Ethnos

Journal of Anthropology

ISSN: 0014-1844 (Print) 1469-588X (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/retn20

Sin and Sovereignty in the Lives of Urban Baptists

in Zimbabwe

Leanne Williams Green

To cite this article: Leanne Williams Green (2019): Sin and Sovereignty in the Lives of Urban
Baptists in Zimbabwe, Ethnos, DOI: 10.1080/00141844.2019.1640263

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/00141844.2019.1640263

Published online: 23 Jul 2019.

Submit your article to this journal

Article views: 24

View related articles

View Crossmark data

Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at

https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=retn20
ETHNOS
https://doi.org/10.1080/00141844.2019.1640263

Sin and Sovereignty in the Lives of Urban Baptists in

Zimbabwe
Leanne Williams Green
University of California San Diego, USA

ABSTRACT
What is the relation between divine and human action in the world? To understand
how a certain group of Christians reckon human capacity and divine authority, I
explore articulations of two theological concepts – sin and sovereignty – as they
played out in the concerns of a congregation of Baptists in Zimbabwe’s capital city.
This paper is situated within emerging conversations between anthropologists and
theologians, and from my ethnographic case I argue that contemporary readings of
Calvin and of Augustinian notions of original sin offer the anthropologist alternatives
to the analytic category of ‘agency’. Beliefs about the limits of human capacity and
about God’s control among urban Zimbabwean Baptists shape their engagement
with the political realm, and their case contributes to ethnographic explorations of
theological and political conceptions of sovereignty.

KEYWORDS Christian theology; Calvinism; agency; sovereignty; Africa

‘We’ll make a plan’, residents of Harare repeat regularly, anticipating difficulties in

everyday life with a sigh or wry smile. Like many inhabitants of sub-Saharan Africa,
Christians in Zimbabwe face existentially unpredictable circumstances on a national
scale and in their daily lives. Scholars have described how persistent uncertainty
shapes social life in similar postcolonial contexts (Mbembe & Roitman 1995; Guyer
2004; Bayart 2009). When Zimbabweans ‘make a plan’, they find a way to contend
with the uncertain situations in which they live, managing to create alternative
pathways.
Yet during 15 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Zimbabwe, I heard Christians
express dissatisfaction with the ‘make a plan’ attitude.1 Congregants at a Baptist
Church in the capital city denounce this attitude for allowing the government to
shirk its responsibility for social and economic upheaval, with civilians bearing the
cost. Perhaps more so, they lament how this attitude excludes any expectation of
God’s action, placing the possibility of change squarely on human shoulders. Believers
affirm that God is sovereign: the final authority and governing agent in all

CONTACT Leanne Williams Green L7willia@ucsd.edu

© 2019 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
2 L. WILLIAMS GREEN

circumstances. But they struggle to make sense of the relation between their own actions
and God’s intervention in human time and space, resulting in a series of theological
deliberations. In turn, these theological debates have important consequences for
believers’ engagement with the political realm. In this paper, I address how theological
categories of human sinfulness and divine sovereignty are key ways in which these
Christians navigate political and economic disruption by determining the relation
between the role played by humans and that played by God in the world.

Agency, Freedom and Theological Alternatives

In this Baptist Church, the theological controversy which came to a head during my
fieldwork, in 2015 and 2016, centred on the role played by God in a person’s salvation.
Congregants disagreed about the activities and outcomes human beings could be held
responsible for and that which only God could do. While these questions have a long
provenance, particularly in reformed theology, they have pragmatic consequences for
those living in a nation characterised by political and economic upheaval.
Recently, some scholars have advocated for a particular kind of engagement between
anthropology and theology (Banner 2013; Robbins 2013; Meneses & Bronkema 2017;
Lemons 2018). In this paper, I employ a ‘transformative’ framework (Lemons 2018)
to explore ethnographic questions about the relation between human and divine
activity. The premise of this framework is that engagement between anthropology
and theology will push or unsettle some of the existing architecture of each discipline.
As Joel Robbins points out in a chapter of ‘Theologically Engaged Anthropology’, one
site of convergence between the concerns of the two disciplines is what he calls the
‘matter of human incompleteness’ (2018: 243). For anthropology, humans remain irre-
ducibly social, and for theology, humans are cast as limited in and of themselves. This
shared operating assumption between the disciplines highlights a key point of struggle
for the case that I describe here: the way in which human capacity is conceived and eval-
uated in theological and cultural terms.
I contribute to anthropological conversations by challenging the ways in which
‘agency’ has been used to examine human action in the world. I turn, instead, to theo-
logical discussions that inform the actions and orientations of Baptists in Harare.
Drawing from the work of contemporary reformed theologians enriches my anthropo-
logical consideration of how seemingly exclusive visions of God’s sovereignty and
human responsibility can operate in relation to one another. By ‘sovereignty’, I refer
to an important notion for my interlocutors, who reckon a major attribute of God to
be his ultimate control over everything that happens in the world and in their own
lives, a discussion that I take up further below.
James Laidlaw (2014) has critiqued anthropological notions of agency for relying
on presupposed liberal political and modern visions of human capacity to bring about
change. These approaches delimit the potential existence of a vast array of other
kinds of agents, and locate agency, reductively, in the predetermined ability and
motivation of the individual to act. Reflecting on the ethical dimension of human
action, Talal Asad and his students, Mahmood (2005) and Hirschkind (2006), have
 ETHNOS 3

taken inspiration from MacIntyre’s (1984) approach, situating the anthropological

investigation in terms of human ‘freedom’ (Laidlaw 2002, 2014). Drawing from theo-
logical articulations of human personhood, I contribute to anthropological theoris-
ations of ‘freedom’ by exploring Zimbabwean Baptists’ view of relations between
God, humans and the world.
Christians in this Baptist congregation are invested in a tense debate about ‘New Cal-
vinism’, a Christian movement promoted in the influential writing and teaching of
figures like John Piper, John MacArthur and theologians like R.C. Sproul.2 These
debates relate to concerns about human capacity. Some leaders at this Zimbab-
wean church reject New Calvinism’s teachings based on what they call the ‘historical
Baptist tradition’ of the church, which emphasises individual choice and the human
will necessary to receive salvation extended by Christ. Others in the congregation,
however, favour New Calvinist teachings and a reformed approach. The New Calvinists
in the congregation highlight God’s work and downplay the ability of individuals to
make any real choice in the process of their redemption. Similar doctrinal disagree-
ments have plagued Baptist denominations since they began (cf. Wallace 1982; Benedict
2002).3 I argue that this disagreement came to the fore for Hararean Baptists at a his-
torical moment when the stakes for reckoning human responsibility and God’s action in
the world were much higher, as a result of major economic disruption. The case also
offers a consideration of the anthropological implications of these Baptists’ theological
concerns.

