Theology : Systematic Theology / Dogmatics: Indigenisation

In the continent where Christianity is experiencing its most rapid growth, a great deal of this expansion is taking place in churches founded by Africans for Africans. These churches are often referred to as 'independent' or 'indigenous' churches, to distinguish them from the 'historic' or 'mission-founded' churches planted during the colonial period by evangelists from Europe and North America. Diverse as they are, the attractiveness of these African Initiatives in Christianity (AICs) stems from the serious attempt they make to express and live out their faith in genuinely African cultural forms and styles. In this new book, two African theologians and church leaders -- one from an historic church, one from an AIC -- offer an insightful introduction into this phenomenon. While their main focus is on what the growth of African Initiatives in Christianity implies for the future of the ecumenical movement in Africa and around the world, they also examine some key teachings of the AICs and trace their roots in African church history since the first century.

African Christian theologies aim to contextualise the gospel in African cultures, yet they also have much to offer to the development of systematic theology elsewhere. In this book the responses of Barth and of Pannenberg to the question of how God is related to the world are analysed and then re-formulated. This is done through interaction with the themes of community, life and co-creativity which emerge in interpretation of Dickson, Pobee and Nyamiti. The discussion makes use of Tanner's rules for Christian language about God and creation, and the methods of the African theologies are distinguished in a new classification of models of contextualisation, which is compared with the work of Schreiter and with Frei's typology of modern theology. The concluding development of Pannenberg's theology is shown to be relevant to topics much debated in the late twentieth century: the environmental crisis, the relationship of science and religious belief, the nature of human freedom, and the problem of evil.