African T heology: Origin, M ethodology and Content

K w esi D ickson The inception of the Church in the Gold Coast (now Ghana) contained the seeds of the questionings that have become associated with the term African theology. A study of documents relating to the work of the Methodist Church in the last century would seem to suggest that for many of the new converts to Christianity there was no clear undersanding of the true nature of the Church . Brodie Cruickshank, a British resident in the country in those days, expressed the opinion, based on his observations, that many people were attracted to the Church by the bait of employment; those who worked for the Church as preachers (known as Native Agents) were given the same level of remuneration as those who were in the employment of the merchants. In the circumstances, according to Cruickshank, as many as could find employment in the Church by professing faith joined the Church.1 There is some evidence that Cruickshank overstates the actual situation, but that there is some substance in this observation as admitted, albeit indirectly, by no less a person than Thomas Birch Freeman, a Methodist missionary of mixed blood, who, writing of Cape Coast (one of Ghanas principal towns) in 1853, observed: Our people here consist of a small band of sawyers and their families . . . 2 Others had joined the Church because the lure of the Europeans world was too strong,3 and indeed the missionaries did all they could to make the African converts fit into their European world; Freeman admitted as much when he wrote: In the matter of the Introduction of European manners and customs we have gone too far. 4 In the circumstances of those days, then, when conversion involved
1 Brodie Cruickshank Eighteen Years on the Gold Coast of Africa , Vol. II, 1853, p. 69. 2 Letter dated 15th December, 1855. 3 S.G. Williamson, A kan Religion and the Christian Faith , Ghana Universities Press, 1965, pp. 17 ff. 4 Report of 1847.

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entering, or at least attempting to enter, the cultural world of the missionary, the possibility that many members of the Church did not quite understand what the Church of Christ stood for must be admitted. T h is was dramatically illustrated in the 1860s when some of the members of the fledgling Methodist Church broke away to form what was referred to as the Methodist Society; they broke away becauseas they themselves explained their actionthey were convinced that the missionaries were not enforcing with due stringency the rules they had themselves promulgated regarding the sale and use of alcohol by members of tfhe Church; they wanted presumably to show their zeal for the Lord by enforcing these rules (and others which had no Christian foundation, as it turned out) with rigour.5 Evidently, the members of this breakaway Society had not understood what being in the Church meant, and this lack of understanding could be traced, to a great extent, to the picture of the Church as it was presented to the people of that time, a picture whose colour scheme was at best patchy: the face of Christ could not be discerned with any clarity, while Europeanism stood out in bold colours, overshadowing Christ. Since the last century the Church has become a very visible institution in Africa as a whole, and Church membership has increased so significantly that euphoric prognostications of future growth are being made. There are certain aspects of this development to which attention has been drawn. First, there is the observable fact that Christians who profess this new faith often limit Christ to prescribed areas of their life. When it comes to things that really matter to the African Christian, many an African member of the Church would push Christ aside and resort to traditional practices. The Christian who has been instructed in the Churchs teaching before full membership is found to have entered the Church without leaving his traditional world view behind. One student of the Church as found among the Akan of Ghana has observed: The convert enters the Church as a traditional Akan attracted to an institution whose demands and concepts are basically foreign to him. However great the attraction, and however sincere his attachment to the Church, he cannot deny himself, or the society within which he has been nurtured. He carries within himself his traditional outlook and attitudes, the religious and social valuations of his people. What he hears he interprets in terms of his own thoughts. He seeks to fit the Churchs demands and teaching
5 See Kwesi Dickson, T he Methodist Society: A Sect, in Ghana Bulletin of Theology, Vol. 2, No. 6,1964, pp. 1-7.

