CURRENT TRENDS AND PATTERNS IN AFRICAN BIBLICAL HERMENEUTICS IN POST-APARTHEID SOUTH AFRICA: MYTH OR FACT?

Abstract

Madipoane Masenya and Hulisani Ramantswana (2012:598-637) have argued that 18 years into the democratic dispensation, South African Old Testament scholarship is still trapped in Eurocentric methods of interpreting the biblical text, deliberately avoiding any meaningful dialogue with the African context. Accordingly, this article examines the role of African Biblical Hermeneutics in the current South African context. In the first section we will engage with Christo Lombaard’s assertion that African Biblical Hermeneutics has not succeeded in its endeavor because it does not use exegesis in its methodological approach. We will also dialogue with another Western Biblical scholar, Gerrie Snyman, who uses the concept of whiteness to engage with his Western Afrikaner context. We will then move on to discuss the three poles of African Biblical Hermeneutics, before focusing on two trends and patterns in African Biblical Hermeneutics, namely, Black biblical hermeneutics and African Feminist hermeneutics. In this last section, we want to examine several challenges facing African Biblical Hermeneutics in the post-Apartheid context. We will start off by locating ourselves in the post-Apartheid context. We will then quickly move on to spell out what the role of African Biblical Hermeneutics could be in the post-Apartheid context.