After the Woke University, Then What?: Lessons from the Azanian Project in Southern Africa

 

This essay is, for the most part, descriptive of what is called Azanian philosophy.  This philosophy offers, in my view, an excellent example of the tribalist thought that necessarily follows postmodern relativism and its social values of diversity, equity, and inclusion.  Azania is a name given to southeastern Africa from earlier times, and the new project of an Azanian social and political philosophy is a critical theory that intends to deconstruct ‘South African’ (the country’s name is problematic itself) identity from the time of its colonial inception.  It criticises the post-Apartheid developments in the country because the problem in Africa is far deeper than cultural conflict or economic disparity.  The paper follows the lengthy, detailed, and erudite article by Joel Modiri titled, ‘Azanian Political Thought and the Undoing of South African Knowledges’.[1] Modiri is an associate professor and the head of the Department of Jurisprudence at the University of Pretoria, and his paper attempts to offer a philosophical foundation for the sort of radicalism that we find in political activists in South Africa such as Julius Malema and his Economic Freedom Fighters (not mentioned in the paper).  As such, it articulates a post-postmodernist alternative philosophy to post-colonial movements in Africa.  It also offers a look at a challenge facing the university, not only in ‘Azania’ but or in Africa but also beyond the continent’s borders.  Amidst my abbreviated description of Modiri’s points, I will interject some of my own criticisms, which could be multiplied further.  My primary purpose, however, is to explore where the university might go next after wokism, if allowed to pursue a post-Christian, post-Enlightenment trajectory.

As Modiri explains, Azanianism[2] rejects

the ubiquitous valorisation of Western values, institutions, and knowledges (sic); taken-for-granted assumptions about the solidity, naturalness, and permanence of the South African state; a hegemonic ANC-centred narrative of history and politics; and uncritical acceptance of liberal multiracialism and moderate politics as entrenched in the post-1994 constitutional order.[3]

‘Azania’ is suggested as an alternative place name to South Africa.  The Azanian ‘five-fold itinerary’ involves:

1.     an advancing of the struggle for liberation in law, politics, and society

2.     critique and negate Western civilisation (colonialism, white supremacy, racial capitalism)

3.     an analytical focus and consciousness of race and racialisation

4.     an historical perception of South Africa’s negative history since colonialism

5.     a ‘restoration and reaffirmation of the political and cultural integrity of African, indigenous, and Black experiences and consciousness’.[4]

Whereas critical theory is ideological, this Azanian critical theory is deconstructive of Western civilisation and formulates an ideology around African identity.  Peculiarly, critical theory is Western, and the Azanian ideology is an imagined construct of African identity.  This is not contextualisation, not an attempt to recover some stage of some African culture or another, not an attempt to affirm a present African identity—as it claims.  It is a new construction of African identity by some vanguard of ‘Azanian philosophy’. 

This involves something along the lines of Western critical theory, but it is a different agenda from what we find with, say, Antonio Gramsci.  Gramsci took Marxist critical theory (the aim of which was to create a universal revolution whereby the proletariat class would overthrow the bourgeoisie) and broaden it to (1) deconstruct all social institutions (not just government and the economy), (2) create a crisis that would galvinise people and force them into action, and (3) leave open the end that this critique will produce.[5]  The Azanian version of critical theory is not open-ended, but it is someone’s or some group’s vision of what an African social construct might be.  In other words, it is putty in the hands of someone wanting to destroy how it has been previously shaped and made into whatever one wishes.

A significant element of Azanian philosophy is to deconstruct not only the power of white people in South Africa but also white methods and white logic as they appear in the academy.  The flip side of this deconstruction of whiteness is not by any means a more pristine pursuit of universalism or colourblindness but a promotion of blackness.  Referencing the claims of M. B. Ramose, Joel Modiri says, ‘The massive academic and scientific power that whites wield over higher education and knowledge production is characterised by a Eurocentric order of knowledge and a Northbound gaze.’[6]  This claim imagines a hegemonic intellectualism and politic in higher education.  That higher education can become so has been demonstrated repeatedly, such as in the ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’ (DEI) values in Western universities in the 21^st century.  The question to ask, however, is whether the university is capable of self-correcting by virtue of being committed to a notion of truth that allows disagreement and requires proof, not political posturing.  The Azanian philosophy offers the opposite.  Like DEI, it is a political ideology that does not support the values of true research.  Like DEI, it is racist.  Unlike DEI, its values are African (not diversity), privilege (not equity), and exclusion (not inclusion).

Thus, the construction of a black African intellectual tradition would be

a self-consciously cultivated and reproduced tradition of analysis deriving its key questions, assumptions, methods, conceptual conventions, styles, and idioms from the authority of Black historical experiences and from the cosmology and cultural-linguistic resources of the African majority, practiced (institutionally and extra-institutionally) within an autonomous and organised community of interlocutors.[7]

