A Semiotic Approach to the Theology of Inculturation

Orji

• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781498200752
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

This book argues that though it is a difficult and delicate task, inculturation is still a requisite demand of a World Church and that without it the church is unrecognizable and unsustainable. The book also suggests that the past failures of inculturation experiments in Africa can be overcome only by critically applying the science of semiotics, which can serve as an antidote to the nature of human knowing and reductionism that characterized earlier attempts to make Christianity African to the African.Drawing from the semiotic works of C. S. Peirce, Clifford Geertz, and Bernard Lonergan, the book shows why semiotics is best suited to an African theology of inculturation and offers ten pinpointed precepts, identified as "Habits," which underline the attentiveness, reasonableness, and responsibility required in a semiotic approach to a theology of inculturation. The "Habits" are also akin to the imperatives inherent in the notion of catholicity--that catholicity is not identified with uniformity but with reconciled diversity, and also that catholicity demands different forms in different places, times, and cultural settings.

1

The Problematic of African Theology of Inculturation

The history of Christianity in Africa seems to mirror that of the continent itself in the sense that it is a very complex history. This “varied and long” history of Christianity in Africa defies all attempts at an easy explanation.1 One thing that stands out, however, is that Christianity has massively impacted African social and political life, a reason for which Adrian Hastings suggested that much of Africa is inconceivable apart from Christianity.2 This notwithstanding, Christianity is also a mixed bag on the socio-political spheres as well. The very Church that offers the citizenry a platform to express their discontent on myriads of political, economic, and even harsh cultural realities has, at times, seemed to reflect the same unjust political tendencies associated with the state machinery.3 This ambiguity in the Church’s role in African socio-political life, particularly in post-independence and post-missionary Africa (1950s–1980s) has resulted in two divergent trends of thought or ideas, each one producing a particular brand of African theology. The first trend is the theological reflections coming out of the social and political struggles of the peoples of South Africa. This reflection produced a black theology of liberation specific to the South African situation. It suggests that while Christianity has played a positive role in dismantling of apartheid in South Africa and “in the second liberation of many African countries,”4 it has also served as a tool of domination and division, in so far as the apartheid system was rooted (even if only in the view of the practioners of apartheid) in Christian Scripture and tradition. The second trend is the theological reflections coming out the other nation-states south of the Sahara as these countries seek political self-determination following colonialism. This theological reflection seeks “integration between the African pre-Christian religious experience and African Christian commitment in ways that would ensure the integrity of African Christian identity and selfhood.”5 The latter trend has been variously experimented using the neologism “inculturation.”

The term inculturation was intended “conceptually both to safeguard the integrity of the Gospel and to encourage sensitivity to various cultural contexts.”6 At issue was the credibility of the Church in the wake of “the growing sense of disgrace of the colonial powers in their treatment of native peoples of various lands.”7 Among Protestants of post-World War II Europe, there was the general feeling that the faith of many European Christians “had proved to be more nominal than real and that European Christianity overall had failed in its obligations to transform culture as well as to oppose elements of culture that had become manifestly evil.”8 This sentiment provided the backdrop of H. Richard Niebuhr’s helpful but nonetheless controversial work, Christ and Culture (1951) and Paul Tillich’s now famed method of correlation, “by which human experience, understood with sensitivity to cultural diversity, poses questions to which Christianity must provide the orientation for an authentic response if it is to be existentially relevant.”9 Beyond safeguarding the integrity of the faith in the gospel encounter with local cultures, the Catholic Church was also concerned with how to re-evangelize those European cultures that were traditionally Christian but have since deviated from their Christian roots and become highly secularized and thus extended the term inculturation to John Paul II’s program of “new evangelization.”10

The program of “new evangelization” and inculturation resonated well with African bishops and theologians “who saw in it an ally against the consequences of cultural alienation and a guarantee of a genuinely African Christianity.”11 Inculturation, in particular, became for Africans still reeling under the onslaught of colonialism an enterprise for which the Church must invest. The program to inculturate Christianity in Africa received, from an African Catholic Christian perspective, its first official authoritative backing at the 1969 meeting of the Symposium of Episcopal Conferences of Africa and Madagascar (SECAM), Kampala, Uganda. In attendance at the meeting was none other than Pope Paul VI himself who at the time was making a pastoral visit to Africa. The Pontiff declared in no uncertain terms to the African bishops and distinguished guests at the meeting: “You may, and you must have an African Christianity.”12 The Pope’s declaration came in the wake of his 1967 Apostolic letter Africae Terrarum (The Land of Africa) in which he accentuated and paid tribute to the positive values in African Traditional Religions (ATRs) and invited Africans to devise new ways of becoming missionaries to themselves.13 Even before the Pope’s declaration that there must be an African Christianity some African theologians were already tapping into the new wave of optimism sweeping across the continent following political independence of many African countries and the religious optimism ushered in by the Second Vatican Council (1962–65). Among their many demands was that there be a recognition of African values and cultures in Christian liturgical services. Their argument was not only that the missionary experiment did not take African cultures into account, but also that terms like “accommodation,” “adaptation,” “contextualization,” and “Africanization” need be embraced as a way of rediscovering what was lost during the missionary and colonial era. Pope Paul VI may have been aware of these demands prior to his Africae Terrarum (Land of Africa) and powerful speech to African bishops and theologians in Kampala. What Paul VI’s declaration did, if anything, was give credence to a cry that was already gathering momentum—that there was a need to reconsider previous assumptions about African cultures and worldviews in light of the Gospel in other to arrive at an authentic African Christianity.

In the main, there are two parts of Paul VI’s statement that galvanized theologians searching for an authentic African Christianity. The first w...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: The Problematic of African Theology of Inculturation
• Chapter 2: Single Story Narratives and Resilience of African Independent Churches
• Chapter 3: Metapragmatic Use of Language
• Chapter 4: “Cultural Turn” and the Problematic of Inculturation
• Chapter 5: Inculturation Reconsidered in Light of New Studies in Semiotics
• Chapter 6: Ten Habits of Highly Effective Work in African Theology of Inculturation
• Bibliography