scholarly journals Allan Boesak

2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Eugene Fortein

This article attempts to exhibit the theology of prophetic resistance presented by Allan Boesak during the church struggle against apartheid and how it influenced the theological landscape. Firstly, the methodology applied in this article is to place Boesak against the backdrop of the significant historical events of the 1960s and 1970s. The purpose of this is to illustrate both the growing resistance of the oppressed black people and the unjust rule of apartheid against which Boesak will assert himself. The article goes on to focus on the theological contribution of Boesak between 1976 and 1990. The author will investigate specific events during the 1980s to showcase Boesak’s involvement within the Dutch Reformed Mission Church and beyond.

2012 ◽  
Vol 68 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Mary-Anne Plaatjies Van Huffel

The struggle of the Dutch Reformed Mission Churches (1881–1994) with reference to the character and extend of discipline. In this article the struggle concerning the nature and extent of the disciplinary power in the Dutch Reformed Mission Church (DRMC) (1881–1994) is discussed. Since the establishment of the DRMC in 1881 until 1982 the Dutch Reformed Church (DRC) retained the right to censure and discipline the missionaries in the DRMC. The article argues that the struggle for disciplinary power under the Constitution of the DRMC, the Statute of the DRMC as well as under the memorandum of agreement between the DRMC and the DRC, was nothing less than an attempt by the DRMC to entrench the principles of Voetius in the disciplinary power of the church polity and church government of the DRMC. In 1982 the DRMC accepted a new church order in which these principles were entrenched. The acceptance of this church order provision concluded the DRMC’s struggle for disciplinary power of all its officers, missionaries included, which already began in 1908. At the inaugural meeting of the Uniting Reformed Church in Southern Africa a Church Order was adopted in which provisions with regards to the disciplinary power based on above principles was hedged.


2018 ◽  
pp. 95-124
Author(s):  
Donald Westbrook

This chapter introduces features of Scientology’s systematic theology as developed in the 1960s and 1970s. In 1959, L. Ron Hubbard established a headquarters at Saint Hill Manor in East Grinstead, England. This location became the international base of Scientology until the founding of the Sea Organization in 1967. The Saint Hill period was instrumental in the intellectual development of Scientology. During these years, Hubbard systematized Scientology’s educational methodology (Study Technology), theology of sin (overts and withholds), theology of evil (suppressive persons), and standards of orthodoxy and orthopraxy (“Keeping Scientology Working” or KSW). KSW serves to legitimate Dianetics and Scientology within the church because it self-referentially dictates that Hubbard’s “technologies” provide mental and spiritual benefits only insofar as they are uniformly understood, applied, and perpetuated by others.


Author(s):  
Mary J. Henold

The Epilogue considers recent attempts to affirm the importance of Catholic laywomen in the church and extend their participation in decision making, while upholding Catholic teaching on gender essentialism and complementarity. Such limited efforts must be placed in the context of the 1960s and 1970s, when Catholic women’s leadership was also affirmed, and yet these women were still limited to prescribed roles and excluded from power. The work that Catholic laywomen did in these years to challenge Catholic teaching on gender roles, and remake laywomen’s identity, has been largely ignored and forgotten. As a result, the church, and particularly Pope Francis, continue to give lip service to laywomen’s dignity while failing to listen to their voices or give them genuine authority.


2018 ◽  
Vol 98 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 407-424 ◽  
Author(s):  
J.C. Bennett

AbstractUnder the Church Building Acts beginning in 1818, new English Anglican churches received governmental approval to formally rent sittings to congregants. Initial profits seem to have been high enough to make the practice financially viable. But over the Victorian era a flurry of popular protests and governmental acts, combined with lower rates of church-going, reduced the profitability of pew-renting. Churches built under the auspices of the Church Building Commissioners were generally offered grants in exchange for ending pew-rents. S.J.D. Green concluded that pew-renting was generally extinguished by the 1920s or earlier, which is correct regarding Anglican churches which received such “in lieu” grants. But Green’s assessment must be modified for other churches receiving no grants and needing even small profits. Primary sources reflect that many of these continued to set sittings for decades after the 1920s—in a few cases, into the 1960s and 1970s.


