RELEVANCE OF THEOLOGY IN RELATION TO SPIRITUALITY: AN AFRICAN BANTU PERSPECTIVE

This article explores the mutual influencing of theology and spirituality in a quest to make theology relevant and coherent to the community of faith it serves. In this case, special focus is on African Christians in their cultural, political, economic, and historical situatedness. Acknowledging that African culture is diverse, special attention will be given to Bantu African culture with the spirituality undergirded by Ubuntu values. Important issues to be pursued include the quest for identity, self-actualisation and destiny in the God-human-cosmos mutual connectedness. Important to note is the missionary endeavour to inculturation and its mutual influencing with the Incarnation and evangelisation in the sense of enfleshing the Gospel message in time and space. Culture is seen here as antecedent to evangelisation as concerns the spiritual, pedagogical and comparative elements of theological discourse. Another important factor to note is the African holistic religious worldview that sets religion and theology as inextricably bound up with all of life. The article will follow a multi-disciplinary approach that culminates in advocacy for a theology sensitive to the signs of the times