Hermeneutics

The three key elements of African biblical interpretation are the biblical text, the African context, and the act of appropriation through which they are linked. The biblical text and African context do not on their own participate in a conversation. For dialogue to take place between text and context a real flesh and blood African reader is required! This reader moves constantly back-and-forth between the biblical and African context, bringing them together in an ongoing conversation which we call appropriation. How the reader moves between text and context is determined by a range of factors, including their ideo-theological orientation, their ecclesio-theological missionary heritage, their engagement with ordinary readers of the Bible in the church and community, and the important issues that require attention in the African context. In this essay, each of these elements in African biblical hermeneutics is explored.

This essay, written at the behest of the agency responsible for developing an anti-corruption ethos in South African governance, including the public service, focuses on the logic of the separation of religion from the public sphere in modern democracies (and challenges this logic as incoherent and unhelpful), comment son its implications for our contemporary situation while making some claims about the pertinence of religion, and then pursues the question of the appropriate role of religion in public life in relation to the issue of corruption.

In most forms of post-colonial discourse, the Bible's reception is subsumed under the reception of Christianity. This article argues that the Bible is a separable object of power in the protracted transactions between the Tlhaping people of southern Africa and the explorers and missionaries who first brought Bibles among them. The focus of the article is the visits of the explorer William Burchell and the missionary John Campbell to the Tlhaping in the early 1800s. Through a detailed analysis of their journals, diaries and letters, read "against the grain," signs of an emerging indigenous hermeneutic can be detected. While the Bible occupied a particular place in the constellation of meanings the missionaries embodied, it is argued there that the Bible as a distinct object took on a different order and fresh significations among the Tlhaping — significations that may be considered foundational for subsequent moments in their history.

What sense does it make to speak of "indigenous exegesis"? In some sense this article is an exegesis of this question and this phrase. While acknowledging the presence and importance of ordinary African "readers" of the Bible in the formation of African biblical scholarship, African biblical scholarship has said very little about the textual interpretative interests of ordinary African "readers" and the place of these interpretative interests in the academy. This article addresses and redresses this anomaly, arguing that it does make sense to speak of "indigenous exegesis" and that indigenous exegesis does have a place in the academy alongside the more familiar forms of exegesis.

Religious convictions and ways of seeing reality have their own independent impact, in the case of the World Trade Center towers a very visible, clearly material, and highly symbolic impact all at once. This has given rise to new discussions on religion in society, in the public sphere. To think again of theology, and religion, in the public place, in the market square, I focus on the lens offered by the idea of civil society, to highlight some important challenges to theology in our time, in dialogue with the African context, and with the work of people such as Mahmood Mamdani, Cohen and Arato, Jürgen Habermas, Jean Bethke Elshtain. Questions about the ecclesia and the believing/acting/responsible human being emerge clearly. I end by claiming that responsible theological reflection seeks to break open new possibilities amidst the limits of present actualities. It partakes of what is to come, refuses to possess the truth, supports the struggle of human beings to actualize themselves, takes its stand against suffering, and incorporates the other in just institutions and ways of living well together. I argue that it is not difficult to test our thought and our action against criteria, or thereby to grasp the task of religion, or practical faith, in civil society.

Perhaps no other individual theologian served as a lightening rod for the explosive energy of the theological world of the 19th century than did David Friedrich Strauß. As author of the controversial The Life of Jesus Critically Examined, he came to be seen as the representative of the liberal attack on the sacred scriptures because of his conclusion that the gospel narratives are myth. The theological right applauded the dismissal of Strauß from the university in Tübingen in 1835, and they were mortified with the announcement of his appointment in 1839 to the university in Zurich. Nowhere was the destructive power of religious conviction unleashed with such political consequences in the 19th century than in Zurich with this appointment. As consequential and deadly as the events surrounding Strauß' appointment and the subsequent political revolution in the canton of Zurich were, their details have not been told in English.2 What follows seeks to fill that lacuna.

Written for the end of the millennium, this essay considers the future for Africa and what this means for a public Christian witness. It begins by considering Africa's experience of marginalization from the globalizing world economy, noting how this is both historically conditioned and heterogeneous. Problems of governance, power and authority rest within this history, particularly the colonial disjunction between citizenship and subjecthood mirrored in policies of mixed direct and indirect rule (M Mamdani). In such a situation, Christianity cannot confine itself to issues of inculturation and evangelization, but must enter into the public sphere more directly. This is complicated, because Africa is also a continent of contested Christianities, indigenous and exogenous. From this angle of view, the question is how one takes into account critical questions in Africa about resources (human and material), gender and well-being (or illness and disease, negatively). Without attention to such issues, a Christian (or any other) response is likely to at best naïve, at worst disingenuous. The challenges are clear. A key issue is whether African churches or Christian groups have the resources, or the will, to respond to them adequately.

What is the public sphere like in South Africa today? In what way is it public? And what might it mean to speak of "reconstituting religion" in this public sphere? In order to answer these questions with some intelligence, we need to understand how the public sphere is currently constructed. The essay describes such a construction in terms of a shift to: a postcolonial situation; a postmodern situation; a post-resistance situation; the reality of globalization with the falling of the walls which were erected from within by apartheid and reinforced from without by international sanctions; the trouble in which resistance discourse finds itself since 1994; and the rise of a more nuanced understanding of resistance (hidden or coded "arts of resistance"). Related to these shifts, we pay attention the way in which identity and difference are implicated in each other in this context. This leads to a final, critical question, an ontological one: Who? Who is our prime interlocutor in determining our view of reality, our sense of what it means to live as a human being in this society? Who sets the agenda, frames the questions, offers the key categories for our understanding or our condition? Who benefits from the way in which transitional processes are conducted and new social arrangements are put in place? Who does not benefit, who suffers the consequences? More pertinently, who does so systematically, that is, not merely arbitrarily?

The title Life, the Universe and Everything, the third volume of the famous four volume trilogy (sic) called the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams, recently deceased ("I love deadlines," he said, "especially the whooshing sound they make as they go by"), is perhaps the most adequate statement of the depth and breadth of the challenges to researchers who investigate the question of religion in South Africa, or anywhere else for that matter. I argue that such research needs to focus not only on the role of religion in social transformation, but on transformations within religion itself, those that are occasioned by our current context and historical conjuncture.

The essay thus deals, after some initial comments, with brief discussions of "regional" concerns about methodological/ontological issues, with hermeneutics, with practical questions, and with the present conjuncture of history in South Africa-all in order to define a field of responses to the question about research challenges on religion in South Africa.

The reader and the Biblical text are partners collaborating as co-creators in an aesthetic event of understanding that, by generating an experience of meaning, originates something that did not exist before. The more acutely the actual reader can perceive that "network of response-inviting structures" of the reader implied by the author, and fulfill that role as designed by the author, the more adequate the construal of meaning will be.

This article brings together the perspectives of liberation theologies, feminist theologies, and the Jewish-Christian dialogue on Paul's theology. Paul is speaking about sin in the context of Jewish experiences in the Roman Empire. Paul's texts should not be read as doctrinal language. His theology is rooted in the prayer and worship of the communities of earliest Christianity. The laments that we read in Paul's letters express the life destroying power of sin and simultaneously the praise of God by those who have experienced liberation through Christ. This liberation includes being faithful to the Torah even for people who come into Christian communities from a non-Jewish religious background.