Divine Control Read Backwards: How Zimbabwe’s New Calvinists Narrate God’s Plans

Among Baptist Christians in Harare, Zimbabwe, adherents to New Calvinism inhabit a temporality shaped by their commitment to divine sovereignty. Followers of New Calvinist doctrines place profound emphasis on God’s control over everything that happens. Yet time itself is presumed to be deeply uncertain, made so by human fallibility and the vagaries of everyday life in postcolonial Zimbabwe. How do these Christians reconcile time as both uncertain and also divinely ordered? Drawing on observations from 15 months of ethnographic fieldwork, I argue that Zimbabwean Calvinists reconcile determinism and uncertainty through the construction of narratives. In narratives of their own lives, they work to find alignment between their own experiences of suffering and the divine metanarrative. They do not read their own lives into the biblical narrative, nor study the world for signs of impending change. Instead, they seek evidence of divine sovereignty where it is most over-determined and most available to them: in the close, mundane past. I apply Paul Ricoeur’s theory of narrative and time to show how determinism and uncertainty together generate practices focused on time, while also serving to moderate human agency.