Fairside Baptist in Context

Behind the brick face of Fairside Baptist Church,4 in Zimbabwe’s bustling capital city,
believers are navigating a tumultuous socio-economic climate while debating the nature
of divine and human action. For regular attendees, numbering around 500, theological
issues are a frequent concern. The community of believers at Fairside Baptist is largely
middle-class and well-educated. While a number of congregants are unemployed, those
who work do so mainly in professional roles- as educators, managers, in healthcare, or
the financial sector. With its resources, the church funds its building and activities, pro-
vides social services to needy city inhabitants, sends resources to poorer congregations,
and contributes to the salaries of pastors in newer churches. While the class position of
many attendees gives them a good degree of cultural capital, they remain excluded from
the strata of the political elite in Zimbabwe, who control access to national resources
and to governing power.
Church members told me that Fairside Baptist is a ‘multicultural’ church, referring to
their choice to conduct church activities in English. They indicate that their community
is not only made up of native speakers of Shona, Zimbabwe’s dominant vernacular
language, but also of white Zimbabweans and migrants from surrounding countries.5
The majority of the congregants are black Zimbabweans who do speak Shona but
who also tie their ideas about language use and multiculturalism to a sense of their
own cosmopolitanism. A cosmopolitan character maps onto perceptions about Fairside
Baptist maintained by Christians at other churches.
4 L. WILLIAMS GREEN

The class position of attendees is closely identified with two features of the church:
teaching style and an atmosphere of restraint. One church deacon, a practiced lay lin-
guist trained in social scientific research, tied what he saw as the visible ‘upper’ class
position of attendees to the text-based teaching of the two pastors employed at the
church. He contrasted their highly expository style of preaching to more entertaining,
story-telling modes. He made similar connections between class position and a commit-
ment to order: Fairside Baptist’s gatherings follow a careful timetable and people refrain
from too much bodily movement during services.
While class is an important factor in the composition of the congregation, concerns
with bodily comportment and an emphasis on text-based study are not fully reducible
to class position. Many of the nation’s richest and most powerful figures attend Apos-
tolic or Pentecostal churches, where thousands gather on a weekly basis for televised
services with large bands, elaborate decorations and lengthy presentations. By contrast,
the praise band and simple flowers of Fairside seem relatively staid and cerebral, and
church leaders appear acutely time-conscious. So while class may play a role in the con-
cerns that occupy Fairside Baptist, this connection is not inevitable, which suggests
other meaningful patterns at play distinguishing these Baptists’ religious lives.
The presence and availability of theological discussions in the religious lives of Fair-
side Baptist believers is a part of what distinguishes it from other churches in Zim-
babwe’s religious field. As opposed to popular prophecy or healing, the climax of the
Sunday meetings at this church is a sermon based on interpretation of the biblical
text. The centrality of text is mirrored in religious practice at the individual level; per-
sonal Bible study is encouraged, with a number of lay members undergoing intensive
exam-based Bible training hosted by the church or taking courses at the local theologi-
cal college.
This emphasis on study and teaching is shared with many other Baptist churches
historically and worldwide. Fairside Baptist is a member of the Baptist Union of Zim-
babwe (BUZ), a comparatively small denomination in the country.6 The BUZ began as
an outgrowth of the Baptist Union of Southern Africa, conducting work in the urban
areas of then-Rhodesia. Fairside was founded in 1932, but not until 1981 did the
church appoint its first black Zimbabwean pastor, and today the church – like many
of the once white-dominated institutions and neighbourhoods – is attended mostly
by black Zimbabweans, a feature of shifts in urban sociality (see Scarnecchia 1999;
West 2002).
The Baptist network exists within a broader evangelical arena in Zimbabwe. The
majority of Zimbabweans profess Christianity as their religion,7 and while the
Roman Catholic Church and mainline denominations like Methodists and Anglicans
have an established presence, the number of churches under the broad umbrella of
‘evangelical’ is substantial. By evangelical, I refer to the distinguishing features of a con-
version ‘born again’ experience that leads to a personal relationship with Christ as
saviour, and a commitment to the authority of the Bible, in Zimbabwe marked particu-
larly by membership in the Evangelical Fellowship of Zimbabwe or EFZ.8
The Baptist Union shares a place in the EFZ alongside larger and more pentecos-
tal groups like the transnational movement Zimbabwe Assemblies of God, Africa
 ETHNOS 5

(ZAOGA), which grew out of the Apostolic Faith Mission (see Maxwell 2006). These
groups have historical resonances with the considerable number of ‘vapastori’ (aposto-
lic) churches in Zimbabwe9 (Maxwell 1999; Engelke 2007). Baptists in Harare maintain
an ambivalent attitude towards these groups: they recognise some shared elements of
belief and applaud various kinds of cooperation, but remain sceptical of ‘prophetic’
ministries and elaborate religious displays.
Actors in Zimbabwe’s religious field are also contending with a tenuous economic
climate. When I arrived in 2015, the country had been in drought for years and unem-
ployment rates were high.10 For the employed, salary disbursements were frequently
late. A cash crisis developed. Zimbabwe adopted a multi-currency economy after astro-
nomical hyperinflation in 2008 had made local currency useless11 and people began to
rely on the US dollar. Then in 2015, mass exports of USD cash by wealthy individuals
and foreign companies created a hard currency shortage. The cash crisis meant many
people spent long hours standing in bank lines for small withdrawal amounts. Govern-
ment and companies tried to increase the availability of electronic payments, but regular
power cuts, unreliable internet access, and commercial industry hunger for cash to pay
their own vendors made swiping and transfers an unreliable option. The whole city
remained a little on edge for many months. This setting of increasing economic instabil-
ity frames the religious concerns of Baptist believers in Harare.

