Time:
3:00pm Central Europe & Central Africa (2:00pm UK & Western Africa, 4:00pm East Africa and Eastern Europe, 9:00am USA Eastern, 6:30pm India Time)
Meeting Theme:
The Kairos Document, a prophetic challenge to the church in apartheid South Africa, offered a powerful critique of the ways theology was being used—both overtly and covertly—to uphold and justify the racist apartheid status quo. While deeply rooted in the South African context of the 1980s, its analysis of “state theology” and “church theology” continues to carry profound relevance across contexts today.
Building on the Kairos Document, Thandi Gamedze has unpacked the specific mechanisms at work within these forms of theology in order to develop a broader analytical framework for recognizing and understanding “status quo theologies” more generally. She then applies this framework to another contemporary example: Christian Zionism, examining how it functions theologically and ideologically to justify Israel’s occupation of Palestine.
While this analysis of Christian Zionism is significant in its own right, the wider value of the framework lies in its ability to help us discern the many forms of status quo theology emerging in our world today—frameworks that use theological language and imagination to legitimize domination, exclusion, and injustice.
In this session, Thandi will introduce the analytical tool developed from the Kairos Document’s critique of state and church theology, demonstrate how it can be applied through the case study of Christian Zionism in a South African conservative Christian media context, and invite conversation about how these dynamics continue to shape churches and societies globally.
Facilitators:
