David Bosch

David Jacobus Bosch ( * December 13 1929 in Kuruman, † April 15, 1992 in South Africa) was a South African mission scientist and member of the Dutch Reformed Church.

Life

Bosch was the son of farmers who were members of the Reformed Church, and received a Christian education. 1948 wrote of a at the University of Pretoria for a teaching degree and welcomed the electoral victory of the National Party. At the University he joined the Student Christian Association, at a camp he realized that he was called to the priesthood. During a summer stay with his parents hosted a Bosch service for blacks, who changed his attitude towards them. Before, they were non-persons, now human beings. In the following years he sat critical of the apartheid apart and could not justify it. By a professor, he learned the lyrics by Oscar Cullmann, who became his PhD supervisor at the University of Basel.

1957 Bosch returned back to South Africa and was until 1966 worked as a missionary among the Xhosa in Transkei. In 1967 he was appointed as Senior Lecturer in Church History and Missiology at the Theological School of the Dutch Reformed Church. From 1971 until his death, Bosch worked as a professor of missiology at the University of South Africa, at the time the only South African university were allowed to study at the Black and White. An appeal to the chair of missiology and ecumenism at Princeton University, he refused to continue to work within South Africa against apartheid and for social transformation and reconciliation can. He died in 1992 in a car accident.

Through his numerous publications - in particular its extensive post-colonial mission theological work Transforming Mission: Paradigm Shifts in Theology of Mission ( 1991) - he has to this day major international influence in the field of missiology. Bosch is also regarded as a bridge person who was respected in the World Council of Churches as well as in the World Evangelical Alliance.

Writings

• The Gentile mission in the future show Jesus. An investigation into the eschatology of the Synoptic Gospels. Zwingli -Verlag, Zurich 1959.
• Believing in the future. Towards a theology of mission for Western culture. EMW, Hamburg 1996.
• Mission changing. Paradigm shift in mission theology. With a new concluding chapter by Darell Guder and I. Martin Reppenhagen, Fountain Publisher: Giessen - Basel 2012, 701 pp., ISBN 978-3-7655-9561-5.