THEOLOGICAL EDUCATION AND SOCIO-CULTURAL REALITIES IN DEMOCRACY IN NIGERIA

Abstract

This paper explores “Theological education and Socio-Cultural Realities in Democracy” in Nigeria. It examines the role of theological education in different spheres of human endeavours. The concepts of the theme were identified to include faith disposition, culture, value, diversity, citizenship, responsibility, love, care, protection, and patriotism visa-vis socio-cultural realities and democracy. Nigeria is blessed with both human and natural resources more than many countries in the world, yet the citizens are languishing in abject poverty and endless insecurity. Theological education that trains the minds of Christians to be respectful and intentional towards spirituality, national unity, peace, and development has not yielded the expected positive results. Instead, people experience bad leadership, intolerance, insecurity, corruption, exploitation, discrimination, ethnic differences, political bigotry in both secular and spiritual spheres. The article draws from library sources as method used. Findings revealed that theological education that is supposed to permeate the hearts of adherents has not taken seriously our spirituality and socio-cultural realities into account. Furthermore, instead of using our socio-cultural diversity for the positive, our religious and doctrinal differences resulted into disunity and suspicions of one another. This attitude trickles down deeply into our socio-cultural realities that affect democratic structure, devaluing our norms and ethics. The study recommended that theological education remains central to our spiritual, moral, social and political formation that will bring the needed change for development. Therefore, religious people should live out their faith in their different places of duty and pray for attitudinal change, because there is no place that does not belong to God.