The Gerhard Hasels of the Presbyterian Tradition: Ferdie Mulder and R. W. Yarbrough

Koot van Wyk, Seoul, 29^th May 2021

Anyone who has read the 2008 online data provided by Arthur Patrick of Avondale University/College with shocking trends in Adventism trying to heroize the heretics of Adventism, try to bring skewness into classical Adventism, will be impressed by this attempt of a Hasel after Hasel for the Presbyterian Calvinistic tradition, especially the Dutch Reform Church of South Africa.

When one talks to liberal scholars in Adventism they think there are basically only two groups: secular and conservative Adventists and that they see themselves as the progressives in the mainstream or middle of the road.

The reality is that there is no middle of the road. There is no grey. It is either liberal or conservative, either Bible keeping and protecting and, mind you, following, or not.

Playing on the veranda of Baal is not going to work with the Word of God.

The Dutch Reform Church of South Africa experienced the same trauma that Adventism at Andrews University and other seminaries experienced. In 1994 Gerhard Hasel, the Conservative powerful Watchman and dialectic against liberalism died in a car accident in Iowa. I was still there. The liberal Raymond Cottrell who denounced the Investigative Judgment, said in an article in Spectrum that the day Hasel came to Andrews Seminary, “a dark cloud came over Adventist theology”. Since then the windows were thrown open to many liberal ideas: VFD was questioned by A. Rodriquez and S. Bacchiochi before his death in 2008, S. Stefanovich and his strange ideas in Revelation, J. Paulien with his End of Time preteristic exegesis of Isaiah 65-66 and other statements of transformational eschatology of Moses etc. his article on the death of historicism, his video on the quetism and idealistic approach to Revelation 13. Hasel mentioned in 1993 that he is worried about dr. Paulien. Yet when I asked him last week, he said no, Hasel and I differed here and there but overall he was very happy with me. He said that a student passed a test of Hasel by studying his (Paulien’s) notes on the covenants. Either dr. Paulien cannot analyze himself properly or he has converted back to classical Adventism as of May 2021 in an e-mail to me? Fact is, his books and publications and videos do present problems with stances that he took. What about those? Where is the list of changes presented currently so that we can update errors in the past?

In 1994 Edwin de Kock and his wife immigrated to Texas in the USA and he was to be used by God to rectify the VFD problem of these Trojan Horse of Liberalism scholars just mentioned supra. He wrote a book over 1000 pages on the topic of 666 = VDF in the Catholic Church and that issue should be quiet for another century. Thanks to the Lord’s leading in a team of researchers and computer data engineers committed to the truth.

The period 1994 to 2021 is one of paradigm shifts at Andrews University Seminary. Woman-Ordination, gender discussions and books (Gane and Swanson), also Administrative actions to bring someone from New York to accommodate the transsexuals and their issues protecting them against discrimination on the campus around 2016, getting in line with liberal Jurisprudence on the issue of gender and sexuality.

Now the Dutch Reform Church. Similar lines of paradigm shifts was at play in South Africa. The Trojan Horse of Liberalism was coming closer already in 1986 when I was at Stellenbosch University and dr. Paul Kruger told me in his office that I will also be a historical critic one day. I said never. Like Ferdie Mulder I was also reacting. Dr. Kruger said that when he is in the class he pulls the Bible apart but when he is on the pulpit he preaches unity and faith. I said to him that it is theological psychopathy. He laughed. So already in those days scholars were playing with higher-critical thinking since it was popular.

But in 1994 prof. dr. J. Heyns, the systematic theology professor died because he was assassinated. He was against apartheid and some think that is why he was shot in his house. He was still a Kyuper-Bavinck-Berkhouwer scholar that tried to protect the Bible as the Word of God. They were from the Free University of Amsterdam these Dutch scholars in Systematic Theology and our own dr. Hans LaRondelle was a product of their traditions. That is maybe why dr. LaRondelle inherited from them the “transformational theology” of the New Testament, meaning, that Jesus, Paul, John, James, Luke, Gospels, took the Old Testament references to David and Messianize it in Jesus. A theory that is really non-Adventist. So many were influenced by LaRondelle since the 1970’s until his death somewhere in 2010?

Many are the scholars who graduated from Berkhouwer and their tradition in the Dutch Reform Church.

