Journal: Conspectus
Volume: CONSPECTUS 35:2 (Sep 2023)
Article: Author’s Response: "Reading Jeremiah in Africa: Biblical Essays in Sociopolitical Imagination."
Author: Anonymous

Conspectus 35:2 (September 2023) p. 33

Author’s Response: Reading Jeremiah in Africa: Biblical Essays in Sociopolitical Imagination.

The best way to begin my response to Yacouba Sanon’s review of my book, Reading Jeremiah in Africa: Biblical Essays in Sociopolitical Imagination, is to thank him for his careful critique. He pointed out the need to address certain issues with greater care, particularly the importance of the African worldview and belief systems in biblical interpretation. The review also affords me an opportunity to clarify the hermeneutical logic behind my reading of the Bible, and in this way, to respond to Michael Blythe’s (2022, 98–100) review published in Transform Journal, which says that I fell short of providing a uniquely African hermeneutic.

In 2002, I was finishing my Ph.D. dissertation at the University of Natal, (now KwaZulu-Natal), after having studied for almost five years at Nairobi Evangelical Graduate School of Theology (NEGST), now Africa International University (AIU). At one point during my studies in South Africa, NEGST invited me to spend time with the faculty, to explain how my years of study at NEGST were helping me now in my Ph.D. program, and the differences that I perceived between the two schools. I explained that at NEGST I learned to do sound exegesis but with very little consideration for the African context, despite the motto of the school: “A school in the heart of Africa with Africa on its heart.” However, in the School of Theology at the University of Natal, I was facing the challenge of too much context and too little exegesis in biblical interpretation. I was trying to draw from these two very different academic experiences to create my own hermeneutic. My aim was to address these two contrasting weaknesses by setting up an ongoing conversation between the sacred text and my African context. The keywords here are ongoing conversation, which I aim to be a part of throughout my reading of the Bible. This is what I tried to do in my book. How to interpret the Bible better, for the sake of the academy, the church, and the larger audience, is a constant challenge, not only for me but for all those who see the need for a fresh alternative to the dominant Western hermeneutic, which we have embraced as the only way to read the Bible.

Generally, most Western biblical studies pay scant attention to the socioeconomic, ethical, and spiritual challenges of the reader. For the Book of Jeremiah, for example, most scholarly attention during the last fifty years has been on the composition of the book, the relation of the Masoretic Text to the Septuagint, the Deuteronomic edition, the feminist imagery, and similar matters. The primary audience of such scholars is their colleagues and students in the academy, who are comfortable with this complex languag...