EMQ » January–March 2020 » Volume 56 Issue 1
Edited by Paul Bowers
Carlisle, Cumbria, UK: Langham Global Library, 2018
784 pages
USD $79.99
Reviewed by Boye-Nelson Kiamu, Doctoral Student, Fuller School of Intercultural Studies, Pasadena, California.
What academic books deal with Christianity in Africa? Who is a credible authority on issues of faith in Africa? What literature is shaping African Christianity in the twenty-first century? These are questions that African scholars and people involved with research in Africa must repeatedly ask. Christian Reflection in Africa offers a needed response to these questions. This book is a reference work with twelve hundred reviews of academic books and articles published between 1986 and 2017 on the topic of Christianity in Africa.
Christian Reflection in Africa is based on the entire collection of reviews through the first thirty issues of BookNotes for Africa. The goal of this collection is to highlight and provide easy access to works about Africa written by both Africans and non-Africans, “to encourage and to facilitate informed Christian reflection and engagement in Africa, through thoughtful encounter with the published intellectual life of the continent” (xi). The book is successful in this regard. The text includes well-known authors like Bediako and John Azumah while introducing works of more recent scholars.
The book is helpful in three major ways. First, it includes a broad range of reviewed materials, including textbooks, covering about thirty-three years of scholarship and many countries in Africa. The text’s one-paragraph reviews have been taken from about thirty editions of BookNotes for Africa, a specialist review journal. Therefore, these reviews are well-vetted. Second, the editor, Paul Bowers, has been involved with theological education in Africa since 1968 and brings his vast experience to the compilation and selection of seminal texts. There are few with his experience working in Africa and his familiarity with writings on African Christianity, and his expertise comes out strongly through the choice of selected texts.
Third, the book is organized to effectively allow the reader to easily explore a particular topic without having to read the whole work. Readers can search the text by looking for specific authors, a particular subject, or a particular title. While the section titles and author outlines work effectively, the subject index seems limited. For instance, such subjects as missions, women’s involvement in theology, and African theology are major themes found in the work, but the theme of technology and faith in Africa is absent.
Also, the arrangement of the text according to authors fails to help the readers to see the progression of theological thoughts and issues within African Christianity. A chronological arrangement from 1986 to now would have proven more useful in this regard. Although plausible, it is not clear if Bowers made an intentional choice against a chronological arrangement in order to avoid constructing a particular narrative about the history of study of Africa Christianity.
Christian Reflection in Africa is a relevant reference work for helping the scholar, pastor, and missionary become conversant with the numerous resources written about Christianity in Africa. It is a valuable resource for any study about Christianity in Africa.
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For Further Reading:
The Bible in Africa: Transactions, Trajectories, and Trends. Edited by Gerald O. West and Musa W. Dube. Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 2000.
