J.A. van der Ven

Practical Theology: from Applied to Empirical Theology

In this article the history of practical theology is reconstructed from the perspective of its main problem: the relation between theory and praxis. The first part refers to the academic status of practical theology, interpreted as applied theology. This interpretation fails to solve the problem, as we shall see. The second part entails a proposal towards the re-interpretation of practical theology in terms of empirical theology. After a critical reflection upon the history of this term, already in use since the beginning of this century, the material and the formal object are described, including some methodological aspects of it.

Human Rights or Religious Rules

Drawing on historical inisights, systematic reflections and empirical data, this book offers a substantive understanding of the complex relationship between religion and human rights and of the empirical impact of Christianity and Islam on the attitudes toward human rights, i.e. a human rights culture.

Interreligious orientations among South African youth: Expressions of religious identity

In a religiously plural world it is important to ask how people of different faiths and with different religious identities can live justly and harmoniously together. In this article we take as point of departure that there is an inescapable link between a persons religious identity and his or her attitudes towards adherents of other religious. Against the background of a narrative understanding of religious identity, we explore three questions regarding the interreligious orientations of a sample of South African youth: What are the interreligious orientations of this sample of South African youth? How do they evaluate these interreligious orientations? What is the religious location of these interreligious orientations?

Images of Death as Perspectives in a Life Crisis

Images of death are reflections of ones own attitude to life, and in existential crises such as a suicide crisis, their meaning should therefore not be underestimated. This article describes the results of a research that has attempted to discuss attitudes, which people adopt towards death in times of a suicide crisis. The analysis of the data shows that death is looked upon from an immanentistic and religious viewpoint. Within this context the combination and the coexistence of the theistic and deistic image of God is striking, as well as the import of the deistic representation of death of the transition and of the faith in the immortality of the soul. The relevance of these two religious images of death is mainly found in the fact that they create a perspective beyond death for the assumption that there will be possibilities for modelling ones own identity.

Religious beliefs and ethnocentrism: A comparison between the Dutch and white South Africans

In 1990 the Dutch Reformed Church in South Africa denounced publicly the ethnocentric system of apartheid as sin. The question is whether this official concession implies that ethnocentrism and apartheid have disappeared in the conciousness of ordinary perople. In order to answer this question a select sample of white South Africans in the Pretoria region was investigated with regard to their attitudes concerning ethnocentrism and apartheid as well as their relation to the Christian faith and the church. For reasons of comparison the results of the research into an a-select sample of the Dutch population, which is known because of its relatively low degree of ethnocentrism, have been added to that.

Religious Liberty in Political Perspective

In this chapter, the author contributes to the defence of human rights, particularly religious liberty as one of the cornerstones of democracy. It draws on the work of perhaps the foremost political theorist of the 20th century, John Rawls. It also draws on the Jena period of Hegels thought on social and political philosophy. The chapter interprets Rawlss views on religion and religious liberty, democracy and human rights. It also endeavours to comment critically on the relation between religious liberty and the situation of religious minorities. The chapter deals with the following issues in four sections: religious liberty, a human right, dynamics of religious liberty, scope of religious liberty, and equal or unequal distribution of religious liberty based on empirical research among religious majorities and minorities. Keywords:Hegel; human rights; John Rawls; political philosophy; religious liberty

Religious Identity Formation. An Educational Approach.

Starting from the current debate regarding the aim of religious education, the article states this aim in terms of religious identity formation. With the help of Ricoeur’s narrative approach to identity formation, the process of religious identity formation is, first of all, described as a hermeneutic task. Next, the process of religious identity formation is described as an educational task. The authors posit that the formation of a religious identity calls for a specific educational approach: i.e., action learning. Subsequently, the value of this specific educational approach is demonstrated by using it to re-evaluate the effects of a religious education curriculum concerning the problem of theodicy. The analysis shows that the limited effects of this curriculum are due to a predominance of guided learning as opposed to action learning. This finding supports the main thesis of this article, that the formation of a religious identity calls for action learning as an alternative to guided learning.

The Legitimation of Parish Leadership

The article examines the sources of legitimacy of local church leadership against the background of the modernization of Western society. The empirical question as to the extent to which the forms of legitimation offered by the Catholic Church are endorsed by parish members at the grass-roots level, forms the point of departure for a discussion based on an empirical study carried out in Germany and the Netherlands. The assumption that modern and ecclesial thinking are interwoven in the consciousness of Catholics suggests that modern forms of legitimation will be more readily accepted than the traditional forms. The empirical results, however, clearly show that it is no longer possible to speak of a single source of legitimacy of church authority. While the Catholics surveyed expressed a preference for a church leadership that meets the criteria of modern society, they did not reject the traditional and even the charismatic foundation of local church authority. These results give cause to reflect on how the legitimation of parish leadership might be reconstructed so as to provide a firm foundation for the credibility and acceptance of the Church in a modem society.

Theodicy or cosmodicy: a false dilemma?

The central question in this article is whether the transcendent and immanent symbols employed to deal with suffering mutually exclude each other. With that question in mind, an investigation was conducted, among slightly more than one hundred and fifty core members of the church, into the presence of theodicy and cosmodicy symbols, as well as into their internal coherence and causal connections. To this, the question was connected whether and to what degree traditional theodicy symbols are combined with a bourgeois social and political position, and modern theodicy symbols, such as those offered by political theology, with a bourgeois-critical position.

Religious Rights for Minorities in a Policy of Recognition

Religion plays an important role in todays multicultural society, especially when it comes to religious rights for minorities. Granting these rights stems from an endeavour to transcend a politics of tolerance, even a politics of respect, and to treat them in terms of a politics of recognition. Assigning these rights implies that some principles need to be critically reflected upon: the individualistic interpretation of minority rights, the separationist interpretation of the separation between church and state, the secularist interpretation of religious freedom, and the uniformistic interpretation of the states legal unity. In granting minorities religious rights, one comes across the importance of their personal law, including marriage law and family law. To incorporate such personal law into the legal systems of Western society, one could apply the distinction between the domains of status demarcation, that refers to entering and belonging to a community, and property distribution, that relates to the rights and duties implicit in these social bonds. The former may be provided for by religious law, the later, by secular law. However, the question is whether marriage under religious law, and rights and duties under secular law can solve the problems women suffer from, especially in the case of polygyny.