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into his own social and religious moulds. It is not therefore surprising that wherever one turns in the Church the religious and social valuations of the Akan people manifest themselves.6 And, because of the picture given him of Christ, the African prefers not to take Christ along with him in grave movementsof sickness and death, of plague and suffering in general; here recourse must be had to traditional and well-tried methods of countering the effeots of evil and giving assurance in a world of uncertainty and danger. It might be argued that Christians who acted in this way could not have become truly converted. This could very well be so, even though the possibility would exist that such a view would be an over-generalisation. In any case, it would be truer to say that the Christ, as he had been presented to such people, was not found to fit into their scheme of things. Then, secondly, the training of ministers in the Church in Africa does not seem to have been carefully conceived as to its aims. Until very recently, those trained for the ministry in Ghana and indeed in other countries in Africa were brought up on what was impeccably in line with the Western type of training, and indeed they were usually trained by Western theologians who had themselves been taught in some of the best-known theological colleges in the West. In my work both as a minister in the Methodist Church and as a University Professor I have had occasion to talk to my colleagues in the ministry on various matters of interest to the Church in Africa, and I have come to the conclusion that there are many full-time workers in the Church in Ghana and other African countries who are curiously incapable of applying the theology learnt in the seminary to the practicalities of their work among their members. Of course, to a certain extent our clergy have inherited a theological position which was often illconceived and indeed impossible, arising as it did from the circumstances of the implantation of the Church by the early missionaries who tended to work on the assumption that all conceivable theological situations had already been anticipated and solved by their home Churches. This was recently illustrated when one Church refused to hold a funeral service in the Church for a deceased member on the grounds that he had been polygamous; and yet at the graveside one of the senior ministers present read his life story to the gathering and thanked God for his life. If it is argued that the minister in question had no alternative in doing the latter since he had often visited the deceased when he was ill and had in
6 S.G. Williamson, op. cit., p. 74.

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-earlier days, when he was enjoying good health, had him in his congrega tion in the Church, then the impossible theological position in which he put himself by refusing to have the body of the deceased in the Church becomes even more apparent. Christ loved the sinner while hating sin.7 The senior minister in question was following Church policy, but he was not aware that this policy entailed a distortion of what Christ stood for. It is not without :justification that T.A. Beetham has observed The curriculum (of African theological colleges) is in most cases too much tied to a traditional Western pattern. Students can still come away from their lecture-room after studying the first two chapters of Marks Gospelw,ith its account of the touch of Jesus -of Nazareth on different kinds of illness, including mental sick nesswithout having come to grips either with the failure of their Church, despite its hospitals and clinics, to exercise a full ministry of healing or with the success of some Independent Churches in this respect.8 ,The conclusion is inevitable that the Western theological training -whether carried out by Western missionaries or by Africans trained in West -em theological colleges, has produced ministers whose theology is not al ways relevant to their circumstances, and who often seem unwilling, or .indeed incapable, of recognising the irrelevance of the received theology The Christ preached by the missionaries was a particular Christ with whom many could not easily identify, and who did not speak in relevant enough terms to the many who had joined the Church. He was understood in a particular way by the missionary, and this understanding was thought ,by him to apply universally. Hence the Churchs theology, such as it was was unsuited to the circumstances of the people. To be sure, missionary records relating to Ghana contain statements which suggest that there was the desire, felt by some missionaries, to bring Christ closer to the people in and through their life and thought, but such statements were the exception rather than the rule, and were not ,in any case translated into action in the way they could have been. As an illustration, there was the expressed intention to raise a local ministry, but in practice this meant a ministry ,modelled strictly along the lines of the European pattern.9 In the process a Christian faith was inculcated which separated the sacred from the secular,
.I must not be understood to be endorsing the view that polygamy is sin Christianity and the New Africa , London: Pall Mall Press, 1967, pp 8. 106-107. 9See Kwesi Dickson, unpublished article, *The Methodist MinisterThen and Now .

