Our Secret African Heritage

How we can remember our big family history

Sometimes it is hard to remember just how I'm connected to some of my relatives. Beyond first cousins, it can be tricky to explain (or remember) what the relationship is. One of my cousins even calls himself my "imaginary cousin." (My father's parents fostered his mother. I don't know what that makes me to him. Yet we feel related.)

My father must have had a similar difficulty remembering family connections. After his death, I found a scroll (how positively biblical!) made of 10 sheets from a yellow legal pad. On the scroll, he diagrammed the descendants of my paternal great-grandmother's nine siblings. One of those nine had a daughter who married a prominent anti-alcohol crusader. He headed up the American Temperance Society and befriended Muslim leaders who appreciated Christians who didn't drink. I knew him as Uncle Billy, but I sure don't know how to label that relationship.

Like families, the church has a genealogy. And just as my family has regional concentrations in Illinois, Wisconsin, Arizona, and Pennsylvania, so the early church had regional concentrations in Antioch, Alexandria, and Rome. Eventually, Jerusalem and Constantinople joined the list. Each center had a family history that helped the churches in their sphere know who they were and tell true believers from wayward ones.

Protestantism was, in part, an argument with Rome over the right version of the Western church's family history. The true heirs of the apostles who planted the church in Rome were those who treasured and taught true biblical faith, the Reformers taught, not necessarily those who occupied a place in a succession of officeholders.

This Western family dispute dominated, of course, because the other ancient centers of the Christian family fell to Muslim conquerors. Those other Christian communities no longer carried political clout in their urban centers.

Like families, the church has a genealogy. Protestantism was, in part, an argument with Rome over the right version of the Western church's family history.In recent decades, many Western Christians have rediscovered these communities and their family histories. This summer I read Thomas C. Oden's new book, The African Memory of Mark: Reassessing Early Church Tradition. Oden's tale centers on Alexandria, where the church produced both the early church's greatest defender of orthodoxy (Bishop Athanasius) and its most infamous heretic (Presbyter Arius).

Oden argues that we ought to take the Alexandrian church's tales of its own origins seriously, as seriously as I take my father's yellow scroll. To read more, click here.