THE IMPACT OF CHRISTIAN RELIGION ON AFRICAN PHILOSOPHY

Abstract

This paper investigates the impact of Christian religion on African philosophy. The method adopted for this paper is analytic. The paper argued that every culture has its own peculiar way of reflecting fundamental ques????ons bothering on human person, their experiences of physical and metaphysical realities. Therefore, our different cultures is what accounts for the diverse philosophic frame around the
globe. African culture is a religious suffused one and African philosophy started as an attempt towards the justification of African traditional religious beliefs and morals. Christianity on the other hand is more than a system of religious belief. It has generated a culture that have been handed down from generation to generation. The European colonial Christian missionaries' refusal to acknowledge the genuineness of African traditional religion and forced them to adopt Christian religion broke the very backbone of African cognition towards African traditional religion which is the structure that informed African philosophic reflections. This state of affairs turned African philosophy into a platform that is leveraging on Christian religious cultural thinking blockchain of understanding, interpretations and projection of outlook to life. Thus, African philosophy must be open to history; a history that is interpreted in the light of African culture with a frame of mind that is free from foreign mental or spiritual construct and interpretations that is free from the lenses of a borrowed and effete foreign ontological categories, or a total package that comes from outside Africa. It is by so doing that African philosophy becomes meaningful to people because it makes their lives and culture come alive and arises from the interactions of their daily existence with the reality on the ground.