Abstract
This article passes from Christianity to African Religion and back again, in order to gain new insight on reconciliation. Traditional Christian reconciliation models are valuable but also contextual and limited; thus new models should be sought. African myths of community, acceptance and rebellion offer alternative ways of understanding reconciliation. When evaluated according to the principles of integration and transcendence, these myths meet the criteria of better religion and emphasise Christian notions that are often ignored in tradition Christianity. These new African-inspired insights can be used in Christian liturgy as a number of examples prove.
Highlights
John Dunne (1978:ix) once said that “The holy man of our time, it seems, ... [is] a man who passes over by sympathetic understanding from his own religion to other religions and comes back again with new insight to his own
African religion offers a wealth of reconciliation models, myths and rituals that may deepen our understanding of reconciliation
It seems that African Religion can enrich Christianity
Summary
John Dunne (1978:ix) once said that “The holy man of our time, it seems, ... [is] a man who passes over by sympathetic understanding from his own religion to other religions and comes back again with new insight to his own. In this article I want to experiment with this adventure and try to pass over from Christianity to African religion[2] with the aim of gaining new insight. Most influential among these were the ideas developed by Augustine, Anselm, and Abelard[3] The best of these “reconciliation models” were contextual and explained the reconciliation in the language and images of their time. For example, did exactly that: he used the prevailing juridical-rational idea of order to explain reconciliation to his 11th century audience. This contextual nature of all reconciliation models limits them. If this was permitted to medieval theology, can we forbid to modern theology its own fresh approach? We can no more commit ourselves than in New Testament or patristic times to a particular conceptual framework – whether juridical, cultic, metaphysical, or even scientific, technical, physiological, sociological – for the interpretation of the highly complex event of the redemption
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