Baptist Views of Sin

In a context of economic upheaval, members of Fairside Baptist regularly talk about sin.
They talk about the general consequences of sin, and of how sin is a struggle in their
everyday lives. They take humans to have a strong propensity to act, and indeed be,
evil. This sinfulness is a general feature of a corrupted and failing world, and not
only a breach of individual moral codes.12
As Fairside church goers discuss the topic in prayer meetings, small fellowship
groups and even social gatherings, believers lay out for themselves the characteristics
of sin. One Sunday afternoon while we waited for meat to barbecue at the pastor’s
house, a group debate about how to select a marriage partner turned swiftly into a dis-
cussion about sin. Ezekiel, an advocate of the ‘New Calvinism’ teachings, spoke up with
his thoughts. Ezekiel earned a degree from a foreign university but was struggling to
find employment in his field. He took classes at the theological college whenever he
could and volunteered regularly at the church. Speaking to the group, he characterised
sin as a feature of life that persisted even after Christian salvation. Ezekiel explained:
No one … will be perfect in terms of sinless [even after becoming a Christian]. Some will con-
tinue to sin. But the whole point is staying in the word of God, reading the scripture, growing in
our walk. We will sin less … People will sin less but you will be aware more of sin in your life.

According to Ezekiel, believers have a spiritual responsibility to participate in devo-

tional practices that address sin, producing an increasing awareness of one’s own state
of sinfulness. He concluded that with the growing awareness, God’s ‘extending grace’ –
a divine action – would enter in.
6 L. WILLIAMS GREEN

This vision of personal sinfulness and how to deal with it is a frequent focus of
prayer and fellowship groups within the church. Yet, even if congregants agree
that sin is a continual part of a Christians’ life, the manner of sin’s effect on
people and on the world remains less clearly outlined. What is the connection
between a Christian’s own moral failings, and bad happenings in the world which
one does not directly cause?
This question was posed during a designated prayer time at the weekly young adult
meeting. Every Friday, twenty or so young people gather in the church basement to
spend several hours singing, listening to teaching, discussing issues, and socialising.
This particular night, Chris was leading the prayer portion of the evening. In his
mid-twenties, Chris had full-time employment and in his spare time juggled entrepre-
neurial projects. Unlike many in the young adult group, his financial situation made it
possible for him to live in a small apartment alone.
Chris asked everyone to spend a few moments reflecting on their week and the
difficulties that they had faced. Chris himself had experienced some work-related chal-
lenges and was inviting others to share some of their own struggles. Sherman, an older
member possessing both levity and gentle humour, raised his hand and pointed out that
this week the only thing he could think about was obtaining cash. The gathering
momentum of cash shortages had struck home as banks began to limit withdrawals,
foreign debit cards were cut off and bank queues grew. Sherman’s example quickly
raised the stakes of the discussion from workplace squabbles to more dire issues of
survival.
Chris responded by reminding the group that worrying does not change things, and
that the focus should remain on God. But Sherman interjected:
Eh, is there a difference between just worrying and being in trouble?

Sherman is in his late thirties and left employment in the city to focus on his family’s
farm. He is known in the group for his willingness to play devil’s advocate during dis-
cussion. This time, though, the questions were not merely hypothetical: he was running
a business and had no cash to pay vendors or workers.
In their response to Sherman, group members focused on the nature of trust in God.
One speaker pointed out that sometimes ‘the trouble comes out of your sin’. In such
cases, he conceded, maybe it is harder to trust God. Unsatisfied, Sherman rejected
their responses as too simplified and insistently reiterated his point:
Actually, in this case trouble is not just a consequence of one’s sin. Like for example with the
cash shortages. You might be [on your way somewhere] and the landlord is screaming about
his rent, you have bills unpaid, the [utility] service is going to be cut [off]. You have employees
to pay and you can’t give them any money because the bank is only giving you a hundred bucks
and you are trying to fork out, say, 2500, you know. So that’s trouble, and it’s general. It’s not
about your sin but it’s about the circumstances that you find yourself in.

Sherman wanted to delineate clearly the line between direct consequences for sin and
just difficult circumstances. The group was not able to do so. Instead, Chris closed the
conversation with his own prayer:
 ETHNOS 7

I pray … that regardless of the things that we are facing in this nation … the things that we have
both imposed on ourselves and the things that have just happened, I pray … that you [God] may
be with us … you may just strengthen us. Help us; give us wisdom that we may see all the
resources that you have given … for us to actually survive in this age when things are hard.

While praying, Chris acknowledged Sherman’s earlier distinction between cases related
to sin: ‘the things that we have … imposed on ourselves’ or what Sherman called ‘con-
sequence’, and ‘things that have just happened’ – those difficult situations which a
person did not cause but still had to face.
Still, Chris’ prayer downplayed this difference by making the solution to both cases
the same: make requests of God. These requests did not involve asking God to give
people access to cash, nor asking that the political regime might change. Rather, the
requests were for personal and relational assistance, so that people could ‘see all the
resources’ they had with which to face the situation.
Chris found satisfaction in affirming God’s assistance, while Sherman found collap-
sing consequences and circumstances under one general banner to be problematic. Both
men shared the securities of having full-time employment and accommodation, but
Sherman bore the much greater responsibility of leading a family business and of mul-
tiple employees. There was more at stake for Sherman in the matter of differentiating
between consequences of bad action and merely bad circumstances.
The outcome of the discussion was an emphasis on God’s control of resources and
situations. Ezekiel, above, described personal sinful acts, but also highlighted God’s
intervention in human efforts through ‘extending grace’. God, as sovereign, maintains
control of all circumstances but also makes resources available to people. The Baptist
commitment to a theological notion of sovereignty makes possible the collapse of
different situations – consequences for sin and just difficult circumstances – into a
request for God’s help.

Theology in the Lives of Urban Zimbabwean Baptists

Anthropologically speaking, one way to consider how Zimbabwean Baptists reckon
responsibility for actions and outcomes would be to draw on theories of ethics.13
Instead, I analyse the relation between divine action and human action in the accounts
of Harare Baptists by turning explicitly to the theological categories that they themselves
use, which resonate with those outlined in more formal theology. Relations between
what these Baptists feel they can do, what they think they should do, and the role
played by an active and omniscient God are evident, revealing the inadequacy of
‘agency’ to explore the distinctions between these relations. Theories of agency allow
us to consider how people might act in the world, but not what they think of that
action nor what they themselves believe about their own capacities or responsibilities.
As I explained above, these urban Baptists are conversant in theology at a congrega-
tional level, and much of their religious devotional lives is logo-centric. They have a
complex and well-developed view of human sinfulness. Though relations of human
and divine action might be concerns shared across various theological traditions, as
Baptists debating reformed issues, the terms in which Fairside believers address these
8 L. WILLIAMS GREEN

