Kwame Bediako and African Christian Scholarship

Kwame Bediako and African Christian Scholarship PDF Author: Sara J. Fretheim
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
ISBN: 1498299040
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 252

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Book Description
In a departure from current theologically-focused scholarship on Ghanaian theologian Kwame Bediako, this book places him within the wider historical continuum of twentieth-century Ghana and reads him as a leading Christian scholar within the African study of African religions. The book traces a variety of influences and figures within this emerging African discourse in Ghana, including aspects of missions and colonial history and the voices of poets, politicians, prophets, and priests. Locating Bediako within this complex twentieth-century matrix, this intellectual history draws upon his published and key unpublished works, including his first masters and doctoral dissertations on Négritude literature, an abiding influence on his later Christian thought and an essential foundation for interpreting this scholar. This book also “reads” the Akrofi-Christaller Institute of Theology, Mission, and Culture as “text” by Bediako, revealing essential components of his intellectual and spiritual itinerary revealed in the Institute’s community and curriculum. This approach challenges narrowly-focused theological scholarship on Bediako, while highlighting critical methodological divisions between African, Western, confessional, and non-confessional approaches to the study of religion in Africa. In doing so, it highlights the rich complexity of this emerging African discourse and identifies Bediako as a pioneering African Christian intellectual within this wider field.

Kwame Bediako and African Christian Scholarship

Kwame Bediako and African Christian Scholarship PDF Author: Sara J. Fretheim
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
ISBN: 1498299040
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 252

Get Book

Book Description
In a departure from current theologically-focused scholarship on Ghanaian theologian Kwame Bediako, this book places him within the wider historical continuum of twentieth-century Ghana and reads him as a leading Christian scholar within the African study of African religions. The book traces a variety of influences and figures within this emerging African discourse in Ghana, including aspects of missions and colonial history and the voices of poets, politicians, prophets, and priests. Locating Bediako within this complex twentieth-century matrix, this intellectual history draws upon his published and key unpublished works, including his first masters and doctoral dissertations on Négritude literature, an abiding influence on his later Christian thought and an essential foundation for interpreting this scholar. This book also “reads” the Akrofi-Christaller Institute of Theology, Mission, and Culture as “text” by Bediako, revealing essential components of his intellectual and spiritual itinerary revealed in the Institute’s community and curriculum. This approach challenges narrowly-focused theological scholarship on Bediako, while highlighting critical methodological divisions between African, Western, confessional, and non-confessional approaches to the study of religion in Africa. In doing so, it highlights the rich complexity of this emerging African discourse and identifies Bediako as a pioneering African Christian intellectual within this wider field.

Kwame Bediako

Kwame Bediako PDF Author: Tim Hartman
Publisher: Augsburg Fortress Publishers
ISBN: 1506480454
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 230

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Book Description
Ghanaian theologian Kwame Bediako presses all Christians to question their own theological commitments. He does so by rethinking Christian identity in light of cultural identity and the shortcomings of colonialism. Bediako's quest to be both African and Christian informs what it means to be Christian in a secularized Europe and North America. Far more than just chronological and biographical, Tim Hartman's analysis of the arc of Bediako's theology demonstrates that Bediako's vision of Christianity as a non-Western religion allows it to serve as a resource for World Christianity amid the exponential growth of Christianity in the Global South. Hartman points to how Bediako sidesteps the influence of Western thought by rooting African Christianity in a twin heritage of pre-Christendom patristic theology and precolonial traditional religious practices of Africa. Bediako expands the canon of theological resources available for Christians by eliminating the distinction between gospel and culture. Since there is no such thing as a pure theology for Bediako, culture itself becomes a source of divine revelation through the incarnation. Hartman's study of Bediako helpfully corrects inaccurate portrayals of African Christianity. The growth of African Christianity should not be feared, nor mischaracterized as narrow-minded or too conservative. Bediako asserts a polycentric understanding of the Christian faith based in grassroots theologies and the beliefs of actual Christians. While Bediako agrees that Christianity in Africa (and the Global South) is the future of the Christian faith, he rejects assumptions that the Christian faith needs to be yoked to political power. Instead, Bediako offers an alternative understanding of politics based on democracy and nondominating power. Both Bediako and the book offer a way forward in thinking about questions of religious pluralism. African Christianity has never known cultural hegemony as African Christians have always lived with Islam and African traditional religions. Bediako offers a theology of "Jesus is Lord" while appreciating the integrity of Islam and traditional African religions. In the end, the book presents an African Christian theologian who values--and does not simply reject--African traditional religions. Bediako believed that traditional African religions, far from being demonic, served as evangelical preparation for the Christian faith and as the substructure of African Christianity, and that African religious imagination was the foundation for the Christian faith worldwide. As Hartman shows, the more distinctively African Bediako's Christianity became, the more suited that theology became for the world.

