Follow Us on Google
The BCS claim is specific: Olumba Olumba Obu teaches that love is the law, that unity is the path, and that self-surrender is the door. Those three notes—love, unity, surrender appear across the traditions we have surveyed. John writes, “God is love, and whoever abides in love abides in God” (1 John 4:16). The Gita says the wise are “the same to all beings” (9:29). The Qur’an says humanity was made into peoples and tribes “that you may know one another” (49:13). The Dhammapada says, “Conquer anger by love” (223). If a teacher gathers these threads and a community practices them, then the claim to embody the Christ-spirit is not abstract; it is testable in lives.
Prophecy in the biblical tradition is rarely about predicting a photograph; it is about naming a pattern. The pattern is decline, mercy, return, renewal. Isaiah’s servant, Malachi’s fire, Joel’s Spirit, Matthew’s lightning, Revelation’s unveiling, the Gita’s descent, the Qur’an’s sign-these point to a divine habit of intervention when the world forgets love. BCS reads the present as such a moment and His Holiness Olumba Olumba Obu’s ministry as such an intervention. Whether one accepts the identification or not, the pattern is recognizable, and the ethical demand is clear. Critics worry that devotion to a living teacher can become dependency. The antidote, within BCS teaching itself, is the constant return to love as the rule. Love does not dominate; it frees. The Teacher points away from himself to the practice: feed, forgive, reconcile, and tell the truth. The Didache’s trumpet is not noise; it is clarity. The opening of heaven is not a spectacle; it is a community that lives as if heaven were real. The resurrection of the dead is not only at the end; it is the raising of the dead parts of us our bitterness, our prejudice, our fear into new life.
The question of color remains for many the stumbling block. But the text that says “hair like wool, feet like burnished bronze” (Revelation 1:14–15) and the Song that says “I am black and beautiful” (Song 1:5) should free us from the need to defend a European Christ. If the Spirit is poured on all flesh (Joel 2:28), then all flesh can bear the Spirit’s witness. If the gospel is translatable (Sanneh, Bediako), then the eschaton is translatable too. A black Christ in Africa is not a contradiction of the canon; it is a refusal to let the canon be colonized.
The practical test is the same as in the Gospels: “By their fruits you will recognize them” (Matthew 7:16). BCS members point to changed lives—reconciled marriages, addictions abandoned, enemies forgiven, service rendered without publicity. Outsiders will rightly ask for accountability, transparency, and the freedom to dissent. Love that is real welcomes scrutiny because it has nothing to hide. The early church did not grow because it won arguments; it grew because it shared food, cared for the sick, and buried the dead when others fled.
The philosophical payoff is simple and demanding. If the divine can appear in a form we did not expect, then our task is not to guard a portrait but to practice a way. Nicholas of Cusa’s infinite God breaks our finite frames; Eckhart’s shared eye teaches us to look for God in the neighbour; Levinas places the infinite in the face that says, “Do not kill.” When the Father says “love is the law,” it is translating those insights into a command that a child can understand and an adult can spend a life time learning. The eschatological imagination of many traditions converges on the same ethic. The Gita’s impartiality, the Qur’an’s knowing one another, the Dhammapada’s conquering anger by love, the Guru Granth Sahib’s “no one is my enemy,” the Tao’s lowliness, the Akan’s patience, the Yoruba’s character as beauty, these are not identical claims, but they rhyme. A return of Christ that is real will make that rhyme audible in a community’s life.
Scholars rarely endorse individual figures, and that is proper. What they do is clear the ground. They show that the New Testament’s return language is apocalyptic and ethical, that could snowball into a portrait that could be laminated. They show that the early church’s imagination was wider than later imperial art. They show that Christianity is translatable and that Africa is a primary theological locus, not a footnote. They show that the gospel’s center is love that liberates. In that cleared ground, a claim like BCS’s can be weighed rather than dismissed.
