The postmodern theologians and Hermen Kroesbergen on the language of the spirit world in Africa

Abstract

In this paper, I critically assess Hermen Kroesbergen’s claim on the southern Africans’ use of language regarding the spirit world. Kroesbergen divulges that a careful examination of southern Africa’s references to the spirit world is a response to the world or what remains mysterious and beyond expression. While Kroesbergen assesses the critical realist and postmodern theologians concerning reference to the spirit world, I pitch my tent with the postmodern theologians within the context of the language of the spirit world among Pentecostal West Africans. Even when I admire Kroesbergen’s reliance on Ludwig Wittgenstein’s linguistic approach to religion as  a theoretical framework, I build on the discourse on mysticism and consciousness by William James to defend the postmodern theologians. To strengthen my principal thesis that the Pentecostal West African response to the world is neither metaphorical nor a   response to the unexplainable, I use Ifá divination system as a paradigm to show that Pentecostal West Africans and their belief in the  spirit world undergirds the urgency to explain, control and predict the spirit world.