“The era of African theology as a reaction to western misrepresentation is past.” This is the postcolonial destination, as reflected on by Kwame Bediako in his collection of essays Jesus and the Gospel in Africa.
Dr. Bediako, a Ghanaian professor of theology at The Akrofi-Christaller Institute of Theology, Mission and Culture, was a product of western missionary Christianity having both a branch of Presbyterianism and Methodism in his recent family tree. Though he took full advantage of a western education, he recognized the influence of the west was waning. Indeed, he writes, “virtually every negative verdict passed on African tradition by the ethnocentrism of the western missionary enterprise” had been overturned by the late 1990s. Africa, he believed, was fully and finally postcolonial. Its duty was now a “creative and critical construction” of uniquely African theologies.
In Jesus and the Gospel in Africa, Bediako argues for the “essential cultural belonging” African tradition has within the universal church. By recognizing this essentialism, African Christianity is freed from “replicating the forms and patterns of the west.” His evidence ranges from African languages and idioms to spiritualities and traditions which lay the groundwork for an African exegesis of scripture and a “mutuality and reciprocity” in theological learning between Africa and the west. What, Bediako wonders, will African theologies contribute to the 1/3 world? What impact will Africa have as a “missionary” to the west?
God speaks Twi
We are introduced to our first “translator” of African theologies in the person of Afua Kuma. Kuma is an “illiterate farmer and traditional midwife” from a forest village. She speaks only Akan. Her story is not meant to be another stereotypical representation of tribal life in the heart of darkness, rather she is the prototypical African theologian. Through her spoken prayers, songs and poems, she bears witness to Jesus. She represents synthesis between Jesus as the Great Ancestor and Jesus as Israel’s Messiah. She represents a primal theology that is rich with cultural continuity and spirituality and simultaneously rich with the missionary history of Christianity that has no center in any one culture. Kuma is the continuation of the gospel that began in the cradle of civilization and moved through Europe, Asia, India, the Americas and North Africa on its way to the horn – and continues to move across time and culture until Jesus returns.
To Kuma, Jesus is experienced as the “Hunter who goes into the deep forest,” as the “Lion of the grasslands”, the one who is able to “carry water in a basket through the desert” and has “tied death to a tree.” He is the “Great Rock we hide behind”, the “Chief of Chiefs” and the “Tall Mountain.” Through the eyes of this prophet, God is not unrelated to the traditions of her people – rather He is the “One who brings to fulfillment all the highest religious and cultural aspirations of [Akan] heritage.”
Bediako emphasizes: this is not syncretism. Jesus is uniquely supreme over every spiritual power – Lord over “the living, the dead and the living-dead.” If religions across human history are not seen as “belief systems” but as “traditions of experience and response to the sacred,” then Jesus can be experienced through any cultural context. Christianity in that sense is as foreign to African lives as it was to Roman and Scandanavian and British lives. Which is to say: Christianity is not “somehow intrinsically part of the western way of life.” Instead all streams of Christianity belong to the same universal story; Christianity transcends “human divisions of race, culture and lineage” and “clarifies the nature of [humanity’s rootedness] in God and Christ.”
Christianity as liberative and anti-colonial
The greatest contribution of African theologies in the postcolonial age is Jesus as the liberator of humanity so that all may fulfill their “divine destiny.” Not as divine beings, but as humanity in an abiding relationship with the Creator. Salvation of the human is the salvation of the universe. The Church then, is the “mind of Jesus” who is capable of liberating society’s “outlook, value-systems, thought patterns, social and political arrangements” to build a just polity.
In an ironic twist of history, Bediako argues that Christianity “de-sacralises” the very powers that colonized the continent to begin with. Jesus de-sacralises all earthly rulers (including the colonizers), all spiritual powers, all institutions and structures. The Kingdom of God liberates humanity from all other kingdoms (including colonizing states) and shows that the way forward must be non-dominating power. Power which is made perfect because it is liberating, redemptive, restorative, and oriented to service. “2/3 Theology” (or “majority-world theology”) is a theology of the people rather than the academy, a theology from the periphery rather than the center, and “committed to liberation in all its dimensions: spiritual, socio-political, individual, collective and cosmic.” 2/3 Theology is concerned with a “transcendent community in vital participation with Christ.” This is the gift that African theologies give to the western world.
The “southward shift” of Christianity should be a source of joy for the whole Church.
Only now, 2,020 years after the Jesus of history walked in Palestine, are God’s people becoming a truly universal body. The question hidden in Bediako’s writing is “Will the western church recognize what God is doing?” We ignore the work of God’s Spirit in Africa to our peril, though perhaps the missionary movement back into the western world from the global south is where our conversion and liberation finally lies.
O, Digression! 