Retief Müller
Biographic Data
| ID | 3835935 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Retief Müller |
| GIVEN NAMES | Retief |
| FAMILY NAME | Müller |
| SIGNATURE | MÜLLER R |
| AFFILIATIONS | Stellenbosch University |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-9569-9368 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 20 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 6 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 20 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2013 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
Harvey J. Sindima. 2024. I Believe: Creeds and Confessions of the Christian Faith Worldwide from the First to the Twenty-First Century
The scope of creeds and confessions presented here appears to be quite encyclopaedic.To the book's credit, it includes most of the well-known creeds and confessions throughout the ages, making this an ambitious attempt to combine such material in a single volume.In that sense it really is a unique and helpful contribution.One might easily imagine this being used as a reference work by students in introductory-level Christianity courses.It is also…
De Kaapsche Kerk, the British Empire, slavery, and the discourses of good and evil
It is a well-known history that the Dutch church in South Africa’s Cape colony up until the early 19th century had readily accommodated the institution of slavery as commonly practiced within Cape Dutch society. Slavery was not seen as “good” but generally accepted as an unfortunate reality of life. Some groups of people, particularly those of non-European heritage, were seen within this colonist society as naturally predisposed for slavery. Bibl…
Fear and Loathing on the Margins of Empire: Socio-religious perspectives connecting the Netherlands and South Africa before and into the South African War
Focusing especially on writings by the theologian Abraham Kuyper and the impact of two Dutch born clergymen with substantial careers in South Africa’s Dutch Reformed Church in the late 19th century, this article develops a perspective on the intertwined relationship between groups and cultural factors involving the Netherlands and South Africa during this period. This intertwined relationship went far beyond Reformed theology, but the literature …
Reflections on an Important Book and the Ways in Which it Might be Read – Joel Cabrita's The People's Zion
THE PEOPLE'S ZION: SOUTHERN AFRICA, THE UNITED STATES, AND A TRANSATLANTIC FAITH-HEALING MOVEMENTBy Joel Cabrita, Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2018 . Pp. 368. Hardcover, $37.71. This is an impressive and important book, field-defining in several ways. Not only does it redefine the religious movement presented here under the basic term Zion within Global Christianity, but it also contributes massively to southern A…
Pilgrimage in Southern Africa: Socio-cultural Perspectives Within the Context of African Religion
Pilgrimage in southern Africa is an imported construct, which is indicated in this essay as an evolving phenomenon with much transregional variance and sway. Certain common features are assessed here such as the preponderance of San sacred sites and associated rituals that were in some cases reappropriated by subsequent inhabitants and newer religious groups. Rainmaking has been an age-old ritual drawing pilgrim-like activity. Although various na…
Precarious Hybridity: War, mission, nationalism, anti-nationalism and the Murray family of South Africa
Since their arrival in South Africa in the early 19th century, the Murray family walked something of a tightrope with respect to the formation of Afrikaner national identity. This article describes the Murraysâ€TM positioning regarding that identity formation as a “precarious hybridity†. On the one hand, the Murrays identified themselves closely with the Afrikaner people among whom they ministered, an identification that was particularly tested b…
The other’s humanity with or without the other’s religiosity? Reflections on the affirmation and limitation of human dignity in early Afrikaner missionary discourse in Central Africa
Taking Wentzel van Huyssteen’s work on early human uniqueness in relation to symbolic or religious awareness as a starting point, this article raises a question whether an implicit connection between humanity and the capacity for religiosity had anything to say about how one could evaluate the so-called other’s religion and their humanity. Does the recognition of the other’s full humanity demand an equal recognition of their religiosity, or are t…
Traversing a Tightrope between Ecumenism and Exclusivism: The Intertwined History of South Africa's Dutch Reformed Church and the Church of Central Africa Presbyterian in Nyasaland (Malawi)
During the first few decades of the 20th century, the Nkhoma mission of the Dutch Reformed Church of South Africa became involved in an ecumenical venture that was initiated by the Church of Scotland's Blantyre mission, and the Free Church of Scotland's Livingstonia mission in central Africa. Geographically sandwiched between these two Scots missions in Nyasaland (presently Malawi) was Nkhoma in the central region of the country. During a period …
War, Exilic Pilgrimage and Mission: South Africa's Dutch Reformed Church in the Early Twentieth Century
