Missions must abandon European frameworks and start from below with Africans.

Evidence

Writing about “les bases de notre Catéchèse en Afrique” in Notre rencontre, Tempels maintains that the missionary must abandon European theories and ideologies, set aside Western manuals and methodologies and begin from below by engaging in dialogue with Africans. The priest has to take into consideration the ideas and beliefs of local African people. — Frans Dokman, Beyond Bantu Philosophy_…, 712

Categorization

Category: Factual Claims

• XREF: Core statement of Tempels’s bottom-up method; central to his relevance for African philosophy and philosophy of religion.

Related

• Tempels’s ethnographic study of African cultures served his goal of Christianization (similarity 0.85)
• Tempels urged missionaries to abandon European methodologies for African dialogue. (similarity 0.84)
• Evangelization failure led Tempels to dialogue-based mission methods. (similarity 0.84)
• Enlightenment racial views shaped missionary evangelization strategy in Africa (similarity 0.83)
• Missionaries should seek shared goals with Africans rather than attacking their beliefs (similarity 0.83)
• Tempels’s Bantu Philosophy aimed at more effective Christianization of the Bantu. (similarity 0.83)
• Tempels learned Kiluba and ethnology after missionaries failed to convert Congolese (similarity 0.83)
• Tempels’s dialogue with Africans arose from failed missionary conversion efforts (similarity 0.83)
• Tempels addressed Bantu Philosophy to colonizers seeking to Christianize Africans (similarity 0.82)
• Tempels’ Bantu Philosophy remains seminal to African philosophy despite its missionary origins (similarity 0.82)
• The failure of missionary evangelization in Africa motivated the writing of Bantu Philosophy (similarity 0.82)
• Catholic missionary ideology itself framed Africans as brute animals needing civilizing (similarity 0.81)
• Tempels generalized Luba religious conclusions to all Africans, overwriting local voices (similarity 0.81)
• Tempels claims Western philosophy is needed to articulate Bantu thought (similarity 0.81)
• Questioning African intellect forced rethinking of colonial administration and mission methods. (similarity 0.81)