Theologian of Christian identity in Africa
Bediako left Ghana for France as a convinced atheist and took a doctorate in French literature at Bordeaux. He was converted in London in 1970, returned for a second doctorate in theology at Aberdeen under Andrew Walls, and spent the rest of his life in Akropong, Ghana, where he founded the Akrofi-Christaller Institute — a graduate school for African theology located in Africa, which was the whole point.
His central argument is historical before it is theological. In Theology and Identity he sets the second-century Greek church fathers beside twentieth-century African theologians and shows they are answering the same question: what happens to a culture's inherited identity when the gospel arrives? Justin, Tatian and Clement were doing in Greek what Africans are doing in Akan. The Hellenisation of Christianity was not the norm from which African theology deviates; it was the first instance of the thing African theology is now doing.
From that follows the claim in his best-known title: Christianity is a non-Western religion. It began in Asia, spread through Africa early, and its centre of gravity has now returned there. The Western phase was a phase.
The doctrine of the church: what ekklesia means, the biblical images, the classic and Reformation marks, the main models of church government fairly stated, the offices, discipline and mission.
What the Bible means by providence — preservation, concurrence and governance — how it differs from fate, chance and karma, how it bears on evil, prayer and "destiny", and how to live by it.
Carey, Judson, Taylor, Slessor, Moon and the century that took the gospel to most of the world — travelling on the same ships as empire. What the missionaries got wrong, what they got right, and why the churches they planted outgrew them.
From Portuguese chaplains in Benin and Warri to Badagry 1842, Crowther and the Niger Mission, Calabar, the Aladura churches, the civil war, the campus revivals and the Pentecostal explosion — and the north, where the story is different again.
What African traditional religion actually holds, why the faith is not a foreign import, where the gospel speaks directly into the tradition, and how to walk with someone out of fear and into Christ.