This is not just a replacement of white racism with black racism.  It is that, but it is also a replacement of the very concept of a university that is founded on the Christian and Enlightenment belief in truth.  The university can only function as a uni-versity if the intellectual work of the different fields of study cooperate in working toward the end of truth.  To be a university, a university must reject the notion of different ‘truths’ within different fields of study, let alone for different groups of people or even individuals.  The presumed ‘whiteness’ of the university did not, in fact, call for racist, cultural, or ethnocentric analyses, assumptions, and methods that are promoted by Azanian philosophy.  As M. Mamdani argues, however, the vastly different intellectual views of liberalism, social Marxism, and conservatism are one and the same product of white intellectualism, and therefore to be rejected out of hand.[8]  If universities succumbed to such political lenses bending their vision in academic research and teaching (and it does), as universities their commitment to truth would eventually be corrected.  (This is happening right now to some extent in American universities with the rejection of antisemitism and wokism.)  Azanian philosophy, however, enshrines a particular, ethnic perspective.  It assumes that all research is political, not scientific.  It imagines that one political perspective (African) is preferred.  It further imagines that there is such a thing as an ‘African tradition’ of analysis.  The Azanian construct ignores the diversity of black tribes in South Africa, let alone Africa, itself prior to colonialism and seeks to create something that never was: a supra-cultural culture of African tradition.[9]  Moreover, it ignores the fact that cultures evolve and do not remain static.  Finally, while it rejects certain cultures and enshrines as sacrosanct some constructed and static ‘Azanian’ culture, it lacks a non-political, self-critical analysis and moral critique.

The Azanian philosophy is both pre-colonial in its nostalgia and very much part of Western, Marxist intellectualism.  It is part of the Western intellectual story in that it is a ‘critical theory’.  As such, it interprets everything through the lens of power (versus truth).  It rejects the very notion of objectivism (and therefore scientific research).  In its promotion of a particular type of subjectivism, one that is African, it hopes to return to a pre-colonial past, and in so doing it takes postmodernity to its natural and next stage: tribalism.[10]  Its replacement for Marxist utopianism is this imaginary ‘Azania’, a pan-African ‘something’ that is good simply because it is African and that has little to define it other than the vaguest of vague notions.  The question will need to be asked, ‘Is it also violent?’  As G. Gerhart says of what Modiri calls the Azanian tradition, ‘the only way in which domination will ever be broken is by a black force.’[11] (The rejection of liberalism’s assimiliationist hopes and the terrible consequences of what we are now to call an Azanian programme was imagined in the fictional book by South Africa’s celebrated author, Nadine Gordimer, in July’s People.)

Three intellectual projects that Modiri rejects are liberalism (modernist and postmodernist), privileging ‘deracialisation’ over ‘decolonisation’, and the postcolonial shift to nation building that ignored the ongoing white supremacy and imperialism.  I will present my own descriptions of these but try to get at the points he is making.  Liberalism operates in the modernist world of universal reason and therefore rejects the independence of a racial group.  It seeks to address racism by skirting the issue of race and addressing the issues more conceptually.  Postmodern liberal thinking is anti-foundational, and therefore opposes essentialism, the view that some characteristics are essential and not accidental.  Of course, postmodernity is relativistic and subjective, but constructs are considered ephemeral and therefore neither foundational nor essential.  An Azanian philosophy, though, insists that culture and history are essential, and, in the case of Africa, conceptualisation of the self and of the community must necessarily include a cosmology that includes belief in the active role of tribal ancestors, the spirit world, and the solidarity of the community.  Liberalism, on the other hand, seeks to dismantle race when addressing racism in the institutions, social structures, and intellectual understanding.

The second project that Modiri rejects is the privileging of ‘deracialisation’ over ‘decolonisation’.  In this, he notes the work of Suren Pillay, who directs the Centre for African Studies at the University of Cape Town.[12]  The privileged attack of Apartheid in South Africa came from Marxism (in religious circles, ‘liberation theology’).  Marxist thought in South African departments of humanities and Marxist rewriting of the country’s history focussed issues on class, not race.  Thus, capitalism, not colonialism, was the problematic past and the issue to be addressed.

The third project involves addressing ongoing white supremacy and imperialism and not suppressing these matters in the concern of nation building.  (The article is focussed on Western imperialism and ignores Chinese economic colonialism and imperialism in Africa.)  Modiri writes,

Dismantling the conceptual whiteness of the academy will require a new generation of oppositional Black academics to reset the terms of social, historical, political analysis through a sustained intellectual and political engagement with the global archive of liberatory Black thought.[13]

Midway through his essay, Modiri turns to outline three tenets of Azanian social and political thought.  These are:

1.     South Africa as an Unjust and Unethical Political Formation

2.     A Black Radical Conception of Race/Racism

3.     African Culture, History, Experience, and Imagination as the Basis for Knowledge Production and Liberation

To criticise South Africa’s colonial history and the Nationalist Party’s Apartheid programme is an easy if not brief task, and the Azanian theorist picks up the powerful winds of such criticism to sail away on his or her own course.  That course involves

1.     ‘the remaking of African identities against tribalist and ethnic divisions as well as spiritual and cultural repair and transformation of those identities;’[14] 

2.     ‘the total dismantling of white supremacy (and not its accommodation)’;[15]

3.     ‘a fundamental change in the basic structure and governing values of South African society through a re-ordering of its political, economic, and cultural-intellectual systems and practices.’[16]

The Azanian project, then, is one of deconstruction (the second point) and of construction (points 1 and 3). Just who gets to take the helm in ‘remaking’, ‘repairing’, ‘changing’, and ‘re-ordering’, and where all this will lead, is where the messiness of calls for change of any sort steps in.  Moreover, I would argue, to criticise the structure of the state using critical theory (really, Critical Race Theory) as itself ‘white’ and, as the theory goes, therefore bad, is to cover over the history of Africa itself.  This would be like criticising the slave trade from Africa as only a problem of colonialism and not also a problem of African tribal warfare and greedy African chiefs or kings.  The story of power abuse is not the privileged domain of the Europeans or the colonists.  Nor is it the only story by any means.  This is reductivism at its worst.  By interpreting South Africa’s history through the lens of colonialism alone is to miss the human story played out throughout time and cultures: the problem of sin.  Missing from Azanian thought is any serious religious commitment or interpretation.  One can only conclude that the great story of Africa’s turn to Christianity in the 20^th century would be dismissed as just another example of white thought because most of the story of Christian missions in Africa comes from Europe and America.

