Abstract
As indicated in the closing paragraph of the last chapter, I want us to enter into the discourse of the Sacred City through the eyes of Jacob Kehinde Olupona as he describes and analyzes the sacred city of Ile-Ife in southwestern Nigeria. We will enter into a dialogue with his work to understand the nature of the sacred city and its demands on Pentecostal social ethics. We will engage with his thought on his own terms and terrains, especially with regard to the divine kingship. For it is in this sphere of analysis he best shows the concentrated divine presence in Ile-Ife, and how group conflicts over how to interpret or appropriate this heritage are determinative of social ethics. He particularly discusses how Pentecostals are not submitting to the traditions of the Ile-Ife, and this is causing social tensions in the city. We will attempt to construct a social ethic of interreligious conflict dialogue based on the Yoruba theory of sacred kingship and political sovereignty. The question we formulate and answer is this: What kind of social ethics will best serve Pentecostals in a sacred city in service of a different religion.
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Notes
Jacob Kehinde Olupona, City of 201 Gods: Ilé-Ifè in Time, Space, and the Imagination (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011).
Jostein Gaarder, Sophie’s World, trans. Paulette Møller (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1994).
See Jacob Kehinde Olupona, Kingship, Religion, and Rituals in a Nigerian Community: A Phenomenological Study of Ondo Yoruba Festivals (Stockholm, Sweden: Almqvist and Wiksell, 1991), 158. Here he makes it clear that the primary purpose of his analyses of festival cycles of Yoruba culture is the articulation of the sacred power of kingship and its relevance to civil religion.
Eric L. Santner, The Royal Remains: The People’s Two Bodies and the Endgames of Sovereignty (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 181.
Ernst H. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957).
Simeon O. Ilesanmi, “The Civil Religion Thesis in Nigeria: A Critical Examination of Jacob Olupona’s Theory of Religion and the State,” Bulletin of the Council of Societies for the Study of Religion 24, nos. 3–4 (1995): 59–64;
Jacob K. Olupona, “Religious Pluralism and Civil Religion in Africa,” Dialogue and Alliance 2, no. 4 (Winter 1988–1989): 41–48.
Jacob Kehinde Olupona, “Bonds, Boundaries and Bondage of Faith: Religion in Private and Public Spheres in Nigeria” (National Merit Award lecture, Abuja, Nigeria, December 5, 2012).
His interest in civil religion dates back to his graduate student days at Boston University in the 1980s. See Ilesanmi, “Civil Religion Thesis in Nigeria,” 60; Jacob K. Olupona, “Beyond Ethnicity: Civil Religion in Nigeria,” in Church Divinity Monograph, ed. John Henry Morgan (Notre Dame: Foundations, 1981), 30–45.
He recently published another single-authored book, a personal narrative on the lives of his parents. Jacob Kehinde Olupona, In My Father’s Parsonage: The Story of an Anglican Family in Yoruba-Speaking Nigeria (Ibadan: University Press PLC, 2012).
This is not how his work has been recently received or interpreted. See Afe Adogame, Ezra Chitando, and Bolaji Bateye, African Traditions in the Study of Religion in Africa: Emerging Trends, Indigenous Spirituality and the Interface with Other World Religions, Essays in Honour of Jacob Kehinde Olupona (Farnham, England: Ashgate, 2012).
Giorgio Agamben, The Kingdom and the Glory: For a Theological Genealogy of Economy and Government, trans. Lorenzo Chisea with Matteo Mandarini (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011), 229.
Forgetting here does not mean a total rejection or abandonment of African political, sapiential, cultural, and spiritual traditions. Christianity, the foreign arrivant, is appropriately domesticated and naturalized, only to become a promise through an anamnesis of origins through the iteration of traces. So forgetting is memory turned toward the future, what is arriving, but paradoxically caught in being interpellated by reiteration of experience, the repetition of certain past cultural logics that cannot be the same. This way of conceptualizing Pentecostal forgetting is indebted to K. Noel Amherd, Reciting Ifá: Difference, Heterogeneity, and Identity (Trenton, NJ: Africa World, 2010), 264, 274.
René Girard, Violence and the Sacred, trans. Patrick Gregory (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), 231.
Eric L. Santner, “Response,” Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory 12, no. 1 (Spring 2012): 45–46; see also Agamben, Kingdom and the Glory.
Jean-Pierre Warnier, The Pot-King: The Body and Technologies of Power (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 185. For discussions of the king’s three bodies, see 131–32, 159–62, 170–73, 179–88, 206–7, 246–49.
Walter W. Cannon, “The King’s Three Bodies: The Textual King and the Logic of Obedience in Henry V,” The Upstart Crow: A Shakespeare Journal 18 (1998): 85.
For a study of the Ifá corpus, see Afolabi A. Epega and Philip John Neinmark, The Sacred Ifa Oracle (Brooklyn, NY: Athelia Henrietta Press, 1999); Amherd, Reciting Ifá.
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1995), 208; italics added.
Julia Reinhard Lupton and C. J. Gordon, “Introduction,” Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory 12, no. 1 (Spring 2012): 1.
For a rich discussion of unitary sovereignty and process sovereignty, see Paulina Ochoa Espejo, The Time of Popular Sovereignty: Process and the Democratic State (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2011); “On Political Theology and the Possibility of Superseding It,” Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 13, no. 4 (December 2010): 475–94.
Daniela C. Augustine, Pentecost, Hospitality, and Transfiguration: Toward a Spirit-Inspired Vision of Social Transformation (Cleveland, TN: CPT Press, 2012), 49–50; italics in the original.
Michel Serres, Rome: The Book of Foundations, trans. Felicia MacCarren (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990), 160,
quoted in Antonis Balasopoulos, “The Discreet Charm of the ‘Anarchist Sublime’: Sovereign Power and Bare Life Revisited,” Occasion: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Humanities 3 (March 2012): 5.
Walter Brueggemann, The Prophetic Imagination (Philadelphia: Fortress, 2001), 40.
David W. Smith, Seeking a City with Foundations: Theology for an Urban World (Nottingham, England: Inter-Varsity, 2011), 54; italics in the original.
See Nimi Wariboko, The Depth and Destiny of Work: An African Theological Interpretation (Trenton, NJ: Africa World, 2008);
Robert Owusu Agyarko, “The Sunsum of Onyame: Akan Perspectives on an Ecological Pneumatology,” Journal of Reformed Theology 6 (2012): 251–61.
For detailed discussion of this approach to public theology, see Nimi Wariboko, The Pentecostal Principle: Ethical Methodology in New Spirit (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2012).
Tony Richie, Toward a Pentecostal Theology of Religions: Encountering Cornelius Today (Cleveland, TN: CPT Press, 2013), 107.
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© 2014 Nimi Wariboko
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Wariboko, N. (2014). The King’s Five Bodies. In: The Charismatic City and the Public Resurgence of Religion. CHARIS: Christianity and Renewal—Interdisciplinary Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137463197_4
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