Book Review: W. J. de Kock's Out of My Mind

de Kock, W. J. Out of My Mind: Following the Trajectory of God's Regenerative Story. Foreword by Tony Campolo. Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2014. ISBN 9781625642322.

One Sunday afternoon in late-1970s Johannesburg, a young Afrikaner university student watched a former classmate, now a plainclothes policeman, force a Black motorist's car off the road and drag him through the shattered windshield to beat him. When real police arrived, they arrested not the assailant but the victim, sent off with a racial slur ringing in his ears. That roadside scene, witnessed from his own front lawn, is where de Kock locates the first crack in an inherited theological world — and where his hybrid of memoir and constructive theology, Out of My Mind, begins.

De Kock, now professor of practical theology at Palmer Theological Seminary and founding director of Openseminary, has written something rarer than a confessional memoir or a systematic treatise: a book that uses his own unraveling as an Afrikaner Pentecostal reared inside apartheid theology to test a constructive proposal he calls "regenerative theology." Twelve chapters, each riffing on the book's title (Splintered Mind, Anxious Minds, God Minding, Trajectory Minding, Maturing Mind), trace the arc from a childhood faith that cast Afrikaners as Israel reborn on African soil, through a "dark night of the soul" precipitated by a Desmond Tutu lecture and a hard season of seminary poverty, to a mature theological method built on four moving parts: sacred questions arising from lived context, the regenerative Story of Scripture, beliefs transformed through following Jesus in the liminal space between "already" and "not yet," and purposeful action.

What keeps this from becoming one more deconstruction narrative is de Kock's insistence on real constructive work. His central image, the "trajectory," tracks how Scripture itself bends: a text that tolerates slavery and patriarchy in Genesis curves, by Paul, toward what de Kock quotes as Christ's vision that "there can be no division into Jew and non-Jew, slave and free, male and female. Among us you are all equal." He treats that bending as a compass heading rather than a finished map, asking the church to keep following it rather than stopping at any single waypoint. His treatment of the Trinity does similar work: drawing on Miroslav Volf and Thomas Torrance's accounts of perichoresis — the mutual indwelling of Father, Son, and Spirit — he argues that a Godhead built on reciprocity rather than hierarchy cannot honestly authorize the one-upmanship of apartheid, patriarchy, or clerical power. The African concept of ubuntu, "I am because we are," gives that Trinitarian vision its social shape.

The writing shows real journalistic instinct. De Kock knows how to open a chapter on a scene — a London Underground warning to "mind the gap," his daughter's invented word "strugglety," a night janitorial shift spent ignoring a Ugandan classmate out of ingrained racial prejudice — and let the theology grow out of the image. He moves between The Matrix and the Cappadocian Fathers, between Nietzsche's Übermensch and Tutu's quiet authority, without the seams showing. Tony Campolo's foreword rightly names this fusion as the book's power: de Kock never abandons theological discipline, he simply insists that reflection start from a body on a roadside rather than a doctrine in a book.

Endorsers Alan Hirsch, Brian McLaren, and John Christopher Thomas call this narrative theology at its best, and the praise holds up under scrutiny rather than dissolving into blurb inflation. Underneath the storytelling runs a working bibliography — James Fowler on faith development, John Westerhoff on searching faith, Charles Gerkin on practical theology, Georg Vicedom on the missio Dei — that keeps the case academically honest.

The theological memoir is generous in scope and honest about its own unfinished edges — de Kock calls even his own conclusions "a resting place along the way," not a destination. It serves as an important constructive theological waypoint between ethnoautobiography as method and theological anthropology. Having been introduced in 2023 by Lily Mendoza and James W. Perkinson to EthnoautobiographyBy Jürgen Werner Kremer, Robert Jackson-Paton, R. Jackson-Paton, as I re-read Out of my mind I see a powerful and fruitful conversation and dialogue for constructive theologians like De Kock to have with Indigenous studies and antropology around bringing eithnoautobiography into the classroom and theological reflection. I seeOut of My Mind as a kindred spirit and fellow traveler with the methodology of ethnoautobiography and providing part of a roadmap for doing theological memoir while reflecting on race/ethnicity, gender, class, and identity.

Out of My Mind belongs on syllabi for practical, contextual, and postcolonial theology, but it rewards any reader curious how one conscience metabolized a nation's theological crimes into something more durable than guilt. McLaren's blurb says the book carries a message "especially . . . for today's Christians around the world." More than a decade after publication, that claim has only sharpened: a theology built to mind the gap between belief and practice has rarely felt more necessary.