Spirits, Ancestors and the Powers

Begin, as always, by describing the faith you are answering in a way its own people would recognise. This lesson speaks mainly of African traditional religion, because many students of this course live with it, but much of what it says applies to the folk and ancestral religion of China, Korea and South-East Asia, to the spirit religion of the Pacific and the Andes, and to religions of the Caribbean and Brazil that blend African and other traditions. Each is different, and the people of each would say so. Ask before you assume.

Most African traditional religions recognise a supreme God who made the world, known by many names, among them Olodumare among the Yoruba, Chukwu among the Igbo, Ngai among the Kikuyu and Mulungu in parts of East Africa. In many traditions this God is great and good but often thought of as distant, and daily religious life is lived among the beings nearer at hand: divinities, such as the orisha of the Yoruba, spirits of the land, the rivers and the forest, and above all the ancestors. The Kenyan theologian John Mbiti, in African Religions and Philosophy (1969), called the recently dead the living-dead: still members of the family, remembered by name, concerned for its welfare, honoured with libations and offerings, and able to bless or to trouble the living. Religion in this view is not a part of life. It is the whole of life, bound up with family, land, birth, marriage, harvest, sickness and death. Its great aim is life itself: health, children, harmony with the community and with the unseen world.

One feature matters especially for apologetics. In this world nothing happens by chance. The British anthropologist E. E. Evans-Pritchard, in his classic study of the Azande people of central Africa, Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande (1937), told of a granary that collapsed and injured the people sitting under it. The Azande knew perfectly well that termites had eaten the supports. What they asked was why it fell at that moment, on those people. Western science answers how. Traditional religion asks why, and its answer is often a person: an offended ancestor, a broken taboo, or a witch. The diviner is the one who finds out, and the healer or ritual specialist is the one who puts it right.

Now hear the objection to Christianity that comes from inside this world, because it is not the objection of a sceptic. It runs like this. Your missionaries told us our ancestors were nothing and our fears were superstition, and then gave us a religion with no answer for the things that actually trouble us: the child who keeps falling sick, the curse a neighbour spoke, the dreams of a dead father. So we went to church on Sunday and to the diviner on Monday night. Christianity, the objection says, is a religion for the soul after death, imported from people who no longer believe in spirits, and it does not touch life. And it asks us to abandon our own fathers and mothers.

Many African Christian thinkers have said that the objection has real force. The missionary anthropologist Paul Hiebert, in a well-known article called The Flaw of the Excluded Middle (1982), argued that Western missionaries brought a theology of God and heaven above and a science of the natural world below, but nothing for the middle realm of spirits, curses, ancestors and fortune that their hearers lived in daily, so converts took those questions elsewhere. Kwame Bediako of Ghana, in Christianity in Africa: The Renewal of a Non-Western Religion (1995), argued that African Christians must work out their faith in conversation with their own religious past rather than pretending it does not exist. The rest of this lesson takes up that challenge from scripture.

The letter to the Colossians was written to Christians in a small city in what is now western Turkey, in a world that was also full of spirits. Someone was urging them to add to Christ: observances of food and festivals (2:16), the worship of angels and the pursuit of visions (2:18), and rules about what not to touch or taste (2:21), all tied to what the BSB calls 'the spiritual forces of the world' (2:8). Scholars debate exactly what this teaching was, whether a form of Jewish mysticism, a local folk religion, or a mixture. What is clear is that it offered protection and spiritual advancement through practices beyond Christ. It is, in other words, very like the pressure many Christians feel to keep a charm, consult a diviner or make an offering just in case.

Paul's answer is not that the spirit world is imaginary. He says plainly that there are 'thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities,' visible and invisible, and that all of them 'were created through Him and for Him' (1:16). His answer is that Christ is supreme over them all. 'For in Christ all the fullness of the Deity dwells in bodily form. And you have been made complete in Christ, who is the head over every ruler and authority' (2:9-10). A believer does not need extra protection, because he is joined to the one who made and rules every power there is.

