Princeton professor receives 2007 Murray-Tutu book prize

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. The recipient is J. Wentzel van Huyssteen for his book, Alone in the World? Human Uniqueness in Science and Theology, published by Wm. B. Eerd­mans Publishing Company in the Unit­ed States.

The book 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.

He explored the interdisciplinary di­alogue between theology and paleoan­thropology and, specifically, questions of human uniqueness, by focusing 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.”

Van Huyssteen studied at Stellen­boch and the Free University of Ams­terdam, was minister of the Dutch Re­formed Congregation Noorder­Paarl, and lectured at the University of Port Elizabeth, before he became the James

I. McCord Professor of Theology andScience at Princeton Theological Sem­inary 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 Murray­Desmond Tutu Prize 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 Dr. van Huyssteen by Desmond Tutu May 31 in Wellington, South Africa.