Writing the Kingdom of God in South Africa

Abstract

John de Gruchy’s The Church Struggle in South Africa was a bold attempt to write the story of the kingdom of God in his native land. While it stood toward the beginning of his written work, the themes laid down in it have followed De Gruchy’s writings up to the present. They have also sketched the story of South Africa from the climax of the struggle to end Apartheid to the present travails to realize its promise. This article takes up the final chapter in that work, comparing it to another great theological attempt to write the kingdom of God: H. Richard Niebuhr’s The Kingdom of God in America. It follows that chapter through its disappearance in the third edition of The Church Struggle, to its re-emergence in The End is Not Yet. The article is especially interested in De Gruchy’s eschatological retrieval of Bonhoeffer’s tension between the ultimate and the penultimate, and in the question of God’s trinitarian reality shaping the world – and us as community of anticipation.