It’s important to remember that we are all a work in progress. That others have laboured had in us than we’ll ever know. And that men cannot be changed by giving the right answers, by guilt or beating them with the truth. We have to be patient as we call on the one who changes people from inside out to do his work. But we can be patient with others because God is very patient with us. Just look at how Jesus was patient with the disciples. Even after his death and resurrection he still has to seek them out. He still has to go for Thomas and Peter. How many times do you think God has sought you out?

The work of discipleship is both easy and hard. It is clear and messy. Straightforward and yet deeper than we imagine. It’s possible to say that person is sorted now only to find yourself dealing with the unthinkable. Easy to tick a box too early and assume growth. But the fact that we are lifelong disciples means none of us have arrived yet and it won’t be that easy discipling others. The problem comes when we start hearing the kind of answers we want to hear. We assume people who give the right answers to theological questions are ready for the next level of discipleship; leadership and teaching opportunities. We figure out if they understand predistination surely they can lead young people. They get the trinity then they can disciples others. They have read far and wide on God’s sovereignty, get them a new believers class to teach.
But perhaps instead of focusing on the answers people give we should focus more on the questions we ask. We need to be careful that people aren’t telling us exactly what we want to hear which happens a lot. We need to ask our questions in way that let’s people know it’s okay to speak their minds. In an environment that doesn’t make people feel foolish if they get things wrong. One thing I’ve learnt from many of us in Africa is that we hate to look foolish so we would rather guess or pretend to know than say something that makes people laugh at our intelligence. Perhaps that’s why question and answer sessions don’t work very well with us. You may have to draw it out and be vulnerable in a more friendly environment. And when you ask questions the last thing you want is to make us feel like we are in an examination setting. We hate that. So what kind of questions should we ask?
One I would say questions that lead us to the heart more than the head. You’ve probably heard this saying that there’s always a question behind the question. That’s the question you want to get to. If someone is asking all these hard theological questions about God’s sovereignty in suffering answering them theologically is not enough. You need to also get behind it all and see what exactly is it that they are struggling with.
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Whether art museums or classical music organizations, those institutions have sacrificed their comparative advantages—connoisseurship, scholarly knowledge, and devotion to the highest expressions of culture—in favor of a partisan political program that distorts both present and past.

Like the Art Institute of Chicago, the Metropolitan Museum of Art has redefined itself as an antiracist “agent of change.” In July 2020, its director Max Hollein and CEO Daniel Weiss announced that the museum will henceforth aim to overcome the racism still perpetrated by our “government, policies, systems, and institutions.”
What such a political mandate means for an art museum may seem puzzling, but two exhibits currently running at the Met provide an answer. They suggest that the museum will now value racial consciousness-raising over scholarship and historical accuracy. Double standards will govern how the museum analyzes Western and Third World art: only the former will be subject to the demystification treatment, while the latter will be accorded infinite curatorial respect. The Met will lay bare European art’s alleged complicity in the West’s legacy of oppression, while Third World violence and inequality will be chastely kept off stage.
The first show, “In Praise of Painting: Dutch Masterpieces at The Met,” arranges the Met’s own seventeenth-century Dutch canvases in thematic categories, such as still life and landscape. (The content of those categories is sometimes hard to discern underneath such mannered academic rhetoric as “Contested Bodies.”) Highlights of the show include Franz Hals’s portrait of Paulus Verschuur, a bravura performance of spontaneous brushwork and psychological acuity that captures the Rotterdam merchant’s modern irony, and Johannes Vermeer’s A Maid Asleep, which anticipates Paul Cézanne in its treatment of decorative pattern and geometry.
The Dutch Baroque formed the cornerstone of the Met’s first holdings; subsequent bequests created one of the world’s great assemblages of Rembrandt, Hals, Vermeer, and their peers. The antiracist museum, however, understands that it is not just Western art that needs deconstructing; the collecting and donating of art does, too. Thus, the commentary accompanying “In Praise of Painting” wearily notes that “of course” there are “blind spots in the story these particular acquisitions tell. Colonialism, slavery, and war—major themes in seventeenth-century Dutch history—are scarcely visible here.” It is hard to know who is more at fault, in the Met’s view: the artists or the art lovers who collected their work. Few seventeenth-century Dutch paintings treat of “colonialism, slavery, and war,” and fewer still approach the technical mastery of the Dutch canon. “In Praise of Painting” contains a Brazilian landscape by Frans Post that shows members of an Indian tribe gathered in a clearing. The painting is included in the exhibit as a synecdoche for a Dutch colony in northern Brazil; its interest is purely ethnographic. What other paintings about “colonialism, slavery, and war” do the curators think the Met should have acquired? Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum recently mounted a self-flagellating show called “Slavery,” intending to atone for Holland’s former holdings in Indonesia, New Guinea, and elsewhere. Even the royally endowed Rijksmuseum assembled few canvases with colonialism subject matter; as a second-best solution, it was left to attribute luxury items in portraits and still lifes to slavery and racism.
