Scriptura: Journal for Biblical, Theological and Contextual Hermeneutics

The Role of the Church in Africa in Helping to Avert National Conflicts from Escalating into Violence

2025-07-09T02:10:30+00:00

Since the 20th century, churches have significantly influenced national reconciliation following catastrophic events. Religious leaders, activists, theologians, and scholars have historically initiated and facilitated reconciliation efforts, including national truth and reconciliation commissions. However, there has been limited focus on proactive measures to prevent conflicts from escalating into catastrophes. Through a thematic analysis of qualitative documents, the article highlights that churches in Africa have frequently played a limited role in preventing socio-economic and political tensions from escalating into devastating crises. This article aims to evaluate the Church’s role in helping to prevent national conflicts from worsening. By integrating, analysing and interpreting findings from an extant body of literature with a view to show evidence at a meta-level, this article contributes to discourse on the Church and Peacebuilding and will serve as a useful resource for future national case studies on the role of the Church in helping to avert national conflicts from escalating into a catastrophe.

Reimagining Tithing in the Selected New Prophetic Churches in South Africa: a Social Scientific Approach

2025-04-22T18:22:06+00:00

The new prophetic churches in South Africa and elsewhere in the continent practice giving. There are many aspects to the concept of giving, such as tithing, seeding, offerings, and so forth. Members of the new prophetic churches are expected to give a tenth of their income as an obligation of their membership. In current practice, the clergy are the main beneficiaries of tithes in the selected new prophetic churches. This article reimagines the practice of tithing in these churches through social-scientific theory. The article argues that the proceeds of tithes should not only benefit the pastors but also the rest of the congregants, particularly those who are living in poverty and the marginalised. This is achieved by introducing the practice of tithing from a biblical and historical point of view. The article also outlines the practices of tithing in Pentecostalism and applies the same in new prophetic churches in South Africa. The aim of the article is to demonstrate that tithing has the potential to benefit society and deal with social ills such as poverty.

How do Religious Icons Read-and-Write?

2025-05-14T02:25:12+00:00

This contribution starts off with a broad understanding of icons and their communication, and the implications this has for religious discourse today. The focus then moves to icons within the Christian Orthodox traditions to indicate aspects of the interaction of text, image and presence. The final part returns to the implication of “seeing” icons for reading texts and hence for the possibility of again in our age encountering God in texts. Analysing the communicative dynamics of icons from the Reformed strand of Protestant Christianity, a tradition which exhibits a stronger inclination to biblical hermeneutics than to icons as operative faith impulses, combines these two interpretative traditions as a service to the unfolding post-secular intellectual and societal climate unfolding internationally.

Hope from a Linear Reading of Lamentations

2025-06-27T08:51:18+00:00

This article investigates whether a linear reading of the book of Lamentations is able to produce the same results as a concentric reading. A number of scholars have argued that a concentric reading of the book of Lamentations results in a chiastic structure that places Lamentations 3 at the centre. The central part is anchored on the words of hope uttered by the גבר. Besides the concentric reading of the text, one may opt for a linear reading of the text. It is observed in this article that if one opts for a linear reading, three of the five laments end with an imprecation. Two of the five laments end with a prayer. Such a conclusion of the laments shows a hopeful ending rather than a doubtful ending. It is therefore argued that the hopeful tone from a concentric reading can still be found from a linear reading of the text of Lamentations.

Trauma Theory and Theological Engagement: An Appraisal on Trends in Trauma Hermeneutics

2025-05-20T03:30:39+00:00

Studies on trauma theory and its significance to biblical hermeneutics are largely unknown in Africa, especially in the West African context. But due to recent sad events of conflicts and violence, trauma is now being explored for possible engagement in biblical and practical theological scholarship. This essay is an appraisal on the crucial problem of trauma studies in an African context, from theological and pastoral perspectives. Certain issues have been highlighted as the background that leads to trauma studies in the history of the modern world and even in modern African contexts. The contribution that this essay provides is mainly in terms of introducing its readers to the possible meaning(s) of trauma, the various trends and types of trauma, as well as some of the useful materials and theological perspectives on engaging trauma theory. Thus if this study further generates more concern and interest in engaging the African human condition of trauma from more rigorous/critical theological, psychological and pastoral perspectives, with the possible aim of overcoming it, toward a state of good healing and the restoration of human dignity, then the aim of this essay will have been achieved.

Biblical Hermeneutics as a Site of Struggle: South African Sites of Contestation in the Late 1980s and Early 1990s

2025-06-25T12:12:00+00:00

‘Hermeneutics’, or the theory of the interpretation of texts, was a substantive component of much biblical scholarship in the 1980 and 1990s. Many articles or essays would begin with a definition of ‘hermeneutics’. Few, however, would be explicit about their own ‘theory of the interpretation of texts’, preferring to define ‘hermeneutics’ and then continue as if their own theory of the interpretation of texts was self-evident. Significantly, South African Black Theology, particularly in its second phase (in the late 1980s), was explicit about its theory of the interpretation of text. Situating itself within this trajectory, the Ujamaa Centre for Community Development and Research has attempted to be explicit about its hermeneutics since its inception in the late 1980s. This article locates the hermeneutic trajectory of the Ujamaa Centre within the formative hermeneutic debates in the late 1980s and early 1990s, drawing on the work of South Africans like Welile Mazamisa (whose work I along with other colleagues celebrate; see 2025-HTS: Honouring Prof Welile Mazamisa: The Reader, the Text, and Two Horizons), Bernard Lategan, Gunther Wittenberg, Jonathan Draper, Itumeleng Mosala, Takatso Mofokeng, and others. The Ujamaa Centre was fortunate at the time, in the early 1990s, in having the inclusive space of Bernard Lategan’s yearly Consultation on Contextual Hermeneutics, facilitated by the Centre for Contextual Hermeneutics at Stellenbosch University, as well as the inclusive publication practice of the journal Scriptura, which published the work of this Consultation and related biblical hermeneutic work. This yearly workshop identified biblical (and theological) hermeneutics as its core focus. My article tracks these formative conversations, reflecting on how this yearly workshop and Scriptura provided the safe space to be overt about the Ujamaa Centre’s emerging theory of the interpretation of texts.