Unlike earlier overview works on African Christian theology that have seen African Christian theology as primarily a phenomenon of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this book begins with figures such as Tertullian, Origen and Athanasius and concludes with modern debates about homosexuality in the global Church. In between, it has essays on martyrdom in Egypt, Augustine, inculturation theology and the Circle of Concerned African Women Theologians. In his introduction, David Tonghou Ngong highlights how such a wide range preserves the geographic unity of Africa as a continent over the temporal or thematic unity that has characterised earlier works. It is an ambitious attempt but it is never entirely clear why geography should have such value. Would Augustine have recognised himself as African? What connections, if any, does Mercy Oduyoye of the Circle see between her African theology and that of Tertullian? African theologians of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have long turned to the appearance of Africans in the Bible as a source of their theology but it is not clear that the people studied in these essays value geographic unity in the same way that Tonghou Ngong and his contributors do.

One strength of the book is that it is primarily African authors writing about African themes. Elias Bongmba's essay on Augustine and the Donatists argues that Augustine's pursuit of church unity was ‘excessive and aggressive’ and that the Donatists themselves should be seen as a ‘prototype of Christian independency’. The suppression of Donatism, Bongmba argues, weakened the North African Church and contributed to its eventual extinction. Masiiwa Ragies Gunda's essay on African Christian thought and homosexuality challenges the oft-held idea that African Christians are universally opposed to a greater welcome of homosexuality in the Church. Gunda highlights voices – often of women theologians – who constitute a ‘minority trajectory’ of openness and points to the influence of foreign actors in shaping African Christian thought on this set of issues. The essays vary significantly in focus. There are broad, thematic essays on topics like African Roman Catholic theology or liberation theology, which are useful for a student new to the field. There are also narrowly focused essays, including on the ‘psychological reception history’ of Augustine's Confessions and ‘why the United Reformed Church in Southern Africa is not a genuine Black Church’, that are of less general interest.

Tonghou Ngong acknowledges in the introduction that the work is incomplete: contributors who promised chapters on Pentecostalism, ecological theology and other subjects did not deliver. But, as a collection of essays, this book brings together some intriguing themes and issues that make the reader ask if there is a greater geographic unity to the history of African Christianity than has previously been considered.