Browsing by Author "Mosala, Itumeleng J"

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    Biblical hermeneutics and black theology in South Africa
    (1987) Mosala, Itumeleng J
    This study seeks to investigate the use of the Bible in black theology in South Africa. It begins by judging the extent to which black theology's use of the Bible represents a clear theoretical break with white western theology. The use of concepts like the “Word of God", “the universality of the Universality of the Gospel", “the particularity of the Gospel”, “oppression and oppressors" and "the God of the Oppressed" in black theology, reveals a captivity to the ideological assumptions of white theology. It is argued that this captivity accounts for the current political impotence of black theology as a cultural weapon of struggle, especially in relation to the black working class struggle for iberation. Thus while it has been effective in fashioning a vision on liberation and providing a trenchant critique of white theology, it lacks the theoretical wherewithal to appropriate the Bible in a genuinely liberative way. This weakness is illustrated in the thesis with a critical appraisal of the biblical hermeneutics of especialiy two of the most outstanding and outspoken black theological activists in South Africa, Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Dr Allan Boesak. The fundamental weakness of the biblical hermeneutics of black theology is attributed to the social class position and commitments of black theologians. Occupying and committed to a petit bourgeois position within the racist capitalist social formation of South Africa, they share the idealist, theoretical framework dominant in this class. Thus in order for black theology to become an effective weapon of struggle for the majority of the oppressed black people, it must be rooted in the working class history and culture of these people. Such a base in the experiences of the oppressed necessitates the use of a materialist method that analyses the concrete struggles of human beings in black history and culture to produce and reproduce their lives within definite historical and material conditions. The thesis then undertakes such an analysis of the black struggle and of the struggles of biblical social communities. For this purpose a materialist analysis of the texts of Micah and Luke 1 and 2 and is undertaken. This is followed by an outline of a black biblical hermeneutical appropriation of the texts. It is concluded that the category of "struggle" is a fundamental hermeneutical tool in a materialist biblical hermeneutics of liberation. Using this category one can read the Bible backwards, investigating the questions of which its texts are answers, the problems of which its discourses are solutions. The point of a biblical hermeneutics of liberation is to uncover the struggles of which the texts are a product, a record, a site and a weapon. For black theology, the questions and concepts needed to interrogate the biblical texts in this way must be sought in the experiences of the most oppressed and exploited in black history and culture. What form such an exercise may take is illustrated by a study of the book of Micah and Luke 1 and 2. Two significant findings follow.The class and ideological contradictions of black history and culture necessitate the emergence of a plurality of black theologies of liberation. Similar contradictions in the Bible necessitate a plurality of contradictory hermeneutical appropriations of the same texts.
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    A critique of the use of the "Exodus" metaphor by feminist theology
    (1991) Mathews, Jeanette; Mosala, Itumeleng J
    This paper presents a study of the Exodus tradition of the Hebrew Bible with a critique from the perspective of a Feminist Liberation theology. It is recognised that Liberation theologies in general have adopted the theme of Israel's Exodus from Egypt as a paradigm for liberation from the particular forms of oppression being addressed by that liberation perspective (for example, Black theology, Third World theology, Feminist theology). The appropriateness of such a use of the tradition is discussed for the broad category of Liberation theologies as well as for Feminist theology specifically. We have chosen to view the Exodus tradition as a metaphor. The importance of a metaphorical approach to theology will be discussed in the first chapter. Briefly, we acknowledge that metaphor is an appropriate category for religious language, since it uses what is known in order to describe the unknown. This is most clear in descriptions of the divine: in the case of the Exodus metaphor God may be described as "the Liberator of the oppressed". Likewise, the Exodus narrative may be considered a metaphor of liberation. However, a metaphorical perspective reminds us that religious language is limited since a metaphor cannot be fully equated with the category being described. A further limitation is noted whereby a two-way relationship is established in metaphorical speech, so that the metaphor is given validity by that which it describes. From the point of view of Feminist theology, such limitations are profoundly important, since a refusal to recognise them results in irrelevance or idolatry. Our second and third chapters explore the use of the Exodus metaphor by Feminist Liberation theology and the limitations of the metaphor, respectively.
