An African Commentary on the Letter of James (Global Readings)
Pages
120
Publisher
Cascade Books
Published
2023
ISBN-13
9781498284387
Africa is a necessary but an often neglected continent. So also is the letter of James necessary but neglected. Yet there is perhaps no biblical text that speaks to the life situation in Africa in the twenty-first century more directly than the book of James. An African Commentary on the Letter of James is an attempt to hear the message of James's letter from a non-Western social and cultural setting. It seeks to demonstrate how one's worldview, language, culture, economic status, and religion make a significant difference in appropriating the message of the biblical text. The commentary explores how the written word impacts the readers in a predominantly oral culture. It attempts to hear what James is saying from a different context but, in doing so, explains James with a different "voice." Like the letter of James itself, the commentary uses pithy sayings, proverbs, and aphorisms to explain the meaning of the text.
Collections
This book appears in the following featured collections.
- Non-Western and BIPOC Commentaries by Matt Quintana
Reviews
ThomasCreedy
December 11, 2023
December 11, 2023
An ultimately disappointing shorter commentary.
Overall, though, this commentary does little new, and whilst there are some useful observations that come from Adewuya’s particular African context (he does not, of course, claim to speak for a whole continent of cultures and countries) there is also an (in my view) unnecessary abundance of quotations from secondary literature, a substantial amount of which I felt added little to the commentary. I think the author could have generated a commentary of the same length with more reflection on the wisdom tradition of James, Proverbs, and the various cultural proverbs he alludes to and engages with – and this would be something that would have made this a recommended commentary for preachers, in my view. As it is, this is a workmanlike but rather underwhelming short commentary on James, which will stay on my shelf due to its small footprint, and will probably come off and be referenced when I’m looking for an ‘African’ perspective on the letter of James.
[Full Review]