John Chrysostom and African Charismatic Theology in Conversation

Abstract

This book puts John Chrysostom in conversation with deliverance ministries and the prosperity gospel in modern African charismatic Christianity. Samantha Miller argues that Chrysostom had a cosmology not unlike that present in the charismatic Christianity of the global south, where the world is populated by spirits able to affect the material world. Additionally, Chrysostom had plenty to say about suffering, demons, and prosperity. Through this conversation, issues of personal moral responsibility and salvation rise to the surface, and it is through these issues that modern Western and African Christians—theologians, pastors, missionaries, and laity—can perhaps have a conversation that gets past the question of a spirit-inhabited world and talk together about the saving work of Christ for the benefit of all the church.