Faith in African Lived Christianity – Bridging Anthropological and Theological Perspectives: Introduction

Abstract

What is the role of faith in African lived Christianity and what roles do faith and religious experiences play in the ways that people understand and explain social realities in Africa? This book discusses these two overarching questions, particularly their relatedness, by bringing theology and anthropology into dialogue in the study of African Christianity. Studying the significance and transformation of Christianity in Africa calls for an understanding of faith that is sensitive to the local context in which faith is lived and experienced. By overcoming the historic dividing line between theology and anthropology in the study of African Christianity, the book seeks to build interpretative bridges between African enchanted worldviews and analytical concepts often founded in Western academic traditions. In this way, the book does not question people’s faith or try to understand why they have faith.1 It takes faith as the starting point and explores how this influences people’s engagement with the world. The book contributes to an emerging literature that combines analysis of religious experience and faith with analysis of how religion feeds into social ideas and practices. The study of faith in African lived Christianity requires an open and broad interdisciplinary approach. African Christians often locate themselves in an interreligious field in which African pre-Christian traditions as well as Islam co-exist with Christianity. This locus of religious plurality is at times perceived as a field of tension, not only between religious traditions, but also within the world of African Christianity. There is ongoing negotiation and competition between the values and truth-claims in these contexts which are not only a matter of different and competing traditions; it is also a matter of how one reads the world through a religious lens and how social reality informs religious ideas and values.