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Under the Shade Tree

Reading the Bible in Africa
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World Christianity is concerned not with Christianity as a global cultural and theological monolith, but with local expressions of Christian faith around the globe. But Christianity's presence in and among the world's cultures is complex and contested. Evangelization has often been the religious arm of colonial expansion, and even authentically indigenous religious traditions have been swallowed up into linguistic and liturgical uniformity. Often neglected in the study of these phenomena is the meaning and role of the Bible and biblical interpretation in shaping local Christianities. Perhaps no modern expression of World Christianity more dramatically illustrates this neglect than African, especially sub-Saharan African Christianity. Under the Shade Tree investigates theologically and historically how the Bible was and is read in Africa and by Africans. The European Enlightenment provided a framework of biblical hermeneutics that still predominates in much of Europe and North America. But is it applicable to African Christian hermeneutics? What contextual experiences shape the interpretation of the Bible in those parts of the world not directly influenced by the Enlightenment? Ogbonnaya engages various ways of reading the Bible in much of Africa, bearing in mind the diversities and complexities of the continent. By studying the African origins of Christian hermeneutics, the key achievements of Enlightenment perspectives, and both the popular and scholarly approaches to the Bible in Africa today, Under the Shade Tree proposes a synthesis that pushes back against the way the Bible is used in Africa to support various forms of deceptions, fraud, and charlatan expressions of Christianity. It argues for critical study of the Bible as the word of God, not only for biblical scholarship but also for ordinary people's reading of the Bible.
Joseph Ogbonnaya is associate professor of theology at Marquette University, where he is also director of the Marquette Lonergan Project. He is the author of African Perspectives on Culture and World Christianity (2017), African Catholicism and Hermeneutics of Culture (2014), and Lonergan, Social Transformation, and Sustainable Human Development (2013). He is the editor of Perspectives on Psychic Conversion (2023) as well as coeditor of five other books.
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