In spite of the impression of unconnected contents, there is a golden line running through this issue of Religion & Theology that creates a conceptual unity in the collected essays here. This issue of Religion & Theology revolves around issues of power, critique, discourse, and invention, and not as freestanding topics but as interweaving practices that, in concert, illuminate the processes of manufacturing religion.¹ Hence the two section topics of “On Power, Contestations, Contextualisation, and Innovation: Perspectives from Africa,” with essays on the reception and interpretation of the Council of Nicaea and its Creed in Africa (by Teddy Sakupapa), contestations around the intrusion of Christian discourses and practices in traditional cultural contexts, in this case Cameroon (by Elias Bongmba), and the construction of a new religious movement in the hybrid Christian–African traditional religion of the Ibandla lamaNazaretha (Nazareth Baptist Church) by Isaiah Shembe (by Sibusiso Masondo); and “Power, Critique, Feminism, and Invention: Critical Perspectives on Religious Discourses,” with essays on Catholic discourses on the paranormal and practices of exorcism (by Nicole Bauer), conceiving of new directions in Catholic theology of human dignity as public theology (by Christiaan Hermans), New Materialism as a philosophical framework to engage the figure of Mary, the Mother of God, to reconceptualise divinity for feminist theology (by Calvin Ullrich), and the retrojection of Romanticism and its legacy cultural values on to the processes of inventive curation of those material artifacts that (now supposedly) constitute – for us – the cultural world of the Roman Empire (by Robyn Walsh).

So, what is that golden line that connects the essays in this issue? It might be useful to invoke here, for the purpose of drawing the connections, Bruce Lincoln’s polythetic definition of religion in which, in various ratios, elements of four domains are operationally constitutive:²

1. A discourse whose concerns transcend the human, temporal, and contingent, and that claims for itself a similarly transcendent status.

2. A set of practices whose goal is to produce a proper world and/or proper human subjects, as defined by a religious discourse to which these practices are connected.

3. A community whose members construct their identity with reference to a religious discourse and its attendant practices, and

4. An institution that regulates religious discourse, practices, and community, reproducing them over time and modifying them as necessary, while asserting their eternal validity and transcendent value.

Thus, as Lincoln summarises it: “All four domains – discourse, practice, community, and institution – are necessary parts of anything that can properly be called a ‘religion.’ ”³ It should be noted, however, that all four domains constitute only the terms of the definitional conceptualisation, and thus that each domain encompasses a variety of possible positionalities/position-takings such that each domain is also a field of difference, contestation, and conflict.⁴ The essays in this issue explore in various ways and in various specific situations or contexts these fields of difference, contestations, and conflicts.

An unspoken assumption underlying the domain of regulatory institutions is the phenomenon of the operations of power, understood here in an adapted Foucauldian sense as the capacity to effect outcomes (which operation can range from classification, order, and institutionalisation; authorisation; persuasion; coercion; covert and overt violence). As Sakupapa shows, the Council of Nicaea, its Creed, its reception in the history of theology and in Africa particularly, are all deeply enmeshed with and coded with imperial ideology. That Constantine played a central role in the calling of the Council in order to lay to rest the theological conflicts consuming the eastern provinces of the Roman Empire as well as officiating at the Council and suggesting the key Nicene definition of the relation of Christ’s divine sonship to God the Father (as homoousios), this is all well known. What is less known is that on becoming emperor, Constantine stepped unproblematically into the traditional imperial office of pontifex maximus (traditionally the “archbishop” and protector of the cults of Rome and traditional Roman religion) becoming thereby the “ultimate bishop” of Christianity taking care of the “harmony between his new deity and his people,” effectively turning emerging Christianity into a civic religion (just like the old cults of Rome) while merging it with imperial ideology.⁵ Even as the hero of the historical narrative of the Christianisation of the Roman Empire, Constantine cut an ambiguous figure: while transforming traditional ancestral cults into a henotheistic worship of a Supreme Deity (albeit cult devoid of blood sacrifices), maintaining traditional cults and temples including cults of Tyche and Rhea,⁶ appropriating pagan symbols on his coins (e.g., Helios), Constantine naturally stepped into the role of ultimate bishop or “overseer” of all the inhabitants of the empire, both Christian and pagan. If bishops took care of cultic matters, Constantine saw his sphere as the public domain (to which he was appointed by God after his victory over Maxentius), and since Christianity was now a civic religion, the emperor naturally had a role to play in settling theological disputes that threatened the unity and harmony of the empire, as maintainer of ecumenical peace.⁷ Even though the office of pontifex maximus was abolished (but only later – by Constantine’s grandson Gratian, r. 367–383, who refused the office and title),⁸ the “Constantinian turn,” of which Nicaea was the manifestation and enduring symbol, set a pattern in place: henceforth, Christianity was imbricated with imperiality. The regularity with which anathemas were appended to confessions of faith (or explications of creedal faith) in this period,⁹ evidences the use of classification, authorisation, coercion, and at times downright violence (i.e., the operationalisation of power) to institutionalise and regularise an authorised version of Christianity.