Modiri follows the argument of the radical Congress Youth League from the 1940s.  This argument is that Africa belongs to Africa, not the whites, who have no rights over the land, the people, or the politics.[17]  The policy of the African Nationalist Congress Youth League (its radical wing) calls for a rejection of the moderate approach of change in South Africa of assimilation of blacks into the white culture and structures of power.  It rejects the desire for

civil and political rights, for belonging, inclusion, and recognition within the settler-created and settler-dominated social order, for access to the civilisational accoutrements and universalist promises of Western modernity, and for the (racial) democratisation of the colonial system.[18]

It also calls for a rejection of the borders established by colonial powers not only for South Africa but for all of Africa (presumably, black Africa).

The constructivist programme of Azanianism may sound concrete, but it is in fact very general and lacks analytical and critical merit. Modiri says,

For the Africanists and black radicals of Azania, the main philosophical and cultural source of the liberation struggle and the primary knowledge system from which paradigms of law, social organisation, political ordering, religious, cultural and educational practices and institutions, ecology, aesthetics, and moral norms for a liberated society would be the unfolding and evolving African historical experience.[19]

Just what is, for example, the religious unfolding and evolving African historical experience?  Is this a return to African Traditional Religion (and, if so, which practices on the continent are African?)?  Does ‘unfolding and evolving’ mean some imaginary new religion made up of religions on the continent, including Christianity and Islam?   Stated in the way it is, the proposal is not only vague but also nonsense.  It imagines itself to be a critical theory, but it is in fact not critical enough.  Whatever roams on the African continent—provided it is not an import unsuited to Africa—is gathered uncritically as treasure.  The process of ‘unfolding and evolving’ is mere ethnographic appreciation, not discernment.  The Azanian project begs the questions, ‘Who gets to say what is good and why?’

In this essay, I have noted my own aversion to Azanian philosophy.  One of my criticisms is that, like so much of the social Marxism in which Azanianism is rooted but also from which it departs, the details of where this is all headed are vague, and the project could take various turns.  My own suggestion is rootedness not in some human identity, such as African, but in the Christian tradition that is both particular or exclusive and universal.  The Azanian project, I suggest, is an anti-university project in its rejection of the pursuit of truth and the unity fields of study have because there is such a thing as truth.  It is representative of the sort of postmodern subjectivism in great favour in the universities under Western dominance while also of the African tribalism that affirms a particular subjectivism: a reinvented and reformed African tradition.  South Africa has been floating listlessly since Apartheid—the winds of liberation having dropped.  It is a ship going nowhere in the doldrums of a wide ocean.  Azanianism proposes to dismantle the ship, a white man’s vessel, while still at sea.  If this project takes hold in South African university departments, the university will be replaced with the ‘ulwaluko’ or circumcision and instruction in manhood institution of traditional Africa.  The erudite academics, with their critical theory and imaginative constructions of African identity of the present university, will be redundant.

Related Articles by Rollin Grams: 

Mission as Theological Education in Africa 6: Academic Challenges in African Universities

This is an article summarising a book addressing problems in African universities, particularly in South Africa: R. W. Johnson, African University: The Critical Case of South Africa and the Tragedy of the UKZN (Tafelberg Short, 2012).

The Postmodern University and Its New Methodologies

This article gives a brief summary of new methodologies.

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[1] Joel Modiri, ‘Azanian Political Thought and the Undoing of South African Knowledges,’ Theoria, Issue 168, Vol. 68, No. 3 (September 2021), pp. 42-85; online: Modiri_Azanian_2021.pdf (accessed 30 March, 2025). 

[2] Modiri himself avoids the term ‘Azanianism’, but he uses different nouns to follow ‘Azanian’.

[3] Modiri, p. 44.  I have attempted to abbreviate the points in the interest of greater simplicity.

[4] Modiri, p. 45.

[5] For Antonio Gramsci, see the collection of his writings in The Gramsci Reader: Selected Writings 1916-1935, ed. David Forgacs (New York: New York University, 2000).  For my discussion of Gramsci, see my What is Progressive Theology? (self-published, pdf, 2022), pp. 100-104; available at my bookshop, Bible and Mission: Book Shop.

[6] Modiri, p. 47; M. B. Ramose, ‘“African Renaissance”: A Northbound Gaze’, Politeia 19.3 (2000), pp. 47–61.

[7] Modiri, p. 48.

[8] As noted by Modiri, p. 49.  Cf. M. Mamdani, ‘When Does a Settler Become a Native? Reflections on the Colonial Roots of Equatorial and South Africa,’ Inaugural lecture as AC Jordan professor of African Studies (Cape Town: University of Cape Town, 1998).

[9] There are similar projects that could be reviewed: a racially and ethnically determined, pan-Slavic movement in the 19^th and early 20^th century, a Germanic racial movement in fascist Germany and surrounding countries in the mid-20^th century; a pan-Islamic, religio-political ideology (cf. Abul A’la Maududi); etc.

