Historical and Social Dimensions in African Christian Theology

Historical and Social Dimensions in African Christian Theology PDF Author: Wilson Muoha Maina
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
ISBN: 1606081241
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 133

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Book Description
African Christian theology has been developing for the last four decades. The trend has been to focus on traditional African religions as a foundation for Christian theology. While acknowledging the importance of African traditional religions to Christian theology in Africa, this study argues that African history progressively changes, and it is these changed and changing circumstances that theology is to address. This work analyzes issues affecting Africa today and shows the social and political role that Christianity has to play in an African context. This study views enculturation as a dialogue among African Christians, their history and culture, and Christian teachings. Theological approaches such as anthropological, liberation, and historical are analyzed from the perspective of Small Christian Communities (SCCs), which are a recent development in African Christianity. SCCs are presented as a concrete hermeneutical tool in theological analyses. Further, this work acknowledges the indispensable need for an authentic African Christology in an African Christian theology. While critical of contemporary African Christology, the study also suggests issues to be considered in the development of African Christology.

Historical and Social Dimensions in African Christian Theology

Historical and Social Dimensions in African Christian Theology PDF Author: Wilson Muoha Maina
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
ISBN: 1606081241
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 133

Get Book Here

Book Description
African Christian theology has been developing for the last four decades. The trend has been to focus on traditional African religions as a foundation for Christian theology. While acknowledging the importance of African traditional religions to Christian theology in Africa, this study argues that African history progressively changes, and it is these changed and changing circumstances that theology is to address. This work analyzes issues affecting Africa today and shows the social and political role that Christianity has to play in an African context. This study views enculturation as a dialogue among African Christians, their history and culture, and Christian teachings. Theological approaches such as anthropological, liberation, and historical are analyzed from the perspective of Small Christian Communities (SCCs), which are a recent development in African Christianity. SCCs are presented as a concrete hermeneutical tool in theological analyses. Further, this work acknowledges the indispensable need for an authentic African Christology in an African Christian theology. While critical of contemporary African Christology, the study also suggests issues to be considered in the development of African Christology.

Historical and Social Dimensions in African Christian Theology

Historical and Social Dimensions in African Christian Theology PDF Author: Wilson Muoha Maina
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
ISBN: 1498275532
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 125

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Book Description
African Christian theology has been developing for the last four decades. The trend has been to focus on traditional African religions as a foundation for Christian theology. While acknowledging the importance of African traditional religions to Christian theology in Africa, this study argues that African history progressively changes, and it is these changed and changing circumstances that theology is to address. This work analyzes issues affecting Africa today and shows the social and political role that Christianity has to play in an African context. This study views enculturation as a dialogue among African Christians, their history and culture, and Christian teachings. Theological approaches such as anthropological, liberation, and historical are analyzed from the perspective of Small Christian Communities (SCCs), which are a recent development in African Christianity. SCCs are presented as a concrete hermeneutical tool in theological analyses. Further, this work acknowledges the indispensable need for an authentic African Christology in an African Christian theology. While critical of contemporary African Christology, the study also suggests issues to be considered in the development of African Christology.

Tertullian the African

Tertullian the African PDF Author: David E. Wilhite
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
ISBN: 3110926261
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 244

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Book Description
Who was Tertullian, and what can we know about him? This work explores his social identities, focusing on his North African milieu. Theories from the discipline of social/cultural anthropology, including kinship, class and ethnicity, are accommodated and applied to selections of Tertullian’s writings. In light of postcolonial concerns, this study utilizes the categories of Roman colonizers, indigenous Africans and new elites. The third category, new elites, is actually intended to destabilize the other two, denying any “essential” Roman or African identity. Thereafter, samples from Tertullian’s writings serve to illustrate comparisons of his own identities and the identities of his rhetorical opponents. The overall study finds Tertullian’s identities to be manifold, complex and discursive. Additionally, his writings are understood to reflect antagonism toward Romans, including Christian Romans (which is significant for his so-called Montanism), and Romanized Africans. While Tertullian accommodates much from Graeco-Roman literature, laws and customs, he nevertheless retains a strongly stated non-Roman-ness and an African-ity, which is highlighted in the present monograph.

Faith in African Lived Christianity

Faith in African Lived Christianity PDF Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004412255
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 370

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Book Description
Faith in African Lived Christianity – Bridging Anthropological and Theological Perspectives offers a comprehensive, empirically rich and interdisciplinary approach to the study of faith in African Christianity. The book brings together anthropology and theology in the study of how faith and religious experiences shape the understanding of social life in Africa. The volume is a collection of chapters by prominent Africanist theologians, anthropologists and social scientists, who take people’s faith as their starting point and analyze it in a contextually sensitive way. It covers discussions of positionality in the study of African Christianity, interdisciplinary methods and approaches and a number of case studies on political, social and ecological aspects of African Christian spirituality.

