Pub Date : 2023-12-04DOI: 10.17570/stj.2023.v9n1.at2
George W. Marchinkowski, Peter Langerman
As humanity seeks to redefine its relationships with technology, the earth and ultimate reality, the mystics can assist in discerning a way forward. How can we live at peace in a rapidly changing and technologically advancing world? Will these redefined relationships facilitate human flourishing or cause alienation? Twentieth century mystics Thomas Merton and Henri J. M. Nouwen believed that the conversation began with confronting illusion. The illusions human beings construct begin in the Self (with the false personas we create) but extend to the collectives we relate to. Merton and Nouwen were mystics and social critics, from a starting point of contemplation, representing ‘Christ, the challenger and disturber of human illusion.’ This article seeks to showcase their contribution while outlining some spiritual practices seekers might adopt to navigate our complex and constantly transforming milieu.
当人类寻求重新定义其与技术、地球和终极现实的关系时，神秘主义者可以帮助辨别前进的道路。在一个快速变化和技术进步的世界里，我们如何才能和平共处?这些重新定义的关系会促进人类繁荣还是导致异化?20世纪的神秘主义者Thomas Merton和Henri J. M. Nouwen认为对话始于面对幻觉。人类构建的幻觉始于自我(通过我们创造的虚假角色)，但延伸到与我们相关的集体。默顿和卢云是神秘主义者和社会批评家，从沉思开始，代表“基督，人类幻想的挑战者和扰乱者”。这篇文章旨在展示他们的贡献，同时概述一些寻求者可能采用的精神实践，以应对我们复杂而不断变化的环境。
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Pub Date : 2023-12-04DOI: 10.17570/stj.2023.v9n1.at3
Collium Banda
Many Africans rely on the spiritualistic solutions offered by the African neo-Pentecostal prophets (ANPPs) to navigate their socioeconomic realities. This article critically evaluates the efficacy of the ANPPs’ spiritual approach within the economic landscape of the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR). The essay delves into the extent to which these prophets’ spiritual perspectives on economic matters equip Africans to meaningfully engage in the evolving 4IR economy, driven by artificial intelligence (AI) and scientific technologies. It seeks a theological framework for economic life that can guide ANPPs in offering avenues for economic engagement that empower Africans to participate effectively in the 4IR-based economy. It is argued that the ANPPs’ spiritualistic approach to economic life disempowers Africans from effectively participating in the 4IR economy. ANPPs are thus urged to incorporate science and technology into their economic worldview.
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Pub Date : 2023-12-04DOI: 10.17570/stj.2023.v9n2.a9
Annelie Botha
Literature about and research on moral injury most often links moral injury with war. Moral injury is usually defined as an act of transgression against moral beliefs in wartime among military personnel. This article explores moral injury as not only an injury of war but also an injury caused by the gender-biased war in our society and homes. Moral injury occurs early in life with the teaching of the gender binary as “masculine” and “feminine”. This essay will focus on patriarchy as a deeper root of the trauma of moral injury. The article will also focus on how moral injury can cause gender-based violence. A feminist pastoral approach will aim to bring awareness to the cultural attitudes and practices that create the contexts where a moral injury occurs and explore ways to transform the patriarchal gender-biased dominant narrative to facilitate freedom and healing from the internal gender identity conflict..
