scholarly journals Afua Kuma’s Prayers and Praises as Evidence of a Vibrant Primal Substructure in African Christianity

2021 ◽  
pp. 229-241
Author(s):  
Joseph Gyebi
Keyword(s):  
Christian Faith ◽  
Feature Analysis ◽  
African Christianity ◽  
Growing Body ◽  
Deep Forest ◽  
Western Religion

Following from the assertion that there exists a symbiosis between Christianity and the Primal Substructure in Africa, this paper sets out to examine Afua Kuma’s Jesus of the Deep Forest using Harold Turner’s six feature analysis of primal religions. It focuses on how Afua Kuma’s poetry builds upon the six features of the primal worldview with her new insights from the Christian faith. The author argues that this is evidence of the vibrant primal substructure in African Christianity. This article thus contributes to the growing body of scholarship on African Christianity and its primal underpinnings and Christianity as a non-Western religion Keywords: Primal Worldview, African Christianity, Apae, Afua Kuma

scholarly journals Africanization of Christianity: Henry Venn’s indigenization of Christianity

2021 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 82-85
Author(s):  
Ekpenyong Obo Ekpenyong ◽  
Ibiang Obono Okoi
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Values ◽  
Christian Faith ◽  
Church Organization ◽  
History Of Christianity ◽  
African Christianity ◽  
The Bible ◽  
History Of ◽  
Native Literature ◽  
The Church

The history of Christianity has always been a two-way process of transformation in any given culture. Christianity and paganism are reciprocal; Christianity is necessary for revelation to be fulfilled, but the actual quality of this fulfillment depends upon the quality of the religious man transformed by revelation. Christianity, as a result of this, needs a natural religion, the same way it needs all human realities as the sole mission is to save what has first been created. The link between Gospel and culture is that Gospel whenever its introduced and established in a new culture, is “transposed” in a particular way a sweet melody into a new key. Moreover, the Gospel, when transposed from its biblical world to other cultural worlds, undergoes change itself as well as causing these other worlds to change. Crowther created an astonishing impact and contribution after his consecration in 1864; as he strived to indigenize or Africanize Christianity to make it possible for the Christian faith to be accepted by Africans without having to give up or disown their cultural values. This work seeks to find what part Henry Venn, the dynamic and accomplished secretary of the Church Missionary Society, played to see how Christian faith can go well together or combine with African beliefs and practices to produce Christianity which may become a religion for Africans. This work has shown that Henry Venn's ideas on native Church organization include: the native Church needs the ablest native pastors for its fuller development and that it should be under a native bishop and that a native Church is organized as a national institution. This work adopted a qualitative method that used historical and content analysis. This work concluded that for the Africanization of Christianity to be actualized, African Church must have its liturgy or incorporate what was good of the native religions to develop an authentically African Christianity. And that reducing the various African vernaculars into writing and developing native literature was a first step in the reforming movement toward Africanization of Christianity; just as Venn urged Crowther to undertake the translation of the Bible into Yoruba and to preach in Yoruba even while still at Freetown.

scholarly journals The Naturalization of Christianity in the Far East

1908 ◽  
Vol 1 (3) ◽  
pp. 249-303 ◽  
Author(s):  
Edward Caldwell Moore
Keyword(s):  
Far East ◽  
Christian Faith ◽  
The West ◽  
The Far East ◽  
Western Religion ◽  
The Mind

It is sometimes said that Christianity has been so long identified with the West, it has so thoroughly become a Western religion, that it is not adapted to take a great place in the mind and life of the Eastern nations. It is not intended in this remark to overlook the fact that Christianity is itself by origin an Oriental faith, an outgrowth of Judaism. Nor is it denied that, in considerable numbers, men of Oriental race, mainly within the borders of the present Turkish Empire, have from of old confessed Christianity in forms familiar to us in the Greek churches. But these Oriental Christians sustain rather than disprove the judgment which was above expressed. Not only have they shown since before the rise of Mohammedanism no perceptible zeal for the propagation of the Christian faith among other Orientals, but they have reacted powerfully against the propaganda on behalf of Western forms of the Christian faith in their own midst.

scholarly journals 林譯《巴黎茶花女遺事》筆下的基督宗教：兼論林紓的畏天與鬼神論

2020 ◽  
Vol 35 (35) ◽  
pp. 165-188
Author(s):  
馮志弘 馮志弘
Keyword(s):  
Filial Piety ◽  
Moral Values ◽  
Image Of God ◽  
Religious Discourse ◽  
Christian Faith ◽  
Source Text ◽  
Chinese Translation ◽  
Western Religion ◽  
Good Nature ◽  
The Mind

