Zulus of Shepstone’s betrayal at the meeting near Blood (Ncome) River. Shepstone reversed his position and sided with the Transvaal in a dispute with the Zulus for Zulu-owned land. Colenso watched as the Shepstone clan drew the English inexorably toward war with the Zulus.
Bishop Colenso and his family did not simply receive information. They acted. The mission station at Bishopstowe, which had once so idealistically carried out its work of conversion, was now a place of political resistance to colonialist rule. The printers that had churned out translated texts—Scripture, theological commentaries, readers, and grammars—now printed the information Colenso and his family had gathered that documented colonialist judicial and administrative indiscretion, violence, and crimes against the Zulu nation. Magema Fuze and William Ngidi, who had joined Colenso in his missionary work, now supported the work of Zulu liberation. With the initial military setback of the British against the Zulu at Isandhlwana, Colenso refused to side with settler rage at the African. Instead, he pressed forward his translation not of Scripture but of Christianity: “Colenso knew the consequences of exposing white injustice to an already bigoted audience which had just suffered such terrible personal losses at the hands of a black enemy, and whose racial prejudices were now fed by terror.”132
Resistance was a family affair, including not only Bishop Colenso but Sarah Frances and their children: their eldest daughter, Harriette Colenso, who most directly carried on her father’s work, and Frances Ellen and Agnes Mary, along with two sons, Francis Ernest and Robert John, both of whom lived principally in England during their adult years but supported their father as best they could. The bishop made his choice in full knowledge of its consequences, and it became their choice as well. In the end, where his church would not follow and where his nation was surely not to go, his family faithfully and willingly went.
After only a few years, the mission ended. Once the theological controversy began, nothing else seemed to matter. There were very few, if any, truly new converts to Christianity, and in the end Colenso was rejected and despised by the very settlers he was sent to shepherd. Colenso’s love of England and its civilizing mission turned sour: “This English rule, barely distinguishable in Colenso’s eyes from God’s rule, had initiated a ‘Saturnalia of wrong-doing’ and ‘an apotheosis of force’ in Zululand. For twenty-five years Colenso had based his actions on the assumption that he represented a system which ‘can hardly be looked at apart from the Divine Government.’ Now, as the result of the British invasion of Zululand, ‘the name of Englishman’ had become ‘in the Native mind the synonym for duplicity, treachery, and violence’ and with reason.”133
Guy suggests that the Zulu “war, in destroying twelve thousand [Zulu] lives … also destroyed the meaning of Colenso’s life.”134 Colenso became the translator against colonial translation. He became a translator bound to the flesh and bound to the plight of the African, and in so doing he interrupted a life of translation bound to the remaking of native worlds. This was a place his theology could not take him, but precisely where the Africans drew him. The practice of translation, the daily acts of sitting with black flesh seeking to say what the Scriptures say, opened Colenso to a path different from his own articulation of his work. His translated theology and his translated life were of different worlds. His translated theology was of a world already formed prepared to instruct, guide, and mangle. His translated life was of a world forming, moving inextricably toward binding, toward communion. His life and his work were of one piece.
The theological implications of Christian translation were often concealed to the colonialist translator. The story of Israel connected to Jesus can crack open a life so that others, strangers, even colonized strangers begin to seep inside and create cultural alienation for the translator and, even more, deep desire for those who speak native words. These implications are far greater than emancipatory possibilities for indigenes rooted in vernacular Christian agency or budding cultural nationalisms, but in joining—loving, caring, intimate joining. That joining is a sharing in the pain, plight, and life of one another. Just as Ngidi felt pathos for the plight of his Sobantu (Colenso), standing against those who called and treated him as a heretic, so Colenso came to feel pathos for the Africans who were called and treated as nonhuman. This, finally, is Christian translation. And such translation cost Bishop Colenso everything.
One should recall what was at stake in Colenso’s mistakes. And in order to grasp this theological performance one must think beyond standard critiques of Christian colonialism in which Christianity is construed as allowing Western cultural imposition or simply as being cultural imposition itself. These critiques are beside the crucial point. Christianity in the colonialist moment offers one a gospel that is for everyone of necessity but joins no one of necessity. Thus the incarnation in this order of things comes to signify divine entrance into the world. The specific contours of that entrance lose their social and political character. This docetic problem is matched by another theological heretical habit of mind, adoptionism.
The adoptionist mode of thought found it easy to conceive of a human being whose life announced divine approval, divine presence, and divine election. God claimed this human being as special, unique among the creatures, and made him divine by an act of divine fiat. Jesus becomes the Son of God, which announces a divine fait accompli. His life witnesses this election—this divine presence and the knowledge that is able to rightly name the name of God. Adoptionism in this regard is a way to make sense of divine presence, divine immanence without suggesting a genuine historic entrance of the divine into space, time, and body. Adoptionist thinking in this way does not disrupt the normal patterns of human existence but finds in those patterns possibilities of holiness, transcendence, and divine approval. My skeletal account of a complex theological development is an attempt to capture what I earlier noted as the emergence of a contextual sensibility in Colenso.