[10] I addressed this development in 2017.  Cf. Rollin G. Grams, The Church and Western Tribalism: Studies in Theology and Culture (self-published, pdf., 2017); available from my bookshop online: Bible and Mission: Book Shop.

[11] G. Gerhart, Black Power in South Africa: Evolution of an Ideology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), p. 163.

[12] Articles written by Suren Pillay and cited by Modiri are: ‘Translating ‘South Africa’: Race, Colonialism and Challenges of Critical Thought after Apartheid,’ in H. Jacklin and P. Vale, eds, Re-imaging the Social in South Africa: Critique, Th`eory and Post-apartheid Society (Durban: KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2009), pp. 235–267, and ‘Why I am No Longer a Non-racialist: Identity and Difference,’ in X. Mangcu, ed, The Colour of our Future: Does Race Matter in Post apartheid South Africa (Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2015), pp. 133 – 152.

[13] Modiri, p. 55.  In this third point, Modiri references the work of Jemima Pierre, an associate professor of sociocultural anthropology at the University of California, LA.  See her The Predicament of Blackness: Postcolonial Ghana and the Politics of Race (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2013).

[14] Modiri, p. 61, referencing Gerhart, p. 61.

[15] Modiri, p. 61, referencing R. M. Sobukwe, ‘The Opening Address at the Africanist Inaugural Convention,’ (4 April 1959); https://www.sahistory.org.za/archive/document-58-robert-mangaliso-sobukwe-opening-address-africanist-inaugural-convention-4 (accessed 31 March, 2025).  However, Sobukwe cannot so easily be signed up to Azanianism as Modiri wishes.  He did reject European intellectual and political exports to Africa, but he did not call for a racial division.  Instead, he said, ‘We guarantee no minority rights, because we think in terms of the individual, not groups.’  (Azanianism rejects the ‘European’ group in favour of the ‘African’ group.)  Sobukwe, therefore, rejected multiculturalism, what he termed ‘multi-racialism’: ‘To us the term "multi-racialism" implies that there are such basic insuper­able differences between the various national groups here that the best course is to keep them permanently distinctive in a kind of democratic apartheid. That to us is racialism multiplied, which probably is what the term truly connotes.’  Perhaps Sobukwe would say that Modiri’s Azanian project is racialism multiplied by virtue of a tyrannical apartheid.  Like Apartheid, Azanianism sees the world in terms of racial groups, not individuals.  Like Apartheid, it privileges one group and its culture over another.  There is a real problem in trying to tie a postmodern, tribalist (or racist) critical theory in the 21^st century to a modernist, anti-Apartheid critique in the mid-20^th century.  Indeed, Modiri wants to assert that racism is itself a European concept that needs to be deconstructed.  He says, ‘Race, for the Africanists, has no real meaning outside of the historical and political context of its ideational fabrication and material (re)production’ (p. 66).  Yet, his criticism of the white Europeans who introduced race as the primary category for determining human value, political power, and economic advantage is not limited to what they did but to who they were as white Europeans.  The end of the matter is that Azanianism makes race the key factor in everything.  It is inherently racist.  Indeed, Modiri later says, quoting Gerhart (p. 158) once again, the problem with the critique of Apartheid or colonialism in Africa by liberals and Marxists, was their  ‘failure to foreground the materiality of race, white supremacy, and settler-colonialism’ (p. 71).

[16] Modiri, p. 61, referencing G. Gerhart, p. 68.

[17] Modiri, p. 60, referencing G. Gerhart, Black Power in South Africa: Evolution of an Ideology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), p. 67.

[18] Modiri, p. 61, referencing J. Soske, Internal Frontiers: African Nationalism and the Indian Diaspora in Twentieth-Century South Africa (Johannesburg: Wits University Press. 2018).

[19] Modiri, pp. 69-70.

'In Decency and in Order': Paul's Ten Applications of This Principle in 1 Corinthians 14

 In Paul’s letters, he not only discusses theology and ethics but also very practical matters for the churches to which he writes.  One of these more practical matters appears in 1 Corinthians 14, where Paul discusses ten ways in which the church can and should conduct itself in order to maintain ‘decency and order’.  Much of what he says is straight-forward, and perhaps the only section that has caused some confusion is what Paul says about women in this chapter.  In this brief article, I will offer my explanation of the verses, but the main purpose for writing it is to highlight the fact that the whole chapter is about practical ways in which the congregation might put into practice the principle of doing all things in decency and in order.

The first check on disorderly worship is that the worship service should not be for someone’s personal, religious experience but for building up, encouraging, and consoling others in the church.  For this reason, prophecy is preferred over the speaking of mysteries in some message in tongues that only builds up the individual (14.1-12).  Crucially, note that Paul does not establish order by suppressing prophecy and speaking in tongues.  Words of prophecy are put in check by making sure that they serve the entire gathering.

The second check on disorderly worship is that it should be understandable.  Words spoken in tongues require an interpretation of tongues so that others may understand what is said, and therefore one speaking in tongues in the congregation should pray for an interpretation (14.13-19).  Paul quotes Isaiah to make his point: ‘In the law it is written, “By people of strange tongues and by the lips of foreigners will I speak to this people, and even then they will not listen to me, says the Lord”’(1 Corinthians 14.21, Isaiah 28.11, 12).  Isaiah was speaking of God’s teaching Israel a lesson through the punishment that would come through the foreign armies of Assyria.  Paul’s use of the text is at the level of implication: a lesson in a foreign tongue does not bring about obedience.  That is, a lesson in an unknown language does not lead to reform when it is not understandable.  Thus, Christian worship can only lead unbelievers to conviction and repentance if they understand what is being said.

