When God is Fortune, when Fortune is God – discussing the divine in Africa and the World

When God is Fortune, when Fortune is God –

discussing the divine in Africa and the World

Jim Harries

Tim Reeves has provided reflections and comments

Temporarily published in beta January to February 2015

Notes

After living for 27 years in an African village, Jim has been trying to understand the view of an idealised group of his African friends. Any reference to 'Africans' should be assumed to be to Jim's experience of some of the members of this group, and not a claim to have put 'all Africans' into the same category.

Read the article below, and also in boxes a discussion that erupted between Jim Harries and his good friend Tim Reeves. (Tim is an amateur physicist cum philosopher. Jim is a missionary in Africa. Both are followers of Jesus Christ.)

In this article, the issue of the capitalisation of God can be difficult; should the term god be capitalised when it refers to a generic notion of god rather than specifically to Yahweh? The reader should ignore the capitalisation of God, or its absence, in this article.

Introduction

Have you ever thought what it would be like in the 'West' if instead of 'God' we started to say 'luck'? Christians would say 'Praise Luck', Christ would be called the 'son of Luck', we would be told that 'Luck is love' and that we should 'have faith in Luck'. This sounds very confusing. Could it be that something like this happens if the 'wrong' name is chosen to translate 'God' in translated Scriptures in the majority world? (Because 'luck' seems to be a singularly Western concept, I use the term 'fortune' below.) … In the discussion below, this question leads to the suggestion that Atheists believe in God.

In the West, there may not be much confusion between God and fortune (luck). The two tend to be looked at as distinct and different. Such a clear distinction may not be evident everywhere. There may be places and human communities for which holding the identity of God apart from that of fortune is difficult. The co-identity of the two may be very strong indeed, so that to some people they could be one and the same thing. ...

For the rest of the article see: http://www.vulnerablemission.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/Fort-to-pdf-26th-Jan-2015.pdf