For Colenso, God was already present among the Zulus. They had a name for God and knowledge of God rooted in their religious consciousness. At one level Colenso’s assumption appears to be an ecumenical breakthrough, a ray of theological sunshine announcing not only religious tolerance for indigenous peoples but possibly even celebration of and respect for their religious sensibilities. Indeed, this has become a way of articulating divine presence serviceable for multiple intellectual projects. Yet at another level, what is apparent in Colenso’s conclusions is the formation of a cultural nationalism that fully captures Christian theology. It is theology of and for the nation, for a people, any people, and every people. And in this conceptualization, Israel is historicized as an exhausted theological moment because God is now with everyone else. “Now” is not a temporal designation but a conceptual one. As Colenso noted, God has always been with everyone, they just didn’t know it. Once this is expressed, theology must come to exist wholly as a nationalist intellectual exercise.
The point here is easy to miss. The tragedy is not contextual reflection; the tragedy is the way divine entrance is imagined among peoples. God’s history is missing—no Israel, no Jesus, no apostles, no material struggle, no divine walking through time and indeed space, real space. Such a walking, such an entrance would be messy, carrying forward Israel’s election and carrying forward many peoples, places, voices, ways of life bound to the Jewish Jesus, always announcing that God is with us. Colenso, following a distorted tradition, bypasses the real historical entrance and discerns God as present among all peoples, thereby eradicating theological history. Divine entrance, therefore, requires no relationships with anyone. Just as God is with Christians in Jesus, God is present among all people. But is God present among all peoples, all cultures? Only on this side of the colonialist moment and its antecedent supersessionism does one see this as a legitimate question. It is not. Divine presence revealed in the Jewish Jesus is a disciplining presence, guiding not only what Christians say about God in the world but how they see God at work in the world. That seeing comes with Christian bodies, their participation in the divine work in the world, drawing them toward other peoples, calling them to become one and to love concretely.
The theological imagination that deploys divine presence without concomitant real presence and real relationship may be enacting a form of Gentile hubris that believes we have the right to claim the very reality that was only announced over us by a gracious act of the Holy Spirit in the presence of Jewish believers (Acts 10, 11). Equally important, this adoptionist habit of mind turns peoples toward an isolating theological creativity, imagining the divine among one’s own people. Such imagining is not wholly wrong, but it is impoverishing. And Christian theology in modern times has been set in place by this very poverty. So the gospel transmitted means in many imaginations the ways in which different peoples have culturally adopted and adapted Christian faith, ideas, doctrine, and language. And thanks to a supersessionist mistake and a colonialist sensibility, few Christians would discern the tragic history and the ongoing tragedy inside that statement about transmission. Unfortunately, the universal (bound up in docetism) and the contextual (bound up in adoptionism) are currently the dominant options for the contemporary theological imagination. They are two sides of the same coin, the one enabling the other, and neither finding its way to a Christian theology that of necessity creates intimacy.
Christian theology as articulated by intellectuals like Bishop John William Colenso continues to unfold in the world, its translation caught in the dynamics he so powerfully displayed. Like Acosta, Colenso has escaped notice in Western theological textbooks. His eclipse may lie in his heretical thought, his reputation as a protoliberal, or the perception that he was not a very sophisticated thinker. Colenso, however, illumines part of the contemporary theological morass. Indeed, Bishop Colenso marked a path that has been traveled by so many others before and since. One must in the end celebrate that path for showing a courageous Christian bishop who gave his life in missionary service and who in the mature years of his life acted for the good of an oppressed people. One must also grieve over that path for showing Christian theology in translation not only bound to colonialism, but still confining Christians to its options. There is a way forward but to find that way forward requires Christians to truly understand the pathos of this translator.
Yet before leaving his world, it is well to remember the words written by William Ngidi that were later turned into a hymn:
Yes, indeed, my brothers, the weapons of war should be beaten into ploughs for cultivating the ground, and war-shields be sewed into garments of clothing, and peace be proclaimed, on the north and on the south, and on both sides, through the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, Unkulunkulu, who ever liveth, and all evil become peace, I mean become goodness. Ah! And soldiers (should) be mustered for tribes which attack those at peace, and be mustered for roads of communication, and all tribes shout and say, “He is the King, He is the King, He is the King, God, Unkulunkulu, who has risen from the dead! By Him, the world, we have overcome it, and all its evil things! All evil is dead, Goodness stands, because the Father of Goodness stands; because the father of evil is dead, evil is dead also! Goodness, and Righteousness, and Holiness, on the north and on the south, and on both sides, stands in Peace! I mean, the Peace which comes from the Holy Spirit.135
In the end, William Ngidi and many others like him captured something in the missionary endeavor. Despite its multiple problems, a translation of the original had happened. And even if the original had been mutilated, tortured, and eventually killed in colonialist power, there was a resurrection.