The main subject of inquiry here is the interrelationship between war, mission and exile in South Africa's Dutch Reformed Church at the turn of the twentieth century. The first setting of note is the Anglo—Boer War (1899–1902) when a group of Boer soldiers decided to form the Commando's Dank Zending Vereniging (Commando's Thanksgiving Mission Society) after visiting a Swiss missionary station in the northern Transvaal. Next follows Boer experienc…
African Indigenous Christianity of Pentecostal Type in South Africa in the Twentieth Century and Beyond: Another Reformation
Movements of reform and reformation have been highly significant in the history of Christianity for various reasons. Yet is it fair or appropriate to ascribe the term reformation to churches or groups not obviously belonging to the sixteenth-century series of events and movements usually associated with that term? This article engages with this question, especially in reference to the phenomenon of twentieth-century African Indigenous Christianit…
Evangelical Nationalism in Apartheid South Africa: Beyers Naudé Reconsidered
Nationalism, the politics of group identity, or “imagined communities” as Benedict Anderson coined the concept,1 has been controversial in modern history for several good reasons, with Nazi Germany and apartheid South Africa still counted among the most pertinent examples. Christianity has similarly been controversial. Both nationalism and Christianity have, in some cases correctly, been identified as responsible for fostering situations of viole…
Mission and Colonialism
This article focuses on two British colonial territories in southern and central Africa, Mashonaland and Nyasaland in the late 19th to early 20th centuries. It concerns the history of Afrikaner missionaries from South Africa’s Dutch Reformed Church ( DRC ), and their relationships with opposing interest groups. The period in question saw some inter-ethnic conflict among indigenous peoples, which included an underground slave trade, as well as muc…
Afrikaner Missionaries and the Slippery Slope of Praying for Rain
Rain prayers and ‘rainmaking’ have been much commented upon in respect to African religions including Christianity. This ritual practice was one of the issues that many colonial-era missionaries to Southern and Central Africa mentioned in their diaries and other materials. Their responses were often quite negative, but in certain cases there were attempts by missionaries to meet the indigenous discourse, if not exactly halfway, then at least in s…
Constructing separatism in South Africa's racially charged religiosity: 20Th century Afrikaner discourses on African Initiated Christianity
African Initiated Churches (AICs) in South Africa developed and grew during the 20th century to eventually become representative of the majority of Christians in the country. Much of this growth occurred during Apartheid. The fact that AICs emphasized their independence from White control is significant for various reasons. However, this article mainly concentrates on the irony of the fact that AICs were for the most part regarded as heretical se…
Beyers Naudé (1915–2004): Christianity, violence, and reconciliation in South Africa
Beyers Naudé was a well-known anti-apartheid Afrikaner clergyman, who spent seven years in the 1970s and 1980s under a banning order that was instituted against him by the South African government. Today he is revered as a model of racial reconciliation. However, in the 1960s he lost his status as minister in the Dutch Reformed Church because of his political stance. He then served as director of the Christian Institute, and as editor of the prog…
Sacralisation and the Colonial-Indigenous Encounter in Southern African Christian History: The Memory and Legacy of Johannes Du Plessis as Case Study
The role of the Dutch Reformed Churchâ€TMs mission policies in the development of apartheid ideology has in recent times come under increased scrutiny. In terms of the formulation of missionary theory within the DRC, the controversial figure of Johannes du Plessis played a significant role in the early twentieth century. In addition to his work as a mission theorist, Du Plessis was a biblical scholar at Stellenbosch University who was found guilt…
The Zion Christian Church and Global Christianity: Negotiating a Tightrope Between Localisation and Globalisation
South Africa's Zion Christian Church (ZCC) is a primary example of African Indigenous Christianity. This article discusses some of the ways in which a church such as the ZCC might be simultaneously understood as a localised indigenous group, a ‘constructed indigeneity’, as well as inherently belonging to a wider historical tradition of Global Christianity. The discussion proceeds alongside a critical engagement of the sociologist Robert Wuthnow's…
Historiography and Cross-cultural Research into African Indigenous Christianity (AIC): A Challenge to Human Dignity
Contemporary South Africa remains a divided country. Interracial tension still characterises much of the public discourse. Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu's vision of a harmonious Rainbow Nation has not yet been realised. One question emerging out of this context concerns the ways in which white South Africans could or could not relate with integrity to black concerns. African Indigenous Christianity remains one aspect of the black social contex…
