Martin, Sundkler and an Unsettled Question

Marie-Louise Martin, a theologian who taught in the Kimbanguist church's own theological school and wrote the first substantial study of it, argued that the church's teaching keeps Kimbangu firmly within a Christian frame. On her account he is a prophet in the biblical sense, a witness sent to Africa, and the church's confession is trinitarian and Christ-centred; the readings that make him a messiah are an outsider's error, inherited from a colonial habit of treating any African prophet movement as a political messianism in religious dress.

Bengt Sundkler, writing earlier and comparatively about southern African prophet churches, had described their founders as occupying a mediating position between God and the community which is not easy to distinguish from a messianic one in practice, whatever the formal confession says, because it is the prophet's person that the community treats as the channel. The two readings use much of the same evidence, the hymns, the pilgrimage to Nkamba which the church calls the New Jerusalem, the honours paid to Kimbangu's family, and reach different conclusions about what they mean. Neither has been refuted. The dispute is also not merely historical: what the church officially teaches about Kimbangu in the present century is itself a matter the atlas cannot settle from the sources it holds, and it is recorded as an open question rather than answered.