“Heavenly Citizenship” at Philipi and the “Four Towns” of Senegal West Africa
Introduction
“ . . . live your life in a manner worthy of the gospel of Christ. . . standing firm in one spirit, striving side by side with one mind for the faith of the gospel. . . for our citizenship is in heaven, and it is from there that we are expecting a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ”
“Look at the inhabitants of the towns. . . Because of their long period of contact with Europeans, they thought themselves more ‘civilized’ than other bush Africans living in the forest or savanna.”
Throughout history, colonial settlers have often built cites wherever they have introduced their faith and civilization as superior and normative. Athenian citizens, for example, were taught to believe that common ancestry and their city’s strategic geography shaped them to be best abled to rule others.1 Many Roman rulers in antiquity and modern French colonists echoed similar sentiments. The Apostle Paul preached in city tenement house-churches to urban audiences aware of Graeco-Roman colonial lore.2 Variably affected by Roman imperial demands, most of them were often forced to create a sphere of existence, a third space or margin as a site for articulating their “ambivalence,”3 and assiduously create an identity “nurtured and nourished by their own goals and aspirations.”4
In a different era, French colonists and missionaries lived in cities built by imperial officials designed to frenchify Senegalese people by educating and granting them citizenship, political and economic rights—a context where faith in Jesus Christ was often confused with imperial rather than heavenly civics. The Apostle Paul, preaching in imperial cities, exhorts his Philippian converts to live as citizens of their heavenly commonwealth rather than adhere to the citizenship imperial Rome secures—a message relevant for Senegalese Christians of the Four Towns.
The City in Greco-Roman Colonial Lore
As noted above, Athenians believed in a common ancestry and lived in an environmentally suited city that shaped them into superior rulers. They alone enjoy a chthonic noble birth, a suitable milieu, unbroken polity, sense of equality, freedom, and most important of all, superiority to non-Athenians (Iso, Paneg. 4.24-5; De Pace, 8.49c-50a), an aptitude to rule all people (Plato, Menex. 245; Epin. 987e; Pol. 7.30). Apollo, the sending deity, sponsors the colonial process by purifying and advising the would-be founder to settle a new land (Callimachus, Hymn. Apoll. 2.55a, 55-7; Hom. Hymn. Apoll. 3.247-53), and build a city and cultic center—an Athens Overseas. The city as center for Paideia, Greek identity construction, was treasured during the classical (Aristotle, Pol. 1253a 1-4; 1 Macc 1:14-15; 2 Macc 4:9, 12; 4 Macc 4:20) and Hellenistic eras but remained a competitive and dynamic process.
Like their Greek predecessors, Roman authors also claimed ancestral linage, a divine mandate to settle and environmental determinism that made them into superior people (Pliny, NH. 2.189-90) “destined by the gods to conquer, rule and civilize the world,”5 namely “barbarians.”6 To achieve this, Jupiter sends Aeneas to settle Latium where the city of Rome would be built (Virgil, Aen. 7.135-60). Most Roman rulers, beginning with Aeneas and his successors, believed this divine mandate, which Augustus Caesar would later assume in parading himself as a divinely sent agent to pacify (Res Gestae, 5.26; cf. 1.3; 2.8; 4.24-5.29), proclaim the imperial good news (OGS, 458), and fulfill Jupiter’s promise of a boundless empire (Virgil, Aen. 1.278-82, 1.231-6.278-83; 6.791-807, 851-3).
Humanitas guides the process ofbecoming Roman in Rome and provincial cities as the civilizing tool to educate would-be elites fit to rule and a “set of ideals to which all men might aspire ”that echoes much of the ideals embedded in Greek Paideia.7 By Paul’s time becoming Roman was “achievable through one’s educational status rather than birth, a process that often involved triangulation, “bilingualism and code-switching . . . at all social levels.”8 Conquered nations, cultures and people groups suffered alienation and loss of identity.
