Articles

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.

As the child of Mary, Jesus is a new creation generated by the holy Spirit. As the adopted son of Joseph, he is a descendant of David and Abraham. Although he represents two generations and wears two christological hats concurrently, he is one person and has one name, Jesus. His life manifests a direct correspondence between his activity and his name, between his person and his work. That is why his naming is so important.

The ideals of redemption and restoration, detailed as the Jubilee in Leviticus 25, envisioned for the nation a covenantal relationship with God and its attendant establishment of justice. They were appropriated and applied by Israel's prophets to the social, economic and political conditions of their times. Jesus' ministry also appears to have been oriented toward the fulfillment of these jubilary ideals.

Again and again throughout the history of Christian thought theological apologetics has dissolved the great ironic paradox of Jesus Christ into binary oppositions. In these historical contexts cultural relevancy has prevailed, and the underlying philosophical ideology has generated a disastrous subversion of the apologentic formulations of Christology in the New Testament. By calling this dichotomization into question, this essay intends to promote a postmodern hermeneutics that preserves the christological paradox and orients the constituting consciousness of theologians and scholars to both a spirituality of "being-affected by" the biblical witness to Jesus Christ and a faith that will initiate action toward the transformation of society.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Resurrection is the entry into a new moral order that is constituted as a terrestrial reality by the creative act of God, and therefore it is something that happens to individual human beings.

In antiquity sexual identity was based on the natural fact of sex. Genitals determined gender. For ancient Israel the binary differentiation of male and female served as the structuring of both the natural and social worlds, and was guarded by the Holiness Code of Lev. 17. Same-sex sexual relations were forbidden, at least explicitly to men, and Christianity adopted and transmitted this ideology. The homosexuality that is condemned in the letters ascribed to Paul: Romans, 1 Corinthians and 1 Timothy is identifiable as pederasty. There are no ancient texts that suggest that homosexual relationships existed between same-age adults. The word homosexuality first appeared in an English dictionary in 1892. Today the taxonomy of male and female is being subverted by science and technology.

The two Old Testament quotations of Mark 1:2-3 serve as the governing principle of Mark's Gospel. Although they stand in contradiction to each other, the resolution that follows constructs a paradoxical relationship between Jesus as "the Son of the Human Being—Son of God" and Jesus as a type of Elijah, like John the Baptizer, who constructs the way for his disciples into death and resurrection. The youth in the tomb, who appears in the Gospel's ending that is not the ending, continues this paradoxical principle of participating in the reordering of power and yet constructing the way into a reordering of power for the addressees of Mark's Gospel.

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.