Christianity in Africa: The Renewal of Non-Western Religion

Christianity’s centre of gravity has shifted in the modern world from the Northern continents to the South, with Africa playing a dominant role in the resurgence of the faith.

When it was first published in 1995, this was the first book to examine this worldwide transformation of the faith from an African perspective and, nearly twenty years on, it remains one of the most incisive treatments of the subject, serving as an important textbook in universities and seminaries around the world.

Bediako surveys this new role of African Christianity, beginning with the intellectual legacy of the 19th-century “Black Spokesman”, Edward Wilmot Blyden, who questioned the suitability of Western Christianity to Africa. He then moves on to varied facets of the twentieth-century resurgence and transformation of Christianity in Africa, including its deep mother-tongue roots, its liberating role and its connections with African primal spiritualities.He discusses the prospects of this modern African experience in the future shape of Christian theological discourse, in understanding of the nature of Christian history and in Christianity’s continuing social and cultural impact in the world,

Kwame Bediako (1945-2008), from Ghana, was an outstanding African theologian and Christian interpreter of Africa and African Christianity during the late twentieth/early twenty-first centuries. He was the founding rector of Akrofi-Christaller Institute of Theology, Mission and Culture, Akropong-Akuapem, Ghana.