But the one who took over from J. Heyns who retired 10 years before 1994, in 1984, prof. dr. J. A. Le Roux was a devoted Higher Critical and one who embrazed Rudolph Bultmann. Anyone who has read Gerhard Hasel’s works will know, that it is impossible to be not liberal clinging to Bultmann. Norman Young of Avondale University clings to Rudolph Bultmann and said to me that he teaches his students the Commentary of Bultmann on John. I told him that Bultmann denies the Second Coming, the virgin birth, resurrection, judgment but he did not want to hear about this.

Now Ferdie Mulder in a video on Youtube and in an article present his autobiography of about the same experience that I had studying at Stellenbosch under the scholars there. They were not so strong as they are these days in liberalism in those days. They did not persecute you for your conservative Adventist positions in those days 1986-1989 when I was there.

But Ferdie has later history of persecution and a later inroad of liberalism at these conservative schools of theology in South Africa to bring.

He gives the example of dr. Ben du Toit that wrote a book about Post-theism. The period after God, what is the alternative? What a disgrace that a theologian that taught pastors is now an atheist.

For years South Africans use to bring Othmar Keel from Europe to teach at their Societies as keynote speaker how to do iconography hermeneutics in the Old Testament and when Keel retired in 2018 he said in a newspaper article that he was an agnostic every since 1968!

I called him a Baal prophet already sometime in 2000 I think?

And there are many of them teaching pastors at seminaries all over the world. World Famous scholars. But, in Elijah’s classification, Baal prophets.

Dutch Reform Conservative Theologian Ferdie Mulder and his persecution by Liberal Scholars in his denomination

Here is Ferdie Mulder’s story:

“In the first half of this review I draw on an autobiographical narrative that intersects with the situation in New Testament scholarship (and biblical scholarship generally) described in Clash of Visions. My own story from roughly 15 years ago shines light on and underscores key issues and insights found in the book. While I was a student in the theology department of the University of Pretoria, South Africa, our “elitist” (one of Yarbrough’s two classifications of scholars and current scholarship) Dutch Reformed Old Testament professor Jurie H. le Roux did his utmost to convince us to accept the hypothetical source theories of the Pentateuch developed by post-Enlightenment German critics like Julius Wellhausen, Hermann Gunkel, W. M. L. de Wette, and Gerhard von Rad.1 It was all in one direction, with no mention of conservative alternatives, nor were there any opposing voices in the module handbook and bibliography. Preparing the ground months earlier, he had injected us with a potent dose of the critical hermeneutics of Rene Descartes, Baruch Spinoza, and Immanuel Kant—all viewed positively from an elitist postEnlightenment critical perspective. As Professor Le Roux wrapped up his lecture one morning, he opened the floor for questions. Taking his chance was Dirk, an evangelical student who usually received a first for his exam papers. He opened his small red pocket Bible at 1 Corinthians 2:12–15 and started reading: The Spirit we received is not the spirit of the world but the Spirit that comes from God. . . . It also teaches us, not with learned words that teach us human wisdom, but with words that the Spirit teaches us. Thus, we explain spiritual things to people who have the Spirit. Man who does not have the Spirit of God does not accept the things of the Spirit of God. To him it is nonsense. He cannot understand it because it must be judged spiritually. Thinking deeply about the theological and hermeneutical implications of these words, Dirk risked his reputation, adding that Scripture is inspired by the Holy Spirit. In response, Professor Le Roux asked him, “Where do you find that?” Dirk replied, “In 2 Timothy 3:16.” By this time in our theological journey, Dirk and a trio of other students, including me, were in our fourth year and getting tired of what we had (correctly) come to regard as a leftist takeover of our faculty. We had enrolled expecting a more balanced confessional education which, basically, came to an end when Professor Johan Heyns—who expressed great concern about Le Roux’s nineteenth-century German historical-criticism—retired ten years earlier.2 At the time, we drew inspiration and encouragement from Robert W. Yarbrough’s translation of a book by Eta Linnemann. In it, Linnemann chronicled her remarkable conversion, as she abandoned her Bultmannian orientation and commitments (Rudolf Bultmann having been one of her university professors and mentors), while at the same time maintaining a high level of academic rigor in her subsequent publications.3 Yarbrough’s publications shedding light on evangelical German scholarship became a lifeboat in an ocean of sinking ocean liners.4 2 Johan Heyns (1928–1994), the best known and most prolific South African systematic theologian of his generation, coming from the Kuyper/Bavinck/Berkhouwer Dutch Reformed tradition, expressed serious concerns about Le Roux’s insistence on the so-called incontestable results of historical criticism. Responding to Le Roux’s challenge, Heyns rejected his claims that (a) it is impossible to talk about the unity of Scripture; (b) the established thinking patterns of the Christian faith must be abandoned completely; (c) the church can no longer make its case with authority; and (d) the light of God’s revelation does not shine over the whole cosmos that easily any longer. Heyns responded: “[I]f the acceptance of the incontestable results of historical-criticism forces a theologian to accept such views, then it is a dangerous road to follow—for the systematic theologian and the biblical scholar, in my judgement” (“‘n Weerwoord,” Skrif en Kerk 15, no. 1 [1994]: 162–63). Similar to, for example, R. C. Sproul, Heyns conducted doctoral studies under the supervision of G. C. Berkhouwer in Amsterdam. Heyns came to be an outspoken opponent of apartheid and was assassinated, perhaps because of that opposition, in 1994. 3 See Eta Linnemann, Historical Criticism of the Bible: Methodology or Ideology? Reflections of a Bultmannian Turned Evangelical, trans. Robert W. Yarbrough (Grand Rapids, MI: Kregel, 2001). Dr. Martin Holdt, a Reformed Baptist pastor in Pretoria, became a mentor to me and out of concern for us, ordered thirty copies of Linnemann’s book which I distributed among theology students. 4 Also worth mentioning is the mentorship offered by Dr. Edward N. Gross and Dr. Rob Visser. The former was an Orthodox Presbyterian Church (OPC) scholar from the USA who came to South Africa to work among poor African communities. The latter was a conservative Reformed scholar from the Netherlands who mentored us on a weekly basis after classes.

