THE CHRISTIAN AFRIKANERS - The Works of F. N. Lee

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Educational Society of South Africa which they want to publish -- and another article on labour andreward for the South African Association of Christian Scholarship Bulletin; and a further critiqueof Professor Oberholzer's educational work; and also another article on contingency; and yetanother work -- and all of these just terribly pressing!"In any case, my hearty thanks to you for your part in the publication of my work on ChristianScholarship. I really do appreciate it. By the way, did you attend the Day of the Covenantcelebrations yesterday in Natal, and did you enjoy it? Hearty Christmas and New Year's wishes arehereby extended from my wife and I, to your wife and yourself. With hearty greetings, totallyyours, H.G. Stoker."P.S. Is your recently completed Doctor of Philosophy dissertation available yet? Who ispublishing it? I do wish you rich blessings with that work."Well, I am still waiting for Dr. Stoker to send me back his final corrected copy of my translation,together with his new introduction to it! But, of course, by now he is getting on toward ninety!Now Stoker was not the only philosopher in South Africa to bring out a corrective on the work ofDooyeweerd. There were others, including Professor G.H.T. Malan of the University of the OrangeFree State. He believed that the numerical sphere presupposes pre-numerical and numerableobjects.The previous Professor of Philosophy at the University of the Orange Free State, Dr. Venter, is notonly a firm advocate of Christian philosophy in general. He is also a proponent of the Christianhistory of philosophy in particular. His specialised studies of Thomas Aquinas (whom he radicallyopposes), and of John Calvin (whom he enthusiastically champions), also deserve a wide audience.Professor Venter sent me a lot of very useful material on Calvin, which I managed to incorporateinto my own book Calvin on the Sciences just before Venter died and went to be with the Lord.Venter was then succeeded by Professor Dr. Pieter de Bruyn Kock. He was kind enough to act asthe doctoral promoter of my Ph.D. on Communist Eschatology.Now Kock is a very pronounced and strong anti-Barthian theologian, as well as a first ratephilosopher. He started a massive eight-volume work on an introduction to Christian philosophy,which he proposed to call not "The Idea of the Philosophy of Law" (like Dooyeweerd) nor "ThePhilosophy of the Idea of Creation" as Stoker had done, but The Philosophy of the Idea ofRecreation -- to be centred round the cosmic work of the second Adam Jesus Christ. He differedrather sharply from Dooyeweerd. He did not believe that the school or the university were creationordinances -- but rather historical ordinances that developed later.Unfortunately, Kock died at a relatively young age -- round about sixty -- before he was able tocomplete this massive work. I told him before he died that I was looking forward to seeing thatwork because my own thought was to develop a Philosophy of the Idea of Covenant, if the Lordwould spare me. Here I would try to synthesise Herman Bavinck's Philosophy of the Idea ofRevelation; Abraham Kuyper's Philosophy of the Idea of Sphere-Sovereignty; Dooyeweerd'sPhilosophy of the Cosmonomic Idea; Stoker's Philosophy of the Idea of Creation; and Kock'sPhilosophy of the Idea of Recreation. He said: "Well, may the Lord be with you and enable you todo it." And now he is gone to glory -- with that work still incomplete!Kock sharply delineated the Philosophy of Dooyeweerd from that of Hepp, Stoker, F. Kuijper,Brummer and Anna Louise Conradie. He especially rejected the Philosophy of Van Peursen andLoen, which he regarded as syncretistic.