A New History of African Christian Thought

A New History of African Christian Thought PDF Author: David Tonghou Ngong
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135106266
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 251

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Book Description
David Tonghou Ngong offers a comprehensive view of African Christian thought that includes North Africa in antiquity as well as Sub-Saharan Africa from the period of colonial missionary activity to the present. Challenging conventional colonial divisions of Africa, A New History of African Christian Thought demonstrates that important continuities exist across the continent. Chapters written by specialists in African Christian thought reflect the issues—both ancient and modern—in which Christian Africa has impacted the shape of Christian belief from the beginning of the movement up to the present day.

Theology and Identity

Theology and Identity PDF Author: Kwame Bediako
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
ISBN: 1610974409
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 527

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Book Description
Kwame Bediako examines the question of Christian identity in the context of the Greco-Roman culture of the early Roman Empire. He then addresses the modern African predicament of quests for identity and integration. Theology and Identity was one of the finalists for the 1992 HarperCollins Religious Book Award.

The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church

The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church PDF Author: Andrew Louth
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192638157
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 4474

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Book Description
Uniquely authoritative and wide-ranging in its scope, The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church is the indispensable reference work on all aspects of the Christian Church. It contains over 6,500 cross-referenced A-Z entries, and offers unrivalled coverage of all aspects of this vast and often complex subject, from theology; churches and denominations; patristic scholarship; and the bible; to the church calendar and its organization; popes; archbishops; other church leaders; saints; and mystics. In this new edition, great efforts have been made to increase and strengthen coverage of non-Anglican denominations (for example non-Western European Christianity), as well as broadening the focus on Christianity and the history of churches in areas beyond Western Europe. In particular, there have been extensive additions with regards to the Christian Church in Asia, Africa, Latin America, North America, and Australasia. Significant updates have also been included on topics such as liturgy, Canon Law, recent international developments, non-Anglican missionary activity, and the increasingly important area of moral and pastoral theology, among many others. Since its first appearance in 1957, the ODCC has established itself as an essential resource for ordinands, clergy, and members of religious orders, and an invaluable tool for academics, teachers, and students of church history and theology, as well as for the general reader.

African Traditional Religion versus Christianity

African Traditional Religion versus Christianity PDF Author: Dmitry Usenco
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
ISBN: 1725271621
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 146

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Book Description
Breaking away from the centuries-long theological tradition, Dmitry Usenco offers a radically new--semiotic--reading of spirituality, proceeding on his original theory of the initial cultural unity that embraces language, technology, and religion. African Traditional Religion comes into focus as a valid alternative and--in the long run--an equal partner to Christianity in the creation of a modern pluralistic society. While the author's concepts and conclusions may seem controversial to some, none of the readers can discard them as irrelevant. Africa's future will in many respects depend on her ability to preserve her cultural heritage in which religion plays a crucial part.

Understanding World Christianity

Understanding World Christianity PDF Author: William R. Burrows
Publisher: Orbis Books
ISBN: 1570759499
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 269

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Book Description
This work introduces Walls's work and explores its wide-ranging implications for the understanding of history, mission, the formative place of Africa in the Christian story, and the cross-cultural transmission of faith.

The Global Diffusion of Evangelicalism

The Global Diffusion of Evangelicalism PDF Author: Brian Stanley
Publisher: InterVarsity Press
ISBN: 0830825851
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
In this fifth volume in the History of Evangelicalism series, Brian Stanley offers an authoritative survey of worldwide evangelicalism from the 1940s to the 1990s. He makes extensive use of primary sources and covers a range of key topics, issues, trends and events, along with prominent and lesser-known figures from the era.

Theological Education and Christian Scholarship for Human Flourishing

Theological Education and Christian Scholarship for Human Flourishing PDF Author: Celucien L. Joseph
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
ISBN: 1666731005
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 359

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Book Description
This book explores the interconnection of theological education and Christian scholarship, cultural and theological hermeneutics, pedagogy and community knowledge, democracy and citizenship. Yet, the three major disciplines or discourses covered in this work include multicultural education, theology, and hermeneutics through the lens of human flourishing and the concept of the good life. From this angle, this project is written from three different methods and approaches that intersect with each other: a theology of contextualization, a hermeneutics of interculturality, and a pedagogy of cultural literacy and transformative community knowledge. The book advances the idea that theological education should be the starting point to foster candid conversations about the importance of democracy and human rights, civic engagement and the political life, inclusion and diversity, and pluralism and difference in our multicultural society. The book uses the tools of multicultural education and cultural knowledge to enhance democracy and promote fundamental human virtues that would sustain the good life and human flourishing in the world—in the Aristotelian sense and in the Socratic idea of local and world citizenship. Finally, this text offers an alternative vision to contemporary theological education, to deconstruct the white, male, and Eurocentric narratives of theological education and Christian scholarship.

Jesus and the Gospel in Africa

Jesus and the Gospel in Africa PDF Author: Kwame Bediako
Publisher: Orbis Books
ISBN: 1608332500
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 124

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Book Description