Book Review: On Being in the Middle by W.J. de Kock

On Being in the Middle: Doing Theology in the Face of Uncertainty (Wipf & Stock, 2024) is W.J. de Kock's account of a life spent between things: between a middle child and his siblings, between an Afrikaner identity and the violence that identity justified, between the answers his theological training gave him and the questions his students forced him to ask instead. De Kock directs Eastern University's PhD in Professional Practice and wrote the more recent Embodied Wisdom as a vision document for that program. This book is the personal and theological ground that program stands on, and it reads nothing like a curriculum guide.

The book splits into two parts. Part A, "Alone in the Middle," is memoir and history. Part B, "With God in the Middle," is constructive theology. A short Methodological Postscript ties the two together. De Kock frames the whole project through liminality — Arnold van Gennep and Victor Turner's anthropological term for the threshold state between one identity and the next — and reads it back into Genesis, Exodus, and Ecclesiastes as a basic condition of life with God.

Part A is where the book earns its weight. De Kock traces the theological roots of Afrikaner nationalism: the Great Trek, the 1838 covenant vow after the Battle of Blood River, the nationalist poetry of "Totius" Du Toit, the all-Afrikaner cabinet Daniel Malan formed in 1948. He's not writing this as outside history. He grew up inside the theology that justified apartheid, absorbed it the way Michael Polanyi says we absorb any tacit knowledge — before we can name it, let alone question it. The turn comes in 1979, when a meeting with Archbishop Desmond Tutu cracks that formation open. The following year he witnesses a police officer assault and racially abuse a Black driver on the street, an episode he doesn't soften or summarize away. From there the book follows him out of complicity and into ministry on the Cape Flats, teaching at an unaccredited, racially mixed Bible college under a mentor named Allen Jansen, in the years when that kind of classroom was itself a quiet act of defiance.

This material is rawer and more specific than anything in Embodied Wisdom, and it changes what "liminality" means in practice. It stops being an abstraction and becomes the literal space de Kock occupied: between the theology he was taught and the one he came to live by, between a white South African's safety and the violence done in his community's name.

Part B shifts register. The chapter "Trinity" works through Jürgen Moltmann's theology of the crucified God — God present in suffering rather than removed from it — using Moltmann's own captivity as a German prisoner of war and Elie Wiesel's account of a child's execution to ground the claim. "Indwelling" argues past the standard choice between materialism and dualism toward a vision of God and matter as mutually indwelling, leaning on Pitirim Sorokin's sociology of cultural cycles to make the case. Later chapters — Belonging, Conversing, Loving, Serving, Growing — keep building outward from there. The argument is serious, but the prose settles into the same expansive, second-person, slightly devotional register that marks de Kock's other book. Long stretches read like an extended reflection delivered from a pulpit rather than a tightly argued claim, and the literature surveys (Sorokin gets several pages) can slow the book down without clearly paying off the slower pace.

The Methodological Postscript is the strongest piece of connective tissue in the book. De Kock draws on Paulo Freire's idea of conscientization — the process by which people start questioning the answers handed to them by those in power — to explain his own shift from a teacher who dispensed settled doctrine to one who taught his students to ask harder questions instead. He's honest that this wasn't a clean conversion: he names the discomfort of realizing his own theological confidence may have done some of the damage he was trying to undo. That admission, and the specificity behind it, is worth more than most of the abstract argument in Part B.

The unevenness is real. Part A has the discipline of memoir: concrete events, named people, consequences. Part B has the discipline of a sermon: it circles, accumulates, and trusts repetition to do work that tighter argument would do faster. Readers who come for the first half's history may find the second half diffuse by comparison.

Who should read it: anyone interested in the theological roots of apartheid and one insider's account of growing out of them, practical theologians working with liminality as a category, and readers of Embodied Wisdom who want the personal history behind that book's method. Readers looking for a rigorously argued systematic theology should expect long devotional stretches alongside the argument, not in place of it. The first half alone is reason enough to pick the book up.