Christian Spirituality in Context: An African Perspective

African Christian Spirituality has often been critiqued as encompassing African traditional culture and spirituality. Some scholars describe it as “syncretistic” and “superstitious” as they find it difficult to distinguish between the African traditional spirituality bound to the African culture and that of the African Christian spirituality. Further, descriptions of Christian spiritualities in the Majority World as “contextual” seem to suggest that the Christian spirituality from the Minority World is not culturally bound and thus designated. This situation could be described as an echo of a dilemma on the phenomenon of spirituality in context. This article aims to reflect on the dynamics of African Christian Spirituality from the perspective of African Christian theology. The paper argues that there can be no authentic Christian spirituality without a specific reference to a particular cultural context. This understanding should therefore be considered as an essential point of reference for tolerance and mutual respect in intercultural dialogue and ecumenical engagements within scholarship and in ecclesial contexts in the contemporary glocal world.