Faculty of Theology
Department of Systematic Theology and Christian Ethics
Selected Highlights from Research Findings
Africa is a huge continent inhabited by a large number of nations and cultural groups. One of the salient features of this continent is the big variety in manifestations of its traditional religions. It is therefore more or less impossible to speak of African religion as a unitary system.
This not to say however, that there are no features, which these religions have in common. It would, to a certain extent, be possible to identify a number of common denominators that would enable one to construct a basic theoretical structure that could be called African Traditional Religion, which manifests itself in concrete and contextual form in a large number of different situations.
The aim of this research project was to study the interaction between the conventional Christian tradition on the one hand and African Traditional Religion on the other hand with special reference to the conceptualisations of evil, which obtain in each of them respectively.
In the conventional Christian tradition the notion of evil is sometimes conceptualised in the personal categories of Satan and demons. Many theologians, however, believe that these figures are not mentioned for their own sake but only as a reality that serves to emphasize the role of Christ in the salvation of mankind from its seemingly incurable tendency towards evil.
In African Traditional Religion the notion of evil is conceptualised in terms of the general African cosmological notion that the totality of reality consists of the interaction of forces or powers. Finding one’s rightful place in the hierarchical network of powers between God, ancestors, chief, father, animals and plants means to be in possession of force. Evil is experienced as displacement within this network of forces and powers.
An important implication of such a monistic system is that both good and evil are seen as being caused by the same Supreme Being. This leads to the position that the Supreme Being is regarded as good when he does not involve himself in human affairs, remaining a distant and transcendent being. The religious awareness and cultic activity of traditional African believers therefore focus more on intermediary agencies like ancestor spirits, witches and sorcerers than on the Supreme Being.
A relevant question at this point refers to the issue of the extent to which it would be possible for present-day African Christians to deal with the notion of evil in their indigenous religious tradition in a manner that is in line with the overall Christian tradition. The researcher found that there is an increasing acceptance in African Christian theological circles of the traditional African framework of thought on the nature of evil and the mechanisms of dealing with it.
According to this approach the notion of salvation is not merely a matter of the forgiveness of sins as emphasized by the tradition of the Latin West but rather the idea of Christ conquering evil as emphasized by the Greek patristic tradition.
The researcher concludes that in this way African Christian theology contributes towards reconnecting the ecumenical church with a vital element of the Christian faith that played a dominant role in the first ten centuries of Christian history
Contact person: Prof CJ Wethmar.
In 1982 the Nederduitsch Hervormde Church (NHKA) terminated its membership of the World Alliance of Churches (WARC) after this Protestant ecumenical institution suspended the NHKA’s membership until the denomination consciously and meaningfully renounced the justification of Apartheid as a theological heresy and confess her guilt about it.
In October 2004, the 67th General Synod of the NHKA decided to mandate the Church’s General Commission to reapply for membership. The WARC’s Executive Committee responded by delegating officers to visit the NHKA’s leadership in Pretoria to determine whether or not the NHKA complied with the set conditions of Ottawa 1982 in light of social attainments in South Africa since political democracy in the country from 1994 onward.
Representatives of WARC visited members of the NHKA during June 2006. The aim of the visit was to determine the extent to which the NHKA in its actions and practices has fulfilled the conditions set by the 21st General Council. Since 1994, NHKA has made the following changes to its official policies:
Black Christians are no longer excluded from Church services, especially Holy Communion;
Concrete support in word and deed is given to those who suffer(ed) under the system of Apartheid; and
Unequivocal synod resolutions are made which reject apartheid and commit the Church to dismantling this system in both church and politics.
As moderator of the NHKA, the researcher was responsible for compiling evidence – based on extensive research – to convince representatives from WARC that NHKA has indeed met the requirements as stipulated in Ottawa in 1982.
His research indicated that the church in principle already agreed on the fact that Apartheid is a sin and that any attempts to justify it in accordance with the Bible is nothing less than a heresy.
In addition, the researcher investigated the notion of an ethnic church (volkskerk) and argues from a Barthian perspective of "Revelation Theology" versus "Natural Theology", which means that the concept of Church is to be understood primarily as a community of believers which is brought to completion by the Spirit of God and which therefore transcends all anthropological qualifications such as race.
Against this background, "racism as religion" is confessed to be idolatry and Apartheid a sin. Any attempt to justify racism theologically amounts therefore to heresy.
The researcher found that the notion of an ethnic church houses an intrinsic categorical impurity in the sense that it mixes two different genera. Church is to be based upon rebirth and not birth, grace and not nature.
If this does not happen, the revelation of God in Christ is civilized and domesticated. Such a rest of humanism has to be abandoned out of a church order
Contact person: Prof J Buitendag.
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