“In Praise of Painting” adopts that strategy as well. “Still life paintings pictured the bounty provided by newly established Dutch trade routes and the Republic’s economic success, while omitting the human cost of colonial warfare and slavery,” the accompanying wall text points out. The curators do not reveal how a still life painter should portray the “human cost of colonial warfare and slavery.” As even the curators admit, a still life by definition focuses on “things without people.” The Dutch masters, who brought the nascent genre to peak gorgeousness, may have delighted in the dragon-fly translucence of grapes and the somber radiance of silver and cut glass; they may have taught us to see beauty in a kitchen’s bounty. Not good enough. They should have anticipated twenty-first-century concerns about racial justice and revised their subject matter accordingly.
The museum’s benefactors also receive a feminist whack. “Only one picture painted by an early modern Dutch woman has entered the collection over the course of nearly 150 years,” the curators scold. Which Jacob van Ruisdael or Gerard ter Borch would the curators forego for a painting chosen on identity grounds? There simply weren’t as many females as males painting in the seventeenth century. Today, there are; women have unfettered access to art schools and galleries. The Met’s founders bought its female-painted Dutch Baroque canvas—a towering arrangement of peonies, tulips, roses, and marigolds—in 1871. Sexism did not prevent that addition to the museum’s original holdings, but sexism, we are to believe, prevented follow-up purchases.
Having been instructed to see oppression behind portraiture and to hear silenced voices in tableaux of oysters and lemons, the chastened Met visitor may wend his way to “The African Origin of Civilization,” another show drawn from the Met’s own collections. He will find himself back in a world of prelapsarian innocence, where art, if not the collecting of it, is unencumbered by a debunking impulse and where the culture that gave rise to that art is accepted on its own terms, not measured against present values.
“The African Origin of Civilization” pairs artefacts from ancient Egypt with those from modern (from the thirteenth-century A.D. forward) Sub-Saharan Africa to demonstrate their alleged “shared origins,” as the Met puts it, and to “recenter” Africa as “the source of modern humanity and a fount of civilization.” A timeline runs around the walls noting significant moments in African history, such as the receipt of Grammy awards by pop stars from Benin and South Africa.
The show is based on the writings of Senegalese historian Cheikh Anta Diop (1923–1986). Diop held that ancient Egypt was black, that ancient Egypt and modern Sub-Saharan Africa are part of a unified black civilization, and that this black African civilization, not Greece or Rome, is the source of Western civilization. The exhibit opens with a covertly doctored quote from Diop: “The history of Africa will remain suspended in air and cannot be written correctly until African historians connect it with the history of Egypt” (more on that doctoring below). The exhibition “pay[s] homage” to Diop’s “seminal” 1974 book, The African Origin of Civilization: Myth or Reality, the Met explains.
So who was this “influential Egyptologist, scientist, [and] activist,” as the Met describes him? Diop came from an aristocratic Muslim background in Senegal. In the 1950s, he participated in Paris’s anti-colonial student groups. Diop’s research aims were unapologetically political. He hoped to accelerate Africa’s independence movements by “reconquer[ing] a Promethean consciousness” among the African peoples, he wrote in The African Origin of Civilization. Such a task would be impossible so long as the proposition that ancient Egypt was a Negro civilization “does not appear legitimate.”
In Diop’s telling, in prehistoric times, black Africans moved into the Nile Valley from the South, merged with the blacks already living there, established the ancient Egyptian dynasties, then migrated back across the Sahara into the South. The less demanding conditions those black Egyptians found south of the Sahara discouraged the further development of science and engineering that had begun under the pharaohs. “The Negro became indifferent towards material progress,” Diop writes. Rather than pursuing scientific knowledge, the southern Africans concentrated on perfecting their political arrangements. Those political structures were and have remained superior to those of the West, in Diop’s view. Africans also far exceeded the Europeans in the “social and moral order,” which was on the “same level of perfection” as their political order.
