Message from the Head of Department

Welcome to Department of Systematic and Historical Theology! Our Department is comprised of broadly three theological disciplines: Systematic Theology, Historical Theology and Christian Ethics. Since 2018, our department also acts as the “hub” for the discipline of Spirituality. Our academic staff team is made up by a variety of diverse lecturers, all specialists in their respective fields. In our Department, “where you speak” from is important to us. This implies a recognition of each student and associate’s positionality and intersectionality. We have a history of academic excellence and international collaboration, and focus on a number of key themes:

• Systematic Theology as a grammar of faith: This relates to how we confess God, understand our relationship and responsibility in the world to God and each other, how we understand the role and identity and unity of the Church, and articulate grace and salvation. This includes our stories of faith and how we understand what it means to be human in the face of God on the African continent; 
• The relationship between power and knowledge construction: This relates to decoloniality, and postcoloniality, and the content of a critical hermeneutics;
• Historical Theology: This relates to a critical understanding of history itself, whose voices are included in understanding that history, and how the discipline of theology itself has developed. In our Department, there is also a special focus that includes South African church history and church polity;
• Theological ethics: This pertains to the moral responsibility and societal participation of Christians in the public sphere as well as an ethical response of theology to technology, economics, power, and environmental and gender related matters;
• Other contemporary themes: the relationship between science and theology/ religion, theology and sustainable development, women’s theology, the Fourth Industrial Revolution, being spiritual while doing research and public theology.

Our staff are experienced supervisors and we look forward to be involved with you, our next generation of change makers! We encourage creative and critical research.

Please reach out to me or one of our staff members in the Department if you have any further questions.

Prof Tanya van Wyk (HoD)