My friend Cath has been enjoying my recent reflections on Tanzanian theology, and asked me what has been challenging or helpful to me. I was aiming for a coherent blog post, but for the time being, I’m just going to reproduce the stream of consciousness comment I made to her […]
A notable absence in my recent discussions of Tanzanian theology has been the atonement. I asked questions about this way back in 2013 but it has not featured much since then. Atonement in terms of forgiveness of sin is preached in Tanzania in two contexts. First, we have observed it in evangelistic […]
I am still planning to come back to the question of how the cross and the atonement feature in Tanzanian theology, but here I want to give a write up of our pastor’s sermon from just before Christmas, because it neatly summarises some important themes in Tanzanian theology. It was […]
With Christmas approaching, our pastor preached on Jesus as Saviour. After all, this is what is announced at Christmas time. “Today in the town of David a Saviour has been born; he is the Messiah, the Lord” (Luke 2:11). Both Mary and Joseph receive separate instructions that he is to […]
Our pastor opened his sermon yesterday by talking about the importance of names. Most Tanzanian names have some kind of meaning. Sometimes these meanings are positive e.g. Amani (peace) or Furaha (joy). Sometimes they’re neutral, for example, you can be named after the day on which you were born. And […]
My language partner and I had a discussion about adultery this week. It came up when we were discussing a fall from grace as a possible reason for a change in one’s circumstances (along with poor business decisions, foolish investments, and so on.) My language partner spoke of women who have […]
In speaking with my friend about the wellbeing of women, we got onto gender roles in marriage. I wanted to push him on the idea that however you configure hierarchy, women are still vulnerable. Everything for them depends on the goodwill of their husband if he is over them in […]
Meet Jesus at uni 