I belabour this point, because, if the Christianity imported into Africa on the wings of the Western imperial-colonial project is chiefly shaped – in theology and practice – by the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed (itself a product of empire), then a space is opened – indeed, as a desideratum – for a decolonial, African-contextual redefinition of Christology, now no longer in terms derived from Late Antique Graeco-Roman/Neoplatonic philosophies but African cultural-contextual conceptualities to give expression to how Christology, as the systematic reflection on the divinity of Christ and his relation to/in the Godhead, can be reformulated to speak in terms familiar to an African context. This is the argument presented by Teddy Sakupapa.

Issues of power as the capacity to effect outcomes inform the essays by Bongmba and Masondo. In Masondo’s presentation of the Ibandla lamaNazaretha it is argued that one of the reasons for the formation of this new religious movement, this hybrid Christian–African traditional religion, was the empowerment of the AmaZulu in the wake of colonial dispossession … the shape of the movement and its practices was an act of resistance. The case studies of Baptist action in Wimbumland in Cameroon, discussed by Bongmba, exemplify the use of power to forcefully Christianise the country and the region, in what Bruce Lincoln called a maximalist religious model, “the conviction that religion ought to permeate all aspects of social, indeed of human existence.”¹⁰ The conflicts arising from Baptist theological prohibitions of traditional cultural (or better: religio-cultural) practices and even destruction of traditional religious shrines are the result of the meeting and clashes between different cultural discourses with all the power plays that are part of it.¹¹ As Bongmba concludes, “These contestations arise when one religious discourse – and one predicated on conversion from previous lifestyles and cultural discourses and practices – ‘intrudes’ upon the territory of a long-existing other set of cultural discourses and practices.” It is only after a longer period of insettling of a new religious worldview and sets of practices that traditional cultural practices can become disarticulated from traditional religion, and come to be seen as … only culture (and it is only roughly a century since the beginnings of the Christianisation of Wimbumland, hence the acuteness of the issue). Consider, as example from the early centuries of Christian formation, the visit of Constantius II to Rome in 357 CE, recounted by the (pagan) senator Symmachus, as an event of admiration of traditional culture:¹²

He diminished none of the privileges of the sacred virgins, he filled the priestly offices with nobles, he did not refuse the cost of the Roman ceremonies, and following the rejoicing Senate through all the streets of the eternal city, he contentedly beheld the shrines with unmoved countenance, he read the names of the gods inscribed on the pediments, he enquired about the origin of the temples, and expressed admiration for their builders. Although he himself followed another religion, he maintained its own for the empire, for everyone has his own customs, everyone his own rites. The divine Mind has distributed different guardians and different cults to different cities.

Symmachus, Third Relation 8

Regardless of the intention of Symmachus’s rhetoric, it shows the beginnings of a process whereby it was possible to present the ancient cult sites as merely monuments to venerable traditions. The contestations in Wimbumland are examples of how Christianisation occurred everywhere right through history from the beginnings of Christianity to the present day – through imposition and destruction, to be sure, but also through appropriation, reinterpretation, and contextualisation.¹³ But in spite of the “anti-heathen” rhetoric often employed in such cases (and demonisation is really a rhetoric of upping the ante), it is really a two-way street. In fact, in the much-cited essay by Birgit Meyer, “ ‘Make a Complete Break with the Past.’ Memory and Post-Colonial Modernity in Ghanaian Pentecostal Discourse,”¹⁴ she shows that notwithstanding Pentecostal preachers’ exhortations to break with traditional religious customs and practices, they often employ the very same religious technologies from traditional African religions to construct their own versions of evangelical Pentecostal Christianity, as something completely divorced from their religious past. Once the focus shifts from authorised, hegemonic discourses to lived religion, as Bongmba suggests, it is clear that the normal way of living religion is highly syncretic or hybridising. As Masondo also shows with respect to the AmaNazaretha, the Ibandla lamaNazaretha is a deliberate exercise in hybridising, which is, really, what all contextualised traditions are, traditions being adaptable discursive formations in continuous processes of reinvention. In the Ibandla lamaNazaretha we have a new religion “cobbled together” from (mainly) the Old Testament, African conceptions of God with a very low Christology, the cultural phenomenon of prophecy, in combination with adapted Christianised Zulu cultural customs, and a social organisation responding to conditions of life under a colonial regime.