The “Indigenizing” and “Pilgrim” Principles of Andrew F. Walls Reassessed from a South African Perspective
The Christian historian and distinguished scholar of world Christianity Andrew F. Walls described the pendulum-like influences of both indigenizing and pilgrim principles that are inherent to the way the Christian gospel has interacted with human cultures throughout history. This article takes seriously Walls’s idea as a powerful theological tool for assessing the authenticity of contextual Christianities. It considers Walls’s concepts from the d…
Rain and Water Symbolism in Southern African Religious Systems: Continuity and Change
This article presents a diachronic perspective on rain and water rituals in southern Africa. The authors claim that contemporary rituals can only be properly understood when cognisance has been taken of their deep roots into the past. The authors indicate how water and rain rituals show signs of continuity between past and present, in spite of the dramatic upheavals created by the arrival of colonialism and missionary Christianity. The authors fu…
African Indigenous Christianity of Pentecostal Type in South Africa in the Twentieth Century and Beyond: Another Reformation
Movements of reform and reformation have been highly significant in the history of Christianity for various reasons. Yet is it fair or appropriate to ascribe the term reformation to churches or groups not obviously belonging to the sixteenth-century series of events and movements usually associated with that term? This article engages with this question, especially in reference to the phenomenon of twentieth-century African Indigenous Christianit…
Sacralisation and the Colonial-Indigenous Encounter in Southern African Christian History: The Memory and Legacy of Johannes Du Plessis as Case Study
The role of the Dutch Reformed Churchâ€TMs mission policies in the development of apartheid ideology has in recent times come under increased scrutiny. In terms of the formulation of missionary theory within the DRC, the controversial figure of Johannes du Plessis played a significant role in the early twentieth century. In addition to his work as a mission theorist, Du Plessis was a biblical scholar at Stellenbosch University who was found guilt…
The Zion Christian Church and Global Christianity: Negotiating a Tightrope Between Localisation and Globalisation
South Africa's Zion Christian Church (ZCC) is a primary example of African Indigenous Christianity. This article discusses some of the ways in which a church such as the ZCC might be simultaneously understood as a localised indigenous group, a ‘constructed indigeneity’, as well as inherently belonging to a wider historical tradition of Global Christianity. The discussion proceeds alongside a critical engagement of the sociologist Robert Wuthnow's…
Historiography and Cross-cultural Research into African Indigenous Christianity (AIC): A Challenge to Human Dignity
Contemporary South Africa remains a divided country. Interracial tension still characterises much of the public discourse. Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu's vision of a harmonious Rainbow Nation has not yet been realised. One question emerging out of this context concerns the ways in which white South Africans could or could not relate with integrity to black concerns. African Indigenous Christianity remains one aspect of the black social contex…
The “Indigenizing” and “Pilgrim” Principles of Andrew F. Walls Reassessed from a South African Perspective
The Christian historian and distinguished scholar of world Christianity Andrew F. Walls described the pendulum-like influences of both indigenizing and pilgrim principles that are inherent to the way the Christian gospel has interacted with human cultures throughout history. This article takes seriously Walls’s idea as a powerful theological tool for assessing the authenticity of contextual Christianities. It considers Walls’s concepts from the d…
Rain and Water Symbolism in Southern African Religious Systems: Continuity and Change
This article presents a diachronic perspective on rain and water rituals in southern Africa. The authors claim that contemporary rituals can only be properly understood when cognisance has been taken of their deep roots into the past. The authors indicate how water and rain rituals show signs of continuity between past and present, in spite of the dramatic upheavals created by the arrival of colonialism and missionary Christianity. The authors fu…
Historiography and Cross-cultural Research into African Indigenous Christianity (AIC): A Challenge to Human Dignity
Contemporary South Africa remains a divided country. Interracial tension still characterises much of the public discourse. Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu's vision of a harmonious Rainbow Nation has not yet been realised. One question emerging out of this context concerns the ways in which white South Africans could or could not relate with integrity to black concerns. African Indigenous Christianity remains one aspect of the black social contex…
The “Indigenizing” and “Pilgrim” Principles of Andrew F. Walls Reassessed from a South African Perspective
