Powers, Principalities, and the Spirit: Biblical Realism in Africa and the West

Among the many factors that separate churches in the West from those of the global South—worship styles, approaches to Scripture, demographic trends of growth or decline—there may be no greater difference than their respective attitudes toward super-natural “powers and principalities.”

In this groundbreaking follow-up to her book For Freedom or Bondage? African theologian Esther Acolatse attempts to bridge this enormous hermeneutical gap—one that exists not only between the West and global Christianity but also between the West and its own biblical-theological heritage. Interacting with the work of Kwesi Dickson, Rudolph Bultmann, Walter Wink, Karl Barth, and others, Acolatse facilitates an intercultural, contextualized approach to hermeneutics that is at once global, creedal, and faithful to the biblical witness.