True missionary adaptation must engage a people’s mentality, not just rituals.

Evidence

In the new churches planted in Africa, the most urgent problem is that of adaptation … But if everyone is convinced of the need to incarnate Chris- tianity in the values proper to each civilization, it must be recognized that the efforts made so far have been more on the secondary elements than on the essential … The merit of Father Tempels is to have seen the funda- mental problem beyond the superficial details. It is not so much in the gestures, the symbols, the rites that an effort of adaptation must be accomplished as in the mentality, the psychology and the wisdom proper to each people. — Frans Dokman, Beyond Bantu Philosophy_…, 706

Categorization

Category: Factual Claims

• XREF: Cardinal Malula’s preface connects to the ‘theology of adaptation’ and to broader inculturation debates in African theology.

Related

• True Christian adaptation must engage a people’s mentality, not surface rites. (similarity 0.92)
• Adapting Christianity to Africa must engage underlying mentality, not surface rites (similarity 0.92)
• Tempels’s ethnographic study of African cultures served his goal of Christianization (similarity 0.81)
• Missions must abandon European frameworks and start from below with Africans. (similarity 0.80)
• Mass African conversions to Christianity remained superficial because underlying Bantu philosophy persisted (similarity 0.80)
• Tempels sought sympathetic identification with Bantu rather than detached observation (similarity 0.79)
• Tempels addressed Bantu Philosophy to colonizers seeking to Christianize Africans (similarity 0.79)
• Christianity adapted to Europe but not to non-Western cultures. (similarity 0.79)
• Tempels’s Bantu Philosophy aimed at more effective Christianization of the Bantu. (similarity 0.79)
• Tempels learned Kiluba and ethnology after missionaries failed to convert Congolese (similarity 0.79)
• Tempels’ Bantu Philosophy was written as evangelization strategy responding to Luba resistance (similarity 0.78)
• Tempels’ Bantu Philosophy remains seminal to African philosophy despite its missionary origins (similarity 0.78)