scholarly journals Tumelo le Moruo

2015 ◽  
Vol 36 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Vuyani S. Vellem
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Black Theology ◽  
Christian Faith ◽  
The West ◽  
Black Africans ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Theology Of Liberation

Paleng ya rona batho ba batsho, tumelo ya boKreste e fihlile lefatsheng la rona la Afrika Borwa mmoho le dikgoka tsa ditjhaba tsa boPhirima. BoKreste bo fihlile ka nako ya dintwa tseo mohopolo wa tsona e neng e le ho hapa lefatshe la, batho ba batsho. Ka mantswe amang, rona batho ba batsho, re ile ra qetella re le setjhaba se ileng sa hlolwa, mme lefatshe la rona la nkuwa ka dikgoka. Ka hare ho dikgoka tsena, ho ne ho dutse tumelo ya boKreste. Makgowa a ile are: �A re kwaleng mahlo re rapeleng, rona ra kwala mahlo, mme ha re qeta hore Amen, re bula mahlo, ra fumana lefatshe le nkuwe matsohong a rona ho setse Bibele.� Re ile ra sala le Bibele eo ka yona re lekileng dilemong tse fitileng ho lwana ntwa ya topollo, kapa tokoloho hofihlela selemong sa 1994. Le ha re ile ra fumana tokoloho ka selemo seo, hare so ka re lokoloha ho tsa moruo. E kaba sena se bolela eng mabapi le tumelo ya rona ya boKreste? Segolweng sena re leka ho araba potso ena. Tumelo ke eng ho batho ba sa lokolohang moruong wa naha ya bona? Re lekola pale ya boKreste, tumelo ya batho le maemo a kereke ntlheng ya ho tadimana le tokoloho ka tumelo.Faith and economics. In our history from a black perspective, Christianity arrived through violent conquest from the west. Evidentially, this faith coincided with wars of dispossession and the ultimate defeat of black Africans. It is difficult to separate the violent defeat of black Africans from the arrival of Christian faith. This well-known statement within the circles of black Theology of liberation: When the white man arrived in our land he said, �let us pray and after prayer, when we opened our eyes, our land was taken and only the Bible was left in our hands,� captures the black sentiment of this history. Ironically, it was this Bible that black Africans used to wage their struggle for liberation up to the demise of apartheid in 1994.Nonetheless, political liberation is not enough as the struggle for economic liberation continue in South Africa post 1994. In the light of this history, what then is the role of faith for a people politically liberated without economic liberation? This article examines this history from the perspective of black faith and its role for liberation.

scholarly journals Ebuhlanti Amandla ngawethu: Womanism and black theology of liberation, in memory of Vuyani Shadrack Vellem

2020 ◽  
Vol 76 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Fundiswa A. Kobo
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
Lived Experiences ◽  
Black Theology ◽  
Black Consciousness ◽  
The West ◽  
Women’S Experiences ◽  
Women's Experiences ◽  
Heuristic Device ◽  
A Site ◽  
Theology Of Liberation

The liberation of black humanity has been an area of scholarly reflection by black theologians and the black consciousness communities. The constructs of oppression such as race, class and sexism amongst others have been critiqued in the quest for liberation of a fragmented black humanity. In this article, this quest for liberation happens within ubuhlanti [kraal], a site for which Vuyani Vellem is ‘like a hermeneutical circle, where the mediations of the bonds of spheres and the instantiation of their life take place’. By looking at a fragmented black humanity and black women’s experiences, we posit that no western framework could ever be representative of those bodies, ubuhlanti becomes our solution as a heuristic device and symbol of a communication of the efficacy of integrated life. From a womanist perspective, ubuhlanti decentres the West. Ebuhlanti Amandla ngawethu [power belongs to us], as black women and men dialogue issues that affect black humanity. The whole proposition of this dialogue ebuhlanti is animated by our lived experiences, which already offer alternatives for us to decentre.Contribution: Premised by the lived experiences of black humanity in their quest for liberation, this paper contributes in the dewesternising discourse by presenting alternative epistemologies and spiritualities. A womanist dialogue with black theology of liberation ebuhlanti, a decolonising and decentring praxis for the liberation of black humanity is our solution as blacks.

