Includes bibliographical references (p. 255-260). / The primary research question of this dissertation is: What was the particular form that Christendom took on at the Cape during the formative period of the Dutch East Indies Company (VOC) rule and how did it shape the Dutch Reformed Church as established church in this locale? This question was prompted by my hunch that the Dutch Reformed Church at the Cape and in the later South Africa has since VOC rule displayed signs of regarding itself as an important ecclesiastical partner in a Christian establishment. This was evidenced in the development of the Church2 into a quasi-established position (during British rule and thereafter), and the Volkskerk of the Afrikaner people and nationalism. In post-VOC times Christendom at the Cape Colony and in South Africa has also undergone various transformations. The answer to the primary research question can therefore contribute to our understanding of the contemporary character of Christendom in South Africa and the Church. A secondary research question is how the development of Christendom at the Cape can help us understand the phenomenon of Christendom itself. In order to answer these questions I embarked on a critical and comparative study of the concept of Christendom in various contexts and the position of the church within them - postChristian Europe, post-Vatican II Latin America, and post-1960's North America. In the light of this study an archival and theologically critical analysis was made of Christendom at the Cape, mainly from the vantage point of the Dutch Reformed Church. The findings were categorised under three headings: Church privilege; the control of state and culture over Church and gospel; and, the freedom of the Church. The primary research question yielded a picture of the Church as inheritor of, and involuntary partner in a Christendom that was the result of a colonial venture of capitalist upper middle class Dutch Reformed merchants. The Church imbibed the habit of being co-opted by the powers that be for the sake of material and social benefit and for the sake of promoting its evangelistic, diaconal, and educational charges. In the process it grew accustomed to compromise the integrity of its own faith and order and ultimately its public witness.

The situation in the Letter to the Romans is one of dissension between Judean and gentile Christians. This dissension is deep seated because it occurs along the fault lines of Judean ethnic identity. Here, Judean Christians define their ethnic identity in terms of possessing the Mosaic law. Two factors aggravate this dissension. First, ethnic identity resists changes. Second, the audience is situated within the Mediterranean agonistic culture where honour is the most sought after limited good. This moves Judean Christians to use the Mosaic law to gain honour from gentile Christians. From a Judean emic perspective, the Mosaic law gains them righteousness. This righteousness is not only a social marker. More importantly, it is a socio-ethical construct that seeks to gain them honour in the eyes of the significant other, God. Consequently, gentile Christians are considered as inferior by Judean Christians. To alleviate this dissension, Paul uses the rhetoric of Abraham's trust (faith) that takes a two-pronged approach. He first undermines the Mosaic law as a means for Abraham to attain a worldwide fatherhood that makes Judeans Abraham's descendants. Paul next explains how trust in God gains Abraham a worldwide fatherhood so that both Judean and gentile Christians can become descendants of Abraham. In this way, Judean Christians' boast toward gentile Christians, and hence, dissension between these two groups are removed.

Bibliography: p. 229-245. / This thesis defines conversion as a process of change management. Individuals and groups mobilise resources and formulate strategies for individual identity and group formation. Strategies are also formulated to manage the process of change for members. In the research done among two churches, one conventionally classified as African indigenous and the other classified as mainline, two models of conversion emerged, the crisis model at St John's and the growth model at the Reformed Presbyterian Church (RPCSA). In the crisis model individuals join the group because of some crisis in their lives, e.g., illness or misfortune. The healing practices and rituals serve to manage and mediate the crisis for individuals. Healing is at the heart of the recruitment strategy at St John's and other African Indigenous Churches (AICs). It is through hearing about the efficacy of the healing powers of the leader that people are attracted to the church. On the other hand, the growth model as represented by the RPCSA, is about organic growth and development where new members are mostly recruited among the children of members. Children are groomed from baptism through Sunday school and confirmation classes to membership in full communion. For them conversion is a process of growth and development, where they keep on learning all the time about their faith and who they are. In scholarship the AICs have always been treated ethnographically while, on the other hand, the mainline churches have been treated historically. However, this thesis is a comparative study of the AIC and a mainline church with a special emphasis on their conceptions of conversion. The two churches are both African and Christian. They each draw from both these resources for self-definition. Christianity has become part of the South African religious landscape. None of the members in the two churches consider it as an alien or foreign religion but they consider it as an indigenous one. The two models mobilise resources and formulate strategies for self-definition and what it means to be human in a hostile environment.

Bibliography: leaves 333-354. / This thesis engages a multi-disciplinary theoretical approach to identifying, analysing, and interpreting discourse relating to the feminine and the maternal found at the intersection of psychoanalysis, feminism, and religion. The study explores embodiment, gender, and the sacred as expressed in symbolic representations of the mother and the institution of motherhood in patriarchy. I have therefore drawn on Freudian and post-Freudian theories, gender analysis, feminist critical analysis, and classical Hindu goddess myth to discern ways in which sacred images of the mother serve to reinforce the oppression of women on the one hand and can be transformed to provide empowering symbols for women's lived reality on the other. Theory of sacred space is also employed, particularly with regard to the human production of the sacred through the contested politics of sacred space.

