Whose questions?

Bediako neatly describes the dualism that results when the church attempts to apply the questions and answers of European or American Christianity to Africa without addressing the questions of Africans themselves. He quotes John Taylor’s pointed question: “if Christ were to appear as the answer to the questions that Africans are asking, what would he look like?” Bediako asks, “Why should an Akan related to Jesus of Nazareth who does not belong to his clan, family, tribe and nation?”

When these questions are bypassed, “many people are uncertain about how the Jesus of the Church’s preaching saves them from the terrors and fears that they experience in their traditional worldview.” As a result, “many African Christians will continue to be men and women ‘living at two levels,’ half African and half European, but never belonging properly to either.”

There is a universal pastoral point here: Something is amiss if we persist in answering the questions of the 16th while living in the 21st.