Theological Impotence

Here is a pertinent piece of theology from one of the top African theologians. It is something i need to remember while i'm over here - to ask questions whose answers will help when i'm back home. The title is "theological impotence" - i like that.

We could go on and on asking basic questions about the whole meaning of the Christian revelation, the Church, salvation, Christ, the Holy Spirit, and a host of other fundamental theological issues as they apply to the church in Africa today, and in the 21st century. For those of us who belong there, who work there, who live with these and other concerns of survival, theology as we have learned it according to western tradition is very much called into question. If seminaries in Europe and America allow African students, whom we send to them for theological circumcision, to return to us with no idea of the theological meaning of our big words, of our life and death concerns, we will feel rightly betrayed. And the cause of Christ will be gravely imperiled. We send you the sons and daughters of our churches to be truly and realistically equipped for the calling of the gospel in Africa today. Please do not send them back to us as bastards or bearing a watered-down theology. If you educate them in the theology of hope, for example, let them theologise hope in terms of feeding the hungry, eliminating famine, providing employment, being remembered in church after death by one’s children – in terms of what is nearby, reachable, desperately necessary. Otherwise the individual and the community will not survive long enough to have their hopes realised.

… The Church cannot exorcise demonic forces in today’s world through guesswork. It must be squarely involved in human concerns, and it must not look back. Theology should assist the church in this task, and to do so, it must itself be freed from inhibitions handed down from past generations. Christianity has exploded in Africa, and theology too must explode. It can no longer be done only according to St ABC Seminary in Athens or Rome; it must find its own method, its own direction, its own voice, where the people of God are, so that it may mediate the meaning of God in Christ for them. The African theologian who has experienced the agonies of having a burning appetite but nothing to eat will surely theologise differently on the same theme of food from the American theologian who knows the discomfort of having a plate full of steak but no appetite.

John S Mbiti, Theological Impotence and the Universality of the Church,
in Lutheran World XXI/3 1974. Lutheran World Federation: Geneva.