“Alas! Alas for you, lawyers and Pharisees, hypocrites that you are! You shut the door of the kingdom of Heaven in people’s faces; you do not enter yourselves, and when others are entering, you stop them. Alas! Alas for you lawyers and Pharisees, hypocrites! You travel over sea and land to win one convert; and when you have won him you make him twice as fit for hell as you are yourselves.” (Matt. 23: 13-15).
The Pharisees were a clerical class, possibly lower than the high priests such as came with the Roman governor and King Herod to confront Jesus, but who were nonetheless in agreement to undo Jesus’ work: “When the chief priests and Pharisees heard his parables, they saw that he was referring to them; they wanted to arrest him, but they were afraid of those who looked upon Jesus as prophet.” (Matt 22: 45-46). The Christians are loath to look upon Jesus as a prophet, only Muslims do, agreeing with Jesus that he was in submission to God, for he did not come of his own accord, but was sent by God Himself.
So the battle lines were drawn between Pauline Christians who propounded alien doctrines to contradict God’s word, and those who looked upon Jesus as a prophet, who were in submission to God Almighty’s command and observed the circumcision as Jesus bid them; i.e. the Muslims. Giving a long, stern warning to his followers, Jesus said: “Take care that no one misleads you. For many will come claiming my name and saying, ‘I am the Messiah’; and many will be misled by them. The time is coming when you will hear the noise of battle near at hand and the news of battles far away; see that you are not alarmed. Such are bound to happen, but the end is still to come. For nation will make war upon nation, kingdom upon kingdom; there will be famines and earthquakes in many places. With all these things the birth-pangs of a new age begin.
“You will then be handed over for punishment and execution; and men of all nations will hate you for your allegiance to me. Many will fall from their faith; they will betray one another and hate one another... and as lawlessness spreads, men’s love for one another will grow cold. But the man who holds out to the end will be saved. And this gospel of the Kingdom - of submission to the Almighty - will be proclaimed throughout the earth as a testimony to all nations; and then the end will come.” (Mt 24:4-14).
It is worth mention here that nowhere in history have Trinitarian Christians been persecuted, but rather they have perpetrated genocides on natives of North America under the guise of promoting Godliness and murdered all who differed with them elsewhere. They massacred millions of Unitarian believers in the Middle Ages and began the murderous Crusades against Islam, killing millions upon millions, which has continued to the present. So, Jesus was not referring to Christian persecution as the Church would have many believe, but of those who paid allegiance to him as a prophet - the Muslims. The world is witnessing this reality on a daily basis.
It is crystal clear from the above that the message of truth will reach all parts of the world however much the “hypocrites” may hate it or try to prevent it by the continuous slaughter of the believers. “Heaven and earth will pass away,” assured Jesus, “but my words will never pass away. Hold yourselves ready, therefore, because the Son of Man will come at a time you least expect him.” (Mt 24:44).
In 1888, a mere seven years before the continent of Africa was carved up following a meeting in Belgium by European Christian powers, Edward Wilmot Blyden, who was born a slave on the Caribbean Island of St. Thomas, published a warning to all Africans about their impending doom at the hands of Christian Europe. Although education was prohibited by law to slaves, the Almighty had bestowed on him such intelligence and wisdom that the slave system made him a priest so as to control him. However, when slavery was abolished, he took what little belongings he had at the ripe old age of seventeen and headed for the Motherland. Blyden settled in West Africa and did much travelling in that region learning the people’s ways.
He observed in his book ‘Christianity, Islam and the Negro Race’ that Muslim communities found further inland were far more advanced and socially coherent than the pockets of Christian villages established along the coastline who saw and planned their lives in the light of the European vision and education of themselves: “Wherever I turned for light and guidance, I saw only what the dominant white man had said in his own way for his purposes; or discovered, now and then, some crude literary effort of the Negro in exile and bondage, giving in broken utterances and in forma pauperis, the conceptions of a blurred past and the hope of an indistinct and troubled future,” lamented Blyden.
As is evident in the Church Missionary Intelligencer review of Blyden’s groundbreaking work in the November 1887 edition, the Church predictably maligned him for “eulogizing Islam to the disparagement of Christianity”. However, to Blyden’s relief, most reviewers “have discovered no attack upon Christianity itself, but only a serious arraignment of the methods of the Christian teachers of the Negro”.
Blyden affirmed; “The experience of each day, especially when we contrast the result of the two systems, convinces the careful and earnest student of the question that an effective missionary among the Natives of interior Africa, whether pagan or Muslim, must begin with ‘Silver and gold have I none’ and continue with, ‘Stand up, I myself also am a man,” Blyden concluded and continued; “And it is becoming more and more apparent that an enterprise which requires so much and such continuous foreign aid and oversight - such an apparatus of alien training and directing agencies - is ill-adapted to compete with that energetic and cosmopolitan system from Arabia, whose agents are indigenous and stand on their own legs, pursuing methods, which, if under the inspiration of the Koran, are ‘racy of the soil’.”
Blyden warned that the Christian approach in Africa would stifle natural development among Africans; Nature suppressed, if vigorous, will make an outlet for itself, and there is no telling the shape it will take when once it has found or made that outlet. The dependency syndrome of Africans, argue the editors of Christian Missionarism and the Alienation of the African Mind, “seems to have originated at this juncture contrary to O. Mannoni’s erroneous thesis”.
Indeed Blyden was merely echoing Jesus’ warning that “Imposters will come... and they will produce great signs and wonders to mislead even God’s chosen if that were possible. See, I have forewarned you.” (Mt 24: 24-25). Jesus had also cautioned about complacency on the part of humanity; “If a servant is bad and says to himself; The master is a long time coming; and begins to bully the other servants and to eat and drink with his drunken friends, then the master will arrive on a day that the servant does not know and will cut him in pieces. Thus he will find his place among the hypocrites, where there is wailing and grinding of teeth.” (Mt.24:48-51). Jesus prophesised about today’s falsehood that is seen everywhere masquerading as truth, the proverbial wolf in sheepskin.
For the Africans especially, and other darker skinned peoples, the situation got worse beyond imagination. They were systematically deprived of the knowledge of the true history of the Christian movement and given Paul’s epistles instead of a rigorous study of the Gospels. The white Church, as seen from the Dutch Reformed Church teachings, could do this with no qualms whatsoever since Africans were skeepsels, after all; mere creatures who could be brought along and civilised and have some semblance of honour conferred upon them although they were never to be equal to their white co-religionists. Even missionaries who were fond of quoting Bible passages that emphasised the common origin of humanity such as David Livingstone, Robert Moffat, Albert Schweitzer and others who are now presented as heroes to the African vanquished, were not free from a bigoted sense of superiority: It is not easy, said Livingstone in his 47-page lecture at Cambridge University in the nineteenth century, to make the subject of religion plain to persons unaccustomed to think, and who have led an animal life.
Thus the Church adopted a two-prong approach in Africa. To white followers they taught discipline and condemned idleness by invoking the Biblical verses; Listen, my son, listen and become wise; set you mind on the right course. Do not keep company with drunkards or those who are greedy for the flesh-pots, Proverbs 23:19-20. Do not give the vigor of your manhood to women... Proverbs 31:3. Give strong drink to the desperate and wine to the embittered (African subjects); such men will drink and forget their poverty and remember their troubles no longer. Proverbs 31:6-7. Africans, on the other hand, were taught obedience to the white man; ‘Turn the other cheek; pray for them that abuse you and bless them that curse you!’ Africans were to never apply their “carnal minds” to understand the things of God.
(Continues tomorrow)