{"title":"Moral injury, not only an injury of war – feminist pastoral approach","authors":"Annelie Botha","doi":"10.17570/stj.2023.v9n2.a9","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.17570/stj.2023.v9n2.a9","url":null,"abstract":"Literature about and research on moral injury most often links moral injury with war. Moral injury is usually defined as an act of transgression against moral beliefs in wartime among military personnel. This article explores moral injury as not only an injury of war but also an injury caused by the gender-biased war in our society and homes. Moral injury occurs early in life with the teaching of the gender binary as “masculine” and “feminine”. This essay will focus on patriarchy as a deeper root of the trauma of moral injury. The article will also focus on how moral injury can cause gender-based violence. A feminist pastoral approach will aim to bring awareness to the cultural attitudes and practices that create the contexts where a moral injury occurs and explore ways to transform the patriarchal gender-biased dominant narrative to facilitate freedom and healing from the internal gender identity conflict..","PeriodicalId":42487,"journal":{"name":"Stellenbosch Theological Journal","volume":"78 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-12-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138604490","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-11-28DOI: 10.17570/stj.2023.v9n4.a11
Aad van Tilburg
In a value chain, products flow from primary producers to end users, often through intermediaries. The distribution of market power in each of the successive stages of the value chain is usually unequal and affects the financial compensation of participants. Unorganized primary producers in food or clothing chains tend to fall victim to heavy competition in consumer markets or to extreme efficiency requirements by retail chains. Increasingly, entrepreneurs running value chains are expected to take on responsibilities regarding the well-being of all participants, especially primary producers in developing countries. But what does acting responsibly mean for these entrepreneurs? Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906–1945) provided clear guidance on what the content of acting responsibly should be for Christians and non-Christians alike. However, is his concept of acting responsibly also relevant for leaders in value chains? Entrepreneurs are expected to adopt corporate social responsibility (CSR) requirements, which, among other things, imply that all participants in a value chain enjoy an appropriate livelihood. I explore whether entrepreneurs, if they take Bonhoeffer’s criteria for responsible action seriously, do justice to all stakeholders in their value chain.
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Pub Date : 2023-11-28DOI: 10.17570/stj.2023.v9n4.a2
Ulrich Duchrow
Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s essay on “The Church and the Jewish Question” (1933) inspired already two ecumenical processes. The first one was the decision of the Lutheran World Federation (LWF) in 1977 declaring apartheid a status confessionis, the second was the call of the World Alliance of Reformed Churches (WARC) to engage in a processus confessionis “regarding economic injustice and ecological destruction” (1997). This led the LWF (2003), the WARC (2004) and also the World Council of Churches (WCC in 2013) to formally reject imperial neoliberal capitalism. Now it inspires the church actions against the state of Israel, depriving the Palestinians of their civil and political rights and the justification of this by misusing the Bible in (Christian) Zionism. This amounts to apartheid according to all relevant human rights organizations and the UN. There are important consequences for Christian-Jewish relations in Germany and the West today. After Western antisemitism and the horrific genocide by German Nazis against the Jewish people it was extremely necessary to overcome this past by intensive Christian-Jewish dialogue. However this has become a deal to silence critique of Israel’s constant violations of international law and human rights, as pointed out by the Jewish liberation theologian Marc Ellis. In order to overcome this a theology of land respectful of human rights is needed. Churches are being called to a process of study and discernment leading to action. A special responsibility lies with the churches in Germany and the USA because their governments must link their cooperation with the State of Israel to international law and human rights.
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Pub Date : 2023-11-28DOI: 10.17570/stj.2023.v9n4.a10
Luís Cumaru
According to Bonhoeffer, responsibility is a global response of the human being to all reality as a whole. In the fragments of his posthumous Ethics, themes such as discipleship, culture, politics, human rights, and others converge to the same point. In this article, I analyse the context in which these fragments were written and expose the reason why even under the most difficult circumstances, Bonhoeffer thought and lived life responsibly as a whole according to what Karl Barth few years earlier called Theological Existence.
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Pub Date : 2023-11-28DOI: 10.17570/stj.2023.v9n4.a7
Katharina Oppel
Drawing on Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s reflections on the anthropos teleios and Raimundo Panikkar’s articulation of monastic archetype, this article seeks to put forward an account of Christian simplicity and a spirituality of worldliness within the context of ever-growing acceleration, digitalisation and over-organisation.