The third and fourth checks for orderly worship are that messages in tongues should be limited to two or three and they should be delivered in turn, not all at once (14.27).  Paul does not, notably, establish order by limiting participation to a select person or to select persons.  He encourages participation: ‘When you come together, each one has a hymn, a lesson, a revelation, a tongue, or an interpretation’ (14.26).  Already in chapter 12, Paul affirmed a diversity of gifts from the Spirit in the church.

The fifth check on worship to maintain order is that, if there is no one to interpret a message in tongues, a person with such a message should keep silent (14.28).  This principle of keeping silent so as to keep order will arise again in reference to women.

The sixth check for orderly worship is in reference to prophecy, which can itself be problematic in that a prophet can claim to deliver a message from God but may in fact not be inspired to do so.  A prophet may come up with his or her own message and even use the mode of prophetic speaking for self-gain.  This was a problem already noted in the Old Testament as there were false prophets.  Jesus had warned against false prophets, too (Matthew 7.15-20).  People were wary of prophecy, and Paul felt a need to warn against quenching the Spirit and despising prophecy (1 Thessalonians 5.19-20).  Rather, the Church should ‘test everything’ (5.21).  Likewise, John says, ‘Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God, for many false prophets have gone out into the world’ (1 John 4.1).  To the Corinthian church, Paul says, ‘Let two or three prophets speak, and let the others weigh what is said’ (14.29).  Prophetic messages only have a place in the congregation if the congregation weighs and approves what is said.

The seventh check on worship so that order is maintained is that no one person should dominate.  Paul says, ‘ If a revelation is made to another sitting there, let the first be silent. ³¹ For you can all prophesy one by one, so that all may learn and all be encouraged’ (14.30-31).

The eighth check is that prophetic inspiration is not, shall we say, ecstatic, in the sense that one is unable to contain or control the message and just has to blurt it out.  Paul says, ‘the spirits of prophets are subject to prophets’ (14.32).  Paul explains that ‘God is not a God of confusion but of peace’ (14.33).  This principle of ‘peace’ runs deeply in Paul’s thinking about the church.  Based on it, he allowed Christians to divorce non-Christian spouses if the latter did not wish to remain in the marriage (1 Corinthians 7.16).  Paul’s entire letter to the Ephesian church was a letter explaining how the reign of Christ brought peace into the various relationships of believers and resulted in their unity.  Christ is our peace (Ephesians 2.14).  Ecstatic prophecy—which was known in Asia Minor especially in the cult of the goddess Cybele—was not Christian.  The spirits of prophets were subject to the prophets.

The ninth check on worship that would keep it decent and orderly had to do with women.  Paul says that the women are to remain silent and not speak in the church (14.34).  We know that this does not exclude ordered speech in the congregation, since women did pray out loud and prophesy (1 Corinthians 11.5).  Women who did so, Paul insists, were to do so with their heads covered, which was a culturally appropriate way of acknowledging household order.  That is, it was a way of recognizing that they were under their husbands’ authority, and to pray or prophesy without their heads covered would be to challenge the household’s order.  One might discuss how to apply this in other cultures, but Paul’s purpose in saying this is to keep order and to avoid introducing disorder in the church gatherings.

To return to what he says in chapter 14, we therefore note that women keeping silent is not about their not saying anything but must be about their not disrupting the service.  Paul says that women should be in submission (14.34) and ‘If there is anything they desire to learn, let them ask their husbands at home’ (14.35).  Speaking appears to have to do with questioning what was being taught in the church, either for a lack of understanding or to challenge the speaker’s message or teaching.  (Even today, congregations listen quietly to the preacher in a service without turning the sermon into a lecture followed by questions and answers or debate.)  The particular speaking in the service that Paul has in mind is a speaking that would render a disruption of order.

The cultural context is important to appreciate as we may be confused why women speaking in a meeting might be taken as indecent and disorderly.  Women in the Greek context more than in the Roman were confined to the home.  This was in part for their protection, but women out in the streets may be thought to be loose and wanton.  Of course, women might go out to the marketplace or attend a theatre, so they were not prisoners in their homes.  Their presence in the business of the city was, however, a matter of stepping into the domain where men played out their social roles.  Coupled with this, we might further need to appreciate, was the fact that education was normally for men.  A few centuries earlier, Socrates thought it unusual that the women of Crete and Sparta, the most ancient of the Greek states, allowed women to learn philosophy.  He said that they in fact excelled in it, and women prided themselves in their education (Plato, Protagoras 342d). Thus, elsewhere in Greece (and throughout the known world at the time), women wanting to participate in the teaching in a service by asking questions would prove disruptive for their lack of education as well as for their taking on a different social role.  Paul is not opposed to their learning, but that learning should take place at home.  Their husbands could answer their questions.  (It goes without saying that this passage is not only culturally embedded but also that it has nothing to do with women in the ministry, preaching, or teaching.  (In fact, Priscilla and her husband, Aquilla, instructed the noted Bible teacher, Apollos, in the full Gospel--Acts 18.26).  It has to do with women creating disorder by speaking in a public service in 1^st century Greece.

The tenth check that Paul mentions, and with this he concludes, is that those independently minded for thinking themselves prophets or spiritual in their own right do not have the right to assert their own views.  Rather, if they really are prophets and spiritual, they should agree with him.  He does not say this because he is an apostle, although he might have done so.  Rather, they should agree with him because together, as spiritual people, they can discern what is a command of the Lord (14.37).  In this point, Paul is saying that nobody has the right to private interpretation along with claims of authority (v. 36).

