God, Spirit, and Human Wholeness

Synopsis: The Holy Spirit provides access to relationship with and reflection on the Triune God. In West Africa, Christians approach the Triune God in a way that challenges the Jewish-Christian memory. Deeply rooted in their ancestral memory, where living is relationality, they embrace the Trinitarian faith, the economy of the relational God-Christ-Spirit, by expanding and reinventing their indigenous experience of God, deities, spirits, and ancestors. Christian faith-practice is marked by the spectacular dominance of the Holy Spirit, whose charisms reflect the operations of deities. African Initiated Churches (AICs), Protestant and Catholic charismatic movements, experience God-Spirit's liberating and healing hand for the enhancement and realization of communal and individual destiny (what one expects from a concerned providential deity). This book argues that the emergent West African Trinitarian imagination is in harmony with Hebrew insight into the One and Only Yahweh of the patriarchs that assumed the dimensions of Elohîm, God--experienced as a sound of sheer silence by Elijah, and proposed in utter weakness as the Only God by Deutero-Isaiah--the God that Jesus called Abba, Father. As Spirit and Life, the Holy Spirit, which is the source of all charisms (Origen), is our link to the Trinity. Endorsements: "Uzukwu has provided us with a groundbreaking overview of a theological anthropology from engagement with West African religious traditions. This insightful and creative text will stretch and transform traditional concepts and claims of Western theological thought. Reading Uzukwu's work opens up the rich and largely untapped treasures of African religious experience." --George Worgul Chair, Department of Theology, Duquesne University, Pittsburgh Author Biography: Elochukwu Uzukwu C.S.Sp. is Associate Professor of Theology at Duquesne University, Pittsburgh, PA. He is the editor of Bulletin of Ecumenical Theology, and author of Liturgy, Truly Christian, Truly African (1982); A Listening Church: Autonomy and Communion in African Churches (1996; 2006); Worship as Body Language: Introduction to Christian Worship, an African Orientation (1997).