Reading Anastasia Boniface-Malle’s thesis about the absence of lament in Tanzanian Christianity exposed for me another plank in the theological foundations of prosperity theology, that is, the idea that God wants you to be happy and healthy, and that for the Christian this kind of victory is within your reach. A key […]
What is the Christian life about? Is it about success, and victory? The emphasis of the Tanzanian church on prosperity often comes from a conviction that God wants wholeness for his people, and brings healing to them by the power of the Holy Spirit, and the blood of Jesus. Or […]
Hearing and Knowing: Theological Reflections on Christianity in Africa is written by Mercy Oduyoye, arguably Africa’s foremost female theologian. A Ghanian, her perspective is shaped by a different context from the one we find ourselves in. Nevertheless, she brings some strikingly relevant questions, in particular, what does Christianity offer to […]
Christ has been presented as the answer to the questions a white man would ask, the solution to the needs that Western man would feel, the Saviour of the world of the European world-view, the object of the adoration and prayer of historic Christendom. But if Christ were to appear […]
As Tamie and I prepare to move to Tanzania, we’ve been trying to get a sense of the religious world of East Africa. ‘Animism’ — the world of tribe and tradition, of folk religion — is an ever-present background to religious life in Tanzania, whether Christian, Muslim or otherwise. One […]
In our animism lecture, we talked about the idea of liminality. It’s the process of being ‘forgotten’ by your community, of being taken out of it and being brought back in. It’s often associated with rites of passage.
A component of the Missiology part of our intercultural studies is ‘Living Faiths’, where we look at current religions to gain a better understanding of them and how Christians can interact with people from these sorts of backgrounds. We looked at animism and African Traditional Religions (ATR) this week. The […]