This Brummer just referred to, is another young South African Preacher-Philosopher who leftSouth Africa and settled in Holland. There he received an appointment at the University of Utrecht.He has written a rather impressive critique of Dooyeweerd -- in English, I am happy to say --entitled, Transcendental Criticism and Christian Philosophy.In this work, which was his doctoral dissertation, Brummer claims to detect the latent influence ofKantianism in Dooyeweerd's thought. In this work, he especially questions: the Dooyeweerdianview of time; also the Dooyeweerdian view of the relationship between theology and philosophy;and further the relationship between common sense and scientific knowledge. (So too, by the way,does Van Til -- in depth!)To Brummer, the Divine Logos or Word is the ultimate ground of everything. The Logos, theWord, is: the creative ground of all existence; the revelatory ground of all knowledge; theincarnative ground of all redemption; and the teleological ground of all consummation.Last, as we round off some of the major South African Calvinist thinkers in this period prior to theestablishment of the Republic of South Africa in 1961, we mention Professor Anna LouiseConradie. She trained under Professor Dr. Andrew H. Murray, the grandson of the great PreacherAndrew Murray, in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Cape Town (as I myself didtoo). She subsequently became Professor of Philosophy at the University of Natal.Dr. Anna Louise Conradie has tried to give an historical outline of the development of The Neo-Calvinistic Concept of Philosophy -- with special reference to the problem of communication. Bythe way, this work of hers has fortunately been published in the English language. It is a ratherexpensive book, but well worth study.In this work of hers, she discusses the problem of communication -- in Calvin, Kuyper, Bavinck,Woltjer, Hepp and especially Dooyeweerd. She analyses Dooyeweerd's thought -- and she contrastsit with the various immanentistic and Romish systems of modern philosophy. She concludes that ifa Christian philosophy is impossible -- then all philosophy is impossible!We saw a little earlier that Anna Louise Conradie is in agreement with Potgieter, in his criticism ofDooyeweerd. She even criticised Van Til at that time. Van Til, she said, has not seen (or did not in1940 see) the real danger pointed out by Dooyeweerd's critics such as Potgieter did at that time. Iftheology is controlled by the Dooyeweerdian philosophy formulated from Dooyeweerd's religiousa priori, theology is made subject not (as it should be) to the objective norm of Scripture, but to thesubjective religious experience of Dooyeweerd over which we have no control!At this point, we will pause. For next, we must launch out into the last phase of the development ofSouth African thought during the last two decades (1960-80). We shall then begin with an analysisof some of the greatest Afrikaner thinkers of this modern period in South Africa.
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THE CHRISTIAN AFRIKANERSA Brief His
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God richly bless the following lect
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There have always been, and always
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But the only one they both appeal t
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Now Zuidema was a very great Dutch
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Dutch churches at the Synod of Dord
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station -- to help the Dutch ships
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It is a country dedicated to freedo
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1760 -- there was more and more dis
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with the Dutch. Many moved farther
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said: "The British have placed our
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financed by White money. It is buil
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Famous Boer Generals, left to right
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Three: Unannihilated: the Resurrect
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(who had arrived in the country onl
Page 31 and 32: of success.I may add that White Sou
Page 33 and 34: General Beyers felt that those text
Page 35 and 36: Balfour Declaration. The gist of it
Page 37 and 38: Africa; treks on into the land both
Page 39 and 40: Four: The Eschatology of Victory in
Page 41 and 42: ide -- to use the instrumentality o
Page 43 and 44: Christian National Calvinist Public
Page 45 and 46: through constitutional process it h
Page 47 and 48: I guess the best way to describe Sm
Page 49 and 50: He was followed after his assassina
Page 51 and 52: So the Scots came. I am going to sp
Page 53 and 54: the Reformed Church in South Africa
Page 55 and 56: ook on Hebrews. But his greatest wr
Page 57 and 58: At that point, Du Plessis enquired
Page 59 and 60: Yet quite apart from this high view
Page 61 and 62: One last point. There is a tremendo
Page 63 and 64: African Republic in 1902, the Cape
Page 65 and 66: One of the most important Calvinist
Page 67 and 68: Pellissier, who wrote on music and
Page 69 and 70: perspective -- even while he minist
Page 71 and 72: ever encountered by the Whites in S
Page 73 and 74: Now the United States does not need
Page 75 and 76: majority of the White citizens are
Page 77 and 78: Now you will not find in any of Sto
Page 79 and 80: Finally, Stoker argues that the so-
Page 81: This then brings Stoker to another
Page 85 and 86: Man was to rejoice in this nature (
Page 87 and 88: enhanced. For, in the present, man
Page 89 and 90: he declared, riddled with the ungod
Page 91 and 92: Van der Waal is a very brilliant So
Page 93 and 94: World War II when he was hiding fro
Page 95 and 96: The Professor of Philosophy -- or I
Page 97 and 98: glory.There are also Christian psyc
Page 99 and 100: Then there are Christian criminolog
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Page 103 and 104: well known -- is being pioneered in
Page 105 and 106: people in South Africa. The South A
Page 107 and 108: nature and of human culture (Prover
Page 109 and 110: The parousia of Jesus Christ will i
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THE CHRISTIAN AFRIKANERS - The Works of F. N. Lee

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