<p>本文析論林紓譯《巴黎茶花女遺事》筆下的信仰與宗教話語，以之比對《茶花女》原文宗教意涵，再聯繫林紓畏天與鬼神論，說明林紓《遺事》對基督宗教的詮釋和重塑，主要指出：《茶花女》原作與林譯均述及「天」與「上帝」，二者皆言「天意」與「天佑」，但林譯中的「天命」為原文所無，其「天從人願」渴求也與原作「爾旨得成」觀念相悖。《遺事》的「天」賞善罰惡，鑒察人心，但林譯卻刪去了許多原作的基督宗教隱喻，其贖罪思想與原作救贖觀並不相同。另一方面，也正由於林譯的重塑，《遺事》筆下基督宗教上帝（天）的形象和道德觀，與林紓本人「畏天循分」、天佑忠孝的觀念，因而變得相當貼近。林紓認為基督宗教的上帝為「善」，這一認識，是他即使視耶穌教為「迷信」，但在譯作中仍屢作介紹，並始終未曾敵視基督宗教的重要原因。</p> <p>&nbsp;</p><p>The religious discourse in Lin Shu’s Chinese translation of La Dame aux cam&eacute;lias is analysed and compared to the religious meanings conveyed in the original. The results are then connected to Lin’s theory on Heaven veneration and his reflection on ghosts and spirits, in order to explain how he interpreted and recreated Christianity. The major findings are that: Lin’s translation retains two terms from the source text, Heaven (tian) and God (Shangdi), both bearing the meanings of &quot;providence&quot; (tianyi) and &quot;Heaven’s blessings&quot; (tianyou). However, &quot;fate&quot; (tianming) is found to be the translator’s own additions. His translation also projects a wish for &quot;Heaven to have any Earthly wish fulfilled&quot; (tiancongrenyuan), which differs from the concept of &quot;let Thy will be done&quot; expressed in the original French work. The Heaven as depicted in the original and Lin’s translation also rewards the righteous, punishes the evil, searches the heart and examines the mind, but Lin’s translation does not preserve most of the religious metaphors, and presents an idea of redemption which is different from the concept of salvation in the original. Because of Lin’s rewriting, the Christian image of God and moral values reflected in his translation are close to his understanding of Heaven veneration (weitian) and belief that &quot;people embodying loyalty and filial piety will have divine blessings&quot; (tianyouzhongxiao). Even though Lin equates Christian faith with superstition, the Western religion is frequently introduced in his translations as he considered the Christian God to be of good nature. This is why he was never hostile to Christianity.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p>

Indigenization, Translation, and Transformation in African Christianity

2019 ◽  
pp. 73-86
Author(s):  
Akintunde E. Akinade
Keyword(s):  
Religious Experience ◽  
Religious Movements ◽  
Christian Faith ◽  
Conversion Narrative ◽  
African Christianity ◽  
Conscious Effort ◽  
Dynamic Forces

Africa has provided an auspicious context for religious reformation, renewal, and revival. Its landscape has been radically shaped by the dynamic forces of Christianity. African Christianity evokes a protean image that has been moulded by the interrelated processes of mission, conversion narrative, prophecy, and waves of spiritual independence. In contemporary times, Africa continues to serve as a living laboratory for creative religious movements and models. This paper analyses the importance of translation and indigenization in African Christianity and how the processes have influenced the dissenting tradition in this religious experience. Translation provided the impetus for genuine and creative appropriation of the Christian faith in Africa. The engine of faith was enabled by the conscious effort to rediscover Christian doctrines and formulas in familiar syntax, symbols, and concepts.

CHRISTIANITY IN AFRICA Christianity in Africa: The Renewal of a Non-Western Religion. By KWAME BEDIAKO. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press and Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1995. Pp. xii + 276. £16.95 (ISBN 0-7486-0625-4).

1997 ◽  
Vol 38 (1) ◽  
pp. 123-177
Author(s):  
KEVIN WARD
Keyword(s):  
First Generation ◽  
West African ◽  
Religious Movement ◽  
Catholic Priest ◽  
African Christianity ◽  
Western Religion ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
New Generation

Kwame Bediako is one of a new generation of West African Christian scholars, who confidently assert the essential ‘Africanness’ of African Christianity against all inclined to emphasize its foreignness. While deeply indebted to the first generation of African theologians of the 1960s, Bediako feels that they accepted too readily that Christianity was a foreign religion which needed to be ‘Africanized’ by incorporating elements from the traditional African religious heritage. It was the posing of this stark dichotomy – Christian or African? – which in Bediako's view led the Ghanaian Catholic priest Osofo Damuah to renounce Christianity and to found his own neo-traditional African, explicitly non-Christian, religious movement, ‘Afrikania’.