There are also modern voices that explicitly connect Christ to the oppressed. James Cone wrote that Christ is black because Christ is with the oppressed in their struggle. Whether or not one adopts Cone’s full program, his logic exposes the bias in assuming a white Christ is neutral and a black Christ is political. All christological images are political; the question is which politics they serve. If the politics is love, unity, and self-surrender, then the image is good news for the poor and a challenge to the powerful. That is the pattern of the Gospels.
Other News
The controversy will not be settled by argument alone. It will be settled by the kind of people this teaching produces. If BCS communities become more truthful, more forgiving, more generous, and more attentive to the poor, that is evidence of the Spirit. If they become defensive, secretive, or domineering, that is evidence against. The same test applies to every church, mosque, temple, and movement. The return of Christ, however we name it, is not a badge to wear but a life to live.
“Him that overcometh will I make a pillar in the temple of my God and he shall go no more out, and I will write upon him the name of my God, and the name of the city of my God, which is new Jerusalem, which cometh down out of heaven from my God; and I will write upon him my new name” Revelation 3:12. Let start by thanking the God of creation who has a new name which is only revealed to the few in the world of man; I have come to explain what may not be native to our corporeal understanding. But it must be said in order to free those that have been held sway by ‘perishable’ credo. Nothing reaches a person as direct as his real name. I recall few weeks ago while in school (usual class lecture), the course was ‘Philosophy of the Existence of God’ for two hundred level students, I decided to ask them a question that made many of them laughed me to scorn. The question was, “what if you are praying in the name which God has either changed or disused, do you think the prayer would be answered?” We all laughed over it but I later asked them to reflect on it as I promised them of discussing it which I did eventually. We all benefitted from it as knowledge is dynamic and no knowledge is a waste. I shall soon revisit this but suffice it to say here that God is a title and not a name.
The word “God” has a very ancient and interesting history. From the Hindu perspective the term could be traced back to Sanskrit through the Old Teutonic language: gudo , ghudho, gheu, and hu. The Sanskrit meaning is to “to invoke, to pour, to offer sacrifice.” In the Hindu Philosophy of Religion (Sanskrit language), puru –huta means “much invoked” and is a name of Indra, who is worshipped by sacrifice. However, the word “God” in English originally meant “that which is invoked” or, “the object of worship.”
In Christian Religion, many people call God Jehovah and regard same as the true name of God. In the Hebrew Scriptures the name of God is recorded as YHWH. Research shows that ancient Hebrew did not use vowels in its written form. The vowels were pronounced in spoken Hebrew but were not recorded in writing. This particularly became a serious issue to some scholars while studying the Hebrew name of God written as YHWH also known as Tetragrammaton.
Despite much study and serious debate among religious scholars it is still not generally agreed upon how the Hebrew name for God-YHWH was pronounced. Some prefer “YEHWEH” others prefer “Yehoweh,” “Yahuweh,” or “Yahawah” still others argue for Jehovah. However, everything is up for serious debate. Should YHWH be pronounced with three syllables or two? Should the vowels be borrowed from Elohim or Adonai? Should the “W” be pronounced more of the “W” sound or more of a “V” sound? My purpose here is not to use this philosophical gospel of the new age to settle the academic debate but to use this medium to properly educate my numerous readers on the need to understand God than man’s creed.
Yes, I wish to accentuate here that majority of Jewish and Christian Biblical scholars and linguists do not share the view that the right pronunciation of YHWH is Jehovah. In ancient Hebrew, there was no true “J” sound; even the Hebrew letter “vav” which is transliterated as the “W” in YHWH is said to originally have had a pronunciation closer to “W” than the “V” of Jehovah. Jehovah is essentially a Germanic pronunciation of the Latinized transliteration of the Hebrew YHWH. It is the letters of Tetragrammaton, Latinized into JHVH, with vowels inserted. However, “Yahweh” or “Yehowah” is far more likely to be the correct pronunciation according to Ken Hemphill. If the name of a personality like God in the Christian world is mispronounced and misapplied, the confusion it will generate shall not be drenched easily. The problem is human creed and nobody wants to take blame for it.
