VIRTUOUS LIVING - Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University

Africa (chapter 1) by an African student of theology (biographical introduction), havethe potential to contribute to the Moral Renaissance of our continent.This chapter represents the more overt “theological” source of an African wisdomtheology as without it there would be nothing distinctively Christian about the wholeenterprise. The chapter title is therefore closely aligned with the overall title of thisstudy: A theological analysis: Toward an African virtue ethics?The structure of this study is a complex inter-relationship of a variety of sources in atheological work, namely, personal experience, social and politico-economic context,philosophical reflection, African culture, Scripture and existing Christian theologicalparadigms. The question of methodology is not so much where one “starts” or “ends”,but rather how these sources are brought into some coherent inter-relationship. Thisstudy is an attempt to construct such an inter-related framework. Its weakness liesprobably in its lack of specifics, but this allows for developing a wider view that ishopefully of some value for more specific and detailed work in future.The reader should nevertheless realize that this study is not itself the materialdevelopment of an African wisdom theology, but merely an attempt to point to thepossible structure of such a theology. In a sense this study is a meta-theologicalenterprise, providing some guidelines to assist in the actual development of localwisdom theologies on our continent. This is at least one route to the moral reorientationof the African continent.24