concerns derive from distinctly Augustinian conversations about sin. They claim a Pro-
testant heritage proudly and are concerned with how Baptist teachings about human
responsibility play out in their understanding of spiritual salvation. As indicated
above, however, within the congregation there is a division in views regarding the
role that contemporary reformed theology plays.
The work of contemporary Calvinist writers offers more than an explanation of the
content of debates between these Zimbabwean Christians. My primary motivation for
drawing from these works is that Christian theological thinking on human and divine
action illuminates tensions around sinfulness and responsibility in the lives of these
Baptists. As Howell points out, for a conversation between anthropology and theology
to ensue, the anthropologist must confront the matter of ‘which theology’ (2018: 29).
The language and categories that Hararean Baptists use derive from specific theological
genealogies. I have chosen to draw from the work of reformed theologian T.F. Tor-
rance’s ‘Calvin’s Doctrine of Man’ (1957), and from certain contemporary Augustinian
views of original sin (Jacobs 2008; McFarland 2010; Couenhoven 2013) to argue that the
visions of human action employed by Zimbabwean Baptists are tied to their conceptions
of human sinfulness and divine sovereignty.
While some at Fairside Baptist are indeed reading works in this reformed heritage,
like Jonathan Edwards and other Puritans, many would not be accessing these works
directly. Still, there remain significant resonances in contemporary interpretations of
these writings which illustrate aspects of Zimbabwean Baptist self-understandings
that are not well reflected in social scientific work on similar subjects. The recurrences
of similar conflicts throughout history within Protestant non-conforming groups in
England (Benedict 2002), and among Southern Baptists in the United States, suggests
that there is a theological tension internal to this strain of reformed Protestantism.
Understanding one aspect of these internal theological tensions (between human and
divine action, or human sinfulness and divine sovereignty) by looking at contemporary
interpreters of this theological genealogy can help us to understand how or why the con-
cerns re-emerge as salient for a specific group. Akin to Reinhardt’s (2015) ‘contrapuntal’
approach to Continental philosophy and the concerns of his Ghanaian Pentecostal
interlocutors, I do not seek to apply theological works wholesale to the ethnographic
case. Rather, I show how theories of human nature in current readings from this theo-
logical genealogy have resonance in the disagreements among Baptists in Harare. Con-
temporary writings provide resources to understand aspects of urban Zimbabwean
Baptist theological interests, while the situatedness of these believers reveals how theo-
logical concerns intersect with the ideational and material aspects of their lives. I turn
first to interpretations of a Protestant Augustinian view of original sin, and then to a
discussion of Calvinist views regarding human depravity as it relates to God’s
sovereignty.

Original Sin and Human Depravity

In an Augustinian characterisation of sin, ‘original sin’ plays a key role. Moser summar-
ises original sin as an ‘inherited defective state prior to one’s free decisions’ (2010: 137).
 ETHNOS 9

This ‘inherited’ aspect of original sin makes humans responsible for sins over which
they have no control (McFarland 2010; Couenhoven 2013). Augustine talks about orig-
inal sin as a kind of disease, and Alan Jacobs points out that our picture of disease is not
readily comparable to that which we have wilfully done: ‘Disease, we tend to agree,
happens to us; sin is what we do’ (2008: xiii). And yet, he says, ‘it is just this simple
and familiar distinction that Augustine … denies’ (xiii). In a sense, Augustine’s
approach cannot make allowance for a division of the kind made by Sherman –
between consequences for action and that of merely circumstance. Augustine’s descrip-
tion of sin as ‘disease’ makes all people capable of sin, and culpable for sin.
Couenhoven takes this as a central problematic for many contemporary readers of
Augustine. Augustine maintains a view of freedom that allows for humans to be respon-
sible for something over which they have no control because human freedom does not
hinge on the capacity to choose between alternatives. Freedom goes beyond ‘ability’ or
‘willing’. Couenhoven’s ‘normative view of freedom’ is that being free is ‘to know, love,
be, and do what is truly good’ (2013: 71). ‘Normative freedom’ is a matter of desire being
rightly directed toward God. As Jacobs has it: ‘Augustine believed that we achieve true
freedom not by doing what we want, but by conforming our wills perfectly to the will of
God, so that nothing in us rebels against him’ (2008: 93).
Sinfulness, too, is deeply about desire, but a disordered desire Augustine calls ‘con-
cupiscence’ (Torrance 1957: 124; Couenhoven 2013: 38; Robbins & Green 2018).
Augustine’s view of responsibility does not rely on the possibility of choice, and so
shares in anthropological critiques, mentioned earlier, that trouble a view of person-
hood in which the self-determined individual acts in the world based on pure will.
As theologian Ian McFarland puts it: the ‘Christian language of sin challenges the
private character of choice, because it locates human deed within a context of a relation-
ship with God that is prior to and independent of any human choosing’, highlighting
that human action is reckoned in relation to God, rather than to autonomous self-deter-
minism (McFarland 2010: 6).
Though not regularly invoking the phrase, congregants at Fairside recognise ‘original
sin’ in their individual experiences, and in their relation to others in a difficult postco-
lonial context. While they talk about sin as being a struggle people experience, they also
describe it as a state in which humans operate, regardless of choice – a background
against which the world plays out. Because people possess original sin, Fairside Baptists
expect that things will go wrong in the world. This is true on the national scale. They
certainly recognise the connections between political and historical events and the
current situation. But if you ask a congregant at Fairside Baptist, they are likely to
talk about living in a sinful world, anticipating that sin will, of course, shape the
outcome of many processes. And so, in the utter helplessness that Sherman expressed
in the face of a screaming landlord, begging employees, and power cuts, his lack of
control did not absolve him from experiencing, and being complicit in, the effects of sin.
Calvinist teachings about human depravity build upon the Augustinian conception
of original sin that I have been describing. There is a strong genealogical connection
between Augustine and contemporary vision of humans as moral agents, and in
Calvin, the individual takes her most extreme form (Rynkiewich, citing Dumont,
10 L. WILLIAMS GREEN