The City in French Colonial Lore
A meeting held in Berlin (1884-5) without the knowledge of any African, as far as I can tell, led to the partition of the African continent by Europeans. French colonists, claiming to have inherited the spirit to propagate France’s civilizing mission from the ancient Celts/Gauls, arrived in Senegal, West Africa in 1659. Over time, they built four “towns/cities,” France Overseas (Saint Louis, Dakar, Gorée and Rufisque 1887-1960), to frenchify Senegalese people —an assimilation policy under the aegis of France’s civilizing mission or, ironically, the peace of France. These cities were similar to ancient Greek gymnasia as assimilation, religious and economic centers and those born in them received French citizenship and political representation in metropolitan France since 1914. Those born in the protectorate would have to earn their citizenship by excelling in French education.
So schooling (to educate and potentially colonize the mind) and the granting of citizenship rights woos the populace but also engenders contempt as the frenchified of the towns (originaires) begin to think of themselves as civilized and superior to their compatriots. Ousmane Sembène’s fictional character opines:
Look at the inhabitants of the towns. . . Because of their long period of contact with Europeans, they thought themselves more “civilized” than other bush Africans living in the forest or savanna . . . How many times have we heard a man from Dakar, Gorée, Rufisque or Ndar (Saint Louis) say contemptuously to his country cousin: “I was civilized before you were.”9
Citizens of the towns, especially the créoles of Saint Louis and Gorée were politically, economically and religiously privileged because they “tended to accept European culture and Christianity.”10
In spite of efforts made by a handful of French Catholic missionaries to indigenize the gospel, most introduced French ways to “Africans alongside catholic teachings” to secure French dominance in Senegal. So “christianization and civilization were practically mixed”11 and “to civilize is to Christianize.”12 To missionaries who believed in African inculturation, the gospel of Jesus Christ is a divine liberative event not to be reduced to or confused with the colonizing peace of France or the civics most of their compatriots were doing.
Heavenly Citizenship in Philippians 1:27; 3:20
Living under imperial Rome and writing to the Philippians, the Apostle Paul, a Jew by birth (Phil 3:3-14; cf Acts 22:5-7, Gal 1:13-14; 1 Cor 9:1-4; Rom 9:3) insisted that his mission and message to non-Jews is divinely orchestrated (Phil 3: 14; Gal 1:1, 11-16). His previous zeal to destroy the church of God (Phil 3:3-6; Gal 1:13; Acts 9:1-2) met with a divine revelation of God’s son to him (Gal 1:16)—an experience that transformed his life and thought (Phil 3:7-13). Though a Roman citizen, Paul was sent neither by Apollo nor Jupiter but the biblical God to Imperial Philippi (Acts 16:9)—a territory once occupied by Crenides, resettled by Philip of Macedon in 356 BCE, later recolonized by Rome (30 BCE) for veterans and others, and renamed from Colonia Victrix Phlilippensis to Colonia Iulia Augusta Phlilippensis (27 BCE).13
Philippian citizens enjoyed privileges that a Roman city offered including tax exemption and the rights to own, buy or sell farmlands.14 Some Jews and Greeks, who had embraced Paul’s message while negotiating life under the imperial cultus, humanitas and patronage (Phil 2:1-4:1-2; Acts 16:9-21), lived in this “Rome Overseas” (Phil 3:1-4; 4:1-2).15 Paul sees in Jesus’ condescension from “glory to death” a unique model rooted in an eschatological rationale for his converts to emulate (Phil 2:6-11), rather than the pursuit of status and apotheosis of divine honors staged by emperors.16 Paul denounces envy, strife and rivalry-driven proclamations and praises those with “goodwill” (Phil 1:15-17). As founder,17 he exhorts his converts to “live as citizens worthy of the gospel of Christ” and adhere to their heavenly citizenship (Phil 1:27; 3:20).
In Philippi, according to Luke, Paul “orders out” (Acts 16:18; cf., Mark 5:8) an imperially legitimated and enslaving money making “Pythian spirit” (Acts 16:16)—an encounter that precipitated charges against Paul and Silas for disturbing the peace of the city (Acts 16:20-21), which led to their imprisonment. After being mistreated, jailed and miraculously rescued, Paul reveals his Roman citizenship, as if to say to the magistrates “why don’t you inquire about what happened to your jail guard? I do not need Roman imperial protection.”
