Kwame Bediako and African Christian Scholarship: Emerging Religious Discourse in Twentieth-Century Ghana: 13 (African Christian Studies)

In a departure from current theologically-focused scholarship on Ghanaian theologian Kwame Bediako this book places him within the wider historical continuum of twentieth-century Ghana and reads him as a leading Christian scholar within the African study of African religions. The book traces a variety of influences and figures within this emerging African discourse in Ghana including aspects of missions and colonial history and the voices of poets politicians prophets and priests.Locating Bediako within this complex twentieth-century matrix this intellectual history draws upon his published and key unpublished works including his first masters and doctoral dissertations on Negritude literature an abiding influence on his later Christian thought and an essential foundation for interpreting this scholar. This book also reads the Akrofi-Christaller Institute of Theology Mission and Culture as text by Bediako revealing essential components of his intellectual and spiritual itinerary revealed in the Institutes community and curriculum.This approach challenges narrowly-focused theological scholarship on Bediako while highlighting critical methodological divisions between African Western confessional and non-confessional approaches to the study of religion in Africa. In doing so it highlights the rich complexity of this emerging African discourse and identifies Bediako as a pioneering African Christian intellectual within this wider field.