The verse that concludes the chapter is where we find the language of ‘in decency and in order’—the theme of the whole chapter.  Paul says, ‘So, my brothers, earnestly desire to prophesy, and do not forbid speaking in tongues. ⁴⁰ But all things should be done decently and in order’  (14.39-40).  Paul could not cover every topic facing churches in his time, let alone in subsequent centuries after him.  However, the principle of ‘in decency and in order’ is one that should still apply.  We need to appreciate that this does not exclude spiritual gifts but regulates their use according to their purposes and the nature of congregational worship.  The principle might apply in different ways at different times, as I have suggested in regard to women’s silence.  Finally, we are reminded that private interpretations cannot be legitimated on the grounds that one claims to be a prophet or spiritual.  This is an important point in our time, when innovative and revisionist interpretations in liberal denominations have undermined orthodoxy and when prophetic voices in certain charismatic churches (and notably in Africa) give prominence to individual prophets seeking attention and power rather than seeking to promote the upbuilding of the church.

Prayers of Confession, God's Steadfast Love, and Jonah

Introduction

 In Scripture, we read several prayers of confession.  Two famous ones are prayers of confession for the sins of the nation, Israel.  Both take place after the exile.  The prayer of Daniel (ch. 9) is his prayer for the nation and takes place while the Jews are still in exile.  This is, therefore, the prayer of a righteous person on behalf of the whole nation for their sins.  The prayer of Nehemiah takes place after the return from exile to Jerusalem and is a national repentance led by Nehemiah and representative elders, with the people gathered (ch. 9).  The prayer of confession in Psalm 51, on the other hand, is a personal prayer for personal sin.  The prayer of Jonah from the belly of the fish in chapter 2 is of the same sort.

 Let’s look at Jonah’s prayer.  I remember my Hebrew professor in seminary telling us that he would read this prayer exactly as it sounded.  We expected to hear what Hebrew sounded like some 2,700 years ago and sat on the edge of our seats.  He proceeded to make gurgling sounds as though he was underwater!  Very funny.  I’m sure we have all tried to picture this story in our minds—it sounds so very incredulous.  We do, however, need to listen to the words and theology in Jonah.

 In fact, the theology outpaces the narrative. The whole book of Jonah—all four chapters—is a commentary on God’s steadfast love. God tells the prophet Jonah to go to the capital of Assyria, the big city of Nineveh, and issue God’s verdict of condemnation for their sins.  We think that Jonah does not want to do this because it is a scary job assignment, but we learn over the next chapters that this was not so.  In any case, what Jonah does instead  is head west in a boat to Tarshish, which is probably Spain today.  God sends a terrific storm, and the ship is in great peril.  Jonah, however, is fast asleep in the belly of the ship.  He is calm in his sin against God.  The crew wake him, cast lots to see who might be the cause of their plight, and discover it is Jonah.  Jonah finally comes clean about his sin, once he is caught out for it.  He explains to them that His God is the God of land and sea, and they are terrified.  The storm intensifies, and the desperate crew follow Jonah’s solution: throw him to the waves.  Once they do, Jonah is swallowed by a large fish.  This is when Jonah finally prays to God, from the belly of the fish.

 The prayer in Jonah 2 is from different perspectives—from while still in the fish and afterwards.  In the end, we learn nothing about how humans might be swallowed by a large sea creature such as a whale and can be assured we do not have a stenographer’s report on what Jonah actually prayed.  What we do learn is something about prayers of confession and repentance, and we especially learn something about the God to whom we pray.

 First, we learn that God sometimes awaits our calling out to Him before He saves us.  Now, our great salvation through Jesus’ death on the cross came while we were yet sinners (Romans 5.8).  But sometimes God lets us go through a punishing time for sin to teach us to turn to Him in confession, repentance, and faith.  You might have thought that Jonah would have prayed before the sailors threw him overboard.  But we read,

Then Jonah prayed to the LORD his God from the belly of the fish, ² saying,

“I called out to the LORD, out of my distress …

  out of the belly of Sheol I cried… (2.1-2, ESV here and throughout).

 Sheol is the place of the dead.  The belly of the great fish was just as good as the place of the afterlife.  Things could not have been worse for Jonah. He was no longer in the storm facing imminent disaster; he was already there.  He was not confessing his wrongdoing and repenting before God punished him; he was already punished.  I say ‘punished’, not ‘being punished’.  Yes, we know that he is saved in the end; the fish vomits him out on shore, and he survives.  But the judgement is passed, the punishment meted out, and you would think that there is no room for confession and repentance at this point.  One take-away for us from this is that it is never too late for us to repent and confess our sins.  I’m not introducing here the erroneous teaching, in my view, that we can pray for people’s sins and salvation after death.  We read in Hebrews, ‘it is appointed for man to die once, and after that comes judgment’ (9.27).  Paul says, ‘For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, so that each one may receive what is due for what he has done in the body, whether good or evil’ (2 Corinthians 5.10).

 Second, Jonah describes what his experience of judgement was like.  One aspect of this was his experience in the water, which emphasises his desperate and deadly situation.  He says,

 For you cast me into the deep,

    into the heart of the seas,

    and the flood surrounded me;

  all your breakers and your waves

    passed over me….

The waters closed in over me to take my life;

    the deep surrounded me;

  weeds were wrapped about my head (2.3, 5).

