How Africa Shaped the Christian Mind

Thomas Oden argues that the Christian Africa of more than a thousand years ago gave to world Christianity its intellectual formation in at least 7 ways:

1. Birth of European university was anticipated within African Christianity
2. Christian historical and spiritual exegesis of Scripture first matured in Africa
3. African thinkers shaped the very core of the most basic early Christian dogma
4. Early ecumenical decisions followed African conciliar patterns
5. Western forms of spiritual formation shaped through African monastic discipline
6. Neoplatonic philosophy of late antiquity moved from Africa to Europe
7. Influential literary and dialectical skills were refined in Africa

Additionally, he argued that the history of the Christian church involved the African South educating and teaching the very best of the North (contrary to popular thought today):

In the period of its greatest vitality, the first half of the first millennium, the African intellect blossomed so much that it was sought out and widely emulated by Christians of the northern and eastern Mediteranean shores. Origen, an African, was actively sought by the teachers of Caesarea Palestina. Lactantius was invited by Emperor Diocletian (245-313) to be a teacher of literature in his Asian palace in Bythinia. Augustine was invited to teach in Milan. There are dozens of similar cases of intellectual movement from Africa to Europe - Plotinus, Valentinus, Tertullian, Marius Victorinus, and Pachomius among them...The Christians to the south of the Mediteranean were teaching the Christians to the north. Africans were informing and instructing and educating the very best of Syriac, Cappadocian, and Greco-Roman teachers. (p. 28)