Teema 2025/1: Global Theologies

Latin American Catholicism often places lived experience at the center of theological reflection. Although the method has been contested in the past, it has made a powerful comeback during the papacy of Pope Francis.

Christian theology created in the so-called Global South is not a new phenomenon. It is, however, after the 1960s that self-identified Asian, African and Latin American theologies have come to the fore. They all stress the cultural context, history of colonialism and mission, socio-economic circumstances, and distance from what they consider Eurocentric Christianity.

For many people, the concept “Latin American theology” primarily brings to mind the liberation theology of the 1970s and 1980s, as if there had not been theological production before or after it. So-called Latin America has been under the influence of European intellectual currents already since the 16th century. In the case of theology, until quite recently it has been mostly Catholic theology.

The Coptic Church of Egypt represents the oldest form of Christianity in Africa: it is anchored in the Christian faith that took root among Egyptians in the Apostolic Age. Today, the Copts are a persecuted minority in Egypt, and the Coptic Church has spread across several continents.

The use of cultural symbols in Tribal Theology, a contextual theology in India, shares the story of the tribal quest to synthesize the Christian message in the culture and to allow it to speak to their life situations.

Asian Catholic bishops have enlarged the interpretation of the missionary understanding of the Catholic Church. The Church’s missionary activity no longer represents a top-down approach, but followers of other religions are welcomed as co-pilgrims and co-workers towards the Kingdom of God.

This article concentrates on the image of God, Modimo, as Mother among the Tswana in Southern Africa. It deals with the traditional idea of creation also included in Tswana Christianity, which differs from the Western concept of creatio ex nihilo. It further discusses the role of women in a society that honours God as Mother.  

If you arrive at an average African Pentecostal Charismatic worship service, you will enjoy lively music, enthusiastic worshippers, powerful prayers, and dancing with the worshippers. Christianity sounds, smells, and feels like this in Africa, where Charismatic Pentecostalism is the fastest-growing form of Christianity.

Liberation theologies give epistemological privilege to the marginalized: the marginalized are the people whose questions these theologies claim to respond to. However, it often seems that the academic theologian decides what is accepted as liberative knowledge, at least within the academic conversations. This text proposes ethnographic methodologies as one way to appreciate the liberative knowledge(s) that lie outside the walls of academia and bring them into academia to correct and challenge this conversation.