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the natural from the supernatural, to a people whose world was undifferentiated. The view has often been expressed that the disappearance of African religion .is only a matter of tme. The early missionaries had hoped to bring an end to what they saw as a form of religious belief and practice which enslaved the peoples minds, but as we have already observed, many Afri can Christians still hold on to the traditional religio-cultural presuppositions. It is sometimes seriously suggested in these days of advancing technology and industrialisation that African culture will have to give up what is seen as an unequal struggle; it is argued that more and more people would be inclined to seek scientific solutions, rather than religious ones, to their problems . Farmers are going to learn to depend more on modem agricultural know-how than on the goodwill of the goddess of the earth; with the many developments in modem medicine and the springing up of medical schools there would eventually be no recourse to the belief in the havoc caused by inimical spiritual agencies, and hence there would no more be felt the need to seek spiritual remedies. The evidence available would seem to suggest that this view of the inevitable disappearance of African religion is a gross overstatement, to say the least. Africans are coming to terms with the new technological and other developments without sacrificing their traditional presuppositions. Africans are using modem agricultural implements and avail themselves of the facilities offered by modem medicine; nevertheless, the traditional religio-cultural world view persists, simply because that and the scientific approach ask different questions and seek for different answers, and Africans see the two approaches as complementing each other. The question then arises: Can Christ be made more real in and through African life and thought, through the tradition of spirit-consciousness which pervades Africa? To those like Troeltsch, one could not encounter Christ except as a member of the Western world,10 but not many would seriously champion such a view today, though the idea remains often as a presupposition unconsciously held and unconsciously influencing some actions. Christianity has been so presented as to suggest that it is necessary for the African to enter into the Western world to become Christian. Many African Church leaders have in recent years stated in various ways the conviction which the study of the word of God forces upon the Christian that
10 Richard Niebuhr, Christ and Culture, New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1951, p. 30.

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God reveals himself to all men. There is an inevitable universalism that issues out of the particularity of Gods choice of Israel, but Africans must approach God in Christ and not through Westernism.1 1 African theology which deserves to be so called is that which does full justice to the Africans humanity.12 For a long time the Church in Africa has been adjusting, unconsciously and without executive fiat, to the theological situation that has officially characterised the Church. The world has become used to thinking of theology in terms of carefully reasoned and systematically set out statements, the theological fraternity electing every few years a leading star by whose decisions, often before the questions were asked, all matters theological were considered to have been definitively decided. Despite the Churchs received theology, African Christians have been doing theology of a different kind for some time. In Ghana, for example, the Methodist Church for many decades has had an unofficial place in her worship for what are referred to as Lyrics: these are generally free-rhythm songs some of which are reputed to have been war songs in the past.13 These are always sung with the greatest enthusiasm; surprisingly, it is only in the last few years that attempts have been made to collect these and reduce them to writing with a view to making them even better known throughout the Methodist Church in Ghana, and perhaps also in the envisaged United Church. Also, as against the often sterile prayers which the Churchs Orders of Service and prayer books feature, impromptu prayers made by worshippers in Church, particularly during prayer meetings, are full of feeling and meaning, and are more wholeheartedly assented to by the worshippers. These songs and prayers show a deep desire to have God involved closely with peoples lives and well-being. There is also the matter of the Churchs preaching, particularly as done by those who had not been trained in the Churchs seminaries. I have had occasion to listen to sermons given by lay preachers, sermons that did not strike me as useful in terms of what my seminary training had taught me to expect of preachers. And yet, the worshippers I had talked to had expressed complete satisfaction with the message given them. It may very well be that the Church in Africa has to give serious
11 Kwesi Dickson and Paul Ellington, Biblical Revelation and African Beliefs, London:: Lutterworth, 1969, p. 16. 12 See Lesslie Newbigin,s article, Salvation, the New Humanity and Cultural Communal Solidarity, in the Bangalore Theological Forum , Vol. V, No. 2, July 1973. 13 See S.G. Williamsons article, T he Lyric in the Fante Methodist Church, in Africa, Vol. XXVIII, No. 2, April 1958, pp. 126 ff.

