The books we read, the movies or documentaries we have watched and interactions with people we have grown up with have shaped who we are. This is especially true when talking about an area of the world like Africa. The name alone conjures up many images from history of beautiful jungles, desolate deserts, primitive tribes or great kingdoms that have fallen. Some of these examples from history have not always been viewed in a positive light. Africa has been a mysterious place and taking a trip and studying some of its history has intrigued me for years. From the first time I remember hearing the exodus story or as we talked about the great Egyptian empires, north Africa held the focus for the little boy in me. It is no wonder that scholars of notoriety have come out of these northern areas.<\/p>\n
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I have to admit that as much education, in school and in the world, as I have had I still found myself both frustrated and slightly challenged by Oden\u2019s book; frustrated at the repetition and challenged at my preconceived notions of this part of the world. For several chapters, I felt the author was being redundant restating several points over and over for what I assumed was emphasis. This is specifically true as it concerns some of the early fathers and theologians; for example Origin, Tertullian and Augustine. I found that as I read, I kept thinking that this was stated in a previous page, a previous paragraph, the previous chapter. Even though some thoughts were taken from a different perspective, the main point was the same. That point being the theologians and founding fathers of Christianity were from northern Africa thus validating Africa as a foundational part of Christianity.<\/p>\n
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In chapters 3 and 4, I began to be challenged to understand how I looked at and define the history of Christianity. \u201cThe liberal bias wrongly assumed that Africa was inexperienced in understanding cultural conflict resolution and only needed larger doses of European enlightment to solve its maladies\u201d (1) This quote made me pause and realize that I had subconsciously separated of the continent of Africa into an upper and lower section. \u00a0The North having a Christian tradition including some of the important first and second century theologians and the south, or sub-Saharan, not.<\/p>\n
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The idea of \u201cexcommunicating the north\u201d or \u201cdetaching it from the real Africa\u201d(2) was a thought that western history has indeed pushed and promoted. I will admit that I seem to be a product of my western education. It is easy for me to think of Africa like Asia, separated into different regions, climates, countries, traditions and influences that does allow us to see what areas have influenced what traditions. When I look at Buddhism and it\u2019s spread across the East, from India, Thailand, China to Japan, I know they are all part of Asia but have had different parts to play in the development and spread of this widely influential religion. Recognizing the parts of a continent as big as Africa and what each area had contributed toward or fought against in the spread of Christianity, doesn\u2019t reduce its place within the continent rather allows us to see where our history began.<\/p>\n
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Christian tradition says that Thomas left Israel and ventured to India. Tradition also states that followers of Thomas set forth to other neighboring countries. Like many countries in Asia, Africa as forgotten or had political change that forced histories to change, either by coercion or death of those that remember. Oden talks about the young Africa that has experienced brutal years of death from early in the church on to today. There was over 600 years of Christian influence before the Islam claimed the northern areas of Africa. (3) I work in China and the State claims Christianity as a western religion. This is taught in schools, and home and encouraged by government leaders. There are many that have forgotten the over 1400 years of Christian influence that has also been forced out of the history books. It does make one wonder how many other African Christian writers, theologians or just stories of God moving in this Continent we no longer have access to.<\/p>\n
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I enjoyed aspects of this book and the author\u2019s passion for recognizing the place of Africa within the history of Christianity. I do think it is important to study the influences and the journeys of those that help us exegete the scriptures. Oden is obviously passionate about encouraging a rethinking of the value to African scholars and hoping to motivate new theologians to study and write on the unique mindset of ancient African followers of God. Even with some redundancies, this book challenged me to rethink some common misconceptions on Africa.<\/p>\n
The books we read, the movies or documentaries we have watched and interactions with people we have grown up with have shaped who we are. This is especially true when talking about an area of the world like Africa. The name alone conjures up many images from history of beautiful jungles, desolate deserts, primitive tribes […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":93,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[953],"class_list":["post-13949","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-oden","cohort-lgp8"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13949","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/93"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13949"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13949\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13950,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13949\/revisions\/13950"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13949"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13949"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13949"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}