Witchcraft and worldviews
Witchcraft raises distinct problems for the typical Western materialist. The first is: Is it real? What is the nature of the spirit world? What do witches think they are doing when they engage in witchcraft? For example, earlier this year in South Africa, witchdoctors were summoned by the country’s soccer authorities to ‘cleanse’ Johannesburg’s new national stadium for the World Cup.[16] Western materialists struggle to understand this. We can call this the ontological problem because it concerns our assumptions about the nature of being, and what can be said to exist. The ontological problem points towards the question of competing worldviews. On the one hand, there is the worldview of the South African witchdoctors which holds that the spirit world exists and, on the other, the materialist worldview which claims the spirit world does not exist.
The second problem is: What do witches actually want? What are the human motivations and attitudes that drive witchcraft? For example, in Ghana, kidnapped 16-year-old Akwesi Buabeng was rescued by police before his captors could kill him and sell his body parts for witchcraft. In 2001 the severed torso of a young boy was found floating down the river Thames, near Tower Bridge; the resulting enquiry saw Scotland Yard join forces with the South African Occult Crimes Unit. Such cases of ‘ritual killing’ are also problematic for Western materialists because, although we might understand why someone might want to kill, we don’t understand why someone would kill just to acquire a human head. We can call this the moral problem. The moral problem also points towards the question of worldview. From the worldview of witchcraft there can be all kind of motivations for engaging with the spirit world. On a visit to the Livingstone Museum in Zambia last year, I saw a range of artefacts confiscated by Zambia’s Witchfinder-General and used in traditional (pre-Christian) African religion. This exhibition, which was assembled by Africans, claimed that such religious practices were essentially motivated by: (1) a desire for knowledge; (2) a desire to control and manipulate and (3) a fear of death. Such themes are common to manifestations of witchcraft, in different societies throughout time. Acquiring body parts makes sense within this worldview, because they are a means of controlling and manipulating the spiritual and the physical world, perhaps through some form of sympathetic magic. By contrast, within a materialist worldview, ritual killing is nonsensical. Materialists do not believe the spirit world exists, and so they do not share the worldview that would enable them to make sense of the behaviour.
From a biblical perspective, the spiritist and the materialist worldviews are the two basic mistakes which can be made in relation to the subject of witchcraft.
The first mistake is the spiritist worldview, found among witchcraft practitioners. This presupposes a view of creation in which there is a spirit world that interacts in powerful ways with the material world. It believes that human beings are able to access this spirit world, by various means, and, through it, to control people and events in the material world. It presupposes the existence of God but, in practice, denies his reality. There is some strength in this position: mediums and spiritists are indeed capable of accessing the spiritual world. The problem is that it ignores the fact that Jesus exercises authority over this spiritual world.
The second mistake is found, at the other extreme, in the materialist worldview, which does not accept the existence of a spirit world. From this perspective, common but not exclusive to the West, ‘witchcraft’ is a sociological construct. It is not seen as ‘real’; it exists only insofar as it represents ‘other people’s’ ‘social and cultural reality’.[17] Thus, a 2010 UNICEF report on the problem of children accused of witchcraft blandly remarks that ‘the issue of whether witchcraft actually exists has long since been abandoned in anthropological research, and… will not be discussed….’[18] For that author, witchcraft is ‘the perceptive categories of a particular group that clashes with the common sense of the researcher’ (italics added).[19] Materialism is simply assumed to be the default explanation of reality: the potential reality of the spiritual world is dismissed. There is some strength in this position as well. Hard-headed scepticism is sometimes necessary. Some claims to spiritual activity do need to be treated as nonsense: witness the ‘satanic abuse’ scares in the UK in the 1980s in Nottingham, Rochdale and the Orkneys.[20] The problem with the materialist worldview is that it throws out the baby with the bathwater, by rejecting claims to spiritual reality which are valid.
We shall see that the Bible presents a challenge to both sorts of worldview. Unlike the materialists, it affirms there is a spiritual dimension. But that does not mean we are being irrational and should prostrate ourselves to spirits. For unlike practitioners of witchcraft, the Bible holds out a Christ-centred vision of reality: one in which Jesus is in charge of the spirit (and the material) world. Both materialists and spiritists need to find the basis of reality in Christ.
Nevertheless, although the spiritist and materialist worldviews are rejected by Scripture as mistaken, there are also Christian versions of these mistakes.
First, there are Christian versions of the spiritist worldview. This is seen in the way some parts of the church recognise the reality of the spiritual world but engage with it in ways that are not biblical. Thus we find, for example, a ‘witch hunt’ industry encouraged by some Pentecostal churches, fuelled by a hyper-charismatic demonology. In some parts of the world, there are even financial incentives for labelling persons as ‘witches’: ‘deliverance’ ministries are then provided – for a fee.[21] Another mistake is found, for example, in African syncretism. Witchcraft is prevalent among many Christians in Africa, who have been characterised as ‘holding the Bible by day, seeking oracles by night’.[22] To the extent that the church takes on a spiritist worldview, it fails to address witchcraft, because it does not witness to Christ’s authority effectively.
Second, there are Christian versions of the materialist worldview. When the church becomes materialist in its worldview, it ‘despiritualises’ the Christian life: Satan disappears, angels disappear – even the active engagement of God in human affairs is underplayed, perhaps for fear of being thought ‘premodern’. To the extent that the church takes on a materialist worldview, it also fails to address the problem of witchcraft.[23] Concern has been expressed by scholars at the Catholic University of Eastern Africa (CUEA) that, by dismissing witchcraft as superstition, the church has not been pastorally effective in responding to those caught up in witchcraft practices, driving them further into the arms of witchdoctors. When the church takes on a materialist worldview it cannot offer redemption through healing prayer, or exorcisms, where these are pastorally appropriate, nor can it provide security against witchcraft realities. It is significant that the fastest-growing churches in Africa are said to be those that address people’s fears and show how they can counteract harmful spiritual powers. By contrast, mainline Anglican and Baptist churches, which tend not to address witchcraft and the spiritual world, are said to experience slower growth.
Against these mistakes, and Christian versions of these mistakes, what is a biblical worldview of witchcraft?
댓글