Analyzes the Biblical understanding of human nature related to race and ethnicity. The student will explore various philosophical and historical perspectives, biblically respond to these, and develop ministerial and missional strategies for engaging issues such as racism, immigration, justice, and the refugee crisis.

Compares the important personalities, theological works, and issues defining the study of Christian theologies in modern Africa. Cultural/theological impacts of pre-modern, modern, and postmodern issues on contemporary African Christian theologies will be analyzed. The student will understand and engage the shift of Christianity from its Western “homeland” to Africa, and the responsibility, problems and opportunities these shifts pose for biblical Christianity in Africa.

To give a meaningful and purposeful existence to its adherents and to have public prophetic voice, African Christianity needs to make deep and significant contribution in interpreting the past, analyzing the present, and setting a path for the future. The impact of the slave trade and colonialism is still haunting Africans after many generations. The global financial system, the presence of China in Africa, the corruption in African leadership, the higher level of unemployment, and the challenge of radical Islam, begs for theological and missiological analysis. For many Africans, the future is dark. This course provides theological understanding of the past, and missiological analysis of the present and the future.

In literature and art, up until recent time, Africans hardly depicted as major contributors to Western Christian theology and pedagogy. The world, particularly the Western Christians are clueless that before the first convert of Anglo-Saxon, Christianity had ten generation in some part of Africa. Among other things, this course presents how the Western idea of university is born in the crucible of Africa, how exegesis of the scripture and Christian dogma matured in African continent, how Christian Neoplatonism emerge in Africa, and how rhetorical and dialectical skills are honed in Africa and how all these ideas were transplanted to the Western Christendom.

Despite the perceived declining of Christianity in the West, Christianity in Africa is growing rapidly. With an increase of 4,000% in the last century, and an annual growth of 2.5%, Africa is one of the fastest growing Christian continents in the world today. Despite the social unrest, poverty, external and internal exploitation and injustice Africans go through; it is undeniable that a strong sense of the Divine pervades the ordinary lives of the peoples of Africa. African converts primarily became Christians instead of church members. Africans have recognized the radical quality of God’s self-disclosure in Jesus Christ and they understand the God of the Bible within their own idioms and cultural accoutrements. This course explores the insinuation of the current Christian growth in Africa on the various challenges the continent face and the implication of growth on global Christianity.

Since the modern Western mission in the continent, African Christianity has been struggling to find its own identity to imbed in African culture, to be the faith of Africans that pervade their mind and soul and speak to their daily life in every context. Because of the unhealthy marriage of mission and colonialism, by many Africans, at the beginning of Western mission, Christ was perceived as uninvited guest. This course examines the progress of African Christianity and its potential impact in global mission.