Press Release from The Andrew Murray Prize Fund in Wellington, South Africa

The Andrew Murray-Desmond Tutu Prize for Christian and Theological Books

The Andrew Murray-Desmond Tutu Prize for the Best Christian and Theological Book by a South African in any official language of South Africa, will be awarded for the first time in 2007. This year it goes to Professor J. Wentzel van Huyssteen for his book, Alone in the World?, published by Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company in the USA.

This book, with the subtitle Human Uniqueness in Science and Theology, is an edited version of Van Huyssteen’s Gifford lectures, given in Edinburgh, Scotland, during 2004. Van Huyssteen discusses at length the extremely important issue of the relationship between science and religion. The judges describe it as a “complete book in a way that you rarely see.” Van Huyssteen is at home in theology as well as philosophy, and here he deals with human origins in paleoanthropology in relation to theological anthropology. One could say that the very notion of interdisciplinarity requires specialized skills in more than one field, and professor Van Huyssteen has demonstrated those skills in an exemplary way. What we have in this book is nothing less than a text, which will move the whole issue of the relationship of science and religion a long step forward. Gone are the days, it seems, when the one (leaning towards scientism) tried to make do without the other (leaning towards fundamentalism). Van Huyssteen explored the interdisciplinary dialogue between theology and paleoanthropology, and specifically questions of human uniqueness, by focussing on the meaning of prehistoric European cave paintings as some of the oldest surviving expressions of human symbolic activity. His conclusion is that theology and paleoanthropology converge on the fact that humans, with inter alia their ability to create symbolically, are unique and therefore…“alone in the world.”

The judges were Prof Christina Landman (UNISA), Dr Hans Engdahl (UWC) and Dr Gerrit Brand (Die Burger).

Van Huyssteen studied at Stellenboch and the Free University of Amsterdam, was minister of the Dutch Reformed Congregation Noorder-Paarl, and lectured at the University of Port Elizabeth, before he became the James I. McCord Professor of Theology and Science at Princeton Theological Seminary, USA, in 1992. Some of his other publications are Theology and the Justification of Faith: Constructing Theories in Systematic Theology (the Afrikaans version of which received the Andrew Murray Prize in 1987); Duet or Duel? Theology and Science in a Postmodern World (1998), and The Shaping of Rationality: Toward Interdisciplinarity in Theology and Science (1999).

The Andrew Murray-Desmond Tutu Prize will be awarded for the first time this year. It was established last year by the Board of the Andrew Murray Prize Fund, and, by combining the names of Murray and Tutu, was widely welcomed as a gesture of reconciliation in South Africa. It will be presented to Professor van Huyssteen by Dr. Tutu himself on the 31st of May in Wellington, South Africa. The prize consists of an amount of R12 000, a glass emblem, and an address.