On the visit of Professor Bediako

One of the great things about being here at NEGST is the visiting scholars who come here to give seminars, primarily in support of the PhD programme here. (There are 12 students on that programme, and this is the first cohort, spilt between Biblical and Translation Studies. They are currently submitting proposals for their theses after 16 months of course work). We've had people like Gordon Wenham and Howard Marshall come, and this interaction is stimulating for everyone.

This week we have Kwame Bediako, a Ghanaian theologian, who's well known in African theological circles. I've really enjoyed listening to him. His main themes have been:
1) the shift of the centre of Christian vitality from the West to the South, in particular Africa (a theme you'll also hear from Andrew Walls, who supervised his PhD). If people are interested in this, I can write more.
2) 'We need a theology of our [African] past'. Bediako strongly believes that African Traditional Religions prepared the way for the Gospel, but this was not perceived by most missionaries, nor by many church leaders today. This failure to recognise the genuine spiritual background leads, he claims, to faith not being built on a secure foundation, and some real issues (e.g. the spiritual world of ancestors and spirits) not being addressed. To use an example I've heard somewhere else, many missionaries, influenced by our own secular European culture, dismissed the spirit world as irrelevant, whereas this is key for Africans, and is taken very seriously in the Bible: the message is not that we should not worry about the spirit world, but that Christ is more powerful than the 'powers and principalities', and that he created 'visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities...' When he preached on this last verse in Ghana, an advisor to a local king asked him why they'd never heard this before. If they'd known this, they would have changed some of their initiation practices (the ancestors would understand if they were told), but they had been doing wrong because the people who should have told them never did.
3)‘African Christianity today is inconceivable apart from the existence of the Bible in African Languages.’ Well, that was good to hear! One of the reasons that Christianity has taken root so strongly in Africa is that God speaks African languages. There is a strong link between the vernacular principle (God speaking people's own language) and cultural and religious renewal. The Western missionary movement has brought about emergence of African Christianity as a non-western religion, as African vernacular religion.
This does need saying. When teaching about language use in church, I found many of the Kenyan students believed that English was the best language to preach in (and in some instances it is). But Bediako criticises the all-too-common scenario of a preacher preaching in English, and being translated so that his mother can understand. But working out how to say the truth in Kikuyu etc means grappling with the framework that Kikuyus think in, showing the relevance of the Gospel to Kikuyus, making the conversion to Christianity more profound, more rooted.

Well, for those of you used to pictures of lions, this is a change. But we did see on Tuesday (a holiday), for the first time, close up, a lioness with four young spotted cubs in Nairobi national park. Just no card in the camera.

And if you should be getting our newsletter, and haven't by the start of next week, let us know. Blessings! Maik