Conclusion
In short, Paul’s exhortations in Philippians and the stories of his actions in Philippi are unique and yet implicitly subversive exhortations that do not settle in reinscribing imperial civics but transcending them.18 Living as citizens presupposes a behavior marked by the kind of unity and like-mindedness only the revealed gospel of Jesus Christ (Phil 1:27; 3:14 cf., Gal 1:6-12) engenders. Paul, like the missionaries to Senegal who rejected an imperially guided gospel in the towns, urged heavenized or divinized civics not to be confused with imperial ideology that celebrates the soteriological significance of the emperor. Paul’s heavenized/divinized Christo and other-centered civics (Phil 1:27; 2:3-5; 3:20; 4:2-3) is relevant for both Christ believers in Philippi and the people living in the four towns of Senegal—a unique heavenly citizenship that negotiates life under transient imperial cities.
Notes
1. Plato, Menex. 237a; Aristotle, Rhet. 1.5.5. See discussion in Victor Rosivach, “Autochthony and the Athenians,” CQ 37.2 (1987) 294–305.
2. David L. Balch, Roman Domestic Art and Early House Churches (WUNT 228; Tubingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2008).
3. Andrew Wallace-Hadrill, Rome’s Cultural Revolution (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 11.
4. R. S. Sugirtharajah, “From Orientalist to Post-Colonial: Notes on Reading Practices,” AJT 10(1996): 24.
5. Greg Woolf, Becoming Roman: The Origins of Provincial Civilization in Gaul (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 48, 54-76.
6. Greg Woolf, "Beyond Romans and Natives," WA 28/3 (1997): 339-350; idem, Becoming Roman, 48-76.
7. Woolf, Becoming Roman, 55.
8. Wallace-Hadrill, Rome’s Cultural Revolution, 3-37, 6.
9. Ousmane Sembène, The Last of the Empire: A Senegalese Novel (trans. Adrian Adams; London: Heinemann, 1981), 134–5.
10. G. Wesley Johnson, The Emergence of Black Politics in Senegal: The Struggle for Power in the Four Communes, 1900-1920 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1971), 19-37.
11. Geneviève Lecuir Némo, Mission et colonisation: Saint Joseph De Cluny: La première Congrégation de femmes au Sénégal de 1819 à 1904; Mémoire deMaîtrise, Université de Paris I, Octobre 1985, 171.
12. Geneviève Lecuir Némo, Anne-Marie Javouhey: Fondatrice de la congrégation des Sœur de Saint-Joseph de Cluny (1779-1851) (Paris: Éditions Karthala, 2007), 78.
13. Peter Oakes, Philippians: From People to Letter (SNTSMS 110; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 10-14.
14. Charles B. Cousar, Philippians and Philemon: A Commentary (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2009), 6.
15. Richard S. Ascough, Paul’s Macedonian Associations (WUNT 2. Reike 161; German: Mohr Siebeck, 2003), 125.
16. Efrain Agosto, “Patronage and Commendation, Imperial and Anti-Imperial,” in Paul and the Roman Imperial Order (ed. Richard A. Horsley; New York: Trinity International Press, 2004); Erik M. Heen, “Phil 2:6-11 and Resistance to Local Timocratic Rule: Isa theō and the Cult of the Emperor in the East,” in Paul and the Roman Imperial Order (ed. Richard A. Horsley; New York: Trinity International Press, 2004).
17. Aliou C. Niang, Faith and Freedom in Galatia and Senegal: The Apostle Paul, Colonists and Sending Gods (BIS 97; Leiden: Brill, 2009), 7-8, 117, 130-31, 134, 136, 138. I describe Paul as founder with the words “create” or “form” see, Niang, Faith and Freedom, 2, 18, 25, 31, 103, 117, 131, 138,
18. Karl Galinsky, “In the Shadow (or Not) of the Imperial Cult: A Comparative Agenda,” in Rome and Religion: A Cross-Disciplinary Dialogue on the Imperial Cult (ed. Jeffery Brodd and Jonathan L. Reed; Atlanta, GA: Society of Biblical Literature Press, 2011), 222.
