John William Colenso (1814-1883)
Research projects are sometimes like the long Greyhound bus trips of my adolescence in which the travel part was usually more stimulating than the arrival part. For long hours, looking out of the window, you often saw interesting, even intriguing new things. Recently I have been reading widely in some nineteenth-century literary topics as they relate to trends in religious thought and in revolutionary politics. I think I know at least the general direction in which I am going; but I am reluctant to hurry along the Interstate when there are so many inviting little side roads. Just at the moment I am much engaged with a new friend, John William Colenso (1814-1883), the Anglican bishop of Natal in southern Africa.
How to describe Colenso? You have perhaps read Jude the Obscure, Thomas Hardy’s last and most depressing novel (1895). Jude Fawley was a Wessex proletarian who dreamed of being a classics scholar at Oxford and undertook heroic self-improvement toward that nearly impossible end, only to be caught in the biological trap of feminine wiles and parental responsibility and forced to earn his meagre wage as a village stonemason. Well, Colenso was an impoverished Cornish lad destined not for obscurity but for celebrity: an anti-Jude, so to speak. Animated by an unwavering evangelical piety and a nearly incredible work ethic, aided by some good luck and timely help, he won a place at St. John’s College, Cambridge. A brilliant mathematician, he won university prizes and a college fellowship. His genius was comprehensive. Mainly self-taught skills in the classical tongues and history made him a suitable candidate for ordination in the established Church. As deacon and priest he taught for a while. He briefly served in a Norwich parish.
We are now around mid-century. The consolidation of British imperial expansion in southern Africa is advancing. The Protestant missionary societies on both sides of the Atlantic are vigorous. The Anglican bishop of South Africa established a new diocese along the coast to the northeast: Natal, with a mainly Zulu native population. Victorian ecclesiastical politics may puzzle us. Who is the perfect man to convert an African nation ever growing in its power over neighboring tribes, a nation whose spear-bearing warriors may well be a match for the Queen’s fusiliers? The answer is obvious: a nerdy workaholic Cornishman of minimal pastoral experience whose meagre public fame rests on his widely used math textbooks. Not without apprehension, but sustained by an unshakable faith, John Colenso and his equally formidable wife, Sarah Frances Bunyon, took up their assignment.
Colenso’s relationship with his Zulu flock was a mutual love affair almost from the start. The bishop loved their nobility, their intelligence, their sense of family loyalty and responsibility. The story has tragic elements; much of Colenso’ constructive work was overwhelmed by the Zulu War of 1879—an almost fated event for which the insolence of British imperial policy was as decisive as the imperial imprudence of the Zulu king Cetshwayo.
Colenso studied the Zulu language with energy and effectiveness. He mastered its phonology, including the clicks so foreign to the European ear, in a matter of weeks. He composed, and had printed on presses he brought with him, an extensive Zulu-English dictionary, a grammar, and Zulu versions of the Prayer Book, the New Testament, and selected parts of the Hebrew Scriptures. He had not thought of himself as theologian or biblical critic, but circumstances forced those roles upon him. Colenso soon acquired an indispensable Zulu convert and colleague, William Ngidi, famous in the instinctively racist British press of the day as “the intelligent Zulu” or “a sort of coloured Spinoza”. Intelligent he was. Upon being told of the talking serpent, the Tower of Babel, Noah’s ark, and the parting of the Red Sea, Mr. Ngidi politely asked Colenso whether he in fact believed those things. Colenso, an honest man, was taken aback. He thought for a while and realized he didn’t. Even less did he believe that the truth of Salvation History depended on the literal veracity of myths. In earlier centuries he would have been burned at the stake. Now he could only be cancelled by High Churchmen, defunded by the missionary societies, and abandoned by fair-weather friends like F. D. Maurice. His legal rights were in the domain of the State, and State trumped Church. All terribly awkward, but…To defend himself, Colenso, from his jungle library, penned a series of theological blockbusters.
Certain Christians in all ages have paradoxically believed that the universal salvation of mankind necessarily required that billions of human souls burn eternally in hell. Happily relegated to hell-fire were those, like Origen, whose optimism was judged excessive. Like Augustine, Luther and many others before him, Colenso found enlightenment in a deep reading of the Epistle to the Romans. He concluded that salvation was plenary. It did not depend on propitiations, rites, ceremonies, corporal penances, or a good deal of other churchy stuff. God had manifested a universal love in Christ in which all human beings basked.
That was a biblical interpretation that could be questioned. There were, however, also biblical facts that could be demonstrated. Colenso turned next to the Pentateuch, in honor of which he had named his horse Penta. It had universally been believed forever among Jews and Christians that the first five books of the Bible (Torah, Pentateuch) had been written by Moses. Earlier nineteenth-century scholarship had, to put it mildly, begun to undermine this belief. Colenso scarcely acknowledged it. No surviving writing could be attributed to Moses. The books of the Pentateuch were by several authors of quite different periods. In particular, Deuteronomy could not possibly be as early as had been assumed. Colenso the mathematician showed the absurdity of the census reports of the Exodus. Colenso the anthropologist would not credit that human beings sprang from a single racial ancestor, Adam. Colenso the friend of the great geologist Lyell knew that our universe had not been created in six days. Colenso the zoologist looked beyond the cubits to the real-life problems Noah would have faced in his ark. None of this was done in a debunking spirit, but rather in the spirit of redefining the genres of the old Hebrew writings for what they really were. All this brought down upon Colenso the condemnation of the orthodox, and even a heresy trial. But scientific and textual truth, as he saw it, did not diminish by one whit the fervor of his Christian faith as ratified by his life experience and the Epistle to the Romans. And all this writing—seven volumes on the Pentateuch alone--was done in stolen hours around the edges of the heavy daily practical demands of his office. The man was a phenomenon. “There is no infallible book for our guidance,” he wrote, “as there is no infallible Church or infallible man….But [God] gives us light enough upon our path that we may do our work here faithfully and fear no evil.”