Scientific progress may have come to a standstill back in Sub-Saharan Africa, but the gains made in black Egypt during the Pharaonic period, Diop argues, were so great as to serve as the basis for all subsequent developments in the West. “The Black world is the very initiator of the ‘western’ civilization flaunted before our eyes today,” Diop alleged in The African Origin of Civilization. “Pythagorean mathematics, the theory of the four elements of Thales of Miletus, Epicurean materialism, Platonic idealism, Judaism, Islam, and modern science are rooted in Egyptian cosmogony and science.”
Diop’s intellectual history is as shaky as his demographic claims. Leave aside for the moment the question of whether Egypt was black. Graeco–Roman science and philosophy were a different enterprise from Egyptian learning. The Egyptians developed the calendar, the calculation of time, and some medical cures in the second millennium B.C. Their funerary architecture attests to their engineering skills. But the Egyptian numeration system did not provide the basis for Western mathematics. And though the Greeks admired Egyptian accomplishments, the principle of grounding scientific conclusions on logic and empirical evidence—the hallmark of Western science—began with Aristotle, not with the Egyptian dynasties.
As for Diop’s arguments regarding ancient Egypt’s black racial identity, they rest on Old Testament myth, cherry-picked images of Egyptian sculpture, a reference to “black” Egyptians by Herodotus, and a few alleged similarities between Egyptian and African words. According to DNA analysis from the Max Planck Institute in Germany, mummies from the New Kingdom were most closely related to peoples of the Levant (Turkey, Iraq, and Lebanon, among other countries). Modern Egyptians share just 8 percent of their genome with central Africans. As small as that share is, it is much more than that between ancient Egyptians and central and southern Africans; that common 8 percent developed only over the last 1,500 years. The ancient Egyptians, notorious xenophobes, did not believe themselves related to the peoples of the south, with whom their relations were often imperialistic.
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Written by T.M. Suffield |
Wednesday, February 23, 2022
Jesus completed his work by giving the Spirit to his people. His promises to make them into springs of running water, his promises that he would send a helper, his promises to return to each of them and be with them forever were fulfilled in that moment.

Jesus had left the disciples. They’d seen him ascend into heaven. He’d given them a mission, his mission. He’d told them to wait.
So, that’s what they did. They waited. For ten whole days. It must have been absolutely excruciating. Most of us find it hard enough to wait for a bus, let alone anything important. This would be one of the most important events in history, utterly life-changing for each of them, and there they were swinging their heels. Waiting.
The Jewish festival of weeks, or ‘Pentecost’, rolled around, like it did every year, fifty days after the first sheaf was cut in the barley harvest. Seven weeks after the end of the Passover. Seven weeks since the world turned upside down and a dead man walked out of a tomb.
Nothing was ever going to be the same. Except, it looked awfully similar to before, waiting around Jerusalem like a bunch of smiling malcontents.
Then their waiting ended. Having died, been raised, and ascended into heaven, Jesus completed his work by giving the Spirit to his people. His promises to make them into springs of running water, his promises that he would send a helper, his promises to return to each of them and be with them forever were fulfilled in that moment.
And then, again, everything changed. It’s like the dramatic twist in a film or book when all the threads come together and the story shifts and changes. He’s a ghost? He’s his father? They’re the same man?
Brightness appears above one of their heads, and spreads from one to another like flames in a fire. A sound, roaring past their ears, like standing in a gale. Or perhaps something different, it’s a little mysterious. Whatever they saw and heard, they saw and heard it. It was definitely visible, audible and dramatic. You couldn’t be there and miss it.
Our expectation of the Spirit doing something is so often invisible, inaudible and inconspicuous. We describe him like he’s the secretive silent partner in the Trinity, like an investor backing up a business. The manager makes the decisions but behind the scenes Mr. H. Spirit is providing the funds. Essential, but never interfering. It’s hard to back this up from the Bible: the Spirit is often big, bold, and in our faces. You can’t miss what he’s doing.
This fits with my experience as well. It’s rare to pray with someone, have the Spirit move on or in them, and not be able to tell. It’s often visible, most commonly in people’s reactions or expressions, but sometimes in a mysterious way that’s hard to describe, you can see the Holy Spirit on someone. It’s a shadow or a whisper of what we see described in Acts 2, but he still acts in the same way today as he did then. Nothing has changed. My expectation is very low, but that’s my problem.
This doesn’t mean that the Spirit is never subtle (though unlike wizards he isn’t quick to anger—the opposite, dear friends), he often works carefully and slowly. It does mean that we must expect powerful encounters because this is what most of the Biblical accounts allude to.
Silence turns to wind and fire. Waiting turns to action. A small group to a great multitude. A locked door to a teaming street. Timid believers to firebrands, bold as brass.
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