Abstract
This article starts with a brief statement on the well-known contradictory nature of the Reformed tradition in South Africa, defending injustice and struggling for justice in the name of the same tradition. By following the work of Reformed systematic theologian D.J. Smit, it argues that the justice-affirming potential of the Reformed tradition is a hermeneutical task built on three specific re-interpretations: (1) the reinterpretation of Scripture from the perspective of the weak, the poor and the oppressed (against a hermeneutic of creation orders and God-willed division of people) (2) a rereading of John Calvin to affirm the dignity and freedom of all humans (against the grain of neo-Calvinist interpretations) (3) a rereading of Karl Barth with a focus on God’s inclusive grace, Christian confessions and the nature of the Christian life (against the limitation of his influence because of his perceived actualistic view on Scripture or unscientific, foundational methodology). The article closes with a brief look into the agenda for social transformation faced by us in the second decade of the 21st century, and under what conditions the Reformed faith will be able to make an enduring contribution to public life in (South) Africa.
Highlights
Those of us who have been writing and doing theology in South Africa over the last three decades know that the Christian gospel – as interpreted from a Protestant or more specific Reformed tradition – can simultaneously be used as a powerful force against social transformation and as a positive force for justice and the transformation of society
It is a much more complex matter because – as we know from the history of interpretation and the specific hermeneutical and exegetical controversies in South Africa during the church struggle of the 20th century – there are competing paradigms from which meaning is constructed
This essay on James – originally a series of Bible studies in conjunction with Smit’s exposition of the Belhar Confession itself13 – does serve as example of what was said in the introduction: The social transformative power of the Reformed tradition lies in the manner in which the Scriptures are read
Summary
Those of us who have been writing and doing theology in South Africa over the last three decades know that the Christian gospel – as interpreted from a Protestant or more specific Reformed tradition – can simultaneously be used as a powerful force against social transformation and as a positive force for justice and the transformation of society. These two points taken together imply that for Smit the key to retrieving and revitalising the socially transformative power of the Reformed tradition – and for that matter the gospel, the Christian life and the church – lies in compassion with the poor, seeing suffering from their perspective, and reading the Scriptures with the excluded, hearing them to understand both God and ourselves better.
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