The Intercultural Hermeneutics of Lamin Sanneh

Abstract

The article examines the work of African historian Lamin Sanneh (1942–2019) on Christianity and world cultural process with a view to teasing out his intercultural hermeneutics and highlighting his contribution to World Christianity. Sanneh was one of the few historians and scholars of religion to recognize that the Enlightenment induced Christianity detached the notion of culture from Christian religious mooring. He also drew attention to the fact that Christianity has been used as a metanarrative to foster exclusion and therefore developed an intercultural hermeneutics as a counterforce. He insisted correctly that the Gospel of Christ, in its purest form, comes unclothed in a cultural garb. Thus, this paper argues that it was in fostering a historically-minded view of culture through emphasis on Bible translation and vernacular language that Sanneh resolved the dichotomy between religion and culture and made his major contribution to World Christianity.