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CHAPTER THREE ISSUES and PERSPECTIVES in CHRISTOLOGICAL DEVELOPMENTS in NIGERIA 3.0 Introduction the African Perception of Jesu

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CHAPTER THREE ISSUES and PERSPECTIVES in CHRISTOLOGICAL DEVELOPMENTS in NIGERIA 3.0 Introduction the African Perception of Jesu CHAPTER THREE ISSUES AND PERSPECTIVES IN CHRISTOLOGICAL DEVELOPMENTS IN NIGERIA 3.0 Introduction The African perception of Jesus Christ pervades every aspect of the Christian’s life in Nigeria and it influences the various ways of appropriating Christology. Jesus Christ is central to African Christianity but Africans have a particular way of seeing Jesus. The current chapter will explore and develop this particular African insight and expression of the Christ-event. For this purpose the chapter considers how Christology has developed in Nigerian Christianity, locating it within the broad spectrum of the historical development of the African theological framework.1 The chapter begins by underscoring the centrality of the person of Jesus Christ for African Christianity. Then the chapter explores how Christology develops in the quest for identity among African Christian theologians. This chapter ends with a discussion on the dominant Christological themes in Nigerian Christianity. The current chapter is important because it helps to understand the development that has taken place in Christology in Nigeria and Africa and to assess whether or not any of these developments would be useful in addressing the issue of violence and mutuality in present day Nigerian society. John S. Mbiti, a notable Kenyan theologian, has argued that one of the greatest features of Christian theology is Christology. For Mbiti, Christology helps theology to engage human situation and context. He proposes that, “Christian Theology ought properly to be Christology, for Theology falls or stands on how it understands, translates and interprets Jesus Christ, at a given Time, Place and human situation.”2 There is a strong connection between the Christian faith and how it is translated in different human situations, times, and contexts. 1 South African theologian, Willa Boesak has justified the importance of history in constructing theology: “To write a critical contextual theology requires a serious encounter with history.” God’s Wrathful Children: Political Oppression and Christian Ethics (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995), 52. History particularly helps to understand and interpret the past events and it channels a new direction for the future. 2John S. Mbiti, New Testament Eschatology in an African Background (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), 190. John Samuel Mbiti (b. 1931) is one of the first generation of African theologians and religious philosophers. A Kenyan Anglican clergyman, Mbiti was a professor of theology and one-time director of the World Council of Churches’ Ecumenical Institute, Bossey/Celigny, Switzerland. 79 A relevant theological enterprise synthesizes the proclamation and transmission of the faith in diverse contexts and it safeguards the unique place of the person of Jesus Christ in the process. Other precursors of African Christian theology, J.N.K. Mugambi and Laurenti Magesa have likewise underscored the centrality of Christology: Christology is, in the final analysis, the most basic and central issue of Christian theology. The faith, the hope and the praxis of love that Christian theology attempts to explicate, and which Christians endeavour to witness to by their life, must have Christ as their foundation and goal. Without Jesus Christ as the cornerstone and final aim, nothing in Christology counts; nothing in theological thought is of any significance from the Christian point of view. In fact, to be precise, theology is not Christian at all when it does not offer Jesus Christ of Nazareth as the answer to the human quest...3 Like Mbiti, Mugambi and Magesa are convinced that the crucial place of Christology in Christian theological reflection emanates from the Christ-event. This becomes glaring when considering how African people respond to the Christ-event. African Christians profess Jesus Christ and seek to encounter Him on a daily basis in their world. Although, the heyday of African Christological discourse is only dated by most scholars to the last three decades of the twentieth century, the profound 'vernacular' Christology predates the said period.4 In assessing the contemporary African Christology, Diane Stinton seeks to know whether the advancement of current African Christology is a crisis or an act of confidence. After a careful examination, Stinton concludes that it is a mixture of crisis and confidence. “Christological confidence abounds in the perceptions of Jesus Christ "through African eyes", as operative among indigenous believers ever since Christianity arrived on the continent.”5 A close examination of the survey of African Christology further reveals that Africans have naturally responded to the Christian revelation "in the light of their own cultural heritage". And yet, a crisis because, despite the prevalence of oral Christology, “not until very recently, there is hardly a concretized, systematic reflection on Jesus Christ by Africans in light of their own cultural inheritance and identity."6 This difficulty is closely related to the literary problem and super-domination of the North Atlantic theological framework that the African theologians sought to break in the beginning. 