ABSTRACT
The culture-building task of the church, understood in terms of the revolutionary religious culture in South Africa, can perhaps best be outlined in terms of liberation, realism, and praxis. Theologians need the challenge of the social sciences to ground eschatology in material reality. If the religious revolutionary vision results in no more than abstract critique of all attempts to build a better world, it is no more than left-wing idealism—what Lenin called a “childhood disease.” The church in South Africa has an obligation to contribute to the emergence of an ethic that is at once both eschatological and realistic. The level of oppression and revolutionary incentive in South Africa demands a nation-building realism of a kind different from that of Niebuhr. The need is for a revolutionary Christian realism. The primary source of renewal in the Christian religion is a sense of eschatology or utopia as a goal towards which history is moving.
