Conclusion

The period of late antiquity provides an example of how syncretism’s use has changed over recent decades as scholars increasingly probe the usefulness of categories like religion or syncretism when applying them to non-Western cultures. Recent scholarship like David Frankfurter’s indicates that the term “syncretism” can remain a useful designation in religious studies when used reflexively. The term’s history can be folded into its present usage, such that the power dynamics behind its negative usage can be turned around. Concluding and summarizing the book’s claims for Christian theology, I argue that some syncretisms can be seen as means of the body of Christ growing in history, which the Swahili language calls umwilisho, or body-making.

The Changing Fortunes of Syncretism

Syncretism’s varying connotations have become sedimented within the word over time. To unearth the perceived challenges around syncretism, the chapter studies the word’s history up to the early twentieth century—its use, how it has been deployed, about whom, and for what ends. The word “syncretism” has been used to reconcile opposing factions, neutrally describe religious mixture, and disparage religious mixture. In Christian circles, the term’s pejorative turn came only recently, in the early twentieth century. This shift relates to wider fears among Christians during this period as Christianity spread in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. These fears relate to two key themes, revelation and race.

Introduction

Syncretism has been a part of Christianity from its very beginning, when early Christians expressed Jesus’s Aramaic teachings in the Greek language. Yet the category “syncretism,” defined as phenomena of religious mixture, has been poorly understood in both religious studies and theology. Syncretism carries a range of connotations—neutral descriptor, pejorative marker, celebration of indigenous agency. Such differing uses indicate challenges of interpreting religious mixture, challenges that today relate primarily to race and revelation. After outlining the primary arguments of the book, the introduction provides an overview of how the concept of race figures in the book’s overall arguments. It also explains methodological considerations regarding why the book speaks to multiple audiences, notably both theology and religious studies.

Between Celebration and Ambivalence

This chapter’s intellectual history of syncretism examines the field of religious studies from the 1960s to the present. Religious studies’ engagement with syncretism shows its struggles with race and colonialism, since the designation “syncretism” has worked within the framing of a center and periphery that sees white European and North American cultures as central and other regions as peripheral. Its engagement with syncretism also shows the field’s tensions over ways one might responsibly interpret other cultures. In particular, is a social scientific approach to research or a humanist approach more respectful of informants’ cultures? Finally, the chapter explores disagreements about whether to use the term “syncretism” at all.

Evading History

This chapter provides an intellectual history of syncretism in Christian theology during the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. It engages three prominent instances of writing on syncretism that represent wider theological trends during this time. The first two perspectives are those of theologians Adolf von Harnack and Hendrik Kraemer, writing in the early to mid-twentieth century. The third perspective on syncretism is more contemporary. Rather than a single writer, it is a grouping of synonymous terms that have become stand-ins for positive syncretism—“inculturation,” “indigenization,” and “contextualization.” Each of these perspectives, in differing ways, exhibits a theological method that sidesteps difficult questions of syncretism and material history, which inadvertently defers to existing Western white forms of Christianity.

Ancestors and Sacrifice

This chapter takes the arguments built over the last two chapters and applies them to two contemporary syncretisms in African Christianity. It argues in favor of Christian ancestor reverencing as a practice that enhances understandings of the divine Logos at work in all human cultures, long before people in a culture consider themselves Christian. It then argues that a Dinka bovine sacrifice ritual, described based on the author’s ethnographic work, enhances understandings of Christian atonement insofar as it challenges individualized and transactional views of sacrifice. It also discusses considerations that inform theological judgments about which syncretisms might be incorporated into Christian tradition and which might not. It does so by examining two syncretisms in Africa that ultimately prove too challenging to incorporate into Christianity—Afrikaner nationalism in the early twentieth century and the Friday Masowe apostolics’ rejection of the Bible.

The Logos in History

This chapter offers a Christian theological response to the inevitability of syncretism in Christian thought and action. Putting theologians Jean-Marc Éla and Rowan Williams into conversation, it offers an understanding of divine revelation that is always in process along with an understanding of Jesus growing across time, transfiguring seeming contingencies of every human culture. The Spirit builds up the body of Christ in history as more and more persons are grafted into that body. Regarding the book’s themes of race and revelation, Éla’s entry point into these questions is race, while Williams’s is revelation by way of his writing on historicism. Finally, given the book’s arguments about syncretism and cultural mixture, this chapter concludes by briefly addressing theological questions concerning mixture between Christ’s humanity and divinity.

The Perils and Promise of Tradition

This chapter contends that an adequate account of syncretism requires its pairing with the concept of tradition. Drawing from multiple contextualized encounters in the sixteenth century—from Ethiopian and Portuguese Christians to Jesuit José Acosta and Andean peoples to Matteo Ricci and Confucian scholars—it portrays tradition as a moving continuity that is constantly syncretizing as traditions are handed on in new contexts. Syncretism and tradition, held together, balance the tension between cultural construction on the one hand and cultural continuity on the other. Traditions are not substance-like materials that remain the same over time, nor are their boundaries static. Rather, receivers interpret a tradition afresh, generating new perspectives and pushing it in unforeseen directions. The account of tradition is dialogical, drawing from examples in the encounters just listed, from Alasdair MacIntyre’s account of tradition—which is unduly defensive at times—and from Africanist historians’ careful treatment of the concept.