/ 12 March 2010

A life committed to social justice

We were not close friends -- but his tragic death vividly brought to mind my last memory of him as a fine theologian.

We were not close friends — but his tragic death vividly brought to mind my last memory of him as a fine theologian and brilliant scholar who lived out a faith that strives to do justice.

I last met Steve de Gruchy — who drowned a fortnight ago while tubing with his son in the Mooi River — at a conference of theological societies in mid-2009, staged to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the Stellenbosch theology faculty.

He presided over the launch of the highly innovative set of essays that he co-edited, From Our Side: Emerging Perspectives on Development and Ethics, and presented a paper on ethics and the environment.

The son of the distinguished theologian and Congregational Church minister John de Gruchy, Steve grew up in a household where scholarship and ministry were inseparably linked with a strong commitment to social justice.

As a student at the University of Cape Town during the terrible twilight years of apartheid, he was a part of the radical Christian anti-apartheid struggle, notably through the Students Union for Christian Action.

A conscientious objector, he worked as a hospital chaplain and later trainee minister in Cape Town. His political concerns emerge clearly from the doctorate he completed at the time at the University of the Western Cape, examining the link between Christian doctrine and justice in the work of political theologian Reinhold Niebuhr.

He was ordained in the Congregational Church in early 1992 and for some years combined university lecturing with full-time ministry. He served as minister of the isolated Moffat Mission in Kuruman in the Northern Cape, where he combined pastoral work with theological writing.

He entered the academic world full-time in 2000, building the theology and development programme at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in Pietermaritzburg. Within five years he was a full professor and, by 2008, head of the school.

Steve’s prolific writings included reflections on pastoral ministry (40 Days in the Desert: Meditations from Moffat Mission on the Edge of the Kalahari) and works on church history and Christian ethics, with a focus on the relationship between religion and development.

With Paul Germond he co-edited the first South African book to confront seriously the relationship between Christianity and homosexuality (Aliens in the Household of God). When his father, John, decided to revise his classic text, The Church Struggle in South Africa, Steve was his obvious co-author.

Steve was a respected lecturer and supervisor of graduate students who found time to edit the Journal of Theology for Southern Africa, the country’s most prestigious organ of theological scholarship.

He will be remembered for his creative approach to scholarship, motivated by a desire for the academic world to serve the church and wider community. The last book he edited, From Our Side, bears this stamp: each chapter, addressing ethical questions of development, is a collaboration between scholars and development practitioners.

Those of us who were privileged to know him will recall his dry humour, passion for justice and the sense that here was someone who constantly lived, as Aristotle put it, the “examined life”.

Steve de Gruchy: born November 16 1961, died February 24 2010