Re-Imagining African Christologies

Description: ""Who do you say that I am"" (Mark 8:29) is the question of Christology. By asking this question, Jesus invites his followers to interpret him from within their own contexts-history, experience, and social location. Therefore, all responses to Jesus's invitation are contextual. But for too long, many theologians particularly in the West have continued to see Christology as a universal endeavor that is devoid of any contextual influences. This understanding of Christology undermines Jesus's expectations from us to imagine and appropriate him from within our own contexts. In Re-imagining African Christologies, Victor I. Ezigbo presents a constructive exposition of the unique ways that many African theologians and lay Christians from various church denominations have interpreted and appropriated Jesus Christ in their own contexts. He also articulates the constructive contributions that these African Christologies can make to the development of Christological discourse in non-African Christian communities. Endorsements: ""Throughout the history of Christian thought, believers have struggled to understand the figure of Jesus Christ in the context of countless different cultures, and today, Africa is the scene of some of the most challenging and imaginative reconstructions. In his erudite and wide-ranging book, Victor Ezigbo offers a sound guide to these daring new Christological ventures."" --Philip Jenkins author of The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity ""A thoroughly researched book on African Christology. One of the neglected questions in African Christianity is how to present Christ in ways that answer questions Africans are asking. Victor Ezigbo tackles this topic brilliantly."" --Allan Anderson author of Spreading Fires: The Missionary Nature of Early Pentecostalism ""What would 'freedom in Christ' look like for Africans when it reflects care to diverse and complex contexts? Engaging with this decades old theological question, Victor Ezigbo's excellent study will reward the reader with a typology of African Christologies; a sense of the complexity of the theological task; an exhibition of the destructiveness of ill-formed knowledge of both the density of the manifold Christian traditions and the irreducible richness of living ancient cultures; and a refusal to reduce contextualization to a phenomenology that under-appreciates the theological task of reading the deep particularities of texts and contexts contemporaneously."" --John C. McDowell Morpeth Professor of Theology University of Newcastle About the Contributor(s): Victor I. Ezigbo is Assistant Professor of Contextual and Systematic Theology at Bethel University in St. Paul, MN. He obtained his PhD from the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, and is the author of several articles on African theologies and Christologies.