The Old Testament and Christian Spirituality - International Voices in ...

viii Introduction
various colonialisms—on the receiving end, that is. By the time the
full implications of historical criticism reached the highly active
broader theological community of scholars on the southern-most
tip of Africa, much of the modernist assumptions that had initially
underpinned it implicitly had been appreciated and pointed out.
Bible scholars who cared to do so could thus fully employ such
exegetical approaches without losing the faith, which is ever the
great fear in church and some academic circles in South Africa.
It is thus not all that surprising that, to my knowledge, the first
professorial chair in Biblical Spirituality has been established at a
South African university, namely at the University of the Free
State in Bloemfontein. The incumbent, Pieter de Villiers, and my
recently retired colleague for Christian Spirituality at the
University of South Africa, Celia Kourie, both initially New
Testament scholars, have been instrumental in establishing the
broader discipline of Christian Spirituality and the narrower
discipline of Biblical Spirituality within the country and outside its
borders.
In acknowledgement of their giant efforts in this regard, I
dedicate this volume to them.
These South African initiatives found much international
nourishment from the Titus Brandsma Institute for Spirituality at
Radboud University, Nijmegen, the Netherlands, in particular from
Kees Waaijman, Jos Huls and Huub Welzen there, and from such
eminent figures in the field as David Perrin in Canada (and through
him the Society for the Study of Christian Spirituality) and Sandra
Schneiders in the United States of America. At different times and
in different ways, words of interest and encouragement on their
part have meant—in a somewhat more literal way than is the
customary use of this phrase—the world to us, as we develop these
disciplines in South Africa.
To colleague Petra Dijkhuizen, my thanks and admiration for
her work on the technical aspects of this text. My thanks too to