Bibliography: p. 265-281. / The aim of this dissertation is to recover the significance of the humanity of Christ for our redemption. This involves exploring ways in which the issue of Christ's humanity has been dealt with in the past, identifying both shortcomings of previous Christological models and elements that can be retrieved for a contemporary paradigm.

This thesis puts forward the argument that the efficacy of ideas that have an impact on human subjects, causing them to act or behave in particular, noticeable ways, such as religion and ideology, is a product of the process of the necessary social labour involved in the production, circulation, exchange and consumption of symbolic property. Symbolic property is itself a product of the set-apart sacred, which is a basic, primary, socially constructed category that is strategically deployed in systems for the appropriation, expropriation, ownership, control and management of all property, whether material or symbolic. Socially effective ideas are expressed symbolically, whether they are signs of material, or real objects, or of imaginary things. It is further argued that to better comprehend these systems for managing the symbolic property, a critique of the political economy of the set-apart sacred must be developed. In developing this argument a literature review was conducted, primarily of structuralist and Marxist social theory, but also of key texts in the study of religion, political economy and of social theory more generally general. In the course of this review arguments to defend this hypothesis are developed and the critique of these arguments and the theory behind them also developed. Ideology, the fetish and money, three crucial categories of the set-apart sacred, are considered in terms of their function within the political economy of the sacred. Conclusions reached include the argument that religion as a category needs to be set aside and the set-apart sacred utilized as a pivotal concept in the study of religion, politics and the economy. Historical materialism, it is also concluded, has many flaws and weaknesses; including idealism, economism and a productivist bias, that make it essential to re-think and to re-materialise the methodology. The product of this work is a unique conversation between two schools of though often thought to stand in opposition to one another, namely, Durkheimian social theory and Marxist historical materialism. In the course of this argument, a materialist definition and theory of the setapart sacred is developed and a re-materialised historical materialist methodology is also proposed. These two theoretical premises are utilised to consider how systems for managing the set-apart sacred function.

Bibliography: leaves 223-241. / This thesis explores the role of multicultural counselling in nation-building in South Africa, using Islamic counselling and psychotherapy as a research case study. It merges a number of seemingly disparate disciplines in an innovative analysis of post-Apartheid social reconstruction. Culture, counselling, politics and religion converge and embrace areas of enquiry like Islam, diversity and identity studies, religio-cultural healing, gender studies, democracy, and human and social transformation.

Bibliography: leaves 297-317. / 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.

Includes bibliographical references. / In this study, I examine the methodological foundations of neo-modernist thought in Indonesia, focussing, in particular, on the thought of the contemporary Islamic intellectual, Abdurrahman Wahid. In discussing this newly established form of Islamic thinking, I analyse the contentious issue of the relation between state and organized religion within the context of pre- and post-independence Indonesia. Abdurrahman argues, through the articulation of a socio-cultural approach, that the antagonistic relationship between state and Islam can be overcome. By focussing on this controversial question and the methodology of Indonesian neo-modernist thinking, I examine the potential of Abdurrahman's religio-political thought to address the current predicament of the Muslim community in Indonesia. Abdurrahman's approach, which both attempts to reconcile the relationship between state and Islam and reinterpret Islamic teachings within the context of modern challenges, is, however, incapable of producing a genuine reconstruction of contemporary Islamic thought. In illustrating this assertion, I employ the historicist understanding of the Islamic heritage - al-Turath - in an attempt to contribute towards the development of an Islamic awakening discourse. I demonstrate that historical analyses can unearth the epistemological and ideological contents of the Islamic legacy, which has shaped the consciousness of the modern Muslim mind. It is concluded that the recovery of the greatness of Islamic civilization can only be achieved through a historicist understanding of the epistemological structure of the Islamic heritage.

While many scholars have used classical rhetoric for the interpretation of 1 Corinthians, others have proposed alternate methods for the same purpose. The problem with these methods is that they are not based on a closer reading of Paul, rather they are based on different flavors of the rhetorical system and sociological theories. My own approach to this problem is to look at the text of 1 Corinthians with an eye for methodology. A careful analysis of the 1 Corinthian passages yields Paul's rhetorical methods that are different to the classical rhetoric and modern scholars' attempts to find new rhetorical methods. The rhetoric in 1 Corinthians is unique because in every significant issue Paul addresses, he uses a Christ centered response. As such, it calls for a recognition of a Christ centered rhetoric, thus the name Christ Rhetoric. This rhetoric is used often enough in 1 Corinthians to be formalized into a rhetorical/interpretive methodology with its own structure, topoi, and argumentative methods. This resultant methodology is then applied to 1 Corinthians 15:1-34 as a case study.