Identity and Ecclesiology

Identity and Ecclesiology PDF Author: Stephanie A. Lowery
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
ISBN: 149829846X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
Questions of identity continue to intrigue theologians in Africa, and African intellectuals often note communal emphases in African thought. This raises the question, How do ecclesiologies in Africa engage with identity concerns, and how do they envision the Christian identity? Stephanie Lowery argues in this book that theologians in Africa provide theological and biblical arguments regarding Christian identity that are relevant to individual Christians and ecclesiologies in all contexts. She also proposes the social identity approach as a tool that can both further articulate and advance these discussions.

African Theology, Philosophy, and Religions

African Theology, Philosophy, and Religions PDF Author: Chammah J. Kaunda
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1793630283
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 334

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Book Description
In African Theology, Philosophy, and Religions: Celebrating John Samuel Mbiti’s Contribution, contributorsexplore John Samuel Mbiti’s contributions to African scholarship and demonstrate how he broke through the western glass ceiling of scholarship and made African-informed and African-shaped scholarship a reality. Contributors examine the far-reaching implications of Mbiti’s scholarship, arguing that he shifted the contemporary African Christian landscape and informed global expressions of Christianity. African Theology, Philosophy, and Religions analyzes Mbiti’s scholarship and shows that his theories are malleable and fluid, allowing a new generation of scholars to reinterpret, reconstruct, and further develop his theories. This collection brings together contributors from a wide range of disciplines to study John Samuel Mbiti as the father of contemporary African theology and grapple with questions Africans face in the twenty-first century.

The Social Gospel in Black and White

The Social Gospel in Black and White PDF Author: Ralph E. Luker
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 0807863106
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 468

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Book Description
In a major revision of accepted wisdom, this book, originally published by UNC Press in 1991, demonstrates that American social Christianity played an important role in racial reform during the period between Emancipation and the civil rights movement. As organizations created by the heirs of antislavery sentiment foundered in the mid-1890s, Ralph Luker argues, a new generation of black and white reformers--many of them representatives of American social Christianity--explored a variety of solutions to the problem of racial conflict. Some of them helped to organize the Federal Council of Churches in 1909, while others returned to abolitionist and home missionary strategies in organizing the NAACP in 1910 and the National Urban League in 1911. A half century later, such organizations formed the institutional core of America's civil rights movement. Luker also shows that the black prophets of social Christianity who espoused theological personalism created an influential tradition that eventually produced Martin Luther King Jr.

How Africa Shaped the Christian Mind

How Africa Shaped the Christian Mind PDF Author: Thomas C. Oden
Publisher: InterVarsity Press
ISBN: 0830837051
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 205

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Book Description
Thomas C. Oden surveys the decisive role of African Christians and theologians in shaping the doctrines and practices of the church of the first five centuries, and makes an impassioned plea for the rediscovery of that heritage. Christians throughout the world will benefit from this reclaiming of an important heritage.

African Theology in Images

African Theology in Images PDF Author: Martin Ott
Publisher: African Books Collective
ISBN:
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 632

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Book Description
This is a revised and updated edition of the comprehensive study of the role of art in the process of inculturation in Africa, first issued in 2000. The study is a substantial contribution toward a theology of inculcation in Africa, and enriches the debate on indigenous African and Christian artistic traditions. It represents the first systematic theology constructed in and from Malawi that establishes a theology of symbolic expression in Africa.

The Church as Salt and Light

The Church as Salt and Light PDF Author: Stan Chu Ilo
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
ISBN: 1630879614
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 188

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Book Description
This book is an attempt at a critical, constructive, and creative theological praxis of social transformation in Africa. The authors apply a multi-disciplinary approach to examining how Christianity in Africa is engaging the problems of Africa's challenging social context. This is a prophetic work that applies the symbols of "salt" and "light" as ecclesiological images for reenvisioning the path towards procuring abundant life for God's people in the African continent through the agency of African Christianity. The contributors to this volume ask these fundamental questions: What is the face of Jesus in African Christianity? What is the face and identity of the Church in Africa? How can one evaluate the relevance of the Church in Africa to African Christians who enthusiastically embrace and celebrate their Christian faith? In other words, what positive imprint is Christianity leaving on the lives and societies of African Christians? Does the Christian message have the potential of positively affecting African civilization as it once did in Europe? What is the relevance and place of African Christianity as a significant voice in shaping both the future of Africa and that of world Christianity?