2018: 3). Depravity means that humans are not only sinful, but that original sin is tota-
lising in its effect on human personhood. At the same time, this depravity is under-
standable only in terms of the relation between God and human persons (Torrance
1957: 106, 108, 112).14 Rather than being assessed in their own terms, or relative to
other creatures, the depravity of humans materialises always and only because
humans are appraised according to the dynamic relation maintained by God towards
them. I heard this view reflected in many conversations about sin: when explaining
their own sinful nature, Christians at Fairside Baptist would do so by describing
God’s characteristics, particularly as a contrast and remedy to their own nature.
Thus, Ezekiel cannot understand sin apart from the grace of God at work, nor can
Chris consider God’s action apart from the sinfulness of humans.
It became apparent in conversations like that between Chris and Sherman, in
prayers, in teaching and sermons that I heard, that the people around me took
their own sinfulness, their responsibility to act, and God’s action in the world to
be comprehensible only in terms of one another. People sin individually and bear
the consequences, and also suffer at the hands of larger forces beyond their
control. The responsibility for the two types – consequence as opposed to bad cir-
cumstances – collapses into general notions of human culpability. This is in part
understandable as a result of beliefs in original sin and the way that its effects
extend to all human beings and human structures. When I heard church goers at
Fairside Baptist denounce the corruption of local city bureaucrats and national
leaders, their condemnation would frequently dissolve into a recognition of their
own sinfulness. Though situations caused by an individual’s sins and those resulting
from broader social issues might be distinguishable from one another, there is no
clear way to divide the attribution of responsibility along these lines. Whether
affirming or rejecting the teachings of New Calvinism, it remains difficult for Baptists
at Fairside to maintain the distinction between consequences for individual wrong-
doing and the problem of an evil world, and so both collapse under the banner of
human sinfulness. In the theological framework of these Baptists, divine sovereignty
is always in close proximity to this collapse.

Practices of Prayer and Anticipating God’s Intervention

During the discussion following Sherman’s questions, the emphasis had been on trust-
ing God. Particularly in the practice of prayer is evident an intersection of divine activity
and human agency. If the main recourse for Christians in difficult circumstances is to
trust God and to request non-material resources, what kind of divine action is expected
from prayer?
After the arrest of a local pastor, I asked Baptist believers this question about what
they expected from God. With no history of political activity, the pastor had become the
incidental founder of a social media campaign for national reform and was being put on
trial for his activity. Gathered eagerly at the courthouse, I asked members of affiliate
Baptist churches: when you advocate for prayer, what is it that you expect of God? A
young deacon, draped in a Zimbabwean flag, said we can ask God for ‘resilience’ and
 ETHNOS 11

‘courage’. He knew that God cared about the injustices in the ‘system’, which also result
from sin. Getting lunch on court session break, I asked the same questions of the pastor
of a suburban church with close links to Fairside. He explained that while Christians
know that God often acts in the world through human persons, their greatest expec-
tation was ‘that God will be God’.
For ‘God to be God’ is closely tied to the characteristic of divine sovereignty, an
important feature of who Fairside believers understand God to be. In this case, Baptists
in Harare affirm that they cannot pretend to know precisely what divine action will look
like nor do they anticipate miraculously supernatural displays, but can only know ‘that
God will be God’. In the vision of prayer that accompanies this perspective, believers do
expect God to act in the circumstances, but mainly by imparting resources to assist
people – the pastor on trial and those protesting for his release – to act and to
endure. Prayer, as expressed here, is less about cultivating an embodied mode than a
statement about God’s attributes.
The discussions of sin and of prayer described above include statements of human
agency, responsibility, and a grounding of both against the sovereignty of God. Even
among Christians with a doctrinal commitment to God’s unquestionable authority,
whose divine ‘presence … is marked by moments of uncertainty’ (Daswani 2013:
476) which believers must learn to discern (Reinhardt 2014), there persist a range of
relations and life events which shape how doctrinal affirmations are negotiated. For
those at Fairside, in a sinful world, governments are corrupt, greedy and irresponsible,
and the circumstances in which people find themselves stem from a general sinfulness
which they cannot control, and which they struggle to address in these terms. As
persons, individuals also participate actively in sinning daily and are responsible for
addressing that sin. All of these activities take place within the purview of God’s
control over everything that happens.

Political and Religious Sovereignty

I have been illustrating how Baptists in Zimbabwe reckon divine sovereignty in their
lives. This discussion of sovereignty touches on themes that have much broader pur-
chase in recent social scientific discourse. Agamben’s critique of Carl Schmitt has
motivated scholars to examine power and political life by identifying the sovereign,
that is, the one who decides on the exception (Schmitt 1985; Agamben 1998). Kirsch
and Turner trouble this view by introducing a range of ethnographic cases in which
sovereignty is reckoned in hybridised realms of ‘the political’ and ‘the religious’
(2009: 5).
The relationships between ‘political’ and ‘religious’ realms in Zimbabwe have been
varied and complex. Traditional spirit mediums played important roles in the fight
for national independence (Lan 1985), and various Christians groups were motivated
by religious mandate in the struggle for African franchise and development of national
consciousness (Hallencreutz & Moyo 1988; Ranger 1995; cf. Phiri 2001). In the time
since, Chitando (2002) has shown the ways in which political and religious discourses
in Zimbabwe have borrowed extensively from one another.
12 L. WILLIAMS GREEN

