Stephen Lawani at 80: Mysticism and the Intellectual Search for Meaning in Christianity

Tunji Olaopa

The title of this piece should not be strange to those who avidly follow my reflections on religion, African theology and its role in my spiritual maturation. In my estimation, Dr Stephen Lawani plays a significant role—as one of the many critical interlocutors on matters religious and spiritual in Nigeria and beyond. I am very pleased to be able to keep paying homage to someone whose spiritual commitment has never been in doubt; someone who embodies the purity of the search for spiritual enlightenment. It is also delightful to celebrate Dr Lawani’s octogenarian arrival. Being eighty only tells me that I now have to contend with the spiritual and existential wisdom of a man who never stops learning, and who never stops searching for meaning.

The trajectory of Dr Lawani’s unraveling is beautiful. It is that of a man who Providence gave a hint of the path to enlightenment, and he caught the break and flowed with it. Being a librarian is not considered to be lucrative in Nigeria. A fortuitous appointment to library services as a secondary school boy at Christ School, Ekiti led to not only the abandonment of a future as a theoretical chemist, but a “lukewarm” choice in librarianship after a first degree in Chemistry. Dr. Lawani most likely would not have known that deciding to be a librarian would eventually open up a purposeful pathway through life in ways that opened several fundamental portals that humans get to peep through when they are as blessed as Dr Lawani. From librarianship to a doctorate in library and information science to a distinguished career at the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA) and the World Bank, Washington D.C., and then on to a lifetime recognition as a foundational bibliometrician and an author of significant renown. And then on to many other great things.

When retirement happened in 2006, Dr Lawani was ready, but definitely not tired, to take up things he considered of “lasting value.” And what could be more of value than spirituality and the search for meaning about God and existence, especially existence in a deeply divided and deeply dysfunctional country like Nigeria? It takes fundamental courage to write about God; indeed, to set out to articulate conceptions and debunk misconceptions about God comes from a place of earnest spiritual boldness. This is because “God” is a concept that excites paradoxical effects and emotions. On the one hand, it is a loaded word that is buried under multiple layers of philosophical assumptions, theological reinventions, eschatological anxieties, religious differentiation and socio-cultural interpretations. And yet, the idea is all the more complicated because it references the mysterious, the unknown, the mystical or the ineffable. Second, history is littered with the tales and horrors of many battles fought in the name of God, or many who have died defending the integrity of the idea of the Almighty.

There is no other author I know in Nigeria who has invested time, energies, emotion and conviction in the urgency of articulating the critical intersection between spirituality, enlightenment and God. All the religions that speak about God as the supreme being also considers God to be a mystery, “an eternal mystery” as Stephen Lampe (Dr Lawani’s pseudonym) says in his 2014 brilliant book, Thinking about God. And he was courageous enough to plunge into this mystery of God with a determination that is meant to unravel pathways for humans to live meaningful and purposeful lives that will not only help them come to a deeper sense of who they are and why they are alive, but would also impact their relationship with others according to the spiritual laws of justice. Lampe is right, as he argues in the book, that misconceptions about God in a plural society like Nigeria has grave consequences. And we need not look farther than the very divisive role religion has played in deepening the postcolonial predicaments in Nigeria. But Stephen Lampe is theoretically and theologically relentless; there is a further conclusion that follows correcting the misconceptions about God. If there are wrong conceptions about God, it implies that there must be a right one. And it is that right conception that is the focus of Lampe. Since he is coming from the Grail Message theological perspective, we need not look further for where that right conception could be found. And in his latest theological offering—The Spirit of Truth brings the Everlasting Testament—Stephen Lampe presses home his most fundamental conclusion: the right conception of God presented by the Grail Message is encoded in an “everlasting testament” that encompasses and ultimately transcends Christianity, Judaism and Islam.

