Oden How Africa Shaped the Christian Mind

Rediscovering the African Seedbed of Western Christianity
1. Auflage 2009
ISBN: 978-0-8308-7556-6
Verlag: IVP Academic
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 204 Seiten

Reihe: Early African Christianity

Africa has played a decisive role in the formation of Christian culture from its infancy. Some of the most decisive intellectual achievements of Christianity were explored and understood in Africa before they were in Europe.If this is so, why is Christianity so often perceived in Africa as a Western colonial import? How can Christians in Northern and sub-Saharan Africa, indeed, how can Christians throughout the world, rediscover and learn from this ancient heritage?Theologian Thomas C. Oden offers a portrait that challenges prevailing notions of the intellectual development of Christianity from its early roots to its modern expressions. The pattern, he suggests, is not from north to south from Europe to Africa, but the other way around. He then makes an impassioned plea to uncover the hard data and study in depth the vital role that early African Christians played in developing the modern university, maturing Christian exegesis of Scripture, shaping early Christian dogma, modeling conciliar patterns of ecumenical decision-making, stimulating early monasticism, developing Neoplatonism, and refining rhetorical and dialectical skills.He calls for a wide-ranging research project to fill out the picture he sketches. It will require, he says, a generation of disciplined investigation, combining intensive language study with a risk-taking commitment to uncover the truth in potentially unreceptive environments. Oden envisions a dedicated consortium of scholars linked by computer technology and a common commitment that will seek to shape not only the scholar's understanding but the ordinary African Christian's self-perception.

Thomas C. Oden (1931-2016), was the general editor of the Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture and the Ancient Christian Doctrine series as well as the author of Classic Christianity, a revision of his three-volume systematic theology. His books also include The African Memory of Mark, Early Libyan Christianity, and How Africa Shaped the Christian Mind. He was the director of the Center for Early African Christianity at Eastern University in Pennsylvania and he also served as the Henry Anson Buttz Professor of Theology at the Graduate School and The Theological School of Drew University in Madison, New Jersey.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Oden, Thomas C.

Leseproben

Introduction

The thesis of this book can be stated simply: Africa played a decisive role in the formation of Christian culture. Decisive intellectual achievements of Christianity were explored and understood first in Africa before they were recognized in Europe, and a millennium before they found their way to North America.

Christianity has a much longer history than its Western or European expressions. The profound ways African teachers have shaped world Christianity have never been adequately studied or acknowledged, either in the Global North or South.

My question: How did the African mind shape the Christian mind in the earliest centuries of Christianity?

The challenge that lies ahead for young Africans is to rediscover the textual riches of ancient African Christianity. This will call for a generation of African scholars to reevaluate prejudicial assumptions that ignore or demean African intellectual history.

Christianity would not have its present vitality in the Two-Thirds World without the intellectual understandings that developed in Africa between 50 and 500 C.E. The pretense of studying church history while ignoring African church history is implausible. Yet this assumption has been common in the last five centuries in a way that would have seemed odd during the first five centuries, when the African mind was highly honored and emulated.

The evidence is yet to be presented. The search for balance in Western history is warped with ugly distortions until this happens.

My task is to show that the classic Christian mind is significantly shaped by the African imagination spawned on African soil. It bears the stamp of philosophical analyses, moral insight, discipline and scriptural interpretations that bloomed first in Africa before anywhere else. The seeds spread from Africa north.

The term Christian mind points to Christian intellectual history. This includes the history of literature, philosophy, physics and psychological analysis. The term African mind points to ideas and literary products produced specifically on the continent of Africa during the first millennium of the common era.

Toward a Half Billion African Christians

There soon may be almost a half billion Christians in Africa. Now estimated at over four hundred million (46 percent of the total African population of 890,000,000 according to the Pew Forum), and rapidly growing, a significant proportion of global Christian believers at this time are residents of the continent of Africa. David Barrett projects the continuing growth rate to 2025 as 633 million Christians in Africa.

The Christian population of Africa is burgeoning. It is to their future that this effort is dedicated. Debates in the West will appear trivial in relation to what lies ahead in the Global South.

The world Christian population is predominantly located in the Southern Hemisphere. That is amply demonstrated already by the careful demographic and sociological writings of David Barrett, Rodney Stark and Philip Jenkins. Europeans and North Americans are cautiously realizing that the future of Christianity lies far more to the south of the equator than to the north.

Yet Christians of the Global South have had far less opportunity to appreciate or even learn of their history than have Western Christians. This is especially so for Africans. The remedy is better historical inquiry, not slipshod history or the ideologically charged tweaking of historical evidence.

