Who am I as a Bible reader?
My family and the community where I grew in have played a big role in making who I am today. The norms and tradition which my family cultivates and community instilled in me has made me value competence, honesty, care, kindness, and patience, and taking care of my loved ones. By the time I was born, Christianity was already a dominant religion and everybody in my family including my extended family was a Christian. But long years ago, my forefathers were not Christians. They knew nothing about the Bible nor Christ. They believed in supernatural powers which are called in Swahili language as “Miungu” meaning “gods.” These gods were seen as the governor of the universe. They sustain this world and keeps everything he made in existence at every given moment. …show more content…
In 1400, missionaries arrived in Central Africa on the invitation of King Nzinga of Kongo tribe. The missionaries took this opportunity to introduce Christianity and the Bible. The missionaries challenged the beliefs of my forefathers as evil and maintain that only the Bible has enough information for anyone who needs to know and understand the creator. Thus, my forefathers left what they believed and embraced this new religion: Christianity. Now we have accepted Jesus Christ as our Lord and Savior. But the question remains where we are as readers of the Bible? Where am I as a reader of the Bible? How has my ethnicity, gender, and community priorities and church influenced the way I read the Bible? Utilizing on Jennifer Bird’s book “Permission Granted” this paper responds to my perceptive looking at the concepts of ethnicity, gender, family and politics. Ethnicity The two creation stories in the Bible have caused a lot of questions. I never looked at the Bible and realized these mythical stories of the creation of the world. The creation stories (Genesis 1-2.4a and Genesis 2.4b-25) have been the same to me, and I believed like many other people the two stories emphasize what God created. In Permission Granted: Take the Bible Into Your Own Hands by Jenifer Bird it is well explained the differences of when and why humankind were created in these creation accounts and the purposes to the world. She wrote in her book “the first story male and female humans are created simultaneously, both ‘in God’s Image.’ But in second, a single human being is formed first, then all the animals, then the companion human being.” The authors of Genesis wrote the reasons why humankind was created in the first story “God gives them dominion over everything on earth,” but in the second story “Lord God puts the human in the garden God has created in order for the human to till it and keep it.” equally important Bird, she explains the reasons of the authors repeated these stories because they wanted “to explain… the origins of many aspects of the culture and worldview of the people of the people of Israel,” on the other hand, the Bible and Bird did not talk much about the race of Adam and Eve for there are also claims that Jesus was black. The descendants of Jesus could be black. A Cameroonian radio presenter of Archives d’Afrique at Radio France Internationale, Alain Foka, always says in French: “Un peuple sans histoire est un monde sans ame” meaning “ A nation without a history is a world without soul.” Although the creation stories may be true, but International archeologists have done many researches and found that the earliest human beings lived Africa, The international team of paleoanthropologists from Arizona State University working in Ethiopia in 2013 discovered a jawbone and the approximate age of the jawbone to be between 2.75 and 2.8 million years old, which makes it the earliest evidence of the Homo genus ever.” So was the race of Adam and Eve black? Did God create Adam and Eve of all races; yet for Africa the rainforest in central Africa be the garden? Furthermore, I learned in my history class that black Africans were nomads and lived from fruit trees(Genesis 1.29-30) and hunting before they began to settle and live in one place when they started farming. The two Bible stories relate to what black African
My family and the community where I grew in have played a big role in making who I am today. The norms and tradition which my family cultivates and community instilled in me has made me value competence, honesty, care, kindness, and patience, and taking care of my loved ones. By the time I was born, Christianity was already a dominant religion and everybody in my family including my extended family was a Christian. But long years ago, my forefathers were not Christians. They knew nothing about the Bible nor Christ. They believed in supernatural powers which are called in Swahili language as “Miungu” meaning “gods.” These gods were seen as the governor of the universe. They sustain this world and keeps everything he made in existence at every given moment. …show more content…
In 1400, missionaries arrived in Central Africa on the invitation of King Nzinga of Kongo tribe. The missionaries took this opportunity to introduce Christianity and the Bible. The missionaries challenged the beliefs of my forefathers as evil and maintain that only the Bible has enough information for anyone who needs to know and understand the creator. Thus, my forefathers left what they believed and embraced this new religion: Christianity. Now we have accepted Jesus Christ as our Lord and Savior. But the question remains where we are as readers of the Bible? Where am I as a reader of the Bible? How has my ethnicity, gender, and community priorities and church influenced the way I read the Bible? Utilizing on Jennifer Bird’s book “Permission Granted” this paper responds to my perceptive looking at the concepts of ethnicity, gender, family and politics. Ethnicity The two creation stories in the Bible have caused a lot of questions. I never looked at the Bible and realized these mythical stories of the creation of the world. The creation stories (Genesis 1-2.4a and Genesis 2.4b-25) have been the same to me, and I believed like many other people the two stories emphasize what God created. In Permission Granted: Take the Bible Into Your Own Hands by Jenifer Bird it is well explained the differences of when and why humankind were created in these creation accounts and the purposes to the world. She wrote in her book “the first story male and female humans are created simultaneously, both ‘in God’s Image.’ But in second, a single human being is formed first, then all the animals, then the companion human being.” The authors of Genesis wrote the reasons why humankind was created in the first story “God gives them dominion over everything on earth,” but in the second story “Lord God puts the human in the garden God has created in order for the human to till it and keep it.” equally important Bird, she explains the reasons of the authors repeated these stories because they wanted “to explain… the origins of many aspects of the culture and worldview of the people of the people of Israel,” on the other hand, the Bible and Bird did not talk much about the race of Adam and Eve for there are also claims that Jesus was black. The descendants of Jesus could be black. A Cameroonian radio presenter of Archives d’Afrique at Radio France Internationale, Alain Foka, always says in French: “Un peuple sans histoire est un monde sans ame” meaning “ A nation without a history is a world without soul.” Although the creation stories may be true, but International archeologists have done many researches and found that the earliest human beings lived Africa, The international team of paleoanthropologists from Arizona State University working in Ethiopia in 2013 discovered a jawbone and the approximate age of the jawbone to be between 2.75 and 2.8 million years old, which makes it the earliest evidence of the Homo genus ever.” So was the race of Adam and Eve black? Did God create Adam and Eve of all races; yet for Africa the rainforest in central Africa be the garden? Furthermore, I learned in my history class that black Africans were nomads and lived from fruit trees(Genesis 1.29-30) and hunting before they began to settle and live in one place when they started farming. The two Bible stories relate to what black African