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The idea that Africa could host the return is not an insult to other lands; it is a reminder that God’s geography is not ours. The prophet Amos said God brought Israel out of Egypt and also the Philistines from Caphtor and the Arameans from Kir (Amos 9:7), a stunning relativizing of chosenness. The book of Acts shows the Ethiopian eunuch reading Isaiah and being baptized into the new community (Acts 8:27–39). Christianity was in Africa early and deep. If the Spirit returns to a place that has known suffering and song, labour and laughter, that is continuity, not novelty. The philosopher John Mbiti wrote that Africans are notoriously religious; the soil is ready.
What does Olumba Olumba Obu teach that makes people say “this is Christ-like”? The same things that the Sermon on the Mount makes central: love of enemies, purity of heart, hunger for righteousness, mercy that is stronger than judgment (Matthew 5–7). He also teaches self-surrender, which sounds like the Gita’s karma yoga, action without attachment, and like the Qur’an’s Islam, a willing submission that brings peace. He teaches unity, which sounds like the Guru Granth Sahib’s vision of the one Light in all. He teaches that the Kingdom is not a future territory but a present reality you enter by practicing love. As Meister Eckhart put it, “If the only prayer you say in your entire life is thank you, it will be enough.” Gratitude is the doorway to unity, and unity is the practice of love.
The controversy, then, is less about metaphysics and more about willingness. Are we willing to accept a Christ who does not confirm our cultural preferences? Are we willing to be corrected by a love that is stricter than our laxity and kinder than our hardness? Simone Weil wrote that “attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.” Olumba Olumba Obu’s call to pay attention to the poor, to the enemy, to the inner voice is a generous disruption. It asks us to stop defending our images of God and to start practicing the love we claim God is. None of this requires us to erase distinctions between traditions. The Buddhist heart of compassion, the Jewish passion for justice, the Christian insistence on incarnate love, the Islamic submission to mercy, the Sikh affirmation of the one Light, the Hindu vision of the divine descent, the Taoist way of lowliness-these are not identical, but they rhyme. BCS hears the rhyme and names the singer for their time. Whether one accepts the claim fully, partly, or not at all, the ethical core is clear and testable: does this teaching make people more loving, more truthful, more willing to serve? If the answer is yes, then something real is happening, even if our categories strain to hold it.
In the end, the controversy of truth is always the same: will we recognize the divine when it comes in the form of a neighbour? “Love is the law, love is the rule, love is the commandment,” says Olumba Olumba Obu. That is either a pious phrase or a revolution, depending on whether we live it. If love becomes our rule in homes, markets, and politics, then the question of who Olumba Olumba Obu is will be answered by the kind of people we become. And if a black Christ in Africa is the mirror that lets us see ourselves, and each other, more honestly, then the controversy will have done its work: it will have led us to the truth that love is not an idea but a practice.
The New Testament keeps the expectation alive without locking it into one geography. “For as the lightning comes from the east and shines as far as the west, so will be the coming of the Son of Man” (Matthew 24:27). Lightning is not a parade; it is sudden, visible everywhere. “The Son of Man will come at an hour when you do not expect him” (Luke 12:40). If we expect a particular look, we may miss the hour. Revelation describes the risen one in symbols that resist portraiture: hair like wool, feet like burnished bronze, eyes like fire (Revelation 1:14–15). The point is not to fix a phenotype but to refuse the trap of a tame image. “Every eye will see him” (Revelation 1:7) suggests universality; the question is whether we have eyes to see when the form is not what we projected.
In the Bible, Mathew 24:43 says “But know this, that if the master of the house had known in what part of the night the thief was coming, he would have stayed awake and would not have let his house be broken into” In Revelation 16:15 “Behold, I come as a thief. Blessed is he that whatchet and keepeth his garment least he walk naked, and they see his shame.” In 1 Thess 5:2 “For you know very well that the day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night.” Coming like a thief, does not make him a thief; rather it’s a symbolic expression and assertion relating to the manner he will appear. Don’t forget that Christ had said this concerning his second coming, “ Then he said to the disciples, the days will come when you will desire to see one of the days of the son of man, and you will not see it. And they will say to you, look here or look there, do not go after them or follow them. For as the lightening that flashes out of one part under heaven shines to the other part under heaven, so also the son of man will be in his day. But first he must suffer many things and be rejected by this generation” Luke 17:22-25.
