"And the rulers of the nations shall bring their treasures into it": A Review of Biblical Exegesis in Africa

Anglican Theological Review, Spring 2006 by LeMarquand, Grant

Review Article

"And the rulers of the nations shall bring their treasures into it": A Review of Biblical Exegesis in Africa

In 1991 R. S. Sugirtharajah published the first edition of his important compilation Voices from the Margin.1 Although this welcome volume broke new ground in helping to make the West aware of the presence of other voices in the scholarly biblical discussion, it struck me at the time that the book was not marginal enough. There were few African voices in the book, for example, and the few that were represented were from South Africa and fit into the paradigm (already familiar to most of the Western scholarly world) of "liberationist" readings. A small but important part of the work dealt with "popular" readings of the Bible. There was little in Sugirtharajah s volume which dealt with the primary paradigm of biblical studies in Africa, usually referred to as "inculturationist." However, as we shall see, any label which attempts to describe all that happens when the Bible is read in Africa will be overly constraining. This short review will attempt to discuss some of the more important works and trends in African biblical scholarship in the last few decades.

But first a few words about the term "Africa." This review will restrict what is said about the continent of Africa to what is sometimes called sub-Saharan Africa. I do this not because I have any wish to deAfricanize northern Africa and the Horn of Africa, but simply because including that part of the continent would make the discussion even more complex. The nations of the northern part of Africa are predominantly Muslim. Those in the Horn live in a mountainous region of the continent which shares as much in common with the Middle East as with Africa south of the Sahara. The majority of Christians in these areas are from the ancient Coptic Orthodox Church in Egypt or from the Ethiopian Orthodox Church. These venerable traditions have much that is interesting to teach us about the Bible, but such a discussion must wait for another time. Even if we leave North Africa to one side, the continent is still an amazingly diverse and complex reality with dozens of nations and hundreds of languages and cultures. Much of Africa is rural, and many Africans make a living by subsistence farming. But Africa is urbanizing quickly and many of the largest cities in the world can now be found south of the Sahara.

The churches in Africa are also diverse. Many African Christians belong to "mission-founded" churches-Roman Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox, and Anglican. But many hundreds, even thousands, of denominations know as "African Independent Churches" or (better) "African Instituted Churches" add to the color and complexity of African Christian life.2 Many of these groups are separatist, having left mission-founded churches to begin something which allowed the worshipers to feel more at home. Many were also seeking a version of living the Christian life without the restrictions laid on them by missionaries and their Western traditions. And African Christianity has grown. From perhaps eight million Christians in the early twentieth century (most of those living in Egypt, Ethiopia, and South Africa), there are now estimated to be almost half a billion Christians in Africa.3

This review will not be restricted to Anglicanism in Africa. But it should be noted that the Anglican churches in Africa have been an important part of the spread of Christianity, especially in those parts of Africa colonized by Great Britain after the famous Berlin Conference of 1885 sliced up the African continent and assigned the pieces to various Western colonial powers. At the same time, the growth of the Anglican Church in the Congo, Mozambique, Angola, Liberia, and other places shows that Anglicanism has not been restricted to former British-ruled areas.

Growing in numbers, the African churches began to take responsibility for governing their own affairs by the mid-twentieth century. Along with self-governance came also the need to take responsibility for theological training of their pastors. For much of the twentieth century that training followed Western models and used Western texts. As African theologians and church leaders have reflected on this mode of theological training, they have found it wanting time and again. And so, out of pastoral need, Africans began the task of "self-theologizing." The emergence of African biblical scholarship in the latter half of the twentieth century, therefore, is an aspect of the growth of Christianity in Africa, and is an important part of the attempt of the African churches to address pastoral needs from African perspectives. There is much to be learned from how the Bible is preached, used in worship, referred to in public discourse, and even used by some in a magical way. There is much to be gained from studying the ways that the Bible has been translated into African languages, or the way that biblical themes have been portrayed in African Christian art.4 This review will be restricted primarily to published works of biblical scholarship.5 In order to highlight the major issues present in contemporary biblical scholarship in Africa, I will survey selected works from two different genres of literature: monographs, most of them published versions of doctoral theses; and articles from journals and edited volumes.