Elsewhere on the continent, Ruth Marshall has contrasted the view of the sovereign
based on exception with that of sovereignty in the postcolony. In postcolonial Africa,
she asserts, the ‘site of sovereignty is designated as an “elsewhere”’ (2009: 171, citing
Mbembe), a commitment of ‘Born Again’ Nigerians that is deeply responsive to post-
colonial uncertainty (236). The Holy Spirit inhabiting each believer also creates a ‘hori-
zontal’ dimension to divine sovereignty manifested in the existence of a community. Yet
other Pentecostal beliefs about autonomous subjectivity and individual discernment
actually ‘weak[en]’ (Marshall 2010: 215) the breaking-in of divine sovereignty in
these moments.
Recourse to a transcendent sovereignty ‘beyond’ characterises urban Zimbabwean
Baptists’ engagement with the ‘political’ in their postcolonial experience and governs
the relation between the political and the religious in their lives. The nature of sovereign
authority can organise the kinds of divine intervention that Christians consider poss-
ible. Certain Vineyard Christians in Southern California, described by Jon Bialecki
(2009), cultivate left-leaning political views and anticipate God acting for ‘justice’.
But the interventions which make justice possible are of a type not legible in the
current temporal order. What Vineyard Christians ‘call for is always a ‘radical’
justice that must mark its alterity, its link to the divine, by rejecting quotidian forms
of practice that could be given a space in existing social arrangements’ (2009: 116).
By contrast, the Baptists I’ve described do anticipate that God will act within ‘quo-
tidian’ forms, not expecting the miracles that Pentecostal-charismatic believers often
do. Yet Bialecki and Marshall’s arguments show how the political may be shaped ideo-
logically such that it does not show itself in the way that the analyst might expect pol-
itical engagement to appear (cf. Maxwell 2006). Mukonyora demonstrates that a
spectrum of evangelical Christians in Zimbabwe (of which these Baptists are a part)
differentially position themselves to the realm of politics, from ‘hope for divine inter-
vention’ that motivates ‘political involvement’, to an emphasis on sin that puts the
possibility of change ‘beyond humanity’s power’, requiring God’s action (2008: 146).
The result is that different groups, within the same churches, disparately participate
in, and also renounce, involvement in the political world.
Urban Baptists in Harare respond to political circumstances, not by mere withdra-
wal, but by pressing their theological concerns to meet their experience of ‘sin conse-
quence’ and ‘mere circumstance’ in the troubled times in which they live. The
existence of sin, both generally in the world and as an aspect of human essence, pro-
duces a deep scepticism of any human institution (political or otherwise) to achieve
the kind of change that these Christians believe possible under God’s sovereignty.
The primacy of their relation to God prevents the development of a sovereign self-deter-
mining individual. At the same time, human sinfulness limits human capacity to dis-
tinguish God’s action in the world in clear terms, and God’s alterity casts this action
in a form not anticipatable. Such beliefs do not prevent Christians at Fairside from sup-
porting certain reform efforts – like attending the court hearing of the arrested pastor or
taking to the streets to celebrate the ostensibly peaceful removal of Robert Mugabe from
the presidency.15 However, theological study and debate come to be privileged in the life
 ETHNOS 13

of believers at Fairside Baptist, mobilising ideas about God’s sovereignty and human
sinfulness as the primary means with which all of these concerns are to be engaged.
Examinations of sovereignty and authority as they order religious and political life
show how sovereignty must be understood not in purely political terms apart from
the ethnographic cases that make its operation possible. Sovereignty has been an impor-
tant theme in Zimbabwe’s political history in nationalist and decolonising projects
(Hammar 2008: 429). The danger in focusing on identifying the sovereign is that the
anthropologist misses out on the ‘social construction of the structure’ that allows for
the decision of exception to be made in the first place (Cañás Bottos 2009: 121). In
this paper, I have taken sovereignty to refer to the theological notion that occupied
my interlocutors: the idea that God has the final authority in all outcomes. Accordingly,
God does indeed decide on the exception – determining who is to receive redemption
into eternal life – but the terms of human involvement in this process are deeply con-
tested in this congregation, visible in the debates regarding Calvinist teachings. At the
same time, I have explored the way that affirmation of God’s control intersects with pol-
itical engagements and the theological categories that make this sovereignty thinkable
and a point of engagement for those debating theological issues at Fairside Baptist.
Zimbabwean Baptists are struggling with the nature of human persons, doctrinally
and in terms of contemporary, postcolonial life. Contributors to the volume ‘Theologi-
cally Engaged Anthropology’ (Lemons 2018) show that such historically ‘theological’
debates might be readily recognised as anthropological ones. McGrath indicates how a
disagreement between Augustine and an interlocutor, a ‘theological dispute’ about one
of the issues at stake here for Zimbabwean Baptists, is ‘more fundamentally a debate
about culturally regnant conceptions of human nature’ (2018: 125).16 I have argued
that an Augustinian conception of original sin and human responsibility sheds light
on the ways that sin and culpability are not dependent on individual free choice to act.
I have also claimed that Calvin’s system for understanding humanity in dynamic relation
to God captures divine sovereign action in relation to human depravity.

Conclusion
Baptist believers in Harare are negotiating a collapse of various difficult experiences into
one overarching vision of God’s sovereignty.17 Understanding how readers of Augus-
tine and Calvin resolve connections between human culpability and freedom help us
to see how the vision that Hararean Baptists have of tragedies which befall them,
their own sinfulness, and their expectations of God, operate together. This case,
where ideas are articulated in distinctly religious terms, illustrates the ‘transformational’
possibilities of engagement between theology and anthropology.
The theology I utilise does not just explain what Fairside believers affirm about the
relation between human action and God’s sovereignty in cultural patterns surrounding
sin and prayer. Their theological disagreements are responsive to their postcolonial
context. Certain theological commitments do lead them to sustain a kind of political
quietism, as many Baptists elsewhere have done so historically.18 But where it might
seem plausible for them to engage in political action motivated by a belief in God’s
14 L. WILLIAMS GREEN

gift of internal resources, their commitment to ideas about sinfulness and their under-
standing of God’s sovereignty forecloses participation in a secularised or modern vision
of ‘the political’. To focus purely on God as sovereign in competition with a political
(state) sovereign, or to see the political as a mere channel of divine sovereignty, is to
misunderstand the Baptist vision of human beings and their relation to God.
Only ethnographic investigation can fully address the ‘permutations’ between the pol-
itical and the religious (Kirsch & Turner 2009). God could indeed be the ‘Christian sover-
eign’ with the power to make the ‘decision on eternal life’ (Cañás Bottos 2009: 109), but in
the terms of Zimbabwean Baptists, divine sovereignty extends into the everyday: they ask
what role God’s action plays in problems of cash circulation or political expression. They
take God’s sovereignty to be the ultimate singularity, but as I have argued, sin and sinful-
ness continually press against this sovereign control, complicating how Christians see
divine authority play out in the world. Their case has important implications for the
way that discussions of ‘sovereignty’ or ‘agency’ must bear out ethnographically, in
this case by taking account of relevant theological visions and concepts.