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Pub Date : 2023-11-28DOI: 10.17570/stj.2023.v9n4.a6
Christoph Barnbrock
Based on Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s threefold definition of confession as a “breakthrough,” this essay explores the question of the extent to which confession, which has largely fallen out of practice, can still have significance for state and society in the 21st century. In doing so, the practice of confession is brought into dialogue with the trends and challenges of our time. In this way, it becomes apparent that, viewed through the lens of confession, being human appears in a new light. The feeling of shame can be overcome through the new experience of fellowship. Evil no longer has to be excluded from perception. But it is precisely in this way that repentance, change of behaviour and mutual reconciliation become possible.
{"title":"Confession as “Breakthrough to community”","authors":"Christoph Barnbrock","doi":"10.17570/stj.2023.v9n4.a6","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.17570/stj.2023.v9n4.a6","url":null,"abstract":"Based on Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s threefold definition of confession as a “breakthrough,” this essay explores the question of the extent to which confession, which has largely fallen out of practice, can still have significance for state and society in the 21st century. In doing so, the practice of confession is brought into dialogue with the trends and challenges of our time. In this way, it becomes apparent that, viewed through the lens of confession, being human appears in a new light. The feeling of shame can be overcome through the new experience of fellowship. Evil no longer has to be excluded from perception. But it is precisely in this way that repentance, change of behaviour and mutual reconciliation become possible.","PeriodicalId":42487,"journal":{"name":"Stellenbosch Theological Journal","volume":"6 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-11-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139225447","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-11-28DOI: 10.17570/stj.2023.v9n4.a1
Joanna Tarassenko
This article presents a pneumatological reading of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s appeal to the phenomenon of musical resonance through his use of the metaphor of “polyphony” and related musical casts of mind. In so doing, it provides an alternative reading of Bonhoeffer’s late theology by establishing a connection between Letters and Papers from Prison and Ethics through his use of musical metaphors. In it I make two significant claims about Bonhoeffer’s use of musical metaphors in his late theology. First, that polyphony is a dynamic metaphor which Bonhoeffer discovers and utilises to express his understanding of the relationship between God and the world in Christ. I argue that the limitations of visual-spatial metaphors, which Bonhoeffer openly laments in Ethics, are overcome by his discovery of polyphony in Letters and Papers from Prison as a metaphor which conceptualises the relationship between God and the world (operating in a single realm or space) as well as preserving the distinction of each; in this respect, polyphony texturizes Bonhoeffer’s view of reality, carefully nuancing it. The way the metaphor functions for Bonhoeffer mirrors the way he employs the work of the Holy Spirit in his theology. Thus, it indicates that implicit in Bonhoeffer’s theological appeal to polyphony is a model of the agency of the Holy Spirit, so that in exploring polyphony a latent pneumatology in Bonhoeffer can be unearthed. Read in this way, polyphony is a potent metaphor for illumining the Spirit’s work as that which enables unity, distinction, and dynamic relationality between God and the world in the church. The article concludes by pointing to how a musico-pneumatology such as that which we find in Bonhoeffer can be further developed.
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Pub Date : 2023-11-28DOI: 10.17570/stj.2023.v9n4.a3
Kevin Lenehan
In his recent book Protestants (2017), historian Alec Ryrie argues that while Dietrich Bonhoeffer may have been “the bravest theologian of his generation”, the impact of his prison writings and his opaque vision of a “religionless Christianity” in a world come of age was disastrous for mainstream Protestantism in the United States in the second half of the twentieth century. Ryrie’s analysis of the trajectory of Western liberal Protestantism needs to be nuanced by a more critical and contextual reading of both cultural processes of pluralisation and Bonhoeffer’s prison writings. Still, Ryrie’s sweeping claim goes to the heart of the question about the “usefulness” of Bonhoeffer’s thought and witness for the future of Christian discipleship and engagement in an increasingly post-Christian and multi-religious world. Can Bonhoeffer’s legacy assist Christians to negotiate the delicate balance between identity as disciples of Christ within faith communities and solidarity with people of other faiths or no religion affiliation?
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