Jesus with the Face of an Ancestor

Abstract

This article attempts to work out a conceptual scheme for the appropriation and understanding of Jesus Christ and His work of salvation from the perspective of the status, roles and functions of ancestors . The author contends that Christ does not require Africans to reject their identity and ignore their deep concerns in order to receive a prefabricated image of Jesus Christ from elsewhere. He opts for a Christology of empowerment from a post-colonial African perspective and argues that interweaving the concerns raised by the Christologies of enculturation and liberation can help us to reclaim our identity as God's children who are called into a discipleship that liberates and transforms. The author proposes the methodology of analogical correlation based on the premise that God deals with us in our various cultural contexts in plural forms. He illustrates this point with examples from the Ghanaian context.