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consideration to discovering what preaching the word of God to her peoples should consist in. Granted that African Christians have been doing theology in their singing, praying and preaching, how is this theologising to be sustained, adjusted (if necessary) and organised? A term that has been used most frequently to characterise the task for the Church in Africa and elsewhere14 is indigenisation. This term is held to involve making a separation between the central revelation of God in Christ, which revelation ,is unchanging and about which there can be no compromise, and the cultural incidentals of a Western nature which accompanied the Gospel to Africa; the latter must be either discarded or adapted to suit the African traditional cultural ethos. This indigenisation concept has been found very useful and is not without merit. There are many Churches in Africa which have learnt to enrich their worship through the singing of African songs and the use of indigenous percussion instruments. Here is an important development, and there is promise of more significant developments in this area in the years ahead. The concept, however, if viewed simply and solely in terms of the definition of it given above, will be found to pose some problems. The one that comes immediately to mind is this: Is there a core of Christian truth that is free from cultural colouring? It is not enough to sing African music; it is not enougjh merely to drape the altar in a kente cloth, to make priests wear kente stoles and to have traditional religio-cultural symbols displayed prominently in the Church. In our zeal to isolate the ,incidentals from the core of the faiththe revelation of God in Christand adapt the incidentals to suit the indigenous cultural ethos, we may end up having a Church the Lord of which still wears a distinctly Western aspect. It ,is because indigenisation, as often understood and implemented, left much of the Churchs foreign character unchanged that the concept of African theology came to be advocated, though it must be added that some would use this latest expression and indigenisation interchangeably. The concept of African theology is meant to express the need to do a more drastic re-th,inking of all that the Church is and stands for with a view to creating a more appropriate Christian instrument, one that would serve more directly and more effectively the spiritual aspirations of those in Africa
14See the Bangalore Theological Forum which devotes Vol. V, No. 1, January-June 1973 to Indigenisation of Worship*.

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who call upon the name of Christ. The term has been in use for about a decade, but it is only now that the prerequisitjes for such a theology are in the process of being defined. Three areas where .important developments could, and must, be brought about are clear: the Churchs Orders of Service, the study of The Bible, and the restatement of basic Christian doctrines. In connection with the last named, the question has been asked whether such restatement should necessarily be along the lines of the accepted theological categories. I shall now look at the three areas seriatim. The Methodist from England on visit to Ghana and other African countris where Wesleyan missionaries have worked, would find the forms of worship in the Methodist (British) Church familiar. He would hear and repeat the same prayers, sing the same hymns, hear and see couples being married and infants being baptised by the use of familiar liturgical formulations. It may be argued that such is the kind of situation that underlines the oneness of the Church of Christ, and that any situation contrary to this destroys this oneness. To this point of the oneness of the Church I shall return. Meanwhile, it is an observable fact, and demonstrable, that not all the Churchs Orders of Services axe meaningful from the point of view of the circumstances of the African. In my article Christian and African Traditional Ceremonies 15 I have illustrated the inappropriateness of the Methodist Churchs Orders of Service for Infant Baptism and the Solemnisation of Matrimony; I shall merely state here the main points made in that article in relation to the latter Order of Service. The Solemnisation of Matrimony Order of Service contains ideas which simply run counter to African life and thought to such a degree that the Order of Service represents an unreal world as far as the African matrilineal situation is concerned. This Order of Service singles out two people, the couple coming to be married in the Church, informs them that the purpose of marriage is principally the nurture of children, and asks that any one who knows any just cause why the two may not be married by the minister should declare it there and then. Now, in African society, whether it be matrilineal or patrilineal, the bringing together of two people in marriage brings together two families, so that traditional marriage involves a union that transcends the joining of the hands of two individuals in marriage. Furthermore, marriage in traditional African society is for the purpose of begetting, first and foremost, and not just the love and comfort the couple experience with each other. This explains why the Church seems
1Practical Anthropology, Vol. 18, No. 2, March-April 1971, pp. 64-71.