Signs, Tokens, and Points of Contact: Religious Symbolism and Sacramentality in Non-Western Christianity

2018 ◽  
Vol 48 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 127-146 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. Kwabena Asamoah-Gyadu
Keyword(s):  
20Th Century ◽  
The West ◽  
Religious Traditions ◽  
African Christianity ◽  
Religious Symbolism ◽  
Western Religion ◽  
Therapeutic Substance

The development of Christianity as a non-Western religion since the middle of the 20th century has generated changes that distinguish it from the expressions of faith inherited from the West. Christian religious innovation and new ways of expressing the faith have become the hallmarks of African Christianity. One way in which these religious changes are discernible is the use of “signs and tokens”, that is, physical substances that in the hands of religious functionaries acquire a sacramental value and that for example serves as support to the sorts of interventionist ministries associated with Pentecostal/charismatic ministries. A classic example of the new sacramental substances is the widespread use of the anointing oil. The anointing oil has become an important “point of contact” in African Christian rituals of healing and supernatural interventions. The use of oil for anointing is not necessarily new in the historic Christian traditions. However, in contemporary African Christianity, it has been reinvented and instituted in healing and deliverance and exorcism rituals that go beyond what was familiar in the older religious traditions. In this essay, we reflect on new sacraments also re-designated as signs and tokens such as the reinvention of the anointing oil as a therapeutic substance in contemporary forms of African Christianity. The new ritual order and the perception of sacraments as therapeutic substances helps us to understand what non-Western Christians, through popular religious innovations, consider important in a faith whose liturgical standards were originally set by Western missionaries.

scholarly journals Christian Faith and Akan Culture in Ghana: A Review of Major Works of Sidney George Williamson

2021 ◽  
pp. 21-31
Author(s):  
Kwabena Opuni-Frimpong
Keyword(s):  
Christian Faith ◽  
Spiritual Needs ◽  
Paradigm Shifts ◽  
Cultural Worldview ◽  
African Christianity ◽  
Secondary Sources ◽  
The People ◽  
Akan Culture ◽  
Hearts And Minds

Christian growth must not only be considered in terms of the growth of numbers. The growth in the church must also be considered in the level of depth and the quality of Christian conversion within a cultural milieu. The depth of the faith has a lot to do with how the Gospel speaks directly to the minds and hearts of its hearers. Moreover, the Gospel can speak to the hearts and minds of its hearers when the indigenous world views that condition the inner lives of the people are given serious consideration. The study is a review of the major works of Sidney George Williamson on the Christian faith and Akan culture in Ghana. As an early student of the tension between the Christian faith and Akan culture and the challenges of Christian identity, Williamson draws attention to the fact that Christianity can adequately meet Akan Christian needs when it pays attention to the cultural worldview of the people it seeks to serve. The study as a qualitative one uses both primary and secondary sources. Interviews and observations were conducted in some Akan communities on the integration of Christian faith and Akan cultural worldview. The study points to the fact that the construction of theology among Akan Christians must be done from the inside to the outside and not from outside to the inside, the approach that Western missionaries adopted. The spiritual needs of Akan Christians will be adequately met when they hear the Gospel in their own cultural understandings rather than theology done in the West offered to the Akan in European worldview. The study further calls attention to the preparedness of the churches in the Akan cultural environment for paradigm shifts in the Christian faith and Akan Cultural engagements in post-missionary African Christianity. Keywords: Akan Culture, Christian Faith, Local Theologies, Sidney George Williamson

scholarly journals Encountering Jesus in African Christianity: A Ghanaian evangelical/pentecostal thought on faith, experience, and hope in Christ

2006 ◽  
Vol 62 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
J. Kwabena Asamoah-Gyadu
Keyword(s):  
Christian Faith ◽  
Preliminary Attempt ◽  
African Christianity ◽  
Pentecostal Churches ◽  
In Christ

This article constitutes a preliminary attempt at reflecting upon Ghana’s journey with a particular tradition within the Christian faith. The author discusses the relevance of Jesus in the contemporary Evangelical/Pentecostal Churches by taking a closer look at how the person of Christ and other elements of evangelical spirituality are appropriated within the indigenous cultural matrix of the country.

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