Ruan Horn studied his theology Helderberg College in the 1980’s where he graduated with a B.Th. He had the same schooling that I had. Dr. Izak van Zyl and prof. Johan Japp schooled him in the proper principles of Adventist hermeneutics.

Neither these professors nor any on campus, worked with HCM or Higher Critical Method which is the bread and butter of the Enlightenment Period that overlaps with the Victorian Period.

What is HCM, shortly? The audacity of rationalism to challenge God’s miracles, wonders, creation ability, revelation, inspiration, and reducing the Bible to a poem of Wiliam Shakespear.

Man in point: Julius Wellhausen. And all in modern SBL kissed his feet and is still doing.

My hope is that young Adventist scholars from South Africa will not follow their professors to kiss the feet of Wellhausen also.

Wellhausen was professor of the Bible in Germany and teaching pastors. Suddenly he felt that he cannot agree with anything in the Bible because he was atheistic. All his friends were. So he resigned. He wrote his resignation letter and please consult it properly on Wikipaedia.

He left and worked against theology, against the pastoral training, against anything you may hope and dream to find in the Word of God. He reduced the Word of God to mere paper and words that can be cut with scissors and glued together with pleasure of human tricks.

And current SBL meetings cannot stop to cite him as authority.

The Dutch Reform church in South Africa is currently and since 2013? experiencing a major “mourn-period” with students from Pretoria Seminary that were persecuted because they objected against the liberalism of the seminary.

Ds. Danie Steyn, the Dutch Reform Church Evangelist, currently in his nineties, went to the University and found their theology students smoking in the streets. H went to the Dean and complain about it, years ago. What happened? When he visited there again later he found that in the lecture halls they have put on each table a cigarette bowl. To accommodate students not to smoke in the street but rather in the class. It is online in his sermons.

So students complained about the liberalism at the Seminary of Pretoria in 2010? Or earlier? But they then stopped the student from studying there and he went to Europe and graduated there at a prestigious University in England. The movement currently is called “dolering”. He was one of the chief protagonists of this movement against liberalism in their church. Where does pluralism and plurality fit into this scenario?

Principle: You cannot embrace Satan and Christ and say to yourself, “Well now I solved the Great Controversy and created Unity in the Universe!”

There is no way you can play with plurality around the Word of God. Period.

Ruan Horn said: “In the thesis Adventist approaches making use of modernist and late/postmodernistic reductionist philosophies are not rejected out of hand.”

He argues that the reductionistic views of modernism coming from the Enlightenment, and mind you all the way from the father of Suspicion Feuerabend, through Schleiermacher, through Hegel, through Nietszche, through Wellhausen, through Barth, through Bultmann, through Gadamer, through all the socalled keys to hermeneutics of Marx, Schiller, and Fichte, all keys that do not fit the lock of the Biblical Revelatory data. All of them doing Hermeneutics of Suspicion and Doubt. There is a very good dissertation on this.

Horn feels that modern suspicion schemes are part of our experience and they are the “building blocks” of a “holistic and mulitverse way” to deal with the “ancient world and modernity and late/post modernity”.

Horn laid down the Calvinistic Reformed primacy of Theodore Bezae’s Sovereignity of God (1580) calling God the “sole player in the game, a stance that Calvinistic pastors and Jakobus Arminius, also a Calvinistic pastor and professor did not agree with Bezae.

Horn explains that his methodology is to first meet Satan [his philosophical cronies] on his ground and see what commonalities there are, and then he will focus on the differences.

“The three broad approaches mainly described are that of fundamentalist mirroring, liberal interpretation and consensual negotiation of texts, theories, human doings and natural cosmic events.”

Almost as if he is looking at Thesis and Anti-thesis and Synthesis.

Horn says this forms the background of his dissertation. He noticed “diverse SDA engagement patterns with the Bible, experiences in the arena of the church and everyday experiences”.

Horn wants to “described in a vortex of holistic overlapping and multiverse integrative reflexivity”.

Synthesis.

He wants to apple-shine all the differences and put them all in a fruit basket as acceptable to God. Like Cain did.

Citation: Horn, Ruan (2015) 'n Lewenskontekstuele hermeneutiek-met verwysing na Sewendedag-Adventiste, University of South Africa, Pretoria, <http://hdl.handle.net/10500/23382>

https://uir.unisa.ac.za/handle/10500/23382