MARKETING THE TESTAMENTS: CANONGATE AND THEIR POCKET-SIZED BIBLES

2002 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 221-244
Author(s):  
Keyword(s):  
Biblical Studies ◽  
Christian Tradition ◽  
The West ◽  
Positive Potential ◽  
Publishing Firm ◽  
Investment Promotion ◽  
The Bible ◽  
King James Version ◽  
As If

AbstractRecently the Edinburgh-based publishing firm Canongate has brought out the Bible in the form of single books in the King James Version. Each of these volumes is introduced by a writer not necessarily associated with the Christian tradition, thus inviting the readers to approach them as literary works in their own right. For long the Bible came with commentaries written by prominent religious scholars, but now it looks as if it needed an introduction by novelists, pop artists, scientists including and even by some who are outside the Christian tradition to make the once familiar texts now widely neglected in the West come alive again. The purpose of this essay is to look at the following: the positive potential of this Pocket Canon; the role of the interpreter's personal voice within the process of discovering meaning in a narrative; the marketing of the Bible and appropriation of religious themes by secular marketeers; the re-iconization of the Bible though the King James Version; the colonial parallels in the investment, promotion and dissemination of the Bible; and the challenge of personal-voice criticism to biblical studies. Put at its simplest, can this disparate group of essayists rescue the Bible, which is fast losing its grip and importance in the West, and discover fresh significance in it?

Rediscovering the Formative Power of Scripture Reading for the Church

2018 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 34-42
Author(s):  
Mark A. Maddix
Keyword(s):  
Christian Faith ◽  
Modern Approach ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Biblical Scholarship ◽  
Bible Reading ◽  
The Church

Central to Christianity is the belief is that the Bible is inspired and authoritative for Christian faith and practice. Even though Christians affirm the authority of the Bible, there is a decline in Bible reading and Scripture usage in worship and discipleship. More recent biblical scholarship, built on a pre-modern approach to interpretation, moves to a reader-centered approach to biblical reading. The focus of this article is to explore a reader-centered approach to Bible reading that gives focus to the role of Scripture as means of formation. This rediscovery of the formative power of Scripture has implications for how the Bible is appropriated in worship and discipleship for the church.

Are the BRICS a Viable Alternative to the West? A Succinct Analysis

2014 ◽  
Vol 13 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 61-69 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Calderón-Zaks
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Global South ◽  
Viable Alternative ◽  
The West ◽  
The People

Abstract In this article I briefly examine the perceived role of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa—also known as the BRICS—as an alternative to the West in the Global South. Their patterns of development must be placed in the context of the West’s development prior to and during the twentieth century. In fact, the burden of “development” remains on the shoulders of the people on the peripheries of the Americas and Africa.

scholarly journals The Good Samaritan has Arrived

2020 ◽  
Vol 48 (1) ◽  
pp. 72-83
Author(s):  
Thamil Venthan Ananthavinayagan
Keyword(s):  
Western World ◽  
The West ◽  
Good Samaritan ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Fertile Ground ◽  
Prime Objective ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Set Up

The purpose of this article is to investigate the ongoing attempts by the West to colonize the Non-Western cultures by the means of religion. To this end, the missionary was and is without doubt the frontrunner for the standard of civilization, providing the pretext and fertile ground for the subsequent infiltration of the colonialist who was eager to carve an empire in the ‘discovered’  world - with the goal to exploit African resources for his own good. The exploitation of the resources in the colonized world was accompanied by the early religious Missionaries who set up secular missionaries. Their travels to other countries was not the bible but other documents of conquest such as dubious treaties, guns and trinkets to attract the unsuspecting colonized to be lured to them. Missionaries often aligned themselves with the powerful in order to achieve their prime objective of “saving souls” more rapidly. Colonization, civilisation and religion are means to the creation of imperialism. This article, to this end, will inquire the role of the non-Western world to resist attempts of there West to engage in practices of repeated colonization under the pretext of religion.

scholarly journals Healing in a Cultural Context: The Role of Healing as a Defining Character in the Growth and Popular Faith of the Zion Christian Church

2017 ◽  
Vol 43 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
James Kenokeno Mashabela
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Cultural Context ◽  
The Political ◽  
Christian Church ◽  
Black Africans ◽  
African Independent Churches ◽  
Independent Churches ◽  
History Of ◽  
Fundamental Needs

This article revisits the role healing has played in the growth of the Zion Christian Church (ZCC) as one of the fastest growing African Independent Churches (AICs) in South Africa. The article argues that the ZCC is appealing to black Africans because it addresses healing within the cultural context of an African. Healing within the cultural context speaks to the fundamental needs of an African. The fundamental needs of an African see healing as addressing more than just a body ailment, but the totality of a person. The paper revisits the history of healing in the ZCC, and in so doing, will be a revisit to this church’s history. In revisiting this history, the discrimination that this church faced from the political authorities and from the white mission churches will also be referred to. 

