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. 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 Gutierrez, 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.

Akenson brings to light critical similarities among three politically troubled nations: South Africa, Israel, and Northern Ireland.

The Universal Church of the Kingdom of God (UCKG), a church of Brazilian origin, has been enormously successful in establishing branches and attracting followers in post-apartheid South Africa. Unlike other Pentecostal Charismatic Churches (PCC), the UCKG insists that relationships with God be devoid of 'emotions', that socialisation between members be kept to a minimum and that charity and fellowship are 'useless' in materialising God's blessings. Instead, the UCKG urges members to sacrifice large sums of money to God for delivering wealth, health, social harmony and happiness. While outsiders condemn these rituals as empty or manipulative, this book shows that they are locally meaningful, demand sincerity to work, have limits and are informed by local ideas about human bodies, agency and ontological balance. As an ethnography of people rather than of institutions, this book offers fresh insights into the mass PCC movement that has swept across Africa since the early 1990s.

This goundbreaking volume explores, and challenges, the prejudice and discrimination that gay people experience within South African churches. Drawing from a broad and diverse base, these stories and essays suggest that 'heterosexism' is the problem.

On the morning of May 24, 1921, a force of eight hundred white policemen and soldiers confronted an African prophet, Enoch Mgijima, and some three thousand of his followers. Called the Israelites, they refused to leave their holy village of Ntabelanga, where they had been gathering since early 1919 to await the end of the world. While the Israelites maintained they were there to pray and worship in peace, the white authorities viewed them as illegally squatting on land that was not theirs. After many months of fruitless negotiations, the South African government sent an armed force to Bulhoek, a village in the Eastern Cape, to expel them. In the event that has come to be known as the Bulhoek massacre, police armed with rifles, machine guns, and cannons killed nearly two hundred Israelites wielding knobkerries, swords, and spears. In The Finger of God, Robert Edgar reveals how and why the Bulhoek massacre occurred. Edgar asks: Why did Mgijima prophesize that the end of the world was imminent, and why did he summon his followers to Ntabelanga? Why did the South African government regard the Israelite encampment as a threat? Examining this clash between a government and a millenial movement, Edgar considers the Bulhoek massacre both as a signal event in South African history and as an example of similar conflicts worldwide.

The role of Africans in the growth and process of Christianity in South Africa in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. In particular the book provides an insight into the role of writing and literacy in the church founded by the South African prophet, Isaiah Shembe, in 1910. The book provides a substantial, contextualising introduction which includes discussion of the church’s history and its position in contemporary South Africa, and weaves in discussion of the topics of literacy and modernity. The book then moves to the three documents, presented in their language of composition, Zulu and in an English translation. The three ‘books’, each from Shembe’s Nazareth Baptist Church, provide the reader with a fascinating insight into the growth and organisation of one of southern Africa’s most influential African Churches, and into the use and interpretation of the Bible by the church’s founder, Isaiah Shembe, and by church members. Central to the writings is the complex presence of Shembe, present both through his own words in the first book and, in the second book, through the memory of Meshack Hadebe, a member of the church in the 1920’s and 1930’s. The extracts in the third book provide a glimpse of the church’s hymnal and the unique religious poetry of the hymns, authored by Shembe.

African Christianity is not an imported religion but rather one of the oldest forms of Christianity in the world. In The Kingdom of God in Africa, Mark Shaw and Wanjiru M. Gitau trace the development and spread of African Christianity through its two-thousand year history, demonstrating how the African church has faithfully testified to the power and diversity of God’s kingdom. Both history students and casual readers will gain greater understanding of how key churches, figures and movements across the continent conceptualized the kingdom of God and manifested it through their actions. The only up-to- date, single-volume study of its kind, this book also includes maps and statistics that aid readers to absorb the rich history of African Christianity and discover its impact on the rest of the world.