MOR AV I A N CO L L E G E

The STorY ConCernS eLIShA, the prophet chosen
as the handpicked successor to the better-known holy man, elijah,
eight centuries before Christ. A desperate woman has appealed
to elisha to save her two sons from being sold into slavery. he
advises her to pour her oil into pots and jars offered by her
neighbors. She does so. Miraculously, there is enough oil to fill
all the containers, and she finds she has enough to pay off
those who threaten her sons.
The lesson, said associate professor deborah Appler, a hebrew
bible scholar at Moravian Theological Seminary, is that the
community of people who pitched in to save the day deserves much
more credit for it than elisha does. That was one of the points
she drew in her year-long analysis of how elisha’s example—
an important one in her field of biblical study—might apply in
the African nation of Tanzania where she spent the past academic
term (her sabbatical) at Teofilo kisani University, a Moravianrelated
school in the southwest Tanzanian city of Mbeya.
highlighting the community as a source of the godly solutions
had a strong resonance in Tanzania, she saw, because Africans
overall place so much emphasis on communal activity to take care
What Profit a Scriptural
ProPheT In Modern-dAY AfrICA?
AT fIrST, ThIS ACCoUnT MAY SoUnd ALL Too fAMILIAr: IT’S
AboUT rAnSoM for oIL In The MIddLe eAST. bUT ITS SeTTIng And ConTenT
Are fAr reMoved froM PeTrodoLLArS And drILLIng rIgS.
08.
of many of their most basic problems. Moreover, awarding
elisha too much of the praise resembled a lingering pattern of
deference to outside benefactors, primarily Westerners, a trend
that continues long after official colonialism has ended.
Professor Appler incorporated this and many other conclusions
in a paper delivered to a selected group of scholars at the Institute
for Wesleyan Studies at oxford University in england this past
August. Its title: “What’s a Mzungu to do? A Western Christian
reading of elisha’s Prophetic Mission in the Light of Today’s
Christian Mission in Tanzania.”
“Mzungu” means “to wander” and refers to all who arrive in
Tanzania from other parts of the world. Appler said she was
often uncomfortable as a privileged Westerner, asking herself
whether she and the various missionaries in the region (the
Moravian mission extends back to 1891) could be helpful in a
setting where foreign Christians often carried the stigma
of colonial oppression and, on the other hand, played a
crucial role, providing urgently needed resources in such
areas as medicine, education and nutrition.