The Christian historian and distinguished scholar of world Christianity Andrew F. Walls described the pendulum-like influences of both indigenizing and pilgrim principles that are inherent to the way the Christian gospel has interacted with human cultures throughout history. This article takes seriously Walls’s idea as a powerful theological tool for assessing the authenticity of contextual Christianities. It considers Walls’s concepts from the d…
Rain and Water Symbolism in Southern African Religious Systems: Continuity and Change
This article presents a diachronic perspective on rain and water rituals in southern Africa. The authors claim that contemporary rituals can only be properly understood when cognisance has been taken of their deep roots into the past. The authors indicate how water and rain rituals show signs of continuity between past and present, in spite of the dramatic upheavals created by the arrival of colonialism and missionary Christianity. The authors fu…
Beyers Naudé (1915–2004): Christianity, violence, and reconciliation in South Africa
Beyers Naudé was a well-known anti-apartheid Afrikaner clergyman, who spent seven years in the 1970s and 1980s under a banning order that was instituted against him by the South African government. Today he is revered as a model of racial reconciliation. However, in the 1960s he lost his status as minister in the Dutch Reformed Church because of his political stance. He then served as director of the Christian Institute, and as editor of the prog…
Sacralisation and the Colonial-Indigenous Encounter in Southern African Christian History: The Memory and Legacy of Johannes Du Plessis as Case Study
The role of the Dutch Reformed Churchâ€TMs mission policies in the development of apartheid ideology has in recent times come under increased scrutiny. In terms of the formulation of missionary theory within the DRC, the controversial figure of Johannes du Plessis played a significant role in the early twentieth century. In addition to his work as a mission theorist, Du Plessis was a biblical scholar at Stellenbosch University who was found guilt…
The Zion Christian Church and Global Christianity: Negotiating a Tightrope Between Localisation and Globalisation
South Africa's Zion Christian Church (ZCC) is a primary example of African Indigenous Christianity. This article discusses some of the ways in which a church such as the ZCC might be simultaneously understood as a localised indigenous group, a ‘constructed indigeneity’, as well as inherently belonging to a wider historical tradition of Global Christianity. The discussion proceeds alongside a critical engagement of the sociologist Robert Wuthnow's…
Mission and Colonialism
This article focuses on two British colonial territories in southern and central Africa, Mashonaland and Nyasaland in the late 19th to early 20th centuries. It concerns the history of Afrikaner missionaries from South Africa’s Dutch Reformed Church ( DRC ), and their relationships with opposing interest groups. The period in question saw some inter-ethnic conflict among indigenous peoples, which included an underground slave trade, as well as muc…
Afrikaner Missionaries and the Slippery Slope of Praying for Rain
Rain prayers and ‘rainmaking’ have been much commented upon in respect to African religions including Christianity. This ritual practice was one of the issues that many colonial-era missionaries to Southern and Central Africa mentioned in their diaries and other materials. Their responses were often quite negative, but in certain cases there were attempts by missionaries to meet the indigenous discourse, if not exactly halfway, then at least in s…
Constructing separatism in South Africa's racially charged religiosity: 20Th century Afrikaner discourses on African Initiated Christianity
African Initiated Churches (AICs) in South Africa developed and grew during the 20th century to eventually become representative of the majority of Christians in the country. Much of this growth occurred during Apartheid. The fact that AICs emphasized their independence from White control is significant for various reasons. However, this article mainly concentrates on the irony of the fact that AICs were for the most part regarded as heretical se…
War, Exilic Pilgrimage and Mission: South Africa's Dutch Reformed Church in the Early Twentieth Century
The main subject of inquiry here is the interrelationship between war, mission and exile in South Africa's Dutch Reformed Church at the turn of the twentieth century. The first setting of note is the Anglo—Boer War (1899–1902) when a group of Boer soldiers decided to form the Commando's Dank Zending Vereniging (Commando's Thanksgiving Mission Society) after visiting a Swiss missionary station in the northern Transvaal. Next follows Boer experienc…
African Indigenous Christianity of Pentecostal Type in South Africa in the Twentieth Century and Beyond: Another Reformation
Movements of reform and reformation have been highly significant in the history of Christianity for various reasons. Yet is it fair or appropriate to ascribe the term reformation to churches or groups not obviously belonging to the sixteenth-century series of events and movements usually associated with that term? This article engages with this question, especially in reference to the phenomenon of twentieth-century African Indigenous Christianit…
Evangelical Nationalism in Apartheid South Africa: Beyers Naudé Reconsidered
