I have recently been directed to Raphael's Vatican fresco Scuola di Atene (Figure 1), within which an assembly of classic Greek philosophers are depicted. Centrally placed are the two figures who have whispered along in practically every argument in Western(ised) societies over the past 24 centuries: Plato and Aristotle. Pointedly, Plato, the idealist, gestures upwards – there lies his essence (the book he bears is his, on the cosmos). Aristotle, the realist, gestures towards his surroundings – there lies his commitments (on his part, his book is on ethics; cf. Caputo 2006:12–13). As teacher and student at odds, Plato and Aristotle signify the ever-present dichotomy in Christian Theology: In this presentation, academic disciplines are indicated by means of capitalisation.¹ between heaven and earth,² soul and body, principle and practice, love for God and/or love for humanity,³ the spiritual and the material, the possible and the actual – where does first emphasis fall? In the wake of millennia of the Platonic-Aristotelian dichotomy into which the early Christian religion was fully brought,⁴ all Western(ised) religious thought has been (un) balanced.

It is this tension, still, that lies at the heart of many recent theological discussions in South Africa (as elsewhere), in one of which I have been participating. However, given the passions – the personal, political, social, theological and (perhaps not always fully aware) philosophical commitments – involved, the representations that have characterised this debate have not always been fair. The recent conceptual enlargements of the by now foundational sociological concept of social capital (cf. Gelderblom 2014)⁵ to extend also to religious or spiritual capital may prove helpful in illuminating this situation. This concept cluster may well provide an intellectual framework for – the intention here – advancing this South African debate beyond its present parameters.

In order to sketch this picture below, firstly, the noted conceptual extension from social capital to religious or spiritual capital will be traced. Secondly, the pertinent theological debate is to be outlined, both in its broader and its more specific dimensions. Lastly, the latter is recast by means of the social and religious or spiritual capital conceptual framework to indicate that an inaccurate characterisation of both the self and the other serves two matters poorly in (South) Africa: the tasks of Theology and – in actuality one of these tasks – of attending to the problems of social inequalities.

The language of ‘capital’ has become a handy way to refer to what may activate human agents in order to reach certain desired outcomes within society. It is handy not only because such a term fits well within societies dominated by market economies and therefore the concept almost naturally ‘rings true’⁶ but also because the metaphor (Urban 2003:354–389) of ‘capital’ is pliable enough to be employed in different, broadly related yet, on closer scrutiny, quite distinct ways.⁷ The association between society and faith has, of course, long been recognised: in the ancient world as intrinsically unified, in the modern world as at least conceptually distinct (see the famous historical analysis of Taylor 2007; cf. Berger & Hefner 2003:1). However, this complementarity has not always been formulated in equally complimentary fashion (with the masters of this narrative including Feuerbach, Nietzsche, Marx, Durkheim, Freud, Weber and, currently, Berger, Casanova, Dawkins and others).

In a very useful recent overview paper on the concept of social capital, Gelderblom (2014) distinguishes between two ways in which this notion has broadly been used:

Bourdieu's more refined, narrowly specialised use of the concept of capital provides fertile ground for the formulation of further, more specifically focused permutations of the concept. Examples of these are – important for the work here – religious capital in referring to matters spiritual.⁸ However, given the nature of the terminology, here too (as Gelderblom [2014] points out with respect to social capital) the term is often employed in an overarching sense to refer to, for instance, any kind of influence religion can have on people (e.g. Middlebrooks & Noghiu 2010:67–85) or any effect that religiously inclined people can have on society. A number of overviews of the concept of spiritual capital – and its related designations, namely religious capital,⁹ sacred capital (Urban 2003:354–389), faithful capital (Baker 2012:13) and religious social capital (Smidt 2004) – have been offered (in great depth: Palmer & Wong 2013:4–16; cf. also e.g. Baker 2013:348; Berger & Redding 2010:1–5; Guest 2007:184–195; Hämmerli 2011:196–203; Swart 2011:98–121; Jawad 2012:29–34; Montemaggi 2011:72–79; Wortham & Wortham 2007:441–443). With the literature wavering between, broadly, an instrumentalist and an analytical use of the term (so too Palmer & Wong 2013:5), spiritual capital is here, in this article, understood as follows:

Given this understanding of spiritual capital, I move on to describing the matter that will be analysed according to these precepts of spiritual capital: the broader and specific dimensions of the Africanisation of the Bible or biblical interpretation debate in South Africa.