1981 ◽  
Vol 34 (3) ◽  
pp. 245-262
Author(s):  
John. W. De Gruchy

In a much publicised address to the 1979 National Conference of the South African Council of Churches (SACC), Dr Allan Boesak, a theologian of the black Dutch Reformed Mission Church, challenged the Church in South Africa to engage in acts of civil disobedience against apartheid laws:The church must initiate and support meaningful pressure on the system as a non-violent way of bringing about change. The church must initiate and support programs of civil disobedience on a massive scale, and challenge especially white Christians on this issue. It no longer suffices to make statements condemning unjust laws as if nothing has happened. The time has come for the black church to tell the Government and its people: We cannot in all good conscience obey your unjust laws because non-cooperation with evil is as much a moral obligation as is cooperation with good. So we will teach our people what it means to obey God rather than man in South Africa.


2018 ◽  
Vol 57 (3) ◽  
pp. 543-563 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel S. Loss

AbstractIn the late twentieth century, a new justification for the Church of England's establishment emerged: the church played an important social and political role in safeguarding the interests of other religious communities, including non-Christian ones. The development of this new vision of communal pluralism was shaped by two groups often seen as marginal in postwar British society: the royal family and missionaries. Elizabeth II and liberal evangelicals associated with the Church Missionary Society contributed to a new conception of religious pluralism centered on the integrity of the major world religions as responses to the divine. There were, therefore, impulses towards inclusion as well as exclusion in post-imperial British society. In its focus on religious communities, however, this communal pluralism risked overstating the homogeneity of religious groups and failing to protect individuals whose religious beliefs and practices differed from those of the mainstream of their religious communities.


Author(s):  
Matthew A. Shadle

This chapter examines the emergence of liberation theology in Latin America. It offers three cases studies illustrating the economic and political turmoil in Latin America in the 1960s and 1970s: Chile, Brazil, and El Salvador. The chapter then turns to the theology of two prominent liberation theologians, Gustavo Gutiérrez and Ignacio Ellacuría. Gutiérrez proposes that God calls us to make a preferential option for the poor, and to work for integral liberation in history. Similarly, Ellacuría explains that God offers his salvation in history, and the church is called to realize the Reign of God in the midst of historical reality, siding with the “crucified people” with whom Jesus identifies.


2019 ◽  
Vol 45 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Selaelo Thias Kgatla

T Church unity between the former Dutch Reformed Mission Church (DRMC) and the Dutch Reformed Church in Africa (DRCA) took place in 1994 under particularly difficult circumstances. South Africa was on the brink of civil war, as the oppressed majority of the country was pressurising the apartheid regime to surrender to their legitimate demands for a democratic dispensation. The regime was relentless and violently resisted any change that would franchise black people. The struggle involved political, social, economic and religious dimensions and many people lost their lives as a result. It was under these circumstances that the DRMC and the DRCA forged ahead with church unity. The most enabling means for survival in the struggle for unity of the two churches was their faith in God as expressed in the Belhar Confession. This article explores the circumstances under which church unification was forged between the two Reformed churches and their eventual unity in 1994, as well as the concrete steps they took in their ritual of unification.


Itinerario ◽  
2003 ◽  
Vol 27 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 189-204 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robin Oakley

In Steinkopf, a former coloured Reserve in the Northern Cape Province, the Nederduitse Gereformeerde Sendingkerk (NGS; Dutch Reformed Mission Church), a former sub-branch of the Nederduitse Gereformeerde Kerk (NGK; Dutch Reformed Church) forged a legitimate public space for the expression of Nama identity in the 1960s. The legitimisation of aboriginal identity was not accidental, but very much an expression of apartheid policies of the day. I hope to demonstrate both the content and the consequences of this particular episode in Steinkopf, and thereby contribute to an understanding of the links between a crumbling capitalist infrastructure and the ideological efforts to reinforce that infrastructure through processes of ethnic strengthening. My claim is that the NGK played an ideological role supporting the capitalist interests as it strengthened the super-structural pillars of the segregation and apartheid eras.


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