 These words give us a graphic picture of the separation from God that we feel in our sin.  Judgement is the absence of salvation and the absence of God in our plight.  As David says in Psalm 51, ‘Cast me not away from your presence, and take not your Holy Spirit from me’ (v. 11).  Once we understand our sin, we feel our separation from our holy God.  Feeling our separation and desperate plight, we become sorrowful over our sin.  Sorrow for our sin leads us to confession, and confession leads us to repentance.  In Psalm 51, David says,

 Have mercy on me, O God,

    according to your steadfast love;

  according to your abundant mercy

    blot out my transgressions.

²   Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity,

    and cleanse me from my sin!

³   For I know my transgressions,

    and my sin is ever before me.

⁴   Against you, you only, have I sinned

    and done what is evil in your sight,

  so that you may be justified in your words

    and blameless in your judgment (1-4).

 Third, in this situation, God hears Jonah’s prayer of confession.  This prayer sounds very much like it is written after the fact because Jonah testifies that God heard him when he prayed.  He says, ‘ and he answered me,’ and ‘you heard my voice’ (v. 2).  God hears the prayers of the repentant heart.

 Fourth, and this is the main message of the book of Jonah, we learn why God answers Jonah’s prayer of repentance.  We learn that the character of God is ‘steadfast love’. You may know that this term, ‘steadfast love’, is actually a single Hebrew word, ‘hesed’, which is somewhat difficult to translate with one word.  It has to do with God’s grace, His mercy, and His love.  It is very often paired in the Old Testament with the word ‘faithfulness’.  Both terms are what we might call ‘covenantal’ words: they are words used in reference to an existing relationship.  Because of the close relationship, one gives to the other hesed.  Because of the close relationship, one is faithful to the other and will remain steadfast in love despite difficulties faced in the relationship.  One Old Testament professor once put it this way in a lecture, hesed involves God’s doing whatever He must do in order to maintain the relationship.  That might be love, it might be showing mercy or giving grace, or something else.  It might involve overlooking some sin or wrongdoing for the sake of the relationship.  The Old Testament as a whole is a story of God’s steadfast,  covenantal love for a sinful, disobedient Israel.

 So, what do we learn about hesed in Jonah?  Interestingly, Jonah is said in 1.1 to be the son of Amittai.  His father’s name means, ‘My faithfulness’.  Here is the son of a man whose name reminded everyone that God is faithful.  He is faithful to the relationship He has with the people with whom He had entered a covenant, the Jews. 

 Now, we meet the word hesed (steadfast love) first in Jonah 2.8-9:

⁸   Those who pay regard to vain idols

    forsake their hope of steadfast love.

⁹   But I with the voice of thanksgiving

    will sacrifice to you;

  what I have vowed I will pay.

    Salvation belongs to the LORD!”

Jonah is sure of God’s steadfast love because he is not a pagan serving other gods but is one of God’s covenant people.  He is, we might say, one of God’s elect people.  There is some irony in all this.  The pagan sailors are safe in the boat, the storm has subsided, and, we learn at the end of chapter 1, they actually offer a sacrifice to Israel’s God, to Yahweh, the ‘God of the sea and the land’, as Jonah had told them.  Yet Jonah, the child of the covenant, is sitting in Sheol in a big fish’s belly at the bottom of the sea!  Israel herself was in this situation: although God’s covenant people, they were in exile among the Assyrians.  Even so, in Jonah ch. 2, we see that God’s covenant love reaches down into that place of absolute destitution, and it brings Jonah salvation.

 As we read on in Jonah 3, we learn more about God’s hesed.  We find Jonah in the great Assyrian city of Nineveh, fulfilling the mission he ran from in ch. 1.  He calls out that there will be judgement on the city from God in forty days: he shouts, ‘Yet forty days, and Nineveh will be overthrown!’ (3.4).  Notice the message is not, ‘If you do not repent, you will be overthrown.’  Has God boxed Himself into a corner so that He cannot relent from judgement?  Just as Jonah in the fish was already under God’s judgement, the Assyrians are beyond the time of appeal: judgement is proclaimed. 

 As it happens, the Ninevites repent in sackcloth (3.5).  Whenever we read about fasting or sackcloth or ashes on someone’s head in the Old Testament, we are reading about practices that enact sincere repentance.  These Ninevites are not just confessing their sins and repenting to get out of trouble, they are sincerely repenting.  Even the king gets involved.  He pops off his throne, takes off his royal robes, covers himself with sackcloth, and does not simply put on ashes: he sits in ashes (3.6).  He then sends out a royal decree:

 Let neither man nor beast, herd nor flock, taste anything. Let them not feed or drink water, ⁸ but let man and beast be covered with sackcloth, and let them call out mightily to God. Let everyone turn from his evil way and from the violence that is in his hands. ⁹ Who knows? God may turn and relent and turn from his fierce anger, so that we may not perish” (3.7-9).

 Notice that the Ninevites hope that God is merciful in general.  They hope that, if they repent, God will show them mercy.  Unlike the Israelites, they do not appeal to their covenant relationship with God because they have none.  Incidentally, we know that this story takes place in the time when the Assyrians were establishing themselves as a great, Middle Eastern Empire.  They were notorious for their merciless violence toward other nations, including Israel, as their armies swept over nation after nation.  They killed men, women, and children.  They enslaved the people that they conquered.  They took them into exile in the attempt to obliterate their nation and culture.  Now, these same people, were repenting of their evil ways and the violence in their hands and were hoping that God would be merciful so that they would not be perished.