Then comes the anchor. God made you alive with Christ, 'He forgave us all our trespasses' (2:13), and he cancelled the record of debt, 'nailing it to the cross!' (2:14). 'And having disarmed the powers and authorities, He made a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them by the cross' (2:15). The picture is a Roman triumph: a victorious general riding through the city with his defeated enemies stripped of their weapons and marched behind him for everyone to see. The cross looked like Christ's defeat. Paul says it was his victory parade. Notice how the victory was won. The powers are disarmed immediately after the debt is cancelled. What gave the powers their hold over people was guilt, the record that stood against us. Forgiveness takes their weapon away. That is why a Christian's protection does not lie in rituals but in being forgiven and joined to Christ.

Christians disagree about who or what the powers are. Most interpreters through history, and most Christians in Africa, Asia and Latin America today, read Colossians 2:15, Ephesians 6:12 and similar texts as speaking of personal spiritual beings, evil spirits under Satan. Others, notably Hendrikus Berkhof in Christ and the Powers (1953) and Walter Wink in his trilogy beginning with Naming the Powers (1984), argued that Paul's language also covers, or for Wink chiefly means, the spiritual dimension of human institutions, traditions and structures: the inner spirit of a state, a market or a system that holds people captive. Defenders of the first view point to Jesus' many encounters with demons and to Paul's own language of a struggle 'not against flesh and blood' (Ephesians 6:12). Defenders of the second note that Paul says 'the rulers of this age' crucified the Lord of glory (1 Corinthians 2:8), which at the least involved human rulers, and that structures do enslave. Many readers hold both: personal powers that work through human systems. For this lesson the point is the same on every view. Whatever the powers are, Christ has disarmed them.

The ancestors are the most painful question for many converts, because they are family. To be told that your grandmother's spirit is a demon, or that the dead do not matter, can feel like a demand to stop loving your own people. Scripture says a good deal that bears on the question, and Christians who take scripture seriously have reached different conclusions about how to apply it.

Some things are settled. Scripture commands honour for father and mother (Exodus 20:12) and for the elderly (Leviticus 19:32), and that honour does not end at a graveside; remembering, naming and giving thanks for those who have died is right. Scripture also forbids seeking guidance or power from the dead. Israel was not to have anyone who 'consults a medium or spiritist, or inquires of the dead' (Deuteronomy 18:11), and Isaiah asks, 'Why consult the dead on behalf of the living?' (Isaiah 8:19). And scripture teaches that 'there is one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus' (1 Timothy 2:5). No ancestor stands between a believer and God. These three points are held by Christians on every side of the debate.

The disagreement is about what Christian honour for the dead may include, and how to understand what happens when the ancestors seem to appear in dreams or to act. One view, held by many evangelical and Pentecostal churches in Africa and Asia, and close to the concerns the Nigerian theologian Byang Kato pressed in Theological Pitfalls in Africa (1975), holds that libations, offerings and prayers to the ancestors are worship, whatever they are called, and must be given up completely. On this view the dead are in God's hands and do not move between worlds; Jesus' parable speaks of 'a great chasm' that cannot be crossed (Luke 16:26), and Hebrews says that man is 'appointed to die once, and after that to face judgment' (9:27). What presents itself as an ancestor is therefore a deceiving spirit, and the believer should have nothing to do with it. Kato's concern was that a church which blurred these lines would slide into syncretism, Christ added to the old religion rather than replacing its gods.

Another view, held by many Roman Catholic and some Protestant theologians, distinguishes worship, which belongs to God alone, from honour, which may be given to the dead, and asks which ancestral practices can be kept, transformed or must be dropped. The Tanzanian Catholic theologian Charles Nyamiti wrote of Christ as our Ancestor (1984), and Bediako argued in Jesus in Africa (2000) that Christ fulfils and surpasses everything the ancestors were believed to be: the one who has died and lives, who intercedes and protects, the founder of a new family. Those who hold this view point out that Jesus said God 'is not the God of the dead, but of the living' (Mark 12:27), that Hebrews speaks of 'a great cloud of witnesses' (12:1), and that the church in China faced the same question in the Chinese Rites Controversy, where Rome first forbade and then in 1939 permitted Chinese Catholics to take part in ceremonies honouring Confucius and the ancestors as civil rather than religious acts. They argue that a church that offers converts nothing in place of the ancestors will see them return secretly to the old rites.

