Today, I decided to track down 1SA1, a quote from David Livingstone:
Analyze and respond to the statement, “The existence of God and of a future life is everywhere recognized in Africa.” David LivingstoneThis statement is taken word for word from Augustus Strong's Systematic Theology (2nd ed. 1889) p. 31. Strong is severely outdated as a source on religious anthropology, but if you're starting to write a speech on the subject, this section of the book is organized, orthodox, and well-stocked with quotes.
Those races and nations which have at first seemed destitute of such knowledge have uniformly, upon further investigation, been found to possess it, so that no tribe of men with which we have thorough acquaintance can be said to be without an object of worship. We may presume that further knowledge will show this to be true of all.
[Robert] Moffat, who reported that certain African tribes wore destitute of religion, was corrected by the testimony of his son-in-law, [David] Livingstone: "The existence of God and of a future life is everywhere recognized in Africa."Using Google Books, I was able to find many editions of Livingstone's book Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa. They all contained the quote in one version or another, but it's clear that the book was abridged over the years. The first edition (1857) should be the most accurate reflection of Livingstone's thought.
From chapter 8, p. 158:
The indirect and scarcely appreciable blessings of Christian missionaries going about doing good are thus probably not so despicable as some might imagine; there is no necessity for beginning to tell even the most degraded of these people of the existence of a God, or of a future state, the facts being universally admitted. Everything that cannot be accounted for by common causes is ascribed to the Deity, as creation, sudden death, &c. " How curiously God made these things!" is a common expression; as is also, " He was not killed by disease, he was killed by God." And, when speaking of the departed—though there is nought in the physical appearance of the dead to justify the expression— they say, " He has gone to the gods,"...Because Strong introduced Moffat into the story, he must have been reading from the appendix to Dr. Livingstone's Cambridge Lectures, edited by William Monk (1858). There, Monk repeates the quote from Missionary Travels and contrasts it with earlier statements from Robert Moffat that the Hottentots and Namaquas did not have a concept of God.
Livingstone's statement brings with it some conditions. First, he was writing specifically about some bush tribes in Zambia: the Bakalaharis, the Bechuanas, and the Bakwains. Second, it must be compared with the findings of other missionaries like Moffat, and with those of modern anthropologists. Third, while Livingstone reported that Africans knew that God existed and there was life after death, he also said on the same page that they thought kneeling in prayer was hilarious, and their sense of right and wrong were far from Christian.
To put Livingstone's words into perspective, read the entirety of chapter 8 in Missionary Travels, and then search the book for words like 'existence' to find other anecdotes about African beliefs on spirits, gods, and a life after death.
Finally, we must realize that Livingstone had a definite bias. He was sent as a missionary, but his main goals were exploration and social justice. He preached, and only made one African convert that we know about. He recorded observations on geography, natural history, medicine, anthropology, culture, religion, and commerce. He was motivated to open up the interior of Africa to "Christianity, commerce, and civilization," to replace the slave trade with production of raw materials for export, and to recruit missionaries to settle in Africa and be a colonizing force for the gospel.
Sjoerd Rijpma, in her book An African Surprise: What Livingstone really discovered in tropical Africa, points out a number of distortions in Missionary Travels (pp. 16-23 of the pdf). She concludes,
It may have been disconcerting to hear ‘what Livingstone really did in Africa’. Yet, if one considers that he was an explorer with a ‘mission’ in the first place, and that he did not want to be obstructed in this mission, it is possible to see our own frustration and that of his twentieth century biographers in perspective. He was not the nice missionary, and doctor, and not even a successful ‘amateur field scientist’, nor a ‘highly motivated Victorian missionary’. For those reasons one must conclude that David Livingstone cannot be considered as a ‘usable’, let alone ‘reliable’ source of ‘general’ information. However, his specific observations as a professional, all in the field in which he was trained (medicine, natural history), ‘reveal Livingstone at his best, recording information in which his emotions and ideals were not directly engaged’, as we soon shall see.Even though Livingstone's accounts are not totally reliable, I would trust specific anecdotes of his conversations with tribal people. His conclusions about religion being universal can be backed up with evidence from other sources, including Romans 1:16-21:
[T]he gospel... is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek [non-Jew].... For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth. For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse. For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him...David Livingstone's travel accounts open for us a window on how Africans (his subject) and Europeans (his readers) of the mid-1800s viewed the world. Let me emphasize: he was one of only a handful of sources by which Brits and Americans could learn about people in Africa. According to lists here and here, he was one of the first to report from Zambia and other parts of the interior. When Livingstone said most of the tribal people he had met already knew about God and an afterlife, this contradicted the ambivalent reports of his father-in-law Robert Moffat, and confirmed Romans 1 as factual. It was big news in 1857.
In that spirit, I offer you a link to Juvenile Missionary Magazine (1857) p. 178, with a story of David Livingstone's travels repackaged just for kids.
12 years ago. I still stand by the message of the book that premature, short-term romantic attachments can be a big distraction from serving God—especially for teenagers. But in the years since, I’ve also seen that a legalistic application of these ideas can be unhelpful, too. One of my main concerns in our church or any other church is that there be no disunity among Christians over issues of dating and courtship. We need to learn to hold our own convictions on this matter with charity. Most importantly, we need to make sure that our convictions are shaped by Scripture—not culture, church culture or my books.
