Wisdom’s rebellion: Kingdom politics as a guerrilla drama

Abstract

This article aims at exploring kingdom politics in South Africa as a guerrilla drama, not only of a contemporary play of wisdom as human virtue, but specifically in the form of the personified Wisdom’s play (cf. Christ’s parable of the children on the marketplace; Lk 7). Firstly, it investigates the availability of hermeneutical space for such an enterprise, attending to the concept of rebellion vis-à-vis a scripture-based, imaginative, theodramatic articulation of the Wisdom’s play of the parable. Secondly, the public space for the enactment of such a ‘wisdom’s rebellion’ is probed. It should not be neutrally indifferent to, but positively advancing of, the nearly universally accepted ‘golden rule’. The public space should, in the public imagination, be seen and treated as a kind of public theatre, hospitable to a plurality of worldviews, each freely and imaginatively enacting its own political alternatives before the critical eyes of a democratic voting public. A follow-up article will attempt to outline the difference it might make to the human dignity of the participants (actors) and in their humane political actions (theodramatic roles), if they can imagine themselves as performing (not only theorising about and not only feeling passionately about) wisdom’s subversive play of God’s kingdom in South Africa.