But that notorious morning when Dirk posed his question, his reliance on God’s wisdom in Holy Scripture angered Professor Le Roux, who retaliated forcefully by wagging his finger and saying in a loud irritable voice: “The Bible is the product of the fraud of people!”5 Students were shocked. A few weeks later, as I finished the Pentateuch criticism exam—for which I later received a first—I got up and started speaking with Professor Le Roux at the entrance of the lecture room while others were still completing their papers. He asked me how it went, to which I responded that I was excited and enjoyed it a lot. He was caught off guard, probably because, for almost four years, I was often critical of his lecturing both in class and during multiple coffee table conversations, as well as once at his home office. I guess he thought he had finally managed to change this “populist” (after “elitist” the second classification of scholarship in Clash of Visions) student into one of his elitist historical-critical trophies. Before my words were cold, he replied: “For the first-century Christians, Jesus rose because it was part of their worldview. Today we cannot understand it like that anymore.” I was stunned. Of course, I had not become his elitist trophy as others did; I enjoyed the paper because I knew the work well and felt confident I was able to reject elitist theories with academic integrity. Later, I learned that a couple of months earlier, Le Roux had said at a public meeting of the so-called “New Reformation,” a South African sister organization of Robert Funk’s Jesus Seminar from the USA, that we do not have to believe in the literal resurrection of Jesus any longer. Professor Le Roux made this claim, standing on the shoulders of his friend and our New Testament professor Andries van Aarde, a Dutch Reformed Church in Africa6 Jesus Seminar scholar, who popularized and continues to lead a renaissance in Rudolf Bultmann’s work on mythology and the rejection of the literal resurrection of Jesus.7

