JOURNALS

ABSTRACT

African Theology refers to the results of the efforts made by the African scholars/ theologians from the 1950s to make the Gospel more relevant to the Africans. The pioneering works of Tempels, All African Council of Churches, Ecumenical Assembly of Third World Theologians and the Vatican Council II were notable among others. This was also the beginning of other liberation movements by and for the Africans in the social and political spheres. For the theologians, two strategies were debatably considered in this ideological and theological warfare with varied levels of effectiveness; Adaptation and Incarnation, With the massive adoption of the word ‘Inculturation’ in 1977, theologians have been encouraged to make more efforts to expound the Christian message from the African traditional worldview. However, till now Igbo theologians have neglected the study of the deities which constitute the one of the major problems of evangelization among the people thereby paying a little more than a lip-service to this endeavour. This paper advocates advancing the praxis of inculturation through the study of the Igbo deities using the review and interview methods. Exploring the reasons for the study, the reality of the deities, their relationships to Christian thoughts as well as the specific areas of attention towards inculturation, we discover that the deities as God’s ambassadors are like the Angels in Christian thought except for their ubiquity, levels of worship and moral irresponsibilities or license to commit evil in some cases. The paper ends with proffering some solutions to these weaknesses without which the Igbo deities can be veritable means of African Incarnation theology and evangelization.