A New Year Celebrating the Concrete Love of God
An Essay by Tim Hartman
About the author: Tim Hartman is Associate Professor of Theology at Columbia Theological Seminary. He is the author of two books: Theology after Colonization: Kwame Bediako, Karl Barth, and the Future of Theological Reflection, and Kwame Bediako: African Theology for a World Christianity. He is an ordained minister in the Presbyterian Church (USA). His scholarly interests include contemporary Christian theologies worldwide, Christology, Lived Theology, Election/Predestination, antiracist theologies, ecclesiology, postcolonial mission, and the work of Karl Barth, Kwame Bediako, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and James Cone.
According to differing cultural traditions, the New Year is celebrated worldwide. Some mark the transition from December to January using the solar calendar, while others follow the lunar calendar or other annual markers. For the Akropong-Akuapim people in the Eastern region of Ghana, a weeklong Odwira festival is celebrated in September or October each year to give thanks at the end of the harvest season and remember their military victory over the Ashati in 1826. The Odwira festival is a time of annual spiritual cleansing and ritual purification.
In 1990, at the Odwira Thanksgiving nondenominational service to mark the end of the weeklong Odwira festival in Akropong-Akuapem, Ghanaian Presbyterian theologian Kwame Bediako (1945-2008) preached a sermon titled “Christ, Our Odwira” based on two texts from Hebrews, 1:1–5 and 10:1–10. Bediako named the connection between Hebrews and Odwira in the very first line of his sermon: “It may seem to some persons that culture and tradition have nothing to do whatsoever with Christ. And yet, our Scripture reading from Hebrews shows us that our present great festival of Odwira is itself mentioned in the Bible.”1 He did not intend this provocative claim literally. The claim is based on the use of the Twi verb, dwiraa, in the vernacular translation of Hebrews 1:3, translated into English variously as “purgation,” “forgiveness,” or “purification”— as in “When he had made purification for sins.”2 This verb is also the root of the festival's name, Odwira.
The local Akan chief, Oseadeeyo Addo Dankwa III, defined Odwira as “the period of purification.” He said, “As human beings, we have, over the past years, committed a lot of mistakes, and as we enter this period of purification, we should ponder over our past mistakes and resolve to improve upon our behavior.”3 Significant here is the admission of wrongdoing and the possibility of future correction as connected to a time to pause, reflect, and steel oneself for future challenges during this period of purification. Through a Christian lens, one sees here elements of confession but not forgiveness; there is future resolve but without the sanctifying power of the Holy Spirit.
A local Bible study group Bediako led in Akropong brought him to connect Odwira to Hebrews. The group had been studying the Epistle to the Hebrews in the local language, Twi, when “it seemed to have occurred to our group members that Odwira had something to do with Jesus, and that the atoning work of Jesus could be related to the traditional Odwira rituals and its anticipated benefits.”4 For Bediako, this was a significant realization that now informs his interpretation of Jesus as Ancestor. He wrote, “The vernacular scriptures became the means of gaining a further insight into the traditional culture, whilst the meaning of the Scriptures was also illuminated in a new way, in relation to a vital aspect of the traditional culture.”5 This example demonstrates the interplay for Bediako between the Bible and elements of African culture.
While reading Hebrews in Twi, the connection of Jesus’s work, bringing about “purification for sins” (1:3), to the purification sought in the Odwira festival was readily apparent linguistically. Using the mother tongue, a connection between Christ and culture was drawn. No longer could Christ’s purification and Odwira be considered separately; now, by reading “ɔde n’ankasane ho dwiraa yɛn bɔne no” [“When he had made purification for sins”] (Hebrews 1:3), the connection between Christ’s purification and the Odwira festival was unavoidable.6 Not only did the Twi translation allow for a connection between the Bible and Akan culture, but this connection also had theological import for Bediako. Because the linguistic connection existed (i.e., Christ and Akan culture present a way to offer purification), Bediako made the theological claim that this connection demonstrated God’s providential provision. He used the Bible study group’s conclusion to express his theological methodology and underlying conviction: “Christ had a stake in the spiritual universe of traditional religion.”7 Bediako’s conclusion connected his reading of Hebrews to the means of God’s revelation through a cultural festival. Bediako used Hebrews to connect Jesus Christ to the ancestors and the traditional Akan festival of purification, reconciliation, and renewal that marks the end of one year and the start of the next. Succinctly, Bediako understands the crucifixion as the fulfillment of the traditional Odwira festival: “The Odwira to end all odwiras has taken place through the death of Jesus Christ.”8
Karl Barth turned to Hebrews 1:3 to demonstrate that this “self-sacrifice of God in His Son is in fact the love of God to us.”9 Barth makes the point that the love of God is tangible, concrete, and active in human history. He continues, “We cannot speak of a love of God the Creator in abstracto, supposedly active and manifest in nature and history as such… Therefore when we try to describe to ourselves the love of God, we can only express and proclaim the name of Jesus Christ. That is what it means to speak concretely of the love of God.”10
As 2025 begins, the insights of Bediako and Barth remind us that God has already done the work of purification and that human efforts toward perfection fall far short of what God has already done for us in Jesus Christ.11
Kwame Bediako, “Christ, Our Odwira,” sermon preached on September 30, 1990 (and again on October 22, 1995), on Odwira Sunday, Mpeiase, Akropong, 1. In the personal collection of sermons on the Epistle to the Hebrews of Gillian Mary Bediako in Akropong-Akuapem, Ghana.
See Kwame Bediako, Christianity in Africa: The Renewal of a non-Western Religion (Edinburgh University Press, 1995), 70–72.
“Speech by Oseadeeyo Addo Dankwa III, Okuapehene on the occasion of the 1990 Odwira Durbar,” at Akropong-Akuapem, Friday, September 28, 1990, 1. In the personal collection of sermons on the Epistle to the Hebrews of Gillian Mary Bediako in Akropong-Akuapem, Ghana.
Bediako, Christianity in Africa, 71.
Bediako, Christianity in Africa, 71.
For more on the connection between the Odwira festival and the Christian faith, see Frank Kwesi Adams, Odwira and the Gospel: A Study of the Asante Odwira Festival and Its Significance for Christianity in Ghana (Oxford: Regnum, 2010).
Bediako, Christianity in Africa, 72.
Kwame Bediako, “Jesus in African Culture” in Jesus and the Gospel in Africa: History and Experience (Orbis, 2004), 33.
Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics I/2 (T&T Clark: 1956), 378.
Karl Barth, CD I/2, 379.
Portions above were selectively adapted from Tim Hartman, Theology After Colonization: Bediako, Barth, and the Future of Theological Reflection (University of Notre Dame Press, 2020), 144 and 159–161.