African Christianity is not an imported religion but rather one of the oldest forms of Christianity in the world. In The Kingdom of God in Africa, Mark Shaw and Wanjiru M. Gitau trace the development and spread of African Christianity through its two-thousand year history, demonstrating how the African church has faithfully testified to the power and diversity of God’s kingdom. Both history students and casual readers will gain greater understanding of how key churches, figures and movements across the continent conceptualized the kingdom of God and manifested it through their actions. The only up-to- date, single-volume study of its kind, this book also includes maps and statistics that aid readers to absorb the rich history of African Christianity and discover its impact on the rest of the world.
This is a reprint of the 1988 publication which is now out-of-print. The book was written while Albert Nolan was in hiding during the State of Emergency in South Africa. This volume includes reviews of the book used with permission from the South African Grace and Truth journal from 1990. The author believes that in South Africa 'the practice of the struggle is the practice of faith', and to show this he reviews the central themes of the Christian faith as found in the Old Testament and the preaching of Jesus, the nature of sin and salvation, and of God's action in the world. He also faces the dilemma of Christians who can no longer support the apartheid state but are uncertain where the liberation struggle will lead. Like his best-selling Jesus before Christianity, God in South Africa is a contextual theology, a theology rooted in the painful conversion of a church to the cause of liberation. It can be regarded, the author says, as a conversation between South African Christians, but out of that conversation comes a challenge to Christians everywhere to discover the meaning of the gospel, to find God, in their situation. This profound book, written in the 1980s to guide those seeking to deploy the gospel message against the repressive and abhorrent South African apartheid regime, continues to speak powerfully to all peoples in all times and in all places. It continues to show how the gospels respond to the signs of the times anywhere that people are in crisis, providing the tools to build a contextualised and local theology that can preach the good news of God's liberating power against all forms of injustice. Albert Nolan, South Africa's Gustavo Gutierrez, revealed hope that God cares for and finds the poor and oppressed wherever they are. For my own community, the potential to construct a contextualised and local Ukrainian theology offers hope that the good news always challenges those who oppress and forever speaks liberation for those burdened by an unjust war and the despair found in its wake.
When Kendem, a varsity instructor, returns to his native Lewoh countryside where he spent his childhood, he is seeking relief from the complexity of human civilization after attending the Fulbright Institute in the United States. Instead, he is confronted with two seething issues: how to reveal to his sick and troubled mother the situation in which he finds his elder brother, the successor of Mbe Tanju-Ngong's household, who travelled to the United States many years before and had never returned and the dispute over Fuo Beyano's funeral which is tearing the land apart, whether the deceased village chief, should be given a Christian burial or he should, according to the age-old tradition of Lewoh people, go through a ritual to enable him return and continue ruling his people.
Our problem on the African continent at the moment is the following: Western people in general and Christian missionaries in particular, were mostly uncritical about their own (European) culture and over-critical about African culture. In reaction, African Christians in general and theologians in particular are today, on the one hand, very critical about the Western type of Christianity which has been transplanted to the continent, but, on the other hand, not critical enough about their own African culture and traditional religion. Many African theologians, for instance, claim that before the Gospel came to our continent, Africans already correctly worshiped the true God. They say that the Gospel was not the beginning of the true knowledge of God, but merely a continuation or fulfillment of true faith that already existed in the pre-Christian African's heart. Some even go so far as to suggest that the African's method of approaching God is as valid as the way of salvation through the Gospel. Such ideas are emphatically denied in this book. The whole book is more than an attempt to present African indigenous beliefs in a systematic manner, comparing it with Biblical teaching. It is not only against Western secularism, but also strongly opposed to the very strong syncretistic tendency in African church life and in African theology. It convincingly argues that the idea of adaptation should be replaced by the idea of transformation in the light of God's Word. We cannot have a peaceful accommodation but only a powerful confrontation between traditional African religion and real Biblical Christian faith. This clash of irreconcilable spiritual powers becomes clear on every page - a struggle between life and death, a struggle for control of the hearts and minds of the African people. The writer pleads with his fellow African to make a definite choice (either the Gospel or traditional beliefs) and not to opt for a
Africa's heartrending picture begs the question: Is Africa cursed? In this book, the author conveys a winning message - that there can be hope for Africa. He unwraps Africa's place in the Bible, wards off superstition and advocates Christians' active engagement in transforming Africa.
There is an interesting knowledge trajectory that God remains incomprehensible, not imperceptible. This lends credence to the fact that religious study since the Enlightenment has dedicated itself almost entirely to the problem of reconciling the non-existence of God in the physical world with his necessary existence in the metaphysical world. When seriously examined, it would be discovered that these two aspects are logically contradictory, and this is a problem with no solution. But interpreting God not as a physical being but as a phenomenological thing changes the nature of the problem enough that a solution emerges almost automatically. In this phenomenological model, the crux of the matter is that God does not exist, but God is real. Therefore, it is imperative to return to experience and verifiability, hence, purging it of unexamined and often hidden assumptions. Phenomenological Approaches to Religion and Spirituality brings together the different disciplines and research approaches to provide a comprehensive analysis of the phenomenology of God and spirituality, as well as offering an effective epistemological apparatus capable of dealing with this concept. The book employs multidisciplinary approaches from religious studies, theology, philosophy, anthropology, and other segments to dissect the subject matter for efficient evaluation and all-inclusive findings. While covering various aspects of religion such as the testaments of the Bible, the church, the religious experience, and various aspects of spirituality, this book is intended for theologians, philosophers, religious leaders, policymakers, academicians, researchers, students, public institutions, and agencies with a special interest in religious matters, values, knowledge, and truth.
For many Africanist historians, traditional religion is simply a starting point for measuring the historic impact of Christianity and Islam. In Tongnaab, Jean Allman and John Parker challenge the distinction between tradition and modernity by tracing the movement and mutation of the powerful Talensi god and ancestor shrine, Tongnaab, from the savanna of northern Ghana through the forests and coastal plains of the south. Using a wide range of written, oral, and iconographic sources, Allman and Parker uncover the historical dynamics of cross-cultural religious belief and practice. They reveal how Tongnaab has been intertwined with many themes and events in West African history -- the slave trade, colonial conquest and rule, capitalist agriculture and mining, labor migration, shifting ethnicities, the production of ethnographic knowledge, and the political projects that brought about the modern nation state. This rich and original book shows that indigenous religion has been at the center of dramatic social and economic changes stretching from the slave trade to the tourist trade.