Student concerns spiraled and things finally came to a head, as leaders of the faculty and in the church dismissed those concerns about ordained professors denying the bodily resurrection of Jesus. I and a group of senior students founded a movement we called Students for Evangelical Learning. We eventually made a public declaration on the bodily resurrection of Jesus, rejecting the revisionist theories of our elitist professors. Evangelical professors, who initially encouraged us to stand up, eventually abandoned us, as their own academic positions and research projects came under threat. Students who supported the protest were threatened with refusal of ordination, after which all but me abandoned the protest. Leading professors at the university charged me with making false accusations about their teaching on the resurrection. I was found guilty and banned from the faculty for life after completing my MTh. As the university disciplinary committee made its verdict known, it specifically declared that ordained professors do not have to believe in the bodily resurrection of Jesus. Despite my sentence and banning, I felt vindicated. The university not only dismissed two thousand years of Christian confession in the bodily resurrection of Jesus as they sided with these skeptical professors, but also actively started persecuting opposing voices.8 My family and I moved to England, where I successfully completed a second master’s degree at Durham University and, in the Netherlands, a PhD on the resurrection of Jesus. Over and over, I witnessed first-hand how classic postEnlightenment historical criticism continues to be a threat to the authority of Scripture and the Christian faith. Having been a lecturer in the Netherlands, organizing international biblical studies conferences, and delivering academic papers in Germany, Scotland, and England, I saw how some conservatives compromise core Christian doctrines in order to gain a place at the table of biblical scholarship with ground rules established by the elites. I also had the opportunity of working with a respected elite German scholar who was a member of the influential Rudolf Bultmann-Gesellschaft (Rudolf Bultmann Society), and who put pressure on me to align my exegesis of the resurrection to that of Bultmann.9 I refused. But I was also encouraged and energized by studying at length the critical German scholarship of Samuel Reimarus, Gotthold E. Lessing, D. F. Strauss, F. C. Baur, Albert Schweitzer, Rudolf Bultmann, Sandy J. M. Wedderburn, and Gerd Lüdemann, alongside the Resurrection in Joseph’s Garden (Pretoria: Protea Bookhouse, 2008), a published version of his PhD thesis under the supervision of van Aarde. 8 I mention a number of examples in my Afrikaans book. 9 At his office, we had a long conversation about the resurrection in Paul and the Gospels. He followed Bultmann closely, arguing that Paul did not believe in the empty tomb, and he refused to accept the counterarguments of, e. g., Adolf Schlatter, Paul Althaus, Udo Schnelle, Martin Hengel, N. T. Wright, and others. Instead of engaging with the evidence I presented in a respectful way, he got frustrated and upset, refusing to give one inch. He even said that, according to Paul, we might one day be able to discover Jesus’s bones. It was obvious he was not going to allow me to disagree with him.

REVIEW ESSAY: CLASH OF VISIONS 119

scholarship of (and sometimes personal friendship with) such scholars as Horton Harris, Robert Yarbrough, Simon Gathercole, Peter Williams, Craig Blomberg, Andreas Köstenberger, and (through their books) Adolf Schlatter, Oscar Cullmann, Gerhard Maier, Martin Hengel, and others. This all represents exposure to a wide and varied range of scholarship. Fast-forward to fifteen years after the controversy at Pretoria summarized above. Mainline Protestant churches that train future pastors at this faculty not only embraced post-Enlightenment critical views on Scripture but also approved same-sex partnerships, in the wake of which hundreds of thousands of ordinary Christians left, joining Bible-believing churches where God continues to save many who affirm the life and message of Jesus Christ and a high view of Scripture. Indeed, Clash of Visions, by Yarbrough (who started teaching in South Africa once or twice annually in 2014), captures the current scene playing out at mainline Protestant churches in South Africa (and all over the globe) remarkably well when he states: [W]e inhabit a world in which for over two centuries a subgroup associated with the Western Protestant church has assumed and asserts control of the meaning of the Bible . . . , promulgated a skeptical understanding of its history and message, and exerted profound influence on pastoral training and cultural perception of the truth of the Bible, not only in the West but worldwide. While churches embracing some version of this hermeneutic of skepticism have tanked in membership numbers and are increasingly complicit in a social order that denigrates pre-Enlightenment Christianity and its correlates today and supports practices like abortion and sexual immorality, God has been saving tens of millions of people worldwide who have believed the saving message that in elitist understanding is invalid (61). Yarbrough has long studied the rise and development—especially in Germany—of post-Enlightenment biblical scholarship. He has also researched key respondents to “critical” scholars—scholars almost forgotten now but in their day highly regarded and with the Christian calling and determination to remain faithful to Scripture and Christ despite “critical” scholarship’s departures from these. Yarbrough’s The Salvation-Historical Fallacy? Reassessing the History of New Testament Theology10 tells the story as it unfolded in New Testament theology at some length. In contrast, Clash of Visions is concise, yet packed with extraordinary and important details every evangelical theology student, pastor, and theologian wants to know. Yarbrough describes the contemporary impact of two hundred years of elitist scholarship that has, he maintains, worked to the detriment of mainline Protestant churches across the globe. As a test cases, in chapter 1 he zooms in on a Scandinavian debate between an “elite” scholar (James Kelhoffer) and a “populist” one (Anders Gerdmar). The clash follows almost exactly the same issues, sequences, and results as my South African experience and discussion about Jurie H. le Roux and Johan Heyns above. 10 Robert W. Yarbrough, The Salvation-Historical Fallacy? Reassessing the History of New Testament Theology, History of Biblical Interpretation Series 2 (Leiden: Deo Publishing 2004).

