Institutional and Popular Interpretations of the Bible in Africa: Towards an Integration

In this paper, I examine how the Bible is interpreted in Africa’s theological institutions (including university Religious Studies Departments and Faculties of Theology), as well as Africa’s churches, homes and open spaces, with the intention of finding out how the two can be best integrated for the sake of African Christian communities. I argue that we can not venture a mutual relationship between the two ways of interpreting the Bible in Africa until we first establish the principles behind the explication of biblical texts in popular interpretations of the Bible in Africa. However, since we posses insufficient data on popular interpretations of the Bible in Africa to allow us to establish such principles, I propose that African biblical scholarship should undertake the task of collecting such data as an integral part of its scholarship