Hoe my gedagtewreld verander het: van ewige waarhede tot gekontekstualiseerde metafore

Abstract

My theological work during a period of approximately four and a half decades has gone through three phases of different theological methodologies. The first phase had to do with the methodology of theological principles derived from the scholasticism of post-Reformation orthodoxy in which the Bible became the depository of eternal truths. In the second phase I discovered that the Reformed faith contained more than the acceptance of a number of eternal truths, but that it is also a way of dealing with the biblical message in a dynamic process of hermeneutical contextualising. The latter method provided a far more incisive way of treating the South African apartheid situation from a theological perspective. The condemnation of apartheid as a heresy and the acceptance of the Belhar Confession must be seen within the parameters of this method. The final stage combines the method of historical contextualisation with the idea of the metaphor as a typical language phenomenon in which we try to express the inexpressible.