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Let me use this opportunity to explain this, in his first advent, the symbolic lightening flashing out of one part of the earth-Jerusalem. The lightning flashed in Nazareth and Christ was born, he came and fulfilled his assignment, and ascended into heaven. In his second advent according to BCS theology, the lightning again flashed in Africa and is presently shining through Nigeria and via 34 Ambo Street Calabar to the other part of the world. This statement re-authenticates the Biblical saying thus, “The kingdom of God will be taken away from you, and given to a nation bearing the fruits of it” Matt. 21:43. What this shows is that God orders events according to time and purpose.
The Hebrew prophets, read by Christians as part of the canon, already unsettle our expectations. “He had no form or majesty that we should look at him” (Isaiah 53:2). Malachi warns, “Who can endure the day of his coming? For he is like a refiner’s fire” (Malachi 3:2). A refiner’s fire does not confirm our preferences; it purifies them. Malachi also promises, “I will send you Elijah the prophet before the great and terrible day” (Malachi 4:5), which Jesus applies to John the Baptist (Matthew 11:14), showing that prophetic patterns recur in unexpected persons. Joel says, “I will pour out my Spirit on all flesh; your sons and your daughters shall prophesy” (Joel 2:28). If the Spirit is poured on all flesh, the vessel can be any flesh God chooses, in any land.
The deutero-canonical books, accepted by some traditions, add their own notes. Wisdom of Solomon says wisdom “is a reflection of eternal light, a spotless mirror of the working of God, and an image of his goodness” (Wisdom 7:26). If the divine image is a spotless mirror, it can appear wherever a human heart is polished by love. Sirach counsels, “Do not praise a man for his good looks” (Sirach 11:2), which is a quiet rebuke to any theology built on appearance.
Second Esdras, found in some canons, speaks of a time when “the city that now is not seen shall appear” (2 Esdras 7:26), hinting that the decisive unveiling will make visible what our current arrangements hide. The non-canonical early Christian texts, though not scripture for most churches, preserve how some early believers imagined the return. The Didache warns, “Then shall appear the signs of the truth: first the sign of an opening in heaven, then the sign of the sound of the trumpet, and third the resurrection of the dead-yet not of all, but as it is said: ‘The Lord will come and all his saints with him’” (Didache 16:6–7). The Apocalypse of Peter describes the Lord appearing in glory and the righteous shining, while the wicked are ashamed; the focus is moral transformation more than geography. The Epistle of Barnabas reads the “eighth day” as the beginning of a new world (Barnabas 15:8–9), a time-mark that suggests a new creation breaking into the old. The Odes of Solomon sing, “Put on the love of the Lord like a garment and know his love” (Ode 3), making love the vesture of the coming one.
Other ancient Christian writings press the same themes. The Ascension of Isaiah has the beloved descending through the heavens in disguise, unrecognized until his exaltation (Ascension 10–11). If the Beloved can be hidden on the way down, then our failure to recognize is part of the pattern. The Acts of Thomas has the apostle sing that the Messiah is “the one who was proclaimed by the prophets, who came in the last times and appeared in the world in a body of humanity” (Acts of Thomas 10), and it does not restrict where that humanity may be found. The Gospel of the Egyptians, though fragmentary, plays with the saying, “When the two become one… then you will enter the kingdom,” a union that BCS interprets as love dissolving division. The point is not to canonize every fragment but to see the arc: the early imagination was wide, not narrow.
The wider canon of humanity adds depth. The Qur’an names Jesus “a sign for the Hour” (43:61) and says none of the People of the Book will fail to believe in him before his death (4:159). Read together, these verses keep eschatology open and personal. The Bhagavad Gita repeats the promise of descent whenever dharma declines (4:7–8). The Dhammapada teaches that “hatred does not cease by hatred, but only by love; this is the eternal law” (verse 5). If the eternal law is love, then any return must be legible as love. The Guru Granth Sahib proclaims, “There is one God… by the Guru’s grace he is known” (Mul Mantar), and urges the recognition of the one Light in all. The Tao Te Ching says the sage “does not display himself, therefore he is luminous” (22), a perfect description of a presence that is hidden in plain sight.
