The Africa Factor
How Africa Shaped the Christian Mind: Rediscovering the African Seedbed of
Western Christianity
By Thomas C. Oden
IVP Books, 2008
(204 pages, $19.00, hardcover)
reviewed by L. P. Fairfield
The thesis of this book can be stated simply: Africa played a decisive role in the formation of Christian culture. For the past fifteen years, Thomas Oden has presided over the publication of The Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture, presenting the best of Christian exegesis from the Church’s first thousand years.
In the course of his labor, he began to notice the preponderance of North African sources in Christian theology, from the third through the sixth centuries in particular. Alexandria and Carthage were the earliest major centers of Christian thought: Origen, Athanasius, and Cyril from the former, and Tertullian, Cyprian, and Augustine from the latter (with many other lesser lights from each).
Conventional wisdom in the Western academy for two hundred years has assumed that the Roman Empire was a littoral civilization, where intellectual influences flowed from north to south across the Mediterranean. From the Eurocentric perspective of nineteenth-century Western universities, Alexandria was an offshoot of Athens, and Carthage took its culture from Rome.
Exported Christianity
Not so fast, Oden began to think. In the early third-century documents, such as Origen’s work in Alexandria, he began to sense the influence of a Christian culture that had been actively processing the gospel for more than a century.
Alexandria was not simply a clone of Athens and the entrepôt for all the religions and philosophies of the Middle and Near East. It spoke for an indigenous Christian culture that stretched up the Nile into Nubia and Ethiopia.
This early Nilotic Christianity drew on ideas and values that had matured in that valley since the unification of Egypt under the Pharaohs three thousand years earlier. Oden proposes that Origen read Hellenism through these lenses as he shaped a distinctly Alexandrine Christianity.
He also came to believe that third-century Christianity in Carthage had its roots in the Medjerda valley (the Maghreb), which stretched three hundred miles westward. The first North African martyrs, from Scilli in Numidia, were lower-class men and women with non-Roman names. Their deaths in 180 revealed a confident Christian community in the Berber and Punic hinterlands of Carthage. In the next generation, Tertullian represented this indigenous culture as much as he did the ethos of the Roman law courts whose rhetoric he mastered.
These African riverine cultures received the gospel by the early second century. Oden believes they heard it and read it with distinctively African ears and eyes. He offers this hypothesis boldly, recognizing that only a fresh reading of the early texts will test whether it was actually so.
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