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    The role of imperial decrees in Ezra-Nehemiah : an ideological and exegetical analysis
    (1995) Richards, Ruben Robert; Mosala, Itumeleng J
    This dissertation is an ideological and exegetical analysis of the role of the imperial decrees of Persia in Ezra- Nehemiah (hereafter E-N). The imperial decrees, to date, have not been considered to play any significant role in both the compilation and the interpretation of E-N because they have been analysed, almost exclusively, in terms of their literary form and character and not in terms of their political-ideological function within the E-N narrative. Consequently, an alternative approach to the E-N text seemed necessary. This study develops a literary- ideological methodological paradigm which has its primary interest in the ideological character and function of a text; a mode of reading the text which gives expression to the nexus of political ideology and religio-cultural (i.e. theological) concerns within a single narrative complex, such as E-N. Thus, matters relative to politics, power, and ideology, and the manner in which they are imprinted on the production of a text, become extremely important. The application of this methodology to E-N yields two conclusions which need special mention. One conclusion is that the imperial decrees, on a literary-structural level, function as the organising centre for the tri-partite narrative design of E-N. In fact, this work demonstrates that the imperial decrees, not only drive the literary production of E-N, but also provide the narrative its ideological cohesion. The second conclusion of this study is that the imperial decrees, more than any other aspect of E-N, facilitates an adequate decoding of the political and conflict discourse inherent in E-N. By refocusing E-N research toward an appreciation of the centrality of the decrees, the dissertation brings into focus, rather sharply, the symbiotic relationship between official Persian colonial documents on the one hand, and the religio-cultural text of E- N, on the other, by demonstrating that there exists a dialectical relationship between the imperial decrees, and the E-N narrative in which they are set. The religio-cultural text, E-N, lends religio-cultural legitimacy to the political decrees of the colonial empire, Persia, while the imperial decrees in turn provide political, military and economic authority and legitimacy to the Golah-led reconstruction of post-Babylonian Palestine. Such a symbiotic relationship illustrates the ideological collusion of the E-N text with Persian colonial ideology. Finally, this study, by virtue of its focus on the role of the imperial decrees in E-N, lays the necessary foundation for further and more in depth exegetical analyses of the E-N literature in terms of an appreciation for those forces (e.g. political, ideological, religious, economic, cultural) which impact its literary production in the context of Persian colonial domination.
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    The rural-urban dialectic in pre-monarchic Israel : Israel vis-a-vis the Canaanites and the Philistines, ca. 1200 to 1020 B.C.E
    (1987) Germond, Paul Andre; Mosala, Itumeleng J
    Using a historical materialist model of the rural-urban dialectic, this study is an analysis of the rural-urban articulation in Palestine c. 1200-1020 B.C.E., with particular reference to the aetiology of the conflict between the Israelite tribes and the Canaanites and Philistines. The model of the rural-urban dialectic which is developed in this thesis, posits that the relations between rural societies and urban societies in the ancient Near East were essentially antagonistic. Urban centers were sites of consumption rather than production. They were parasitic upon their rural hinterlands, extracting the produce of the village peasantry by means of enforced tributary relations. This extortion of the surplus product generated the conflict between the inhabitants of the rural areas and the city-dwellers. The resistance to such oppression by the peasantry engendered the class struggle in the ancient Near East, which took the form of conflict between the tribute exacting class, located in the cities, and the agrarian peasant class, located in the villages. The major thesis of this study is that the relations between the Israelite tribes and the Canaanites and Philistines can best be explained in terms of the rural-urban dialectic, which means that the conflict between the Israelite tribes and their urban neighbours was a manifestation of the antagonistic relations between rural and urban societies in the ancient Near East. The Canaanite and the Philistine societies were urban societies which existed as such by virtue of their ability to maintain tribute-extracting relations with the peasantry of their rural hinterlands. The Israelites, a tribal peasant society, were subject to this form of oppression to the extent to which they came under the orbit of Canaanite or Philistine power. The aetiology of the sustained conflict which pre-monarchic Israel experienced with the Canaanites and the Philistines lay in the relations of production imposed on them - relations which belong to the economic base of society - rather than in the realm of the superstructure, which includes the religious, political and ethnic aspects of a society. This conflict was expressed in religious, political and even ethnic terms, but had its source in the economic relations that existed between rural and urban societies in the ancient Near East.