Description
About the book.
This is a reprint of the 1988 publication which is now out-of-print. The book was written while Albert Nolan was in hiding during the State of Emergency in South Africa. This volume includes reviews of the book used with permission from the South African Grace and Truth journal from 1990.
The author believes that in South Africa ‘the practice of the struggle is the practice of faith’, and to show this he reviews the central themes of the Christian faith as found in the Old Testament and the preaching of Jesus, the nature of sin and salvation, and of God’s action in the world. He also faces the dilemma of Christians who can no longer support the apartheid state but are uncertain where the liberation struggle will lead. Like his best-selling Jesus before Christianity, God in South Africa is a contextual theology, a theology rooted in the painful conversion of a church to the cause of liberation. It can be regarded, the author says, as a conversation between South African Christians, but out of that conversation comes a challenge to Christians everywhere to discover the meaning of the gospel, to find God, in their situation.
Albert Nolan OP, God in South Africa: The Challenge of the Gospel (ATF Press, 2024)
This profound book, written in the 1980s to guide those seeking to deploy the gospel message against the repressive and abhorrent South African apartheid regime, continues to speak powerfully to all peoples in all times and in all places. It continues to show how the gospels respond to the signs of the times anywhere that people are in crisis, providing the tools to build a contextualised and local theology that can preach the good news of God’s liberating power against all forms of injustice. Albert Nolan, South Africa’s Gustavo Gutierréz, revealed hope that God cares for and finds the poor and oppressed wherever they are. For my own community, the potential to construct a contextualised and local Ukrainian theology offers hope that the good news always challenges those who oppress and forever speaks liberation for those burdened by an unjust war and the despair found in its wake.
PT Babie
Priest of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, and Bonython Chair in Law and Professor of Law, Adelaide Law School, The University of Adelaide, Australia
About the author.
Albert Nolan was born in South Africa in 1934 and died in 2022. He entered the Dominican Order in 1954 and studied in South Africa and Rome. Since then he has lectured in seminaries and theological schools, has been engaged in pastoral work among the poor, and was for many years a university chaplain. In 1983 he was elected Master General of the Dominican Order in Rome but declined in order to return to his theological apostolate in South Africa. He was one of the founders of the Institute for Contextual Theology in Johannesburg.