 Just what kind of God is this God of the Hebrews?  If He is a just God, He will return on the Ninevites—the Assyrians—a judgement that fits the crime.  But repentance throws a wrench into the works of justice.  Will this just God also be merciful?  We get our answer in 3.10: ‘When God saw what they did, how they turned from their evil way, God relented of the disaster that he had said he would do to them, and he did not do it.’  God is indeed merciful, but we are still to learn more about hesed.

 In ch. 4, Jonah explains why, in ch. 1, he did not go to Nineveh with God’s message in the first place but headed in a boat in the opposite direction to Tarshish, the end of the world, as it were.  He says, ‘I knew that you are a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love, and relenting from disaster’ (4.2).  He knew this because it is written in Exodus 34. After Moses destroyed the first tablets of the Ten Commandments because of the Israelites’ idolatry at Mt. Sinai, God gave a second set of tablets.  This time, however, as we read in Exodus 34, He revealed more of His character to the them.  He was not only the God of the Ten Commandments but also ‘a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, ⁷ keeping steadfast love for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin’ (vv. 6b-7a).  Even though they Israelites sinned, God would still give them His covenant commandments by which they might live.  God would go with this people, despite their sin, for He was in covenant relationship with them.

 This identity of God actually separates the three religions of Judaism, Islam, and Christianity.  The Jews know God’s steadfast love, but as a covenant relationship with them.  Jonah, however, shocks the reader by saying that this is not just a covenant relationship but the very character of God, and therefore it extends to those who are not elect, those who are outside the covenant, even to those who have enslaved God’s covenant people and violently oppressed all other people.  This would be like, in our time, a prophet going to Gaza and prophesying judgement in forty days, only to have them repent and God forgive them.  God’s steadfast love finds Jonah in the belly of the fish at the bottom of the sea and forgives the violent Assyrians.  We gain this much understanding of God from Judaism: God is like that.  How do we know?

 In Jonah 4, Jonah sets himself up outside the city to watch to see if the city will yet be destroyed.  God teaches Jonah—and through him the reader—a lesson about His steadfast love.  This is the Middle East, and the chapter tells us that God sent a blisteringly hot, easterly wind such that Jonah wished he would just die.  One might be forgiven for thinking that Jonah is a bit of a drama queen, but remember, he is in God’s drama and experiencing the most extreme conditions.  God then lets a plant grow up quickly beside him to give him shade.  The next day, a worm eats the plant and Jonah is back to scorching in the heat.  He again says it is better for him just to die (v. 8).  The lesson God teaches Jonah contrasts Jonah to God.  Jonah pities a mere plant he did nothing to help grow, but God pities a city full of people who, being outside God’s elect people, haven’t a clue about right and wrong.  (The text says they don’t know their right hand from their left.)  It is a city in which there are numerous cattle, for that matter--Jonah is further reprimanded for caring more for a single plant than for the many cattle, if not also the 120,000 people of the city.  And there the book ends.  And so we learn something about God’s steadfast love: as part of God’s very character, it extends not only to His covenant people but also to all His creation.

 What we do not get is an understanding of the lengths to which this steadfast love of God will go.  Yes, it will go so far as to save a sinner like Jonah at the bottom of the ocean, already in Sheol.  Yes, it even extends so far as to offer forgiveness to sinners outside the covenant over whom judgement has already been prophesied.  Yet we do not learn, as we do in Jesus Christ, that ‘God loved the world in this way, that He gave His only begotten Son, that everyone who believes in Him should not perish but have eternal life’ (John 3.16).  God’s steadfast love is found in Christ Jesus, God’s Son, shedding His blood for our sins on the cross.

 In the Koran of Islam, Allah is said to be ‘merciful and beneficent’ over and over again.  I would argue that Allah is understood in terms of a powerful sheik in the religion.  That is, his mercy is an aspect of his power.  He can kill the enemy, render justice, or show mercy because he is so powerful.  His mercy is not different from his power.  Yet the Christian understanding of God’s mercy is based on love, weakness, the shame of the cross, God’s giving of His one and only Son for our sins.  As a Jew, Jonah knew that God’s character was forgiving in a deeper sense than the all-powerful sheik’s whim to show justice on one occasion or to show mercy on another.  Yet neither the Muslim nor the Jew can fathom the divine love that is self-sacrificing.  Paul says that Christ Jesus, being

 in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, ⁷ but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. ⁸ And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross (Philippians 2.6-8).[1]

 Conclusion

 The book of Jonah teaches us that we can come to God with confession of our sins and in sincere repentance for them, even when the time of repentance seems to have passed, and we can trust in His steadfast love.  It teaches us that this steadfast love extends even beyond God’s covenant people to others, even our enemies, when they acknowledge their sins and call out to God for forgiveness.  This is because God’s steadfast love is not only a covenantal negotiation but is part of His very character.  From the New Testament, we also learn that we can have an assurance of God’s pardon.  This is because God has acted upon His steadfast love in Jesus Christ.  His love for the world is such that He gave His one and only Son to die sacrificially for us and for our salvation on the cross.  And so, as Paul says, we can ‘have boldness and access with confidence through our faith’ in Christ Jesus our Lord’ (Ephesians 3.12).

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[1] I have chosen to read the adverbial participle ‘being in’ rather than the ESV’s ‘although’ at the beginning of v. 6.  It could just as well be, ‘Because he was in the form of God’.