Article Sidebar
Published:
Aug 11, 2021Keywords:
Article Details
The author(s) retain copyright on work published by AOSIS unless specified otherwise.
Licensing and publishing rights
Author(s) of work published by AOSIS are required to grant AOSIS the unlimited rights to publish the definitive work in any format, language and medium, for any lawful purpose. AOSIS requires journal authors to publish their work in open access under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) licence.
Read more here: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
The authors retain the non-exclusive right to do anything they wish with the published article(s), provided attribution is given to the applicable journal with details of the original publication, as set out in the official citation of the article published in the journal. The retained right specifically includes the right to post the article on the authors’ or their institution’s websites or in institutional repositories.
Previously published work may have been published under a different licence. We advise the community that if they would like to reuse the work to consult the applicable licence at article level.
Main Article Content
The Bible, theology and the Dutch Reformed Church in South Africa 1920–2020
Izak J.J. Spangenberg
Abstract
Professor Johannes du Plessis (1868–1935) of the Theological Seminary at Stellenbosch was fascinated by the results of the historical-critical research into the Bible. He acquainted his students and readers of the journal Het Zoeklicht with the results of this way of studying the Bible. However, in 1928, he was accused of heresy for cherishing views not aligned with the reformed confessions of faith. After 2 years and many meetings, he was dismissed as the professor. Being convinced that the Dutch Reformed Synod did not act in good faith, he took his case to the High Court and won. Almost a century later, the General Synod of the Dutch Reformed Church (DRC) once again had to defend a resolution in the High Court. This time it concerned gay marriages and the ordination of people with a homosexual orientation as elders and ministers. The DRC again lost its case and had to retract the resolution of the Special General Synod held in 2016. The underlying issue in both cases is the doctrine of Scripture. Since the Du Plessis case, the DRC has struggled to come to terms with the historical-critical methods of reading and studying the Bible and to formulate a doctrine of Scripture aligned with it. Had it embraced the new way of reading and studying the Bible which emerged in the late 19th and the early decades of the 20th century, its history of support for the apartheid policy and the almost homophobic resolutions concerning gay members might have looked differently.
Contribution: This historical overview on how the Bible has been used in the Dutch Reformed Church (DRC) the past century (1920–2020) highlights the problems which the Bible creates when it is not read as a document from a different time and culture.
