Albert Owusu-Afriyie

I am a biblical exegete and a priest of the Congregation of the Holy Spirit. My research reads the Fourth Gospel against the ancient Jewish traditions that stand behind it, and asks what that reading yields for Christians in Africa who are still being asked to choose between fidelity and authenticity.

I completed my doctorate in theology at the Catholic University of Paris in 2017 with a thesis on Jacob's well: an exegetical study of John 4:4–15 in the light of ancient Jewish traditions, and of what is at stake when the Fourth Gospel presents Jesus as greater than the patriarch. My earlier Parisian work examined Nicodemus as a figure constructed to serve the plot of that same Gospel. Both projects turn on one conviction, that the Johannine text argues, and that its arguments can be reconstructed step by step.

My formation was deliberately itinerant. I studied philosophy and religious studies at the Spiritan Institute of Philosophy in Ejisu, Ghana; French at Université Cheikh Anta Diop in Dakar; theology at the Université Catholique d'Afrique Centrale in Yaoundé; and biblical exegesis in Paris. In between I served in parishes in Guinea and Benin, and as chaplain at the Broca Hospital and to the Sisters of St Joseph of Cluny in Paris.

From 2017 to 2024 I taught at the Spiritan International School of Theology in Attakwu, Enugu, Nigeria, where I served as Registrar, as Director of the Brottier Centre for Mission and Spirituality, and as Acting Academic Dean. Alongside exegesis, my recent writing engages the African intellectual tradition directly: Jean-Marc Ela on the audacity of removing the Bible from its inherited geography, and Engelbert Mveng on the strategies by which an African thinker survives a world arranged against him.

I work in English and French, and preach in Twi. I write for an audience that includes seminarians and lay readers as often as it includes exegetes, and I take that to be a discipline rather than a concession.

Teaching scripture in a seminary is not the transmission of results. It is the slower work of showing students that a text can be interrogated without being betrayed, and that the questions they bring from their own communities are exegetically serious questions.

For seven years at the Spiritan International School of Theology I taught and formed students drawn from across Africa and beyond. Much of that teaching was in biblical exegesis, and much of it was conducted with students reading a Greek or French text in a third or fourth language. That circumstance taught me to make method explicit: to show the steps of an argument rather than announce its conclusion, and to treat every reading as a claim that must be defended from the text.

I combined teaching with formation and administration. As Registrar I was responsible for the academic records and processes of the school. As Director of the Brottier Centre for Mission and Spirituality I convened programmes for the ongoing formation of formators and missionaries. As Acting Academic Dean I carried responsibility for the curriculum as a whole. I have also taught at secondary level in Benin, and as a visiting lecturer at Bigard Memorial Seminary in Enugu.