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Churches hold different views regarding the office of deacon and role of deacons in the church. Churches also use different terms for their social ministries. This lack of a common language regarding the church's diaconal ministry often creates confusion in the ecumenical discourse on the diaconate of the church. This article explores the hypothesis that the conceptualisation of a church's diaconal ministry is influenced by a specific frame of reference, be it a historical perspective, a specific theology or tradition. In this case study of the Dutch Reformed Church (DRC) it is shown how a specific historical and theological understanding of diaconal ministry determines not only this church's preference for the term 'service of compassion' but also its diaconal praxis. The article concludes with a suggestion to the DRC to consider the use of the concept diakonia in contemplation of more active participation in ecumenical disourses regarding the diaconate of the church. INTRADISCIPLINARY AND/OR INTERDISCIPLINARY IMPLICATIONS: The article describes how a specific historical and theological understanding of diaconal ministry determines not only the DRC's preference for the term 'service of compassion' but also its diaconal praxis. The suggestion to more actively participate in developing a common understanding of diakonia ecumenically has implications for the DRC's ecclesiology, as well as its missional and social ministries.

Paul Ricoeur se verstaan van die narratiewe struktuur van menslike “tydlikheid” bevat ’n dialektiese begrip van die transendensie van tyd, ’n begrip wat meer inhou as die gebruiklike tweedeligheid van transendensie en immanensie. Hierdie begrip van narratiewe tydlikheid behels ’n dialektiek tussen (1) narratiwiteit as die voorwaarde vir die vaslegging van die transendensie van tyd in menslike tydlikheid en (2) die transendensie, of onnaspeurbaarheid, van tyd as ’n transendentale voorwaarde vir die narratiewe struktuur van menslike tydlikheid. Met ander woorde: sonder narratief sou dit nie vir ons moontlik gewees het om die transendensie van tyd om te sit in menslike ervaring nie, maar wederkerig as dit nie was vir die transendensie van tyd wat ons ervaring deurentyd deurkruis nie, sou ons tydlike bestaan nie ’n narratiewe struktuur ontwikkel het nie. Op hiérdie manier kom die betekenis van die narratiewe funksie tot vervulling eers wanneer dit ’n voorwaarde vir tydlike bestaan word. Maar hierdie “vervulde betekenis” van die narratiewe funksie berus op hierdie spesifieke dialektiek van die transendensie van tyd. ABSTRACT: Ricoeur’s understanding of the narrative structure of human temporality involves a dialectical notion of the transcendence of time, a notion beyond customary dichotomies between transcendence and immanence. For example, Wessel Stoker indicates that transcendence does not have to be understood only in a simplified opposition to immanence. Stoker (2012:3– 23) identifies four types of transcendence, namely (1) immanent transcendence – where the absolute (God) and human beings are directly connected and where the absolute is experienced in and through mundane reality; (2) radical transcendence – where the absolute is the wholly other and thus sharply distinguished from mundane reality; (3) radical immanence – where the absolute is no longer sought outside mundane reality; and (4) transcendence as alterity – which rejects the opposition between transcendence and immanence and therefore the wholly other can appear in every other.

This dissertation addresses the research question of what demands us to be ethical after the ‘death of God’ and the ethico-political critique of the modern Subject. It moreover explicates the implications of the proposed answer to this question for the debate on race and rehumanization. The question is addressed in conversation with the French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy and Cameroonian philosopher and historian Achille Mbembe. Accordingly, the study argues for the position of an ontological demand that situates the ethical demand in being obligated to take responsibility for our disposition of existing in the world always already with others, a demand that concerns our ethos or conduct of existing in the world. The implications of this claim is considered in conversation with Nancy, who first outlined this stance, and Mbembe, who pushes it further in terms of a critical engagement with the question of race—more specifically, regarding the relation between the ethical demand and the reparation of the dignity of those historically dehumanized under a racialized worldview. As Mbembe notes, it concerns reparation not reduced only to its economic meaning. Instead, it concerns the reparation of the broken relations within our shared world. Correspondingly, the main research question is divided into three sub-questions: how does Western metaphysics constitute ethics, and why is it problematic? (chapters 2 through 5); how do Nancy and Mbembe help us reconceive what demands us to be ethical, given the critique of Western metaphysics and the limits of the Self-Other schema? (chapters 6 and 7); and how does the dialogue with and between Nancy and Mbembe help advance the debate on race in a globalized world, and what are the implications thereof for philosophizing from the Global South? (chapter 8).

A fault line in contemporary scholarship has emerged around what Gil Anidjar calls “the Christian Question,” litigating Christianity’s historical contributions to the creation of a profoundly unjust arrangement of global politics. On one side of the fault line stand those who argue that Christianity is ultimately abusive, and therefore should be discarded as much as possible through deconversion; on the other side are those who argue that the way out of perverse Christian products is a deeper conversion to a true, pure identity for Christianity. This dissertation wades into the dilemma by arguing that Christianity can be fruitfully understood as a technology of human beings, by which people change the world and themselves. Drawing from Paul Virilio, it suggests further that, like all technologies, Christianity contains unforeseeable accidents (e.g., the invention of the ship is also the invention of the shipwreck), consequences that may not at first seem recognizably Christian but nevertheless descend from Christian sources. Reading Christianity through the lens of the accident, the dissertation aims to provide a method for dealing with Christianity’s historical relationship to oppression and liberation, arguing that Christian technologies must be retrofitted according to a horizon of liberation. The study is organized into six chapters, bookended by an introduction and conclusion that ground the dissertation broadly in what Enrique Dussel calls philosophy of liberation, which presents an alternative means of conceiving of the role of philosophy of religion beyond postmodern approaches. The study begins by explaining how Christianity could be conceived of as a technology, engaging media theorists like Peter Sloterdijk and Vilém Flusser (chapter one). Then, the study takes Virilio as a particular theorist of technology and guide for thinking about Christianity and accidents, briefly offering the emergence of white supremacy in the United States as a case study to illustrate this theoretical point (chapter two). To better understand Christianity’s historical and formative role in global politics, the study explores critical scholarship on religion and secularism, proposing to see Christianity as an infrastructure undergirding categories that may not seem ostensibly Christian (chapter three). Philosophically, these insights have consequences for philosophy of religion and the secular, which the study demonstrates by engaging Charles Taylor and Jürgen Habermas through critics like Talal Asad and Saba Mahmood (chapter four). With a broad paradigm in place, the study directly engages the fault line around the Christian Question, reading theologian William Cavanaugh as representative of the conversion side and Gil Anidjar and Daniel Colucciello Barber as representative of the deconversion side (chapter five). Lastly, the study puts forward the possibility of constantly retrofitting Christian technology, always accountable to the negative inevitabilities of the accident (chapter six).