–– Warrick Jubber
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Earlier this year, the Association for Christian Theological Education in Africa launched a new academic journal titled “African Christian Theology.” According to the website, the journal promotes Christian perspectives “through deep engagement with African contextual realities.” This is but the latest in a great effort to “Africanise” Christianity. Various books and journals promote so-called African Christian theology, African Christian ethics, African expository preaching, African pastoral care, and African hermeneutics.
This raises the critical issue that confronts the African theologian of how to interpret and apply the Word of God within the African context. Some may assume this to be an issue that is limited to the academicians, but since “everyone’s a theologian” as R.C. Sproul rightly reminds us, it is an issue relevant to every believer on the African continent.
However, the prolific attempts to disciple the African church through Africanised theology often represent an unbiblical approach to theology that is certain to produce faulty doctrine that leads to faulty conduct in churches corporately and among believers individually. That’s because most of the attempts to Africanise theology are based upon a reinterpretation of Scripture from an African cultural perspective.
In the book, African Hermeneutics, the author argues:
“Scripture is meant to be relevant to the context in which it is being taught and applied. And yet millions of believers in Africa are constantly being bombarded with foreign ways of approaching the text of the Bible that ignore important aspects of the social, economic, political and theological culture of Africa. We need an African hermeneutic, one that raises questions that a hermeneutic from a different environment would not.”
It’s clear that this attempt to have a distinctly African method of interpretation aims ultimately to use African culture to evaluate Scripture, instead of using Scripture to evaluate African culture. As another author argues, “The quest for African Christian theologies… amounts to attempting to make clear the fact that conversion to Christianity must be coupled with cultural continuity.”
In other words, the goal is to blend African culture with Christian doctrine, not so that Christian doctrine might sanctify cultural practice by bringing it under the Lordship of Christ but rather so that African culture might prescribe the manner in which Scripture may shape the thinking and practice of African believers.
Instead of pursuing a uniquely African interpretation of Scripture, we need to apply the faithful principles of interpreting Scripture objectively and then appropriately apply the objective meaning to the African context. It is vital, then, to understand the distinction between interpretation and application.
Interpretation is the process of using normal, grammatical hermeneutical principles to discover the Biblical author’s intended meaning. Application is the process of drawing out the timeless principle from the author’s intended meaning and demonstrating how the lives of present-day believers need to change.
Of course, Africa does have a unique cultural context that presents challenges that theologians in other areas of the world do not face. Few Western theologians spend much thought on what the Bible says about polygamy, because that is not a prevalent cultural practice, unlike Africa where it is a very common issue that believers face. However, that requires careful application of Scripture, not an African interpretation of Scripture.
African theologians need to recapture the very best of our heritage in church history as we follow in the faithful footsteps of other African theologians such as Tertullian, the second-century church father who was born in the North African city of Carthage. Not only was Tertullian the first person to use the Latin term Trinitas, from which we derive our term “Trinity,” but he also famously dismissed the church’s attempts to use Greek philosophy—the culture of his day—to interpret Scripture.
African theologians must reject the attempts to Africanise the doctrine and practice of the church through a distinctly African interpretation and focus instead on accurate interpretation that allows for faithful application to the various issues confronting the church in Africa.
To illustrate the different approaches, an Africanised interpretation will attempt to understand and explain what the Bible says about angels and demons through the cultural lens of ancestors and spirits which are common ideas in African Traditional Religion. One author argued the need to use “the African traditional religious system as the basis of understanding Christian spiritual warfare within an African context.” In the Africa Bible Commentary, that same author went as far as arguing that “Jesus has come to fulfil our African ancestral cult.”
On the other hand, a faithful interpretation will understand and explain the doctrines of angelology and demonology as Scripture reveals them to all people of every time and every culture, and then apply those doctrines to the cultural practice of appeasing the ancestors through witch doctors. The supremacy and sufficiency of Christ as described by Paul to the Colossians is as relevant to African believers as it was to Paul’s original readers, but it is a faithful interpretation that will unlock the helpful application of Paul’s epistle to those believers.
Like Tertullian, we need to reject the attempts to Africanise theology by using culture to interpret Scripture. We don’t need an “African hermeneutic,” but we certainly do need a faithful hermeneutic that we use to accurately understand the timeless relevance of the Bible which we then apply to the thinking and practice of African believers.