The Africa Bible CommentaryI will often turn to the one-volume Africa Bible Commentary for a non-Western perspective on a passage of Scripture. Western commentators have significant blindspots, which African commentators partially fill in.
For example, shaped by the scientific outlook of the West, too many Western commentators do not take the supernatural in the New Testament seriously enough, explaining it away as often as they can.
For example, wealth blinds western commentators to see the emphasis of the New Testament on caring for the poor.
I have used this commentary for years and found it often helpful. But there is a serious flaw. The flaw need not be there, but because westerners have overseen the production of the book (I guess), it's there in glaring colours, on pages xiii-xviii. What's wrong? In these pages the contributors are listed. And what information about them is it deemed necessary for us to know?
Do we find New Testament descriptions of suitability, like:
"full of the Spirit and wisdom." (Acts 6)
or
"above reproach, faithful to his wife, temperate, self-controlled, respectable, hospitable, able to teach, not given to drunkenness, not violent but gentle, not quarrelsome, not a lover of money. He must manage his own family well and see that his children obey him, and he must do so in a manner worthy of full respect..." (1 Timothy 3)
No! The qualifications deemed necessary to write a commentary are the following (a fictional but typical composite example):
Barnabas Adisa. BA (University ABC), MTh (University DEF), PhD (University GHQ). Director of Charity PQR, Secretary General (for 30 years) of XYZ Church.
What's wrong, someone asks? Absolutely everything:
(1) In the Scriptures, no-one is appointed to office because of secular qualifications, indeed Jesus avoids calling any learned scribes into his team.
(2) Secular qualifications are irrelevant to one's ability to write a commentary on Scripture - and if you have absorbed liberal nonsense from one of those theological institutions, your qualifications are a distinct disadvantage.
(3) What is required is godliness and a close walk with the Lord to understand his Word, not years cooped up in some academic institution with teachers who may have never worked an ordinary day in an ordinary job in the whole of their lives, and be so far removed from real life in a real-life church that what they teach is just cerebral white noise.
(4) These boastings - for that is what they are - set a terrible precedent for future leaders who think they have to climb the greasy pole of academia to "be useful."
(5) Ordinary Christians reading this stuff wonder if they will ever be useful in the kingdom unless they spend endless years and money doing irrelevant - and often claptrap - university degrees.
(6) In heaven all such letters-after-your-name stuff will be forgotten and irrelevant.
(7) Most ordinary people in the world would find these ridiculous letters incomprehensible and a barrier to faith, and a hindrance to approaching these "high and mighty ones" (as they may think they are); in the pub they'd probably have a good old hoot about them.
(8) What institutions someone has started is irrelevant to their ability to write sound Gospel commentary - for all you know they may run their institutions like the mafia (it's not unheard of).
There is a good reason Jesus chose nobodies as his Twelve disciples. There is a good reason before Paul could be useful he had to regard all his past "qualifications" as dung. Here's the reason:
God will not give his glory to another. So the Lord delights to use fishermen or tax-collectors or former church persecutors and former slave traders.
Paul had to deal with this kind of foolish worldliness in the churches of Corinth. Into those churches had infiltrated some of these pretend-to-be-something kinds, who boasted of their knowledge and powers of speech and secular stuff like that.
Instead Paul boasted about his weaknesses and his sufferings (in other words he gloried in the cross.)
If the Africa Bible Commentary is ever re-edited, they should scrap all the letters jazz and ask each contributor how and to what degree (pun intended) they have suffered and put down those sufferings and hardships as their highest accolades.
So here is how Barnabas Adisa should rewrite his entry, I've taken hints from 2 Corinthians 11 and Philippians, to make his bio better fit in with Scripture:
Barnabas Adisa. A hard worker. I have been beaten twenty times. I have been in and out of prison constantly for the last 20 years, and gone without food for days on end. I have many enemies, including some that have been "false brothers" - they've pretended to be my friends. I have often had sleepless nights concerned and praying for the churches and flocks. I regard as "dung" all the stuff I used to think was important, like academic qualifications. I have lost all worldly reputation for the sake of the Gospel.
Wouldn't it be wonderful to read a REAL New Testament bio?
How far we have fallen, and we can't see it! And we wonder why most of the population view middle class Christianity as a distant irrelevancy?
If you sense God's hand upon you for service in his kingdom, don't waste your years in some institution, evangelical or otherwise. The Lord is looking for humble diligent followers, who will automatically, led by the Spirit, be keen to read and learn and grow in the grace, as well as the knowledge, of Jesus Christ.
John Stott
Ironically, and beautifully, and by stark contrast to every African contributor, John's Stott's foreword to the commentary has just "John Stott, December 2005." Why didn't they take a leaf out of his humble book?
In future history all the high-faluten degree-laden qualification-boasting earthly-minded leaders will be forgotten, but I bet good ol' Jonny Stott, Charlie Spurgeon, AW Tozer and Billy Graham will be long remembered.
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