All Christians on the continent of Africa have a birthright that awaits their discovery. But in subtle ways they seem to have been barred access to it as a result of longstanding preconceived notions and biases. So their heritage has remained sadly unnoticed, even in Africa.

Not only Westerners but tragically many African scholars and church leaders also have ignored their earliest African Christian ancestors. Some have been so intent on condemning nineteenth-century colonialist missionary history that they have hardly glimpsed their own momentous premodern patristic African intellectual heritage. Even black nationalist advocates who have exalted every other conceivable aspect of the African tradition seem to have consistently ignored this patristic gift lying at their feet.

Ordinary African Christian believers deserve to have a much more accessible way of understanding early African Christianity: its faith, courage, tenacity and remarkable intellectual strength. That is why this story must be told, told now and told accurately.

An Epic Story

The story of early African Christianity needs to be told to African children in villages and cities. The story deserves to be told in a simple way. Though it will be heard by a global audience, it first must find a way of reaching the African child.

Replete with intrepid characters and surprise endings, this is a story of heroic proportions. Not a myth but a real history—the actual story of African believers faithfully facing life-and-death choices, centuries of demeaning slavery and intractable dehumanization—it is timely today for African mothers and daughters, fathers and sons. Its time has come.

The core plot is not difficult to grasp: out of a continent of suffering has come an understanding of suffering transformed by compassion. A story of death resurrected, life rising from the grave, it is the living story of anyone who has grasped the meaning of history from the point of view of the cross and resurrection.

The story begs to be told in its factual truth, so that the heart of it can be grasped easily by anyone. This story is laden with mystery, full to overflowing with unanticipated providences, heavy with sacrifice and miracle, with unforeseen twists and turns, unrepeatable choices to be confronted, and learnings to be treasured.

The story hopes to find especially that single hearer who has witnessed a good creation that has radically fallen and been radically redeemed, and yet is puzzled over the mystery of the continuing power of evil in that creation. This touches something deep in human wonder. It is powerfully dramatized in narratives of early African saints and martyrs, who demonstrated the capacity to overcome. Their stories illumine personal struggles everywhere.

Hence this is not a story for a Christian audience only. It is not intended to be heard only by those already convinced. Nor is it a story whose audience primarily resides in academic settings. It is for seekers, skeptics, and for those convicted, but especially for the children of African villages.

The story will be informative to open-minded Muslims tracing the footsteps of their own early history. As rich for children as for their elders, it will not be rightly prized until it is rightly told.

Nor is this story just for a Western audience. I hope it will find ready hearers first on the African continent, and equally in Asia. Global Christian believers are intrigued by modern Africa, but most have not thought of it in the light of its astonishing ancient history. Least of all have Africans had the opportunity to hear their own full story told. Since literacy levels remain low in some parts of the continent, this story must also be recounted on recording devices in indigenous languages. Creative visual formats will also be used as they have been in AIDS awareness and ecological education.

When I speak of “early African Christianity,” I am referring to all the early forms of Christianity in the first millennium in the four billions of square miles of Egypt, Sudan, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Libya, Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco, and possibly further south than we now know. The geography of the continent shaped the fact that African Christianity first appeared north of the Sahara in the first millennium, and then its second millennium saw exponential growth in the south. Both north and south have been blessed by an enduring heritage of centuries of classic Christianity. Early African Christians spoke many indigenous languages and were not limited to the major commercial languages along the Mediterranean coast.

Out of Africa

African Christianity is no less ecumenical by having grown up on a particular continent. African Christianity has arisen out of distinctly African experience on African soil. Those who have most suffered for its genuine depth and continuity have been born as Africans and have struggled in African cultures nurtured within untold generations of indigenous African experience. They are not imports from outside. They have felt the sweat and known the thirst of African deserts and mountains.

The global Christian mind has been formed out of a specific history, not out of bare-bones theoretical ideas. Much of that history occurred in Africa. Cut Africa out of the Bible and Christian memory, and you have misplaced many pivotal scenes of salvation history. It is the story of the children of Abraham in Africa; Joseph in Africa; Moses in Africa; Mary, Joseph and Jesus in Africa; and shortly thereafter Mark and Perpetua and Athanasius and Augustine in Africa.

The truth of Christianity has always been told in story form. It is a narrative of God’s work in creation and history. Christian truth is shaped by the specific memory of the apostles’ story about what happened with Israel and Jesus.

Among the chief patterns for...