This everlasting testament is the result of a “progressive revelation” of the Spirit of Truth, mentioned in the Bible, that is now emerging as the third phase of a spiritual chronology. The first phase he calls the age of the Father (corresponding to the Old Testament). The second phase is the age of the Son (the New Testament). The last and final age is that of the Spirit of Truth that clarifies, sums and transcends the other ages. And this new revelation conjoins the divine justice of the old testament and the divine love of the new testament with the divine purity of the Spirit of truth into a final blueprint of divine perfection.  

Three significant points keep bringing me back to Stephen Lampe. The first is his commitment to a rational understanding of spirituality. This derives essentially from the core method by which the writer of In the Light of Truth: The Grail Message, Abd-ru-shin, offers the message to the world—via a rational acceptance rather than a proselytizing compulsion; its theological claims must be reflected upon and logically accepted. The second is his insistence that Nigeria’s problems are essentially spiritual. From this perspective, it is therefore easy to see what religious fundamentalism, mobilization and ignorance have done to further fragment Nigeria, and still be able to argue, as Stephen Lampe does, that the religious is different from the spiritual. And that as humans, we are first spiritual beings whose attempt at creating a good tradition of governance can become successful only if we reject wrong theologies and spiritualities, and focus on what he calls “the primordial laws of creation.” There is a lot for me to accept in this understanding of the relationship between religion, spirituality and the predicament of, say, the Nigerian state and its citizens. I am a Christian and I hold strongly the claim that God rules in the affairs of humans. 

And this brings me to the third reason that Stephen Lampe keeps drawing me back to his theological arguments. This reason draws on the two previous ones: it is the intellectual undercurrent of my own commitment to Christianity. When I started my journey into Christianity, it was more intellectual than emotional. In other words, I am more of an intellectually-minded Christian whose faith is rooted more in the knowledge and experience of the faithfulness of God. My experiences in secondary school reinforces the basis of my intellectual inquiry into Christianity, especially in relations to human mystical experiences. And this is centered around the questions: How can we know Christ outside of his historical manifestations? How can Christians come into an intimate union with Christ? How does knowing Christ mediate my life and temporality as a Nigerian living in a postcolonial context of underdevelopment, fear and poverty?

My response to Christianity as a source of spiritual enlightenment therefore parallels Stephen Lampe’s continual probing of spiritualities for the right understanding of God. In my search for spiritual enlightenment, I was forced to confront the dilemma opened up by a sense of spiritual puritanism that Christianity preaches and the open-mindedness that derives from the spiritual possibilities inherent in non-Christian practices, like the Ifa corpus. And this is why I find Stephen Lampe even more intriguing. In both Thinking About God and The Spirit of Truth brings the Everlasting Testament, the thesis that Stephen Lampe builds ultimately inserts the Grail Message itself into the absolutist and binary thinking of other Abrahamic religions. It is this same absolutism that I struggled against while keeping agnosticism at bay in my search for spiritual understanding and enlightenment. And the unseemly solution I found to resolve my spiritual puritanism and intellectual open-mindedness, what I am certain will fall short of Dr Lawani’s enlightenment framework, is to hold on to my faith in Christianity while deeply and respectfully relating with other religious and spiritual formations without undermining their validity as established conceptions about God and belief systems.

This “solution” certainly requires serious theological finetuning. I have always been suspicious of theological absolutism on the basis that God cannot be summed by just one religious’ framework. And my suspicion of such absolutism is even more enhanced given the entanglement of religions in Nigeria’s national project. How can Nigeria achieve a civic nationalist space if religions eschew open-minded and ecumenical relationship with one another? How can the Grail Message step into the breach as a spiritual panacea to Nigeria’s myriad postcolonial predicaments if it excludes other religious and spiritual forms as “false”? I know I am posing formidable queries to an even more formidable octogenarian whose many more years in search of spiritual enlightenment I can always count on to sharpen my own understanding of the place and role of God in human affairs.

*Prof. Tunji Olaopa is a Professor of Public Administration & Chairman, Federal Civil Service Commission, Abuja