The Churches and Apartheid

In 1960 delegates of the South African member churches of the World Council of Churches met its representatives at the Cottesloe Consultation (Cottesloe Declaration (1960), Part I). Their statement records “widely divergent convictions” on apartheid, from the judgment that it is unacceptable in principle to the conviction that “a policy of differentiation can be defended from the Christian point of view” (Cottesloe Declaration (1960), Part I). They agreed all the same that no one who believes in Jesus Christ may be excluded from any church on the grounds of colour or race, that there are no Scriptural grounds for prohibiting mixed marriages, and that a policy which permanently denies people a share in the government of their country cannot be justified (Cottesloe Declaration (1960), Part II, 6, 10 and 15). The archive of the Dutch Reformed Church notes that the Dutch Reformed churches then decided to resign from the World Council (Cottesloe Declaration (1960), introductory note). South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission reports that the statement brought the marginalisation of some of that church’s own delegates, among them Beyers Naudé, who went on to found the Christian Institute (Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Report, vol. 4, ch. 3, para. 87 and note 37), and that the state banned the Institute and its leadership in 1977 (Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Report, vol. 4, ch. 3, paras. 65 and 67).

As the United Church of Canada recorded two years later, the World Alliance of Reformed Churches, meeting at Ottawa in August 1982, suspended the two Dutch Reformed churches from the privileges of membership and declared “that apartheid…is a sin, and that moral and theological justification of it is a travesty of the gospel, and in its persistent disobedience to the word of God, a theological heresy” (United Church of Canada, Apartheid as Heresy (1984), preamble and first resolve). The commission credits Allan Boesak, then president of the Alliance, with promoting the resolution (Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Report, vol. 4, ch. 3, para. 89). In the same year the Dutch Reformed Mission Church drafted a confession, which its synod adopted in 1986 (Belhar Confession, introduction and closing note). The Belhar Confession rejects any doctrine that “sanctions in the name of the gospel or of the will of God the forced separation of people on the grounds of race and color” (Belhar Confession, article 3). The church, it says, must stand where the Lord stands, “against injustice and with the wronged”, and must confess these things even if authorities and laws forbid it (Belhar Confession, articles 4–5).

Desmond Tutu received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1984; the Nobel Foundation’s record describes him as bishop of Johannesburg and former secretary general of the South African Council of Churches (Nobel Prize, Desmond Tutu, facts). In his lecture he spoke of more than three million people uprooted from their homes and of shelters demolished daily at a squatter camp near Cape Town: “There is no peace because there is no justice” (Tutu, Nobel Lecture (1984), paragraphs 2, 4 and 13).

In 1985