Summoned from the Margin: Homecoming of an African
by Lamin Sanneh, Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company
The name Lamin Sanneh is hardly a household one for most Canadian Presbyterians, but he is someone worth getting to know. His autobiography is a compelling read, simply in terms of the unlikely and remarkable trajectory of his life.
Sanneh was born in a small village in the Gambia (into the Islamicized Mandinka people of West Africa), eventually converted to Christianity and later went on to become professor of world Christianity at Yale University.
Even more, it is worth getting to know Sanneh because his narrative and scholarship represent a significant resource for the western church as it confronts two overlapping realities: namely, the crisis of confidence in its own ranks and the dramatic rise of Christianity across Africa.
For Sanneh, encounter with the risen Jesus, whom he first met through the Islamic traditions of his childhood and youth, lies at the centre of the story. He writes of his discovery of Jesus as one who lived a compellingly human life, and of his discovery that this Jesus is the embodiment of God’s forgiveness. In sharing his story, Sanneh writes beautifully of the moment of his turning to Jesus: “Like a gentle nod, a wave of anticipation rose in me as I responded feebly to a long delayed invitation, like rejoining a journey begun before my mother conceived me.”
The person of Jesus and the forgiveness he embodies are central both to Sanneh’s story and to the story of Christian renewal that is unfolding across Africa today, where it is expected there will be more than 600 million Christians by 2025. Although the Christianity that is coming to fresh expression across the continent is neither uniform nor uniformly positive (Sanneh would ask whether Christianity in the West has ever been so!), this Christianity is nevertheless rooted in a very real re/discovery of God and is unabashed in its faith in Jesus.
At the same time, Sanneh’s deep convictions about the reality of God’s love and of forgiveness in Christ do not translate into an attitude of superiority or into a refusal to engage openly with those of other traditions. His convictions are held firmly, but also lightly, so that he remains open to expressions of global Christianity and to dialogue and encounter with Islam (both personally and academically). Sanneh will argue, in fact, that our engagement with world Christianity and with Islam can only be meaningful if we western Christians know where we ourselves stand. Also, that such engagement will invariably require of us that we decide where we stand on foundational questions of faith.
Sanneh’s openness to conversation with others is rooted both in his faith and in his particular experiences as a person. His openness to dialogue with Muslims, for example, cannot be separated out from his first discovery of Jesus within Islam itself. I am enough a student of Kierkegaard to know that there are some things we humans cannot give directly to one another, the kind of openness exhibited by Sanneh being a prime example. We must learn or discover this openness for ourselves, if at all. Yet having read Sanneh’s autobiography, and having had the opportunity to speak with him by telephone at his Connecticut home, I have come away with the sense that this is someone who can apprentice us in the ways of a generous and gracious orthodoxy.
We in the western church stand at a stark crossroads. In our cultural context, orthodox expressions of faith are marginalized and maligned and our confidence in faith wanes. And we look across to sisters and brothers within global Christianity who are uninhibited in expressing their faith in Christ and in pointing out the implications of this faith for the wider society. Living our faith in such a context can often be a lonely experience, notwithstanding the friendship and community that the body of Christ affords.
On this question of loneliness, Sanneh again proves a helpful guide. This is so not only because he invites us into conversation and community with those who live faith more confidently in the worldwide context, but also because he has lived through the experience of loneliness in faith. Following his conversion to Christ as a teenager, Sanneh approached the local Protestant and Roman Catholic churches in Banjul, the Gambia, seeking baptism, only to be rebuffed for more than a year. When he later moved to America, he found local Protestant congregations to be less than fully hospitable toward him.
Even more, as a scholar Sanneh has staked out positions that have made his a lonely voice in the academy, arguing, for example, that the work of Christian missionaries sometimes led to a renewal of indigenous cultures (particularly through their linguistic work and their translation of the Christian scriptures). That is, he argues, that missionaries were sometimes more than mere handmaids of colonialism. Further, he has argued that the contemporary renewal of Christianity across the continent is indigenous to Africa and its own people, rather than being simply a vestige of colonial exploitation.
Through this personal and professional “loneliness” Sanneh has exhibited faithful patience, holding fast to Christ and his purposes in the face of broken Christian community and in the face of ideological resistance to the gospel as a constructive force relative to culture. I suspect that Lamin Sanneh would say that his patience and trust in Christ have been rewarded, finding himself at home as he now does within the Roman Catholic Church. And we can only hope that his academic colleagues might one day become open to Sanneh’s counter-intuitive arguments concerning the constructive contributions of Christian faith and mission in relation to indigenous African culture.
In our particular context it is refreshing to discover among the saints one who speaks so clearly and helpfully and hospitably. Sanneh’s hospitality was on display as we ended our recent telephone conversation with traditional Mandinka greetings that I had learned from my wife (who spent a year and a half working as a nurse in the Gambia). Faithful to his West African heritage, Sanneh also asked me to pass on his greetings to Becky, which I was only too happy to do.
