Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

African Pentecostalism: An Introduction

2010; Oxford University Press; Volume: 71; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1093/socrel/srq012

1759-8818

J F Soothill,

Religion, Society, and Development

The late Ogbu Kalu was a prominent and thoughtful voice in the study of African Christianity. In this book, he explores the changing faces of African Pentecostalism. He has two agendas. First, his approach to the history of Pentecostalism in Africa is resolutely Afro-centric. For Kalu, Pentecostalism is an indigenous movement first and foremost, even its most recent manifestation: the charismatic or neo-Pentecostal movement. As a cultural insider he writes to recover the African voice from what he sees as a distorting Western scholarly agenda. The book, he argues, "preserves the indigenous voice" (3) to reveal the roots of African Pentecostalism in indigenous pneumatology and older African religious revivals. This looking back to an African religious heritage leads to Kalu's second agenda: the recovery of a religious explanation for the origins and evolution of the Pentecostal movement. It is, he argues, both an indigenous and a religious phenomenon, not merely a social one. Its burgeoning across Africa signifies not just the social insecurities of its adherents but equally (if not more) their religious sensibilities as they "battle for identity through religious power" (ix). Kalu writes as both an African and a Pentecostal, and it is this that distinguishes his work from the Western secular social science tradition that has dominated the field to date. He states clearly that his book is not sociology or anthropology but church history and, for Kalu, church history is always a "confessional enterprise" (82).