Part of the post-colonial African and anti-apartheid South African religious discourse since roughly the mid-1900s has been the insistence on the inculturation of Christianity within Africa. Put differently, it is the claim that Bible interpretation should come home in Africa. Whilst established churches have in time managed such inculturation quite remarkably via, for instance, liturgical symbols and languages (cf. e.g. Magesa 2004) and with many African Initiated Churches (cf. e.g. Ositelu 2002) doing so culturally to great effect (to the point that, to observers from other continents, the religious observance may often seem more like syncretism than contextualisation), it has been different in academic circles. This is unexpected since, if the whole of the South African academic Bible scholarship over the past half a century had to be painted with one broad stroke, it could generally speaking best be pictured against the backdrop of Liberation Theology. We are all liberation theologians. Moreover, all of South African biblical interpretation is hermeneutically, ideologically and sociologically extremely aware – though admittedly not in the senses in which, for instance, philosophers and sociologists would employ these terms.

The search for an African reading of the Bible has certainly been intense, crossing the boundaries of ecclesial and academic institutions, race and gender, age and more (with as some of the recent main works:¹³ Dube, Mbuvi & Mbuwayesango 2012; De Wit & West 2008; Holter 2007; Liew 2009; Page & Bailey 2010; West & Dube 2000). Classifying such readings is complex, with orientations stretching from Liberation Theology to Black Theology to African Theology (leaving aside for the moment the intersections of various feminisms with these approaches). However, all of these orientations have a shared strong emphasis on bringing (parts of) the Bible to bear on struggles that beset the African continent: political, developmental, medical, economic and other problems, even tragedies. This is attempted, generally, more by means of contextual-hermeneutical than by historical or textual-exegetical contributions, with the latter being the mainstay of First-World scholarship, on which (South) African contextual-hermeneutical Bible scholarship, nonetheless, draws strongly.

Let me, at this juncture, put my cards on the table regarding the quest for African readings of the Bible so as to avoid possible misunderstanding:

These two points summarise my position.

The problem with indicating the misconception (the problem indicated in the second bullet above) of current Africanisation or contextualisation or relevance theology is that it is reflexively equated with the rejection of this theological project itself. To illustrate this, I provide a personal example.

When at the 2005 Old Testament Society of South African congress at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in Pietermaritzburg I presented a paper (published as Lombaard 2006:144–155) making the above points, a rumour amongst those who did not attend my presentation immediately spread that ‘I hear that you are against contextualisation’. This misrepresentation had seemingly not been corrected by either the 2006 publication of the 2005 paper or by its follow-up three years later (Lombaard 2009:274–287). The pleas for better Africanisation or contextualisation or relevance were simply taken as rejection of the same. The established involvement with the Africanisation project had become so strong that a proposal in solidarity for improvement came to be perceived as opposition to a heartfelt commitment.

In my 2005 paper (2006 article), reference was made to a publication of a very promising Old Testament scholar (Farisani 2004:24–55, with Farisani 2002 as the fuller background to this publication). I utilised his work as an example of commitment to certain aspects of contextualisation that seems to preclude finding other modern parallels which are comparatively speaking more fitting, analogically, with the historical situation reflected in the particular biblical text. Some ten years later, the compliment of referencing was returned in an inaugural lecture (Farisani 2013),¹⁷ presenting my position on these matters as, again, one of opposition to Africanisation or contextualisation or relevance.

Unbeknownst to the inaugurant, at the time, my most strongly worded critique (still in the mode of appraisal in solidarity) was in press (Lombaard 2013), in which precisely such misconstrual had been explicitly countered:

To pre-empt these [misrepresentations], the above criticism is not meant to imply that:

The plea here is not for less but for more:

Such commitments remain, and this contribution is part of giving expression to those sensibilities.

