This article examines the specific position of Theology at South African universities, following the recent developments on campuses that catapulted the urgency for greater commitment to radical transformation in higher education to public attention. A large corpus of material is generated on theological education as such, but the major question is rarely thematised as the transformation of Theology at public universities in (post-)apartheid South Africa. This article addresses the nature of the challenge by following a distinct approach. Ten major discourses in the wider reflection on theological education are identified and interpreted as avenues to achieve three aims: to convey the unique challenge for Theology, to give historical texture to issues conventionally addressed a-politically in Theology and to forward an interpretation of ‘transformation’ for Theology that emphasises its multi-layered nature
This article addresses a specific issue, namely the ramifications for theology practised at a public university under (post)-apartheid conditions. In South Africa, scholarly opinion has not paid sufficient attention to what "transformation" entails for theology under these circumstances. The article describes transformation in detail by clarifying the main referents for this notion and attending to discourses in higher education. Heuristic categories such as inclusivity, alterity, critique, freedom and flourishing are identified that should inform multi-level and comprehensive embodiment in terms of knowledge, people and practices. The article identifies several critical issues such as the plurality of intellectual traditions and identity formation that should be explored in more detail. It also emphasises the distinctive theological task of theology at a public university -the articulation of transcendence and the construal of a non-naturalistic symbolic interpretation of reality.
you are a professor in Practical Theology in the School of Humanities at UNISA. You are an emerging scholar and researcher on theological education in South Africa. Thank you for giving Acta Theologica the opportunity to engage with you. Tell our readers something about your life and academic journey to UNISA. MN: I felt a call to Christian work in 1989. My undergraduate theology training was an exhilarating time of learning at the Evangelical Bible Seminary of South Africa in the early 1990s, at the time of the political transition in South Africa. As we experienced the country's upheaval, this became the material we wrestled with in the theological classroom. As a multicultural student body, we were living together and experiencing each other for the very first time and considering what the new South Africa could look like.
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