Both views want Christ alone as Lord, and both oppose consulting the dead. They differ over how much of the inherited practice can be redeemed, and over whether the language of ancestor can safely be applied to Christ. A wise pastor will know both cases, will listen to mature believers in his own community who came out of these practices, and will be clear about the settled points even where the application is debated. What no Christian position allows is a believer offering to the dead for protection, consulting a diviner, or living in fear that the ancestors will punish him for following Christ.

Many Christians in Africa, Asia, Melanesia and elsewhere believe that witchcraft is real: that some people can harm others by hidden spiritual power. Scripture does treat sorcery as a real practice and forbids it; Deuteronomy 18:10 lists 'divination or conjury' and 'sorcery' among the practices of the nations, and Paul names 'sorcery' among the works of the flesh (Galatians 5:20). Christians differ over how much power such practices actually have. That is not the issue here. The issue is what happens when people are accused of witchcraft, and on that the evidence is overwhelming and the church must speak without hesitation.

Accusations of witchcraft fall, again and again, on the weakest people in a community: elderly women, especially widows with land others want; children, especially orphans, stepchildren, children with disabilities or behaviour others find strange; people with mental illness; the poor and the friendless. People with albinism suffer from the same beliefs in another form, attacked and even killed for ritual purposes. The results are terrible. In Kinshasa and other cities of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, many thousands of children, by some estimates tens of thousands, have been driven onto the streets after being accused of witchcraft, often by relatives and often after a pastor or prophet named them. In parts of southern Nigeria children have been beaten, burned, starved or killed after such accusations. In northern Ghana there are camps, such as the one at Gambaga, where women accused of witchcraft have lived for years because they cannot safely go home, and in 2020 a woman of about ninety, Akua Denteh, was beaten to death in the town of Kafaba after being accused. The economist Edward Miguel showed in a study of rural Tanzania, published in 2005, that killings of elderly women as witches rose in years of drought and flood, when food was short. The pattern travels: in London, Victoria Climbié in 2000 and Kristy Bamu in 2010 were killed in their own households by adults caring for them, relatives and their partners, who believed they were possessed or were witches. In 2021 the United Nations Human Rights Council adopted a resolution on eliminating harmful practices related to accusations of witchcraft and ritual attacks. These are not stories about other people's religion. Many of the accusers were church members, and some of the accusations were made in churches.

Say it plainly in your church: accusing a child, a widow or an old person of witchcraft on the strength of a dream, a prophecy, a diviner's word or a run of bad luck is a grave sin against God and against the person, and it has destroyed lives. Scripture gives every reason to refuse it. The law of Moses required that 'A matter must be established by the testimony of two or three witnesses' (Deuteronomy 19:15); a dream or a revelation claimed by one person is not a witness. Scripture forbids punishing one person for another's misfortune: 'each is to die for his own sin' (Deuteronomy 24:16). When his disciples asked who had sinned so that a man was born blind, Jesus answered, 'Neither this man nor his parents sinned' (John 9:3), and he refused to say that the eighteen killed by the tower of Siloam were worse than anyone else (Luke 13:4). Jesus did not hunt for a human culprit behind every misfortune, and his followers must not.

Someone will point to Exodus 22:18: 'You must not allow a sorceress to live.' Answer it honestly. It was a law for Israel's covenant courts under the old covenant, to be applied by judges with witnesses, never by a family or a mob; it concerned someone who practised sorcery, not someone suspected because others suffered; and the New Testament nowhere gives the church or its members such a power. When the gospel met real practitioners of magic in Ephesus, they 'brought their books and burned them in front of everyone' (Acts 19:19), freely, as an act of repentance. When Simon the sorcerer sinned in Samaria, Peter told him, 'Repent, therefore, of your wickedness, and pray to the Lord' (Acts 8:22). The Christian response to sorcery is the call to repentance and the protection of Christ, never violence. 'Do not avenge yourselves, beloved' (Romans 12:19).