Notes
1. Morreira (2015) discusses potential origins for the adoption of the phrase ‘make a plan’ in con-
temporary Zimbabwe.
2. Little scholarly work exists on this movement but see Hansen (2006). Chow (2014) also includes
a discussion of how a simultaneously rising influence of Calvinism in urban China is focused on
theological concerns that are distinct from those of so-called New Calvinism.
3. Oftentimes this disagreement has taken the form of a discussion on predestination, that is, the
degree to which God has predetermined those humans who will be saved, thus downplaying the
role of humans in their own salvation.
4. All names given here are pseudonyms.
5. When I surveyed the group on their ‘first language’, a number of respondents who indicated
‘Shona’ also pencilled in that English was their preferred language.
6. These churches are all registered with the global Baptist organising body, the Baptist World
Alliance. Of the 678 churches and 73,000 members listed for all Baptist denominations in
Zimbabwe, the BUZ accounts for only 68 churches and 5000 members, according to the
Baptist World Alliance website statistics (www.bwanet.org). I heard the comparatively
small and slow growth in the BUZ lamented by church leaders who were aware of the 68-
church count in comparison to other Baptist denominations in the region. In the Harare
region, there are six Baptist Union churches, having existed as an autonomous denomination
for more than 60 years. The Baptist Union of South Africa, which started the churches in
Zimbabwe, began with the arrival of British settlers to the Cape Colony in the early 20th
century.
7. The Pew Global Religious Futures measured 87% of Zimbabwe’s population were professing
Christians in 2010. Of these, 67% were Protestants (http://www.globalreligiousfutures.org/
countries/zimbabwe).
8. The more mainline denominations belong to the other dominant church alliance: the Zimbabwe
Council of Churches. This includes Methodists, Anglicans and Lutherans. Membership is not
generally shared between the Zimbabwe Council of Churches and the EFZ; generally, churches
belong to one or the other (Mukonyora 2008).
9. Vapastori refers to a collection of Southern African churches who follow a prophetic leader.
They are not members of the EFZ, although, for example, Mukonyora (2008) has included
them under a broad umbrella of ‘evangelical’.
 ETHNOS 15

10. By some estimates, in the 70–80% range. See newspaper articles by Moyo (2013) and Chiumia
(2014).
11. See Hammar et al. (2010) and Jones (2010).
12. For a robust discussion of Christian notions of sin and sinfulness in a different cultural context,
see Robbins (2004).
13. For example, see Robbins (2010) and Daswani (2013).
14. Engel (1988) makes sense of the seeming contradictions in Calvin’s thought by speaking of the
‘perspectivalism’ evident in the God-human relation. From God’s perspective, the dynamics of
the situation can appear one way, while from a human perspective they can appear in opposing
terms. Both perspectives can operate simultaneously in relation to one another within Calvin’s
system.
15. The ‘coup that was not a coup’ which ousted Mugabe as the country’s leader occurred some 9
months after my fieldwork ended.
16. As one anonymous reviewer of this paper pointed out, Saint Augustine himself was also from
the African continent, and living in the ‘failing state’ of Rome. The context in which his influ-
ential theology was developed bears interesting parallels with some of the current political situ-
ation in Zimbabwe. I thank the reviewer for pointing out this interesting connection.
17. China Scherz sees a similar kind of affirmation play out in how Catholic sisters in Uganda
understand their own action: they
feel they are working within God’s divine plan [but] they do not see themselves as able to
bring about social change without divine intervention. They believe that only God can
complete and perfect their imperfect works, which are always broken and always
partial, as they believe themselves to be. (2014: 133)
While the ethnographic similarities between these Catholic nuns and Zimbabwean Baptists are
striking, the theological imperative for Zimbabweans is different.
18. For a contrasting and also complimentary case, see Greenhouse’s (1986) discussion of Southern
Baptist approaches to ‘civil religion’ and the Moral Majority.

Acknowledgements
I am grateful to J. Derrick Lemons, and participants of the Center for Theologically Engaged Anthro-
pology conference in Atlanta for helpful workshop interactions. I particularly thank Brian M. Howell,
Joel Robbins, Francis X. Clooney, S.J., Don Seeman, Martyn Percy, and Alister E. McGrath for their
charitable comments and critical feedback. Thanks also to Haleema Welji. I am grateful for the inter-
ventions of three anonymous reviewers for Ethnos. All errors are my own.

Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Funding
This work was supported by the Wenner-Gren Foundation under Wenner-Gren Dissertation Research
Grant 8876.

References
Agamben, Giorgio. 1998. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Translated by Daniel Heller-
Roazen. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
16 L. WILLIAMS GREEN

Banner, Michael. 2013. The Ethics of Everyday Life: Moral Theology, Social Anthropology and the
Imagination of the Human. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Bayart, Jean-François. 2009. The State in Africa: The Politics of the Belly. Cambridge: Polity.
Benedict, Philip. 2002. Christ’s Churches Purely Reformed: A Social History of Calvinism. New Haven,
CT: Yale University Press.
Bialecki, Jon. 2009. Disjuncture, Continental Philosophy’s New ‘Political Paul,’ and the Question of
Progressive Christianity in a Southern California Third Wave Church. American Ethnologist, 36
(1):110–123.
Cañás Bottos, Lorenzo. 2009. Order and Dissent Among Old Colony Mennonites: A Regime of
Embedded Sovereignty. In Permutations of Order: Religion and Law As Contested Sovereignties,
edited by Thomas Kirsch and Bertram Turner, 107–123. Surrey: Ashgate.
Chitando, Ezra. 2002. ‘Down with the Devil, Forward with Christ!’ A Study of the Interface Between
Religious and Political Discourses in Zimbabwe. African Sociological Review/Revue Africaine de
Sociologie, 6(1):1–16.
Chiumia, Sintha. 2014, October 1. Is Zimbabwe’s Unemployment Rate 4%, 60% or 95%? Why the Data
Is Unreliable. Africacheck Reports. http://africacheck.org/reports/is-zimbabwes-unemployment-
rate-4-60-or-95-why-the-data-is-unreliable
Chow, Alexander. 2014. Calvinist Public Theology in Urban China Today. International Journal of
Public Theology, 8(2):158–175.
Couenhoven, Jesse. 2013. Stricken by Sin, Cured by Christ: Agency, Necessity and Culpability in
Augustinian Theology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Daswani, Girish. 2013. On Christianity and Ethics: Rupture As Ethical Practice in Ghanaian
Pentecostalism. American Ethnologist, 40(3):467–479.
Engel, Mary Potter. 1988. John Calvin’s Perspectival Anthropology. Atlanta: Scholars Press.
Engelke, Matthew. 2007. A Problem of Presence: Beyond Scripture in an African Church. Berkeley:
University of California Press.
Greenhouse, Carol. 1986. Praying for Justice: Faith, Order, and Community in an American Town.
Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Guyer, Jane. 2004. Marginal Gains: Monetary Transactions in Atlantic Africa. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
Hallencreutz, Carl F. & Ambrose Moyo. 1988. Church and State in Zimbabwe. Zimbabwe: Mambo Press.
Hammar, Amanda. 2008. In the Name of Sovereignty: Displacement and State Making in Post-inde-
pendence Zimbabwe, Journal of Contemporary African Studies, 26(4):417–434.
Hammar, Amanda, JoAnn McGregor & Loren Landau. 2010. Introduction. Displacing Zimbabwe:
Crisis and Construction in Southern Africa. Journal of Southern African Studies, 36(2):263–283.
Hansen, Collin. 2006. Young, Restless, Reformed. Christianity Today, 50(9):32–38.
Hirschkind, Charles. 2006. The Ethical Soundscape: Cassette Sermons and Islamic Counter-Publics.
New York: Columbia University Press.
Howell, Brian. 2018. Which Theology for Anthropology? Types of Theology for Anthropological
Engagement. In Theologically Engaged Anthropology, edited by J. Derrick Lemons, 29–49. Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
Jacobs, Alan. 2008. Original Sin: A Cultural History. New York: HarperOne.
Jones, Jeremy. 2010. Freeze! Movement, Narrative and the Disciplining of Hyperinflatory Zimbabwe.
Social Dynamics, 36 (2):338–351.
Kirsch, Thomas G. and Bertram Turner (eds). 2009. Permutations of Order: Religion and Law as
Contested Sovereignties. Surrey: Ashgate.
Laidlaw, James. 2002. For an Anthropology of Ethics and Freedom. Journal of the Royal Anthropological
Institute, 8(2):311–332.
———. 2014. The Subject of Virtue: An Anthropology of Ethics and Freedom. Cambridge: University of
Cambridge Press.
Lan, David. 1985. Guns and Rain: Guerrillas and Spirit Mediums in Zimbabwe. Berkeley: University of
California Press.
 ETHNOS 17

