جون مبيتي
الدين حاضر في كل جوانب الحياة الأفريقية، ولا يوجد الفرد إلا بالجماعة: «أنا موجود لأننا موجودون».
التموضع
لاهوتي كيني وكاهن أنغليكاني: تستحق الديانات الأفريقية الاحترام الذي تناله سائر ديانات العالم. وصارت عبارته «أنا موجود لأننا موجودون» شعارًا؛ أما زعمه أن الزمن الأفريقي لا يكاد يعرف مستقبلًا بعيدًا فقد تلقى نقدًا متواصلًا.
الأفكار الرئيسة
- «أنا موجود لأننا موجودون؛ ولأننا موجودون فأنا إذن موجود»
- ساسا وزامَني (الزمن)
- الديانات الأفريقية أديانًا قائمة بذاتها
التأثير
أثّر في 1
إيفاني منكيتي
أثّر في
Menkiti took up Mbiti’s ‘I am, because we are’ and concluded personhood is attained in community, not given at birth (‘Person and Community in African Traditional Thought’, 1984). I. A. Menkiti, “Person and Community in African Traditional Thought”, in R. A. Wright (ed.), African Philosophy: An Introduction (3rd ed., 1984); J. S. Mbiti, African Religions and Philosophy (1969)
التوثيق: مسودة بالذكاء الاصطناعي
إيفاني منكيتي › 1940–2019
النقد
انتقده 3
أوكوت بيتيك
انتقده
Okot p’Bitek objected that Mbiti and other African theologians had “Hellenised” African deities by describing them as omnipotent, omniscient and eternal. O. p’Bitek, African Religions in Western Scholarship (1970); Masolo 1994; S. O. Imbo, Oral Traditions as Philosophy (2002)
التوثيق: مسودة بالذكاء الاصطناعي
أوكوت بيتيك › 1931–1982
كواسي غييكي
انتقده
Gyekye read Mbiti’s ‘I am, because we are’ as radical communitarianism without room for individual rights, and proposed a moderate version (‘Person and Community in African Thought’, 1992). K. Gyekye, “Person and Community in African Thought”, in K. Wiredu & K. Gyekye (eds.), Person and Community (1992); Tradition and Modernity (1997), ch. 2; J. S. Mbiti, African Religions and Philosophy (1969)
التوثيق: مسودة بالذكاء الاصطناعي
كواسي غييكي › 1939–2019
هنري أوديرا أوروكا
انتقده
Odera Oruka placed Mbiti’s African Religions and Philosophy (1969) under ‘ethnophilosophy’, a description of collective beliefs rather than critical reflection by individual thinkers. H. Odera Oruka, “Four Trends in Current African Philosophy” (1978; publ. 1981); Sage Philosophy (1990), introduction
التوثيق: مسودة بالذكاء الاصطناعي
هنري أوديرا أوروكا › 1944–1995
الأعمال
مسح للأديان الأفريقية في مجملها – مع المقولة «أنا موجود لأننا موجودون» وأطروحة زمن متجه نحو الماضي.
الموقف
African Religions and Philosophy was written against the missionary view that African religions were superstition or devil worship. Mbiti presented them as a coherent whole, with a belief in one God, intermediaries such as spirits and the “living dead”, rites of passage and an ethics bound to community, and asked that they be studied with the same respect as Christianity or Islam: “Africans are notoriously religious.” Two theses from the book became widely known. The first is his summary of African views of the person: “I am, because we are; and since we are, therefore I am.” The second, drawn from the verb tenses of Kikamba and Gikuyu, holds that time in African thought has two dimensions: a lived present (sasa) that flows into a long past (zamani), with almost no distant future. Both met strong criticism. Okot p’Bitek, in African Religions in Western Scholarship (1970), accused him of dressing African gods in the attributes of the Christian God. Kwame Gyekye, D. A. Masolo and others argued from Akan and other languages that the claim about time was false, and noted that the Swahili terms themselves are loanwords from Arabic. Henry Odera Oruka placed his work under “ethnophilosophy”, a description of collective beliefs rather than critical reflection. His formula about the community, on the other hand, became a starting point for the debate on personhood with Ifeanyi Menkiti and Gyekye.
الحياة والسياق
John Samuel Mbiti was born in 1931 at Mulango in Kitui, Kenya, into a Kamba family. He studied at Makerere College in Uganda and at Barrington College in Rhode Island, and in 1963 took a doctorate in theology at Cambridge with a study of New Testament eschatology, the basis of his later book on that subject in an African setting. In the same year he was ordained an Anglican priest. From 1964 to 1974 he taught religion and philosophy at Makerere University, where he wrote African Religions and Philosophy (1969). In the 1970s he moved to the World Council of Churches’ Ecumenical Institute at Bossey near Geneva, which he directed until 1980. He then served as a parish minister in Burgdorf in Switzerland until 1996 and taught at the University of Bern. He was married to Verena Mbiti-Siegenthaler. In retirement he translated the New Testament from Greek into his mother tongue, Kikamba. He died in Switzerland in 2019.
أعمال رئيسة أخرى
- Concepts of God in Africa (1970)
- New Testament Eschatology in an African Background (1971)
- Introduction to African Religion (1975)
- Bible and Theology in African Christianity (1986)
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