In this book, Klaus Nürnberger, professor emeritus at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, seeks to establish grounds for an engagement between Christianity and African indigenous religions, what he prefers to call ‘African traditionalists’, by ‘listening’ to forces, both historical and contemporary, that affect African societies. These include ‘African spirituality’, ‘the biblical witness’, ‘the Reformation’, ‘modernity’ and the ‘global future’. His main point, as a Christian theologian and missiologist, is to develop a strategy for the church's mission in Africa that takes seriously the traditional emphasis on ancestors in African religions (following Mbiti, he calls them ‘the living dead’) while as the same time noting the erosion of traditional authority under the forces of modernity both in African societies and in the church. He concludes that the church's mission applies equally to those in Africa who ‘are under the spell of ancestral authority and subject to fear of uncanny forces’, and to those who have become modernised and thus are ‘caught up in the constraints and pressures of modernist pragmatism and hedonism’ (241). Both groups, traditionalists and modernists, are ‘welcome’ in the church and accepted by God, but Nürnberger adds that ‘with his acceptance of the unacceptable God does not condone what is unacceptable in their dispositions, perceptions, attitudes, actions and life worlds’ (241). In the end, Nürnberger calls for people in all religious traditions, including Christianity, to undergo the ‘transformative processes’ induced by becoming ‘free and responsible sons and daughters of God’ (241).

The theological assumptions that motivate this work, in this reviewer's opinion, ought to raise healthy suspicions about Nürnberger's analysis of the relationship between the ubiquitous belief in sub-Saharan Africa in ancestors, and the author's description of an African understanding of God. To his credit, he draws distinctions between Christian and African conceptualisations of God, but he reinforces many of the assumptions that have been promoted widely in previous studies, primarily that the African God is remote and largely inactive. Nürnberger writes: ‘The Supreme Being is not accessible in the communicative sense of the word at all … because his weight is too mysterious and too massive to be amenable for human understanding and manipulation’ (32). He further notes that although there are no shrines to the Supreme Being amongst Bantu-speaking African peoples, this is largely because the Supreme Being ‘is the ultimate source of the whole of experienced reality’ and ‘the peak of the spiritual hierarchy’ (32). Quite correctly, I think, he challenges the commonly propagated view amongst African Christians that the ancestors' primary function is to carry messages to the Supreme Being, since ancestors are authorities in their own right. In the end, Nürnberger opts for a ‘dynamistic’ interpretation of the African God, calling this an ‘existential interpretation’ in which the Supreme Being ‘reflects the experienced ambiguity of reality’ (34). He concludes: ‘It cannot be otherwise if the Supreme Being represents the ultimate origin of experienced reality’ (34).

Nürnberger suggests that his interpretation of the importance of ancestors amongst traditionalists represents a genuine listening to ‘African spirituality’, but it remains couched in Western philosophical language that is highly amenable to a Christian application, which in fact is what Nürnberger intends in his subsequent chapters by attempting to create a synthesis between African spirituality, the biblical witness and modernity. My point is that anyone reading this book will deduce quite correctly that Africans do not believe in God in the way Christians do, but could be excused for concluding that highly nuanced beliefs about a Supreme Being influence day-to-day African experiences of reality.

For Christian theologians and missiologists, this book should promote discussion and even debate, but for those interested in learning about African religions in their own right, the results are disappointing. The author in effect concedes this point at the outset when he admits: ‘I have neither the expertise nor the time to do exhaustive anthropological fieldwork or gain ethnographic precision’ (1). His analysis instead is intended, in his own words, to offer reflections on ‘the inner rationale of faith assumptions’ (1). This comment is enough to underscore the irrelevance of this work for anyone interested in an empirical study of religions in Africa and to suggest clearly the audience for which the book is intended.