In chapter 2, focusing on present developments, Yarbrough explores the resurgence of interest in the work and ideas of F. C. Baur (1792–1860) and Rudolf Bultmann (1884–1976), providing a useful update on the continuing appeal of their skeptical ideas in influential circles. Especially in his discussion of Bultmann, Yarbrough highlights discomfiting evidence, such as how at an early age Bultmann abandoned his mother’s orthodox faith and personal trust in the miraculous work of Christ, as he was exposed to skeptical thought in high school and followed his pastor father’s shift from confessional to liberal conviction. Yarbrough shows convincingly how Bultmann continues to be revered in critical circles, often with disregard for critics who refuted Bultmann’s theories convincingly decades ago. I find that the same is happing in a renaissance of Bultmann scholarship in South Africa. The highlight of Clash of Visions (see especially chapter 3) is by far the hope and encouragement Yarbrough offers. He not only explores the necessity of creative academic excellence and populist (or confessional) scholars articulating intellectually rigorous but also theologically responsible alternatives—giving as examples the New Testament theologies of George Ladd, Donald Guthrie, Howard Marshall, Frank Thielman, and Tom Schreiner. He also celebrates the exponential growth of Christianity globally, outlining key biblical doctrines and the high view of Scripture intrinsic to this development. He uncovers another former elitist-turned-populist German scholar Ulrich Wilckens (born 1928), who stood against the tide as others, like Adolf Schlatter (1852–1938) and Eta Linnemann (1926–2009), did before him. The difference between Schlatter and Wilckens, however, is that the latter recovered from a lifethreatening illness late in life and was only able to rectify his critical views afterwards. In his earlier academic career, as theology professor and bishop, Wilckens was by no means regarded as a pious advocate of confessional Christianity. Since his near-death experience, he is among the most outspoken churchmen in Germany and produced a magisterial theology of the New Testament in six volumes. Yet, Wilckens concedes he was unsuccessful in stopping the decline of the church. As Yarbrough quotes him, Wilckens laments: I should have done more. . . . I should have had a stronger hand in the training of [German] pastoral candidates. . . . I could have influenced . . . the future pastors themselves. Back then it already required courage for someone to testify to their faith in Jesus Christ and to take the Bible seriously as Holy Scripture. Pastoral trainees all came from university programs where their professors had already talked them out of such convictions. I’m afraid that I didn’t speak up enough about this. (90) Wilckens also mentions becoming a target of the animosity of virulent feminist theologians and his scholarly work being ignored by fellow German professors.11 11 But see the review by (English) New Testament scholar Robert Morgan of Wilckens’s Theologie des Neuen Testaments, Band 3: Historische Kritik der historisch-kritischen Exegese in The Journal of Theological Studies 69, no. 2 (October 2018): 787–93.

Pondering how his theological work fell out of fashion, and what the solution is, Wilckens explains (again in Yarbrough’s translation of an interview with Wilckens): We’re dealing with no less than a captivity to radically critical, liberal thought, what we might call the “ugly wide ditch” into which many have fallen in the wake of the Enlightenment and of the demythologization of the Bible by Rudolf Bultmann (1884–1976). This theology bears atheistic features and continues to spread. . . . Since the Enlightenment, faith has been widely understood as something concocted in man—as subjective religiosity. The sense of God being an active presence in and party to faith has vanished. For that reason, theology, like the church, needs a deep renewal. We need fresh discovery of the reality of God. (91) I cannot see—given two hundred years of dialogue on the highest academic level with post-Enlightenment skeptical scholarship—how the remedy for the state of theological education globally is a continuation of a compromised dialogue with Baur, Bultmann, and their elite disciples and heritage. In his apologetic masterpiece at the Areopagus (Acts 17), Paul utilized in a remarkably sophisticated way all his Graeco-Roman and Judaic knowledge, but he did not dilute the gospel one iota. As he shared the platform with Stoics and Epicureans, Paul’s gospel was sneered at, yet Dionysius, a member of the Areopagus, a woman named Damaris, and a few others accepted the message. The church desperately needs more scholarly martyrs (in the original sense of the Greek word: “witnesses”) less concerned to impress the elites—academic martyrs willing to abandon Baur and Bultmann and return to Scripture, joining Bultmann’s mother and millions of others from the Third World in becoming foolish, forsaking all earthly gain, humbling themselves in taking up their crosses, and submitting under the God-breathed Scriptures which are useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting, and training in righteousness, so that the servant of Godmay be thoroughly equipped for every good work (2 Tim. 3:16). For as Yarbrough aptly concludes, “The worldwide populist church calls us . . . to humility regarding any intellectual accomplishments, to openness to the Spirit, to lifelong growth in grace and knowledge, and might I add to more reverence for the Bible than for criticism of it” (83).

