However, up until now, these valuable insights have not yet been mined and made available for broader intercultural debates. So far, little has been written in the traditional format of academic texts from a francophone African perspective (see the exceptions mentioned in Chapter 1: Makanzu 1986 Bame Bame 1994) yet, there are good reasons to suppose that some of the most relevant insights are to be found in discourses about science and religion among Christian students and academics. Due to our expectation that insights from French-speaking Africa would provide valuable new perspectives for the global science and religion debate, and particularly the Western section of that debate, we were automatically invited to study the ‘ordinary’, ‘lived’, or ‘espoused’ theologies of relevant groups. In the second section of this chapter we explain our choice of discourse analysis and the use of Group Model Building as the principal research tool.
Furthermore, we elaborate on why we expect that our intercultural and theological approach will contribute valuable insights to the science and religion debate that are not limited to particular cultural contexts, and why they are valuable even to those who work with different theological presuppositions than those that underlie this project. We discuss the notion and place of ‘culture’ that is so central to this relatively new theological enterprise, and we explain what makes this a theological approach. In the first section of this chapter, we look at our understanding of ‘intercultural theology’ as the most essential part of the theoretical framework. Examples of even relatively comparable projects were limited, and so our approach was mainly inductive. Ultimately, the research methodology is justified if it enables new and significant insights into the realities that are studied. This chapter discusses the methodological decisions we arrived at as a result of the interplay between our research interests and theoretical framework, and the need to do justice to the unique research contexts and the specific research requirements that we formulated. Therefore, it also necessitates critical reflection on the question of which methodological approaches are best suited to both the field of study and our research objectives.
Our research into how the espoused theologies of African Christian students and academics in French-speaking Africa can contribute to the global science and religion debate leads us into little-explored territories of research.
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