Abstract
John de Gruchy’s The Church Struggle in South Africa was a bold attempt to write the story of the kingdom of God in his native land. While it stood toward the beginning of his written work, the themes laid down in it have followed De Gruchy’s writings up to the present. They have also sketched the story of South Africa from the climax of the struggle to end Apartheid to the present travails to realize its promise. This article takes up the final chapter in that work, comparing it to another great theological attempt to write the kingdom of God: H. Richard Niebuhr’s The Kingdom of God in America. It follows that chapter through its disappearance in the third edition of The Church Struggle, to its re-emergence in The End is Not Yet. The article is especially interested in De Gruchy’s eschatological retrieval of Bonhoeffer’s tension between the ultimate and the penultimate, and in the question of God’s trinitarian reality shaping the world – and us as community of anticipation.
Highlights
It was Alasdair MacIntyre who said, “I can only answer the question ‘What am I to do?’ if I can answer the prior question ‘Of what story or stories do I find myself a part?’” (MacIntyre 1984:216) A theological version of this question reads: “What is God doing?” is the Christian story is told in terms of the divine act and our lived response to it
John de Gruchy’s The Church Struggle in South Africa was a bold attempt to write the story of the kingdom of God in his native land
This article takes up the final chapter in that work, comparing it to another great theological attempt to write the kingdom of God: H
Summary
The Kingdom of God in America was written as the world tottered on the edge of catastrophe. Niebuhr discerned a growing “spiritual unrest” within the “institutionalization and secularization” of the kingdom of God. New movements were manifesting “increasing interest in the great doctrines and traditions of the Christian past,” not as heritage, but because “there was no way toward the coming kingdom save the way taken by a sovereign God through the reign of Jesus Christ.”. New movements were manifesting “increasing interest in the great doctrines and traditions of the Christian past,” not as heritage, but because “there was no way toward the coming kingdom save the way taken by a sovereign God through the reign of Jesus Christ.” Could this become “the seed bed of new life?” (Niebuhr 1937:198). Even though “the kingdom of Christ” located divine activity in the depths of human subjectivity, the overwhelming view of God as absolute otherness confronting “man the sinner” (Niebuhr, 1935a) lacked a properly theological point of contact with the world
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