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We began 2009 already aware of unusual life-course conjunctions. I'm thinking especially of celebrations centered on February 12, the date in 1809 when the well-to-do Darwins of Shrewsbury in Shropshire and the dirt-poor Lincolns of Hardin County, Kentucky, welcomed sons who left such a mark on the world. Now a conjunction of life endings has made Thursday, January 8, of this year a day to be remembered with sadness, reflection, and gratitude. In New York City, Richard John Neuhaus succumbed to complications from a recurrence of cancer; on the same day in Chicago, Ogbu Kalu died from complications arising from pneumonia.
Neuhaus was better known, at least in North America. Love him or loathe him, this larger-than-life figure had been an unmistakable force for more than forty years—from his efforts in 1964 at founding Clergy Concerned About Vietnam, to the posthumous "Public Square" column in the February 2009 issue of his journal, First Things. Since 2001, Kalu had served as the Henry Winters Luce Professor of World Christianity and Mission at Chicago's McCormick Theological Seminary. This Nigerian scholar shared an expatriate status with Neuhaus, who had come to the United States from his native Ontario as a mid-teen. For those committed to understanding the dramatic worldwide spread of Christianity, Kalu's death is as devastating as Neuhaus' decease has been for those who joined him in seeking the right kind of Christian support for the right kind of public life.
Before moving to the United States, Ogbu Kalu enjoyed a distinguished career for more than twenty years at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, and he had lectured in many of the world's leading universities. Above all, he was a trailblazing historian of African Christianity defined essentially, primarily, and preeminently as an African story. Kalu earned his PhD at the University of Toronto, where he wrote a dissertation on Puritan church discipline under the unfriendly regime of England's King James I. But the churches that engaged his great life's work were African, and the discipline he worked so successfully to illuminate belonged to African believers as they defined for themselves the imperatives of the gospel.
When Kalu was inaugurated as the Luce Chair, his McCormick colleague, Ken Sawyer, gave him the charge to serve faithfully in the space between the academy and the congregation. Kalu took naturally to "standing between" because his work had always moved effortlessly across academic disciplines: religion, history, economics, pastoral care, development, ethics, and literature. More particularly, the great achievement of Kalu's scholarship was to remind the academy that responsible accounts of world Christianity—as it has actually come to exist—simply must deal with the supernatural, even as it demonstrated to the church the high value of carefully documented and patient learning. As he taught, so he lived. Even as Kalu was winning world renown for his books, he served the Nigerian Presbyterian church as an active elder; in the United States, he joined Chicago's Progressive Community Center—The People's Church, where he taught adult classes as well as worshiped.
In an interview published in the issue of Christian History that examined "African Apostles" (no. 79, 2003), Kalu described forthrightly the scientific racism and the imperialist baggage that infected missionary outreach to Africa. He struck another blow against convention in his inaugural lecture at McCormick, which took on the default naturalism of Western historical practice. After making sure to praise that practice for its judiciousness, Kalu went further: how, he asked, could African Christians be treated as agents of their own destiny if African Christian accounts of supernatural activity were routinely ignored or explained away? Kalu did not condemn the caution of Western Christian historians so much as urge them to seek broader perspectives that could make their scholarship adequate for the realities of lived experience. [1] Most recently, the tide of provocative publication pouring out of Kalu's McCormick office included an impressive work on Pentecostalism around the world. It argues that Pentecostal experiences in Africa must be understood, not primarily by studying what others brought to Africa, but by examining how Africans internalized the gospel in their own cultural terms. [2]
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