Nationalism, the politics of group identity, or “imagined communities” as Benedict Anderson coined the concept,1 has been controversial in modern history for several good reasons, with Nazi Germany and apartheid South Africa still counted among the most pertinent examples. Christianity has similarly been controversial. Both nationalism and Christianity have, in some cases correctly, been identified as responsible for fostering situations of viole…
The other’s humanity with or without the other’s religiosity? Reflections on the affirmation and limitation of human dignity in early Afrikaner missionary discourse in Central Africa
Taking Wentzel van Huyssteen’s work on early human uniqueness in relation to symbolic or religious awareness as a starting point, this article raises a question whether an implicit connection between humanity and the capacity for religiosity had anything to say about how one could evaluate the so-called other’s religion and their humanity. Does the recognition of the other’s full humanity demand an equal recognition of their religiosity, or are t…
Traversing a Tightrope between Ecumenism and Exclusivism: The Intertwined History of South Africa's Dutch Reformed Church and the Church of Central Africa Presbyterian in Nyasaland (Malawi)
During the first few decades of the 20th century, the Nkhoma mission of the Dutch Reformed Church of South Africa became involved in an ecumenical venture that was initiated by the Church of Scotland's Blantyre mission, and the Free Church of Scotland's Livingstonia mission in central Africa. Geographically sandwiched between these two Scots missions in Nyasaland (presently Malawi) was Nkhoma in the central region of the country. During a period …
Precarious Hybridity: War, mission, nationalism, anti-nationalism and the Murray family of South Africa
Since their arrival in South Africa in the early 19th century, the Murray family walked something of a tightrope with respect to the formation of Afrikaner national identity. This article describes the Murraysâ€TM positioning regarding that identity formation as a “precarious hybridity†. On the one hand, the Murrays identified themselves closely with the Afrikaner people among whom they ministered, an identification that was particularly tested b…
Reflections on an Important Book and the Ways in Which it Might be Read – Joel Cabrita's The People's Zion
THE PEOPLE'S ZION: SOUTHERN AFRICA, THE UNITED STATES, AND A TRANSATLANTIC FAITH-HEALING MOVEMENTBy Joel Cabrita, Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2018 . Pp. 368. Hardcover, $37.71. This is an impressive and important book, field-defining in several ways. Not only does it redefine the religious movement presented here under the basic term Zion within Global Christianity, but it also contributes massively to southern A…
Pilgrimage in Southern Africa: Socio-cultural Perspectives Within the Context of African Religion
Pilgrimage in southern Africa is an imported construct, which is indicated in this essay as an evolving phenomenon with much transregional variance and sway. Certain common features are assessed here such as the preponderance of San sacred sites and associated rituals that were in some cases reappropriated by subsequent inhabitants and newer religious groups. Rainmaking has been an age-old ritual drawing pilgrim-like activity. Although various na…
De Kaapsche Kerk, the British Empire, slavery, and the discourses of good and evil
It is a well-known history that the Dutch church in South Africa’s Cape colony up until the early 19th century had readily accommodated the institution of slavery as commonly practiced within Cape Dutch society. Slavery was not seen as “good” but generally accepted as an unfortunate reality of life. Some groups of people, particularly those of non-European heritage, were seen within this colonist society as naturally predisposed for slavery. Bibl…
Fear and Loathing on the Margins of Empire: Socio-religious perspectives connecting the Netherlands and South Africa before and into the South African War
Focusing especially on writings by the theologian Abraham Kuyper and the impact of two Dutch born clergymen with substantial careers in South Africa’s Dutch Reformed Church in the late 19th century, this article develops a perspective on the intertwined relationship between groups and cultural factors involving the Netherlands and South Africa during this period. This intertwined relationship went far beyond Reformed theology, but the literature …
Harvey J. Sindima. 2024. I Believe: Creeds and Confessions of the Christian Faith Worldwide from the First to the Twenty-First Century
The scope of creeds and confessions presented here appears to be quite encyclopaedic.To the book's credit, it includes most of the well-known creeds and confessions throughout the ages, making this an ambitious attempt to combine such material in a single volume.In that sense it really is a unique and helpful contribution.One might easily imagine this being used as a reference work by students in introductory-level Christianity courses.It is also…
Sociology (16 works) · Christian Theology and Mission (14 works) · Political science (14 works) · Law (13 works) · Philosophy (13 works) · Christianity (12 works) · History (12 works) · South African History and Culture (11 works) · Religious studies (9 works) · Religion, Society, and Development (8 works)