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to lack authority in a situation of childlessness, particularly where the expedient of raising children outside the marriage ,is resorted to, because its original stand on the question of children in marriage is basically different. Moreover, to invite someone or other to declare why the two may not lawfully be married by the minister is ,in a sense to engage in a meaningless exercise since, having performed the customary rites in connection with marriage, the couple would be considered already married by the contracting families. There are many traditional ceremonies with such crucial significance (e.g., initiation rites) from which much could be gained if one were to study them and use them to tell the story of Christ coming to man to make him fully human. Our Orders of Service often fail to bring people to the heart of worshipcommunion with God, because they ignore those gathered in worship, taking little or no account of their being who they are. The quest for an African theology must involve a close study of the received Orders of Service in the light of cognate traditional liturgical situations with a view to arriving at formulations which will make Christ real to Africans in the particularity of their circumstances. The second area, which has been woefully neglected by the Church in Africa and which deserves urgent attention, is the study of The Bible. Of course, the many hermeneutical tools which scholars have defined over the years are indispensable, and in the departments of religious studies all over the continent care is taken to ensure that students are brought up to appreciate the modem critical methods of biblical study. Earlier I referred to Beethams dissatisfaction with the study of the Bible done in the seminaries in Africa,16 where there is little attempt made to relate the Bible to the students circumstances. A thorough study of the Bible should involve finding the word of God for the inquirer in the context, of his own circumstances. It is not surprising that the West African Association of Theological Institutions, at its 1974 annual meeting at Ibadan, Nigeria, called for a Bible commentary that would, while employing modern critical methods of study, at the same time help Africans to hear God speaking to them direct. Such a very contemporary work as the Acts of the Apostles, which foreshadows the discussions going on today on Christianity in Africa, has yet to catch the eye of a commentator who would make the questionings of Acts 15 and the reasoning of Acts 17, and the thoughts of many other passages in that book, come home to Africans with immediacy.
16 See note 8 above.

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While on the study of the Bible, a special word must be said about the Old Testament. Not only does the Old Testament enunciate more clearly the principle of the particularity of theologising, but also, and with greater clarity than the New Testament, it relates religion to every sphere of human activity. The Old Testament contains much that pre-dates the formation of the authentic Hebrew religion, though such material is made to tell the story of Gods covenant relations with a people, and hence given a new setting. It would be surprising, indeed, if the constant contact with other peoples had not left its mark on Hebrew religion and literature. It is a well-known fact that Israel reacted in two simultaneous ways to its milieu: ,it on the one hand freely appropriated some of the traditions of her neighbors (such as Egyptian wisdom), while on the other hand rejecting the context in which the things appropriated stood. The pre-Hebrew magical use of the sin offering is solemnly recorded17 by the priestly writers in their compilation of ritual regulations and the role of sacrifice as a means of approaching God. The matter of the Old Testament relating religion to every sphere of mans activity has long been recognized,18 and it is partly this which accounts for the popularity of the Old Testament in the African independent Churches. It is in recognition of this that several university departments of religious studies in Africa are experimenting with a course on the Old Testament (or The Bible) and African life and thought. It must be admitted that the recognition of the continuity between the Old Testament and African life and thought should be balanced by the recognition of the discontinuity between them, seeing that the Old Testament makes something new of the ideas and customs appropriated, and also stands in a close relationship with the New Testament, the later ftmphasking the need for recognising a radical dialectic of continuity and discontinuity: the Old Testament prepares the way for the New, but in the light of the latter the Old is judged. I am convincd that the complex cross-currents of ideas in The Bible ought to be studied with all seriousness by Africans. God must be heard to speak to Africans in clearer tones than the traditional theological studies have made it possible for them to hear. In my own department such a traditional course as Christian ethics is made to take account of African moral ideas, and the interaction that is likely to take place, or has already taken
Leviticus 11-15. 18 See Kwesi Dickson, The Old Testament and African Theology, in the Ghana Bulletin of Theology, Vol. 4, No. 4, June 1973, pp. 31-41.

