ABSTRACT

Biblical and theological interpretation in Africa has long operated within methodological frameworks shaped by Western intellectual traditions — frameworks whose epistemological assumptions frequently render African communal experience, oral traditions, and philosophical resources marginal or invisible. This article argues that this condition is neither hermeneutically inevitable nor theologically acceptable, and that the African Integrated Hermeneutical Method (AIHM), developed by Okoronkwo, constitutes a necessary and urgent response to a demonstrable interpretive crisis. Drawing on the genealogy of hermeneutical theory from Schleiermacher through Gadamer, Ricoeur, and the postcolonial epistemic turn, the article maps the historical trajectory by which Western hermeneutics came to occupy a position of global dominance — and identifies the constitutive lacunae that this dominance has produced in African biblical scholarship. Employing the AIHM's own five-phase integrative process, the article demonstrates how African epistemological resources — Ubuntu philosophy, communal performativity, oral epistemology, and African cosmo-ontology — function not as contextual illustrations appended to Western frameworks but as constitutive elements of a methodologically distinct and academically rigorous interpretive architecture. The findings indicate that the AIHM addresses specific structural gaps in the existing hermeneutical literature, contributes original theoretical resources to the global conversation on interpretive method, and carries significant implications for theological education, ecclesial formation, and national development in Nigeria and across the African continent. The article concludes that the urgency of the AIHM is not merely contextual but epistemological: interpretation that ignores African knowledge frameworks does not merely produce incomplete readings of biblical texts — it actively perpetuates the epistemic conditions of colonial alienation.