Racial Diversity and Social Cohesion in South African Theological Education

Abstract

In our post-apartheid South African society, church denominations have gone through the process of reformulating their identity and have restructured theological education for all its members resulting in growing multi-cultural student bodies. These new student constituencies reflect a wide spectrum of cultural backgrounds, personal histories, and theological commitments and represent the diversity in race, ethnicity, culture, class, gender, age and sexual orientation. The articulation of diversity and how people experience it is often highly charged simmering with all sorts of resentments and half-understandings. These issues of diversity are theologically complicated and contested as they are attached to religious dogma. Diversity exists as a threat and promise, problem and possibility. This article is a discussion on the idea of diversity and the management of racial diversity in theological education showing that it has real potential in offering a Christian intervention towards social cohesion in post-apartheid South Africa.