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place, between the two. Indeed, the Department of Religious Studies, University of Ibadan, Nigeria, has for many years run a course entitled Interaction of Religions which seek to study some of the matters raised here with respect to the meeting of Christianity and African life and thought. The third area for careful consideration is Christian doctrines. Christian doctrines need to be re-examined for two reasons. They are often the result of biblical truth being interpreted in a Western way, which interpretation may obscure some aspect of the faith or indeed omit reference to matters which are taken account of in the Scriptures but which are not part of the active, living experience of Western theologians. One may cite as an illustration the meaning of death as seen in relation to the meaning of Christs work. In Africa death is seen as a force that revitalises societys interrelationships, thus renewing societys vitality and strengthening the community bonds. The powers of ev,il may have triumphed in bringing about death, but the triumph is only temporary since the often elaborate and protracted customary rites in connection with the dead emphasise the temporariness of the interruption. There is a paradoxical attitude to death, to be sure. Death is mourned and regretted, but the ceremonies aimed at stabilising the community which have suffered loss are very striking: the ancestors are called upon to re-inforce the community by giving the women more children; there is also drumming and dancingthese and other activities underline the belief that death is not an unmitigated disaster. As against this, traditional Christian theology has tended to see the death of Christ as a regrettable prelude to the resurrection, and hence the uncharacteristic solemnity of Good Friday as celebrated in Christian Churches in Africa. Is there more meaning ,in the death per se of Christ than Christian teaching has recognised? In the African situation Christs death would mean, among other things, the strengthening of the bonds binding Christians together. There was great gain in his death; it was a 1 triumph, the Church allows, but not much more than lip service is paid to this because of the traditional Christian view that the death of Christ would have meant nothing without the resurrection. It is not surprising that since the patristic period the death of Christ has given rise to a diversity of theories of atonement. Leading Christian thinkers have at various times sought to fathom the meaning of Christs death, and this is an area where African theology can make a contribution to Christian thought. In connection with matters of doctrine, a more fundamental question needs to be asked: should the rethinking of Christian beliefs assume the

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inviolability of the traditional categories of theological thought? On the one hand, it could be a useful procedure to examine the Churchs theology by looking at its various parts as traditionally defined, such as the doctrine of redemption, an aspect of which has already come under consideration here when a look was taken at the meaning of Christs death. To proceed along these lines could be very useful in .that it would mean relating fresh thinking to specific areas of thought, thus enabling discussion to proceed within recognisable and manageable limits. However, the possibility that this procedure may become a limiting factor cannot be discounted; for, the rethinking would then be done in terms of areas of thought defined in the Western context. This might very well stifle greater originality, and result in confused thinking. Much thought will have to be given to methodology to ensure that African theology develops as a real contribution to * !hrintian thought. In these days of labels, African theology, as it is developing, might be considered as a theology of selfhood, not only in recognition of the changed status of much of Africa, from the colonial to the post-colonial period, but also as a symbol of the desire of the Church in Africa to be in a position to present Christ as one who knows and understands the hopes and fears of Africans, and who promises salvation in the context of their circumstances. Of course, when one writes about Africa one always runs the risk of oversimplifying the picture of a continent which has a great variety of peoples and traditions. Also, ,in some parts of the continent Africans live under oppressive white rule, while in others Africans are under oppressive black rule. Given this nature of the continent, with its varied religious, social, economic and political realities, one must face the possibility that rforktian theology in Africa will be expressed in different ways to reflect the particularities of local circumstances. However, the focal point of African theology would remain the same: an expression of the Christian faith which does justice to the Africans humanity and God-given ways of life and thought. Finally, a brief word about the view sometimes expressed that the quest for an African theology is a quest for /the breaking up of die one Church of Christ. Many feel that since the Church is one, there can be no room for theologies characteristic of particular areas of Christendom. Such a view confuses unity with uniformity. Christ is the one Lord of the Church, the basis of the oneness of the Church, but this one Church is made up of many peoples the swell of whose various and authentic praises cannot but enrich the one Church.

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