Lemons, J. Derrick. 2018. Theologically Engaged Anthropology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
MacIntyre, Alasdair. 1984. After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory. 2nd edition. Indiana: University of
Notre Dame Press.
Mahmood, Saba. 2005. Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject. Princeton:
Princeton University Press.
Marshall, Ruth. 2009 Political Spiritualities: The Pentecostal Revolution in Nigeria. Chicago: University
of Chicago Press.
———. 2010. The Sovereignty of Miracles: Pentecostal Political Theology in Nigeria. Constellations 17
(2):197–223.
Maxwell, David. 1999. Christians and Chiefs in Zimbabwe: A Social History of the Hwesa People.
Westport, CT: Praeger.
———. 2006 African Gifts of the Spirit: Pentecostalism & the Rise of a Zimbabwean Transnational
Religious Movement. Ohio: Ohio University Press.
Mbembe, Achille & Janet Roitman. 1995. Figures of the Subject in Times of Crisis. Public Culture,
Winter 7(2):323–352.
McFarland, Ian A. 2010. In Adam’s Fall: A Meditation on the Christian Doctrine of Original Sin. Oxford:
Wiley-Blackwell.
McGrath, Alister. 2018. Narratives of Significance: Reflections on the Engagement of Anthropology and
Christian Theology. In Theologically Engaged Anthropology, edited by J. Derrick & Lemons, 123–
139. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Meneses, Eloise & David Bronkema. 2017. On Knowing Humanity: Insights from Theology for
Anthropology. London: Routledge.
Morreira, Shannon. 2015. ‘Making a Plan’: Responses Amongst the Wealthy to Declining
Socieoeconomic Conditions in Suburban Harare. Social Dynamics, 41(2):273–288.
Moser, Paul K. 2010. Sin and Salvation. In The Cambridge Companion to Christian Philosophical
Theology, edited by Charles Taliaferro and Chad Meister, 136–151. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Moyo, Jason. 2013, October 31. Zim Graduates Join the Jobless Heap. Mail and Guardian. http://mg.co.
za/article/2013-10-31-graduates-join-the-jobless-heap
Mukonyora, Isabel. 2008. Foundations for Democracy in Zimbabwean Evangelical Christianity. In
Evangelical Christianity and Democracy in Africa, edited by Terence Ranger, 131–160. Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
Phiri, Isaac. 2001. Proclaiming Political Pluralism: Churches and Political Transitions in Africa.
Westport, CT: Praeger.
Ranger, Terence. 1995. Are We Not Also Men? The Samkange Family & African Politics in Zimbabwe
1920–1964. Harare: Baobab Books.
Reinhardt, Bruno. 2014. Soaking in Tapes: The Haptic Voice of Global Pentecostal Pedagogy in Ghana.
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 20: 315–336.
———. 2015. A Christian Plane of Immanence? Contrapuntal Reflections on Deleuze and Pentecostal
Spirituality. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 5(1):405–436.
Robbins, Joel. 2004. Becoming Sinners: Christianity and Moral Torment in a Papua New Guinea Society.
Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
———. 2010. On the Pleasures and Dangers of Culpability. Critique of Anthropology, 30(1):122–128.
———. 2013. Afterword: Let’s Keep It Awkward: Anthropology, Theology, and Otherness. The
Australian Journal of Anthropology, 24: 329–337.
———. 2018. World Christianity and the Reorganization of Disciplines: On the Emerging Dialogue
Between Anthropology and Theology. In Theologically Engaged Anthropology, edited by J.
Derrick Lemons, 226–243. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Robbins, Joel and Leanne Williams Green. 2018. In What Does Failure Succeed? Conceptions of Sin
and the Role of Human Moral Vulnerability in Pentecostal and Charismatic Christianity. In
Straying from the Straight Path: How Senses of Failure Invigorate Lived Religion, edited by David
Kloos and Daan Beekers, 21–36. New York: Berghahn.
18 L. WILLIAMS GREEN

Rynkiewich, Michael. 2018. Athens Engaging Jerusalem. In Theologically Engaged Anthropology, edited
by J. Derrick Lemons, 211–225. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Scarnecchia, Timothy. 1999. The Mapping of Respectability and the Transformation of African
Residential Space. In Sites of Struggle: Essays in Zimbabwe’s Urban History, edited by Brian
Raftopoulos and Tsuneo Yoshikuni, 151–162. Harare: Weaver Press.
Scherz, China. 2014. Having People, Having Heart: Charity, Sustainable Development and Problems of
Dependence in Central Uganda. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Schmitt, Carl. 1985. Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty. Translated by
George Schwab. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Torrance, Thomas F. 1957. Calvin’s Doctrine of Man. Michigan: Eerdmans.
Wallace, Dewey D. Jr. 1982. Puritans and Predestination: Grace in English Protestant Theology 1525–
1695. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press
West, Michael O. 2002. The Rise of an African Middle Class: Colonial Zimbabwe, 1898–1965.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press.