From the tower to the pews: A call for academic theology to re-engage with the local context

Abstract

This article assesses the shortcomings and the disconnectedness of the current academic theological education in South Africa. It offers a brief history to provide a guiding principle for academic theology. It then proceeds to show the current disconnect and challenges between academic theology and the church, with its primary focus on academic theology. Drawing on original research and reflection on these responses, commodification, euro-centricity and rankings are seen as three traps of modern academics. These three areas have distorted the true content of theological reflection. This article thus clearly highlights the current problem and motivates the need for academic theology and the local church to reconnect with each other. With this article focussing on academic institutions, it calls for the academy to change not in nature but in content, and to draw its content for the local context.

When the Gap between Academic Theology and the Church Makes Possible the Orthodox–Evangelical Dialogue

“…During this period, the relationship between theology and a life of faith was influenced, on the one hand, by the need to clarify the meaning of true faith in relation to the ideologies of heretics and persecutors and, on the other hand, by assuming Christian identity within a certain historical context marked by opposition and specific social, political, and religious realities. Although some authors argue that, for this period, we cannot yet talk about a decline in the relationship between theology and church life (Womack and Pillay 2019), we believe that certain fractures between them could already be observed at various levels. The first refers to the use of philosophy in the work of theological reflection (Hill 2003, pp.…”

“…The theme of the distance between theology and the church has been analyzed by various theologians both in the Orthodox tradition (Florovsky 1972) and in the Evangelical Protestant one (Hiestand 2008). Some of these studies target specific contexts such as that of South Africa (Womack and Pillay 2019) or Romania (Coman 2019).…”

“…The existing literature on the gap between academic theology and the church emphasizes the implications of the problem in the contemporary context and aims at analyzing the past to identify where this fracture comes from. In our estimation, discussion about this phenomenon occurring (Womack and Pillay 2019) only after the Reformation is restrictive and does not consider several important dynamics regarding its evolution in the earlier Christian tradition, such as the relationship between faith and reason, on the one hand, and that between the charisma and the ecclesial institution, on the other. Moreover, the existing studies do not take sufficiently into account the importance of interconfessional dialogue, nor the mutual influence between the different ecclesial traditions from certain geographical areas.…”