And scripture commands the opposite of accusation. God is 'A father of the fatherless and a defender of widows' (Psalm 68:5). 'Defend the cause of the weak and fatherless; uphold the rights of the afflicted and oppressed' (Psalm 82:3). Jesus said of children, 'Let the little children come to Me, and do not hinder them!' (Mark 10:14), and warned that it would be better to be drowned with a millstone round one's neck than to cause one of these little ones to stumble (Matthew 18:6). A pastor who names a child as a witch is not fighting the devil. He is doing the accuser's work. If an accused child, widow or old person comes to your church, give them safety first. Do not subject them to deliverance by beating, starving, burning or isolation. Do not announce a name. Where the law protects them, involve the authorities. Teach your congregation that Christ has disarmed the powers, which means no one needs to find a witch in order to be safe.

C. S. Lewis, in the preface to The Screwtape Letters (1942), warned of two equal and opposite errors about devils: disbelieving in their existence, and taking an excessive and unhealthy interest in them. Both errors are alive in the worldwide church. Many Western and Western-educated Christians live as if the spirit world were a story from a less scientific age, and so have nothing to say to the questions of most of the world's believers. Many other Christians are so absorbed in spirits, curses and witches that they live in more fear than their non-Christian neighbours, and their churches become places where every problem is a demon and every pastor a diviner with a Bible.

Scripture walks between those errors. It does not deny the powers. Jesus cast out unclean spirits, and people were amazed that 'He commands even the unclean spirits, and they obey Him!' (Mark 1:27). He gave his disciples 'power and authority over all demons' (Luke 9:1). Paul told a spirit, 'In the name of Jesus Christ I command you to come out of her!' (Acts 16:18). But scripture never makes the powers the centre. When the seventy-two returned rejoicing that the demons submitted to them, Jesus said, 'do not rejoice that the spirits submit to you, but rejoice that your names are written in heaven' (Luke 10:20). And it gives believers no reason to fear: 'greater is He who is in you than he who is in the world' (1 John 4:4), and nothing, 'neither angels nor principalities,' nor 'any powers,' will 'be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord' (Romans 8:38-39). Christ shared our humanity 'so that by His death He might destroy him who holds the power of death, that is, the devil, and free those who all their lives were held in slavery by their fear of death' (Hebrews 2:14-15).

Christians disagree about deliverance ministry, and both sides deserve a hearing. Many Pentecostal and charismatic churches practise regular deliverance from demonic oppression, pointing to Jesus' own ministry, his commission to his disciples, and the experience of countless people freed from real bondage; they warn that a church which never confronts evil spirits leaves people captive. Other Christians, including many Pentecostals, warn against diagnosing a demon where there is mental illness, epilepsy, grief or abuse that needs medical or pastoral care; against long, dramatic sessions that focus on the demon rather than on Christ; and against any deliverance that charges money or harms the person. Both sides agree that authority lies in Jesus' name, not in a ritual, an object or the power of a particular minister, that the sick should also receive medical care, and that prayer for the sick (James 5:14-15) is part of ordinary church life.

So here is the answer to the objection that Christianity does not touch real life. The gospel does not tell an African, Asian or any other believer that the unseen world is empty. It tells him that it has a Lord, and that the Lord is on his side. It does not ask him to stop loving his family, living or dead, but to entrust them to the God of the living. It takes the question why seriously, and sometimes answers it as Jesus did, by refusing to blame anyone. And it removes the reason to fear. A church that teaches this will need no charms, no diviners and no witch-hunts.

Your practical step this week. Read Colossians 1:13-20 and 2:8-15 aloud, slowly. Then write a short pastoral answer, no more than one page, to a church member who asks: My child keeps getting sick and my relatives say an old woman in the village has bewitched him; should I go to the diviner or to a prophet to find out who it is? Your answer should use Colossians 2:15, refuse the accusation and say why from scripture, urge medical care for the child, offer prayer and the elders' help, and protect the woman. Do not write anyone's name. If your church has never been taught about witchcraft accusations, ask your pastor or elders whether you may help prepare a short teaching on it.