Faculty of Theology
Prof CJA Vos, Dean
Telephone number: 012 420 2322
Fax number: 012 420 4016
E-mail address: cas.vos@up.ac.za
Message by the Dean
The Faculty of Theology strives to make the University’s vision and mission its own. Therefore, the faculty has a strategy in place to ensure that the mission gains stature through men and women who clearly reflect the envisaged profile of the University.
By its nature, the faculty is involved in people-centred activities and all the programmes of the faculty have been specifically constructed to contribute meaningfully to the development of people. The training of ministers in religion, including sensitising students to the world view and religious affinity of other people, is an important part of this undertaking. Last year, the faculty completed the degree structure and corresponding curriculum regulations decreed by the Higher Education Qualifications Framework. In 2010 the first year of this curriculum will be implemented and new study guides associated with this part of the faculty’s programmes will be developed.
The Faculty of Theology is the largest residential faculty of its kind in South Africa. Lecturers in the faculty hail from diverse denominational backgrounds and provide training for the ministry in various churches, both locally and abroad. The renewed curriculum of the faculty, coupled with a staff complement from a range of backgrounds, will help to chart a course for the faculty that meets the challenge of placing transformation high on the agenda for the faculty.
Theology, like philosophy, has a privileged position in the academic environment. This discipline serves as a cohesive field of study in the social and even the natural sciences.
The Faculty of Theology aims to foster this interdisciplinary spirit in its official research focus areas, which include biblical tradition as a basis for theology, the systematic and historic formulation of the Christian message in traditional and present-day contexts, and the practical application of theology in relevant communities.
There is a steady growth in research outputs through the two accredited academic journals of the faculty, Verbum et Ecclesia and HTS Theological/Teologiese Studies, which is ISI accredited. The faculty is the largest contributor per capita to the research output of the University of Pretoria. The weighted average article output per academic in the Faculty of Theology is 5.55, compared to 0.67 units for the rest of the University.
Through focused, well-planned and carefully monitored strategies, the faculty maintains an exemplary research record in its research areas. However, the faculty aims to remain an international leader in the discipline of theology. Thus, a meta-theological research programme is being established in the faculty, which aims to investigate the international status of theology as an academic discipline in keeping with recent trends in the development of epistemology and the theory of science.
The programmes offered by the faculty are well managed and responsibly controlled. The annual courses in research methodology are well attended and the faculty is convinced that this will undergird its research output in future.
Subsidies have been received for 130 journal articles and 17 books, chapters in books and conference proceedings. The faculty also excels in its number of NRF-rated researchers. It still boasts with 25% of its academic staff being NRF-rated researchers and aims to increase this to 28% in the foreseeable future. Prof Johannes Van Oort has now been placed in the A category at the A2 level in the NRF rating system. This is the first A-rating for this faculty and is unsurpassed by the traditional theological faculties in the country. Other rated staff members are Prof Dirk Human, Prof Andries van Aarde, Prof Jan van der Watt and Prof Hennie Pieterse.
As a consequence of its research stature, a large number of international scholars have visited the faculty and are part of its research programmes. The results of these meetings have been published by respected international publishers, for example Mohr Siebeck, De Gruyter, T & T Clark, Brill Boekencentrum and Peters.
As is the case in many faculties, postgraduate enrolments are unfortunately declining. The faculty views this as an opportunity to further improve its postgraduate student recruitment strategies and aims to increase postgraduate enrolment by 1% per annum for the next three years.
Strategic measures that are to be pursued in this regard include the implementation of different and market-related programmes and encouragement of research-related master’s degrees, the identification of talented master’s students and encouraging them to enrol for doctoral programmes, and encouraging alumni to “advertise” courses.
In the year under review, the Department of Dogmatics and Christian Ethics focused on research in Christian natural theology, exciting interdisciplinary dialogue between natural sciences and systematic theology and the prospects of a Christian ethics of responsibility and its application to public discourse in the democratic South Africa. A contribution is made in the department to revisit natural theology and transform it to a theology of nature. It puts theology in the public sphere and opens it up for a broad and inclusive understanding of reality.
The Department of Old Testament Studies has been involved in contributing to and coediting an internationally published volume of collected papers that was presented at the 50th anniversary of the Old Testament Society in South Africa, entitled Exile and suffering.
The so-called Story of the Fall, as recounted in Genesis 2–3, was investigated and an alternative approach to the traditional Christian one of “sin” is being suggested. The Department of New Testament Studies focused its research efforts on the abiding concern that the faculty needs to equip church leaders to be agents of moral regeneration in times of moral crisis. Research in this department has recently explored issues of ethics and morality in a changing, modern, democratic and pluralistic society. The point of departure in this research is that early Christianity embodied a new idiom of morality that inspired many in the Roman world and beyond. Early Christian morality was formed and adapted from older traditions of moral discourse, but it radically transformed the society of its day with respect to issues of slavery, inequality, love and compassion.
In its research, the Department of Practical Theology addressed, among other things, the topics of HIV and AIDS, water as a resource in poor communities and the task of the church and grounded theory research in homiletics. The latter topic has been applied to a research programme in the faculty, namely, Grounded theory research of sermons on Matthew 25:31–46. This research unites the Reformed and Dutch Reformed preachers on important issues relating to poverty and the poor.
The Centre for Public Theology is continuing with a research project entitled The public role of churches in the democratic South Africa which is running for a three-year period (January 2009 to December 2011), while the Department of Science of Religion and Missiology continued research on reconciliation and was invited to participate in the work of the Canadian School of Peacebuilding. This school provides a forum for practitioners, students and scholars from diverse religious and cultural backgrounds around the world to gather and deepen their practices of peacebuilding.
Research and Development for the Prevention of Poverty/Navorsing en Ontwikkeling vir die Voorkoming van Armoede (NOVA) and the Institute for Missiological and Ecumenical Research (IMER) are continuing with the People’s Power Project (PPP). The initial aim of this project was to determine the feasibility of a project to reduce domestic electricity use through behaviour change. The project team unites staff and students from the University of Pretoria, as well as church and industry representatives from South Africa and abroad.
The project is funded by Imtech, the ICCO-Kerk in Actie (Church in Action) partnership and the South African-Netherlands Research Programme on Alternatives in Development (SANPAD). Initial research suggests that some households are saving up to 20% of the energy used in their homes, solely through changing their behaviour.
Prof Johan Buitendag
Dean: Theology
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