If religion is also a collective noun for those traditional customs and practices, the affectively-charged habitus (the inculcated habits, ways of seeing the world and acting accordingly), and the materialisation of religious imaginaries in artifacts and cultic spaces – in other words: culture, then here, in the essays by Bongmba and Masondo, we encounter another intersection between the domains of institutionalising power operations and cultural practices.

Operations of power surface as well in Bauer’s essay on the discourses of the paranormal and demonic, and the institutionalisation of practices of exorcism (as officially prescribed and regulated rituals). Framing her study by the Foucauldian concept of pastoral power, she shows how a class of exorcistic ritual experts have come to be constituted and authorised in the Roman Catholic Church. The “exorcistic movement” arose in the interstices of a cultural worldview that had taken leave of a transcendent world populated by spirit beings, and one very much predicated on the interpenetration of the spirit world with the human world (supported by church doctrine according to which spirit/demonic beings and the Devil exist, and that they act in the human world). Through an extensive process of authorising as ritual experts as well as through popularising their views in publications and social media, exorcists gain enormous power over the individuals they claim to heal and in the communities in which they operate. It is not simply a throwback to a mediaeval worldview, as inputs from psychology and psychiatry are also employed, but the fact remains that it posits a world that is open to “non-obvious beings,” and in that, the world that exorcists and their enthusiastic supporters inhabit, sidles up closely to that of traditional cultures, very definitely divorced from what is conventionally still called secular culture.¹⁵ The phenomenon occupies a specific positionality in the complex make-up of the contemporary Roman Catholic Church (but also across a broader range of Christian religious formations and denominations).

The two essays by Hermans and Ullrich plough the fields of discourse construction in Christian theology, albeit discourse constructions with social implications, and thus with relevance to community and in the extension of which, with reimagined practices of being religious. Hermans critiques regnant discourses on human dignity in Catholic Social Teaching, in order to rethink what makes for a dignified human life – in short, the capabilities to achieve a fulfilled life or quality of life. But since this is not solely dependent on individual capabilities, but also through a conducive social, political, and economic environment – the domain of social and political action, this becomes part of the task of public theology, which is that theological discourse that speaks to matters of import to a broad public. Ullrich investigates how recourse is taken to the figure of Mary (in the history of theology the feminine, and Mary, taken to signify the material creation over against God as rational Creator) to devise a new materialism in which the feminine/creation is absorbed into the divine, rethinking the relation between materiality, femininity, and the divine. He proposes “rethinking materiality, not as a passive substrate but as a dynamic, form-giving force. This plastic ontology posits that matter itself is dynamically related to signification and when considered theologically, Mary, in this view, emerges as a site of generative possibility, embodying the contingency and transformative potential of divinity.” This is the substance of the new understanding of materiality as propounded in the New Materiality.

Lastly, the essay by Robyn Walsh seems to stand at a distance to the other essays. But by showing how those material artifacts she discusses – sculptures supposedly representing (as in making present) Greek and Roman antiquity, but it concerns not only these examples, these are emblematic of much of the curated remains of antiquity – are actually “cobbled fictions,” some of fairly recent origins even, assembled together to sustain a certain mythical idealisation of a pure Graeco-Roman (but mostly Greek) past. This myth of Greekness is a legacy of Romanticism as a cultural movement in which the discovery (and invention) of a heroic Greek past-as-ideal performed ideological work in the massively turbulent years of the late eighteenth through the nineteenth century to manufacture national identities in Europe, and to provide an intellectual remedy to the traumas and social disruptions of industrialisation. While Romanticism is drawn on to interpret the phenomenon of cobbled-together artworks, the Romantic era and its complex legacies were also the foundations for almost all our current scholarly fields of study, all of which coded by the values embedded in the myth of Greekness and the imperial ideals built on this myth of a once-upon-a-time greatness. The value of Walsh’s study lies in its unmasking of the fictitiousness and factitiousness of our inherited vision of the past and constructions of history (and the practice of historiography).¹⁶ That her study is also of importance for a redescriptive historiography of Graeco-Roman religions and Christian origins is more than borne out by the fact that it is now recognised that Mediterranean religions in antiquity and Christianity in its first formative centuries have been “cobbled” in the image of Western, European, cultural imaginations in the long nineteenth century.¹⁷ That this has grave significance for our understanding of Christian origins is more than illustrated by a slew of recent studies on the (mis)curation – and sometimes even pastiches of pasted together material evidences – of the artifacts on the basis of which the historiography of Christianity in its early centuries is manufactured.¹⁸ Her essay raises important questions the significance of which far transcends only cultural or religious studies: Who owns history? Which history is manufactured in whose image? How is the objectness of a historical or discursive object constituted by the processes of producing and curating it? What Christian discourse is, should be rethought. That is the challenge calling us to renewed vigour in reflexive scholarship.