Christian-Chagga afterlife beliefs: pertinent tensions

Abstract

In fulfilling the commandment of the Lord to share the Gospel to the entire world, Christianity has encountered other cultures with different comprehension regarding the afterlife belief. Christianity has its own anthropology and eschatology. It has different understanding of the afterlife reality characterized with it: that which occurs to the individual immediately after death and what is concerned with the communitarian consummation in the Parousia of Christ.The author of this paper is examining the Chagga Christians of Rombo who have received Christian faith with its own belief on the afterlife dominated by Christ event while the Chagga people have their belief dominated by the ancestors and the living-dead. How to reconcile the two beliefs which seem to be well rooted in the spiritual life of the Chagga people is the key question of this paper.