Images of God in the South African Kairos Document (1985)

Abstract

The South African Kairos Document (KD) was written, signed and published in 1985 by an ecumenical group of theologians and concerned laity. In 2025, the KD is commemorating four decades since its publication. This article explored the images of God in the KD, which has not been done before in any academic publication. It furthermore attempted to understand these images against the background of that time by comparing them with the God images of two other documents of the same time, the Belhar Confession (BC) of the (then) Dutch Reformed Mission Church (DRMC) and the Kerk en samelewing or Church and Society (CS) of the Dutch Reformed Church (DRC). This study found: (1) In KD and the BC, God is portrayed by means of present tense verbs – as active, intervening, taking sides and correcting. In Church and Society, God is passively caught up in noun constructions, such as ‘the Kingdom of God’. When God is used in conjunction with a verb, the verb is in the past tense, referring to God’s actions in the Bible. (2) In all three documents, God is portrayed as transcendental, but in KD and the BC, God is portrayed as immanent—as co-suffering with the oppressed. (3) All three documents portray God as male. (4) KD and the BC portray God mainly in terms of the contextual issues of the time, such as justice, peace and reconciliation, using various strands of liberation theology. CS uses salvation history and a theology of predestination to determine God’s will for present times, arguing that God’s will has never changed for his chosen people since biblical times. (5) While KD and the BC refer to God in terms of the New-Testament God of love and justice, CS often refers to the God of the Old Testament.
Contribution: All three documents show a preference to refer to God rather than to Jesus Christ who is only mentioned in reference to reconciliation.