Akan Christology

As Christianity expands and grows in Africa, there is deep new interest in African theology in general, and the way in which some African theologians are interpreting the significance of Christ within African culture, in particular. This volume explores the Christology of two of the foremost African thinkers against the background of the West African Akan culture. The result is a rare and fascinating look at some of the key cultural symbols of African culture, the struggle to reinterpret the "white, blond, blue-eyed Christ" presented by pioneering missionaries to Africa, and the pitfalls and promises that attend the exercise. The selected theologians, John Samuel Pobee and Kwame Bediako, are put into a critical conversation with Karl Barth in order to initiate a dialogue between Western theology and African theology that brings to the fore some of the pertinent issues about the particularity and universality of Christ. The volume, while seeking to make Christ relevant for Africa, moves away from romanticizing African culture and insists on being faithful to the biblical witness to Christ. The result is an attempt to present an engaging piece of work that makes a significant contribution to contemporary debates on Christology and indigenous theology.

As Christianity expands and grows in Africa, there is deep new interest in African theology in general, and the way in which some African theologians are interpreting the significance of Christ within African culture, in particular. This volume explores the Christology of two of the foremost African thinkers against the background of the West African Akan culture. The result is a rare and fascinating look at some of the key cultural symbols of African culture, the struggle to reinterpret the "white, blond, blue-eyed Christ" presented by pioneering missionaries to Africa, and the pitfalls and promises that attend the exercise. The selected theologians, John Samuel Pobee and Kwame Bediako, are put into a critical conversation with Karl Barth in order to initiate a dialogue between Western theology and African theology that brings to the fore some of the pertinent issues about the particularity and universality of Christ. The volume, while seeking to make Christ relevant for Africa, moves away from romanticizing African culture and insists on being faithful to the biblical witness to Christ. The result is an attempt to present an engaging piece of work that makes a significant contribution to contemporary debates on Christology and indigenous theology.

In this revised introduction, an internationally respected scholar explores biblical, historical, and contemporary developments in Christology. The book focuses on the global and contextual diversity of contemporary theology, including views of Christ found in the Global South and North and in the Abrahamic and Asian faith traditions. It is ideal for readers who desire to know how the global Christian community understands the person and work of Jesus Christ. This new edition accounts for the significant developments in theology over the past decade.

In this volume, the author shows how the Akan concepts of sunsum and honhom offer a degree of Christian pneumatological similarity, providing the avenue for translating and contextualizing the doctrine of the Holy Spirit within the context of the Akan people of West Africa.

A scholarly volume that reflects the rich diversity of Anglican theology With contributions from an international panel of writers, Twentieth-Century Anglican Theologians offers a wide-ranging view that presents a survey of over twenty diverse Anglican thinkers. The book explores well-known figures including William Temple, Austin Farrer, Donald MacKinnon, and John A.T. Robinson. These theologians are set in a wider context alongside others from India, China, Australia, Ghana, and elsewhere. Notably, the subjects include a number of women from Evelyn Underhill, the first woman to teach the clergy of the Church of England, to Esther Mombo, a major contemporary Anglican figure, from Kenya. The book reflects the rich diversity of Anglicanism, suggesting the ongoing vitality of this religious tradition. This important book: Contains information on a number of prominent women Anglican thinkers Includes contributions from experts from around the world Presents material on both familiar figures and others that are unjustly little known Written for students and teachers of Anglicanism, Anglican clergy, and ecumenical colleagues, Twentieth-Century Anglican Theologians is the first book to reflect the diversity of the Anglican tradition by considering its global theological representatives.

In this critical study, Dr Turbi Luka uses historical-theological methodology to engage in detail with Christologies of key African theologians and conventional theological sources for Christology, including the church fathers Tertullian and Athanasius as well as modern theologians. Turbi argues that existing African Christologies, specifically ancestor Christologies, are inadequate in expressing the person of Christ as Messiah and saviour, the fulfilment of Old Testament prophesies. Providing a new approach, Turbi proposes an African Linguistic Affinity Christology that explicitly portrays Jesus as Christ in a contextually relevant way for Africans in everyday life. This crucial study highlights the need for biblically rooted Christology and for sound theological understanding and naming of Jesus at every level. This book also warns the church in Africa, and elsewhere, to avoid repeating the dangerous christological heresies of the ancient church by remaining faithful to a biblical interpretation and orthodox theology of Christ.

This book seeks to demonstrate the significance of Ancestor Christology in African Christianity for christological developments in World Christianity. Ancestor Christology has developed in the process of an African conversion story of appropriating the mystery of Christ (Eph 3:4) in the category of ancestors. Logos Christology in early Christian history developed as an intricate byproduct in the conversion process of turning Hellenistic ideas towards the direction of Christ (A. F. Walls). Hellenistic Christian writers and modern African Christian writers thus share some things in common and when their efforts are examined within the conversion process framework there are discernible modes of engagement. The mode of Logos Christology that one finds in Origen, for example, is an innovative application of the understanding of Jesus Christ as Logos (incarnate); a new key but not discontinuous with the Johannine suggestive mode or the clarificatory mode of Justin Martyr. African Ancestor Christology is at the threshold of an innovative mode and the argument this book makes is that this strand of African Christology should be pursued in the indigenous languages aided by respective translated Bibles; a suggested way is a Logos-Ancestor (Nanasɛm) discourse in Akan Christianity.

In this book, African Christian theology is introduced as a Kpelelogical reflection about life in the context of Africa, which exists in the context of the cosmos. Kpelelogy is the ontological mode of being grasped by the agape of God in Christ by grace through faith in the power of the Holy Spirit. By this mode, African theology is introduced by way of a definition, a principle of paradox, and a description, as well as a critical view of the works of African theologians. It examines the issues of method, criteria, and sources of doing theology in Africa and introduces the method of Kpelelogy as an African theological method. This is explored further as a holistic theological method that is conscious of its being in existence, and its life in history, that is driven by faith in the triune God in a pneumatic experience that has been termed in this book as the Kpelelogical ontological mode. The book is ecumenical in view of its engagement with Christian tradition. It presents a Kpelelogical theology that is concretely African and universally Christian in the Okpelejen Wulormor—the cosmic Jesus Christ who is and was, but beyond the munus triplex (Priest, King and Prophet, threefold office of Jesus Christ) that is to come. Hence it is a theology which embraces elements of Reformed, Lutheran, Methodist, Pentecostal, Charismatic, Roman Catholic, and Eastern Orthodox theological insights in the African context.