The prospect exists, though, that the continuing discussion will be characterised by yet more misunderstandings, reciprocated, and misrepresentations, inadvertent. Such a debate may end with nothing resolved and with the issues at stake merely being tabled – perhaps more openly than usual but with no true advance. Therefore, I provide this attempt, by means of the concept of spiritual capital, to sketch my position differently. The aim is not to retract my views but to state them otherwise in the hope that they will be better understood. Once my position is conveyed in this alternate way, one can hope that the project of Africanisation or contextualisation or relevance in South African Bible scholarship can progress with greater efficacy, that is, with greater intellectual integrity when measured against the interdisciplinary protocols of our time.

In his influential book on religious communication, Kraft (1999:103–104) points out as a misconception the pious sentiment amongst many engaged in evangelisation and mission that ‘(t)he Holy Spirit will make up for all mistakes if we are sincere, spiritual and prayerful enough’ (Kraft 1999:103). This much, mission history, as much as current mission practice, show us too. A parallel misconception seems, however, to go along with the Africanisation or contextualisation or relevance trajectory in South African Bible scholarship, as summarised above. Rather, I propose, Bible scholarship has much to learn from the Social Sciences or Humanities such as Sociology (Felter 2012:80–97) and Journalism (Lombaard 1999:22–46), namely as fully complementary and critically interacting disciplines. This is even more valid of the post-secular time in which we find ourselves in which boundaries between ‘the religious’ and ‘the secular’ are avowedly indistinguishable.¹⁸

However, setting up such canons of scholarship as standard practice requires critical thinking on all fronts: now, as much without unreflected assumptions about the apparent current expectations on the spontaneous efficacy of research, as of – long accepted in South African Bible scholarship – the subject matter of one's research and the methodologies involved. Put differently, although academic theologians may have broken through the first naiveté (Ricoeur 1967:350–352) as far as many religious fundamentals (e.g. the concepts of God, the Bible, church, revelation, etc.) or ‘vertical matters’ are concerned, I have argued above that this is not equally the case with ‘horizontal matters’. It seems still to be the case that the implicit current rationale at times corresponds in some ways to that of popular sermonising: Once the message has been delivered (the paper read, the book published, etc.) on a topic of serious societal concern, it is often simply assumed that, therefore, the theology is relevant – the good work has been done. This may seem virtuous, and indeed, this itself is idealistic, in a – vide supra – Platonic sense of the term. However, the way in which research affects society, the role of the university within its communities, the manners in which faith impulses transform society, and all the intermediary societal layers and processes – all have remained largely unconsidered.

In coming to terms with these Aristotelian dimensions of the South African biblical-theological enterprise, that is, its contextualisation or its reality, concepts such as spiritual capital prove greatly helpful in indicating that this horizontal first naiveté has yet to be broken through. There is no direct, automatic connection between publishing research and altering society.¹⁹ To assume that the research would be more significant because it is, emotively, thematically relevant for Africa and to insist on such self-efficacy when publishing research on (for instance) Africa amount to all the old clichés: confessional armchair theology, practiced in the ebony tower. The research may be well intended. Still, to be intellectually honest with ourselves, it goes nowhere by itself. There is no deus ex machina process by means of which Bible analyses automatically solve societal problems as would a mechanical arm in a staged play in ancient Greece. A more realistic, contextually sensitive view of the relationship between research and society is required.

What is more, the concept of spiritual capital has inherent to it the (typical post-secular – Lombaard 2014) acknowledgement that a sense of the divine amongst human agents has the potential to influence society differently, precisely because it brings about sensitivities and activities to improve the circumstances of those in dire need. The either-or choice between vertical theology and horizontal theology disappears.²⁰ Thus, the characterisation as the one or the other of critics who point out insufficiencies becomes meaningless. The tasks of Theology, pressingly also those related to social inequalities are better served by us being greater realist theologians.