3J. N. K. Mugambi and Laurenti Magesa, ed. “Introduction” in Jesus in African Christianity: Experimentation and Diversity in African Christology (Nairobi: Action Publishers, 1998), x. Laurenti Magesa is a Catholic priest and scholar in Tanzania. Jesse N. K. Mugambi is a Kenyan teaching at the University of Nairobi, Kenya. 4 Vernacular ‘Christology’ is also known as oral or local ‘Christology’. 5 Diane B. Stinton, Jesus of Africa: Voices of Contemporary African Christology (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2004), 4. Diane Stinton is a Canadian and one-time theology professor at Daystar University, Nairobi, Kenya. 6 Stinton, Jesus of Africa: 6. 80 However, the major difficulty of African Christology is its descriptive nature. Bénézet Bujo, a Congolese Christian ethicist, has reminded us of this limitation: You cannot define Christology as such in Africa unless you describe it. You cannot define it as in classical philosophy, because I think African Christology is not yet shaped like that in Europe. We are trying to open many ways for African Christology of African understanding of Christ.7 This problem requires attention if Christian theological expression will reflect selfhood among Africans and will be able to contribute to the theology of the church universal. Kwesi Dickson has suggested that to solve the problem confronting Christology, modern African Christian theology needs to pay a close attention to local theologies. These are informal ways of theologising that serve as the true expression of the mixture of theology and every day experience.8 Kwame Bediako of Ghana avers that ‘implicit theology’ and ‘vital Christian experience in various African communities’ need to be studied.9 It is in this way that the theology will be responsible to the situations of theologians in Africa. The emergence of Christological discourse in Nigeria can be summed up under the quest for a distinct identity. It evolves in the contexts of how missionaries interpreted Jesus Christ, the reactions to and interpretations of the missionaries’ theology by African intellectuals, and further developments in African Christian theology. I will explore this quest for identity and how it aided Christological development and emerging issues from that quest. 3.1 The Question of Identity (1): From the Missionary Christology to the Post- Missionary Contexts of the Emergence of African Christological Discourse I will employ the term ‘missionary Christology’ as a designation for the presentation and appropriation of Jesus Christ as offered by the early missionaries in Nigeria.10 The basic 7 Stinton, Jesus of Africa, 15. 8 Kwesi A. Dickson, Theology in Africa (Maryknoll, NY: Darton, Longmann & Todd Ltd, 1984), 108-116.. The local or informal theologising that Dickson reflects upon includes songs, prayer and preaching. Kwesi A. Dickson (1929-2005) a clergyman, was the seventh President of the Methodist Church Ghana. He was a professor of theology at the University of Legon, Ghana. 9 Kwame Bediako, “The significance of Modern African Christianity – A Manifesto”, Studies in World Christianity. 1:1, (1995): 53. Kwame Bediako, (1945-2008) was a Ghanaian theologian and professor of theology, Rector/founder of the Akrofi-Christaller Institute of Theology, Mission and Culture, Akropong, Ghana. 10 There is a difficulty in a search for ‘missionary Christology’ since the missionaries did not write books on their own Christology. But as far as I can identify in the literatures on Christianity/missiology in Africa, various 81 assumption of the early missionaries to Africa was a divine commission by God to conquer ‘the ends of the earth’ for Him. This affected their presentation of Jesus. The Jesus presented by the missionary is a conqueror of the souls of men, culture, and the land. Whilst examining the shortcomings of missionary Christianity, John Parratt has noted that despite the importance of Christianity, “the form in which it had been presented had failed to penetrate to the African personality.”11Parratt linked this failure to two crucial factors which have formed the background to the questions leading to current Christological themes in Africa: the proximity of colonialism to the missionary movement, and the missionary’s inferior perception of the African culture.12 The nineteenth century European Colonial expansion in Africa coincided with the new era of the mission frontier
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