The Aramaic Bible in the East

2019 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 39-66
Author(s):  
Philip S. Alexander
Keyword(s):  
Systematic Study ◽  
Religious Identity ◽  
The West ◽  
Jewish Communities ◽  
Bible Translation ◽  
The Bible ◽  
History Of ◽  
Ready Access

Abstract This article challenges the assumption that insofar as the Jewish communities of Babylonia were a ‘people of the book’, their book was a Hebrew Bible. Functionally the Bible that most people would have known was the Aramaic Targum of Onqelos and Jonathan. The Bible’s content—its law, narrative, and prophecy—was culturally mediated through Aramaic. Even in Rabbinic communities, where some had competence in Hebrew that gave them ready access to the original, the lack of formal and systematic study of Miqra may have made the Targum the tradition of first resort for understanding the Hebrew. The situation in the Aramaic-speaking east may not, then, have been all that different from the west, where a Greek Bible shaped the religious identity of the Greek-speaking Jewish communities. This essay is offered as a contribution to the neglected study of the role of Bible translation in the history of Judaism.

scholarly journals Unshackling the Church

2015 ◽  
Vol 71 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Vuyani Vellem
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Crucial Role ◽  
Methodological Approach ◽  
Black Theology ◽  
Black Africans ◽  
Colonial Legacy ◽  
Institutional Structures ◽  
History Of ◽  
Cultural Domination ◽  
The Church

In whose ‘order’, ‘newness’ and ‘foundation’ is ecclesiology based in South Africa? The colonial legacy of pigmentocracy, the cultural domination and annihilation of the indigenous dispensation of black Africans, is not devoid of institutional structures of faith and their historical performance in South Africa. The church is one institution in South Africa that played a crucial role in perpetrating perversities of racial, economic and cultural exclusion with a fetish of its institutional character that is still pervasive and dangerously residual in post-1994 South Africa. By presenting a brief outline of the basics on ecclesiology, the article argues that things remain the same the more things seem to change if the methodological approach to ecclesiology circumvents the edifice and foundations on which the history of ecclesiology in South Africa is built. To unshackle the church, a Black Theology of liberation must begin from and debunk the foundations of models of ecclesiology that are conceived on perverse theological and ideologised forms of faith that have become residually hazardous in South Africa post-1994.

scholarly journals Un-thinking the West: The spirit of doing Black Theology of Liberation in decolonial times

2017 ◽  
Vol 73 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Vuyani S. Vellem
Keyword(s):  
Black Theology ◽  
Knowledge Systems ◽  
The Self ◽  
Gender Violence ◽  
The West ◽  
Black African ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Theoretical Foundations ◽  
Theology Of Liberation

It is indisputable that Black Theology of Liberation (BTL) intentionally un-thinks the West. BTL has its own independent conceptual and theoretical foundations and can hold without the West if it rejects the architecture of Western knowledge as a final norm for life. This, however, is a spiritual matter which the article argues. The historical arrest of the progression of liberative logic and its promises might be self-inflicted by rearticulating and reinterpreting liberation strong thought. At a time when neofascism, which is virtually an open display of psychological and ideological confusion, racism, classism, sensibilities of integralism and gender violence, having become rife, liberal democracy is arguably in crisis today. BTL has to move beyond rethinking and repeating its tried and tested ways of response to black pain caused by racism and colonialism. Un-thinking the West is not only cognitive but also spiritual. Umoya, the spirit of life, the article argues, to un-think the West, constitutes inter alia, the rejection of Hellenocentric concepts as a starting point of knowledge. Umoya should reject the self-serving periodisation of history centred on Europe, dualistic obfuscating secularism and willingness by black to occlude their knowledge systems. Without this, the article argues, the lethargic sleep, the mocking laughter of the West at the self-wounding black African remains a syndrome that arrests the translation of liberation knowledge from history.

scholarly journals The idolatry of white supremacy in church and society? Some reflections on Black Theology of Liberation in present-day South Africa in memoriam of Vuyani Vellem

2020 ◽  
Vol 76 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Rothney S. Tshaka
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Black People ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Black Theology ◽  
Social Sciences And Humanities ◽  
Church And Society ◽  
History Of ◽  
Black Life ◽  
Scholarly Contribution ◽  
Theology Of Liberation

In remembering Vuyani Vellem, this paper delves into his scholarship, a scholarship that admittedly exudes his activism in academia, church and society. Choosing intentionally the marginalised as the primary interlocutors in discourse, Vellem demonstrates that he is situated in the arena of those who are otherwise seen as the wretched of the earth, insisting that Black Theology of Liberation must engage in a praxis that centres the lived experiences of black people and creates for itself legacies that would attest to Black Theology of Liberation as a formidable hermeneutic that recognises the sanctity of black life in a context of the prevalence of white supremacy. It notes however that a history of colonisation and subjugation has wrecked the humanity of black people, and as a result, a contract with black people becomes essential on this path towards the total emancipation of black people in South Africa and the world.Contribution: The scholarly contribution of this article is its focus on the systematic and practical reflection, within a paradigm in which the intersection of religious studies, social sciences and humanities generate an interdisciplinary contested discourse.

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