Footnotes

5 A precise English translation from the Afrikaans is difficult: “Die Bybel is die produk van die gekonkel van mense!”

6 The Dutch Reformed Church in Africa (with around 130,000 members) should not be confused with the Reformed Church in Africa (around 100,000 members) or the Dutch Reformed Church in South Africa (around 1,000,000 members). The Dutch Reformed Church in Africa is theologically the most liberal, while the Reformed Church in Africa is the most conservative, with the Dutch Reformed Church in South Africa usually somewhere in the middle.

7 See Andries van Aarde, Fatherless in Galilee: Jesus as Child of God (Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press, 2001), 185. Together with van Aarde, here are the most important other South African scholars who paved the way for a Bultmann renaissance: Willem S. Vorster, “Rudolf Bultmann as historikus,” HTS Teologiese Studies / Theological Studies 83, nos. 1–2 (1987): 138– 61; G. M. M. Pelser, “Rudolf Bultmann se ontmitologisering van die Nuwe-Testamentiese eskatologie,” HTS Teologiese Studies / Theological Studies 45, no. 4 (1989): 815–42; Jurie H. le Roux, “Andries van Aarde se vaderlose Jesus,” HTS Teologiese Studies / Theological Studies 58, no. 1 (2003): 77–99. Together with van Aarde, his student Philip J. W. Schutte represents probably the closest alignment with Bultmann. See especially Philip J. W. Schutte, Jesus’”.

The interesting thing is that Gerhard Hasel gave me the book of Eta Linnemann just before he died. He was very excited about the book.

Ferdie Mulder observations and criticism of Higher Critical Scholars are not only supported by Gerhard Hasel in his works but also be the Hasel before Hasel, namely John Hurst who wrote in 1864 an extensive history of Rationalism: History of Rationalism which is online available for free download.

He analyzed the liberal scholars in all countries since the Reformation until 1864 and is a backbone on what Ferdie Mulder and Hasel is saying.

It thus appears that at least two denominations, experienced in 1994 the Trojan Horse of Liberalism floating into their denominations. The damage that has caused in the work of the Lord is still to be accessed and evaluated.

Sources:

Ferdie Mulder, “Review Essay Clash of Visions: My South African Story and a Book that explains it. Clash of Visions: Populism and Elitism in New Testament Theology, by ROBERT W. YARBROUGH. Edited by J. V. Fesko and Matthew Barrett. Reformed Exegetical and Doctrinal Studies. Fearn, Ross-shire, UK: Mentor, 2019. Pp. 116. ISBN 9781527103917. Presbyterion 45/2 (Fall 2019): 115–121. Downloaded on the 29^th of May 2021 from file:///C:/Users/user/Downloads/CLASH_OF_VISIONS_MY_SOUTH_AFRICAN_STORY%20(1).pdf

John Hurst, History of Rationalism. 1864 Downloaded from the internet on the 29^th of May 2021 from https://ia800706.us.archive.org/34/items/historyofrationa027452mbp/historyofrationa027452mbp.pdf

* FERDIE MULDER is a biblical scholar who has lectured in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, and Winchester, England. He has a YouTube channel called “Evangelical Platform” and lives in Winchester, England. 1 This account is a condensation based on the first-hand testimony of students who witnessed these events. It forms part of my Afrikaans book: Ferdie Mulder, Opgestaan. Studente se Stryd om Geloof by Tukkies in die jare 2001–2006 [Resurrected: Students’ Struggle for Faith at Tukkies in the Years 2001–2006] (Cambridge: Opgestaan Publikasies, 2011), 36–37.