It is not often recognised that a number of the early church fathers were Africans, and there was a strong African formative influence on the early years of Christianity. That is essentially the message of Thomas Oden’s book How Africa Shaped the Christian Mind: Rediscovering the African Seedbed of Western Christianity. It is a message which forces a rethink of the way most people perceive the role of Africa within the Christian faith.
It is an interesting message and certainly one worth telling. Unfortunately the substance of the book is disappointingly brief. I would have liked to have heard about the lives of the African church fathers Augustine, Tertullian, Cyprian and others, and I would have liked to hear more about the history and spread of Christianity in Africa in the first few centuries, as well as the particular distinctives of early African Christianity as compared with, say, early European Christianity.
Instead, the author has taken enough material for a magazine article and stretched it out to form a book. He asserts that a new generation of African scholars need to take responsibility for conducting the research and fleshing out Africa’s contribution to Christianity. I found the book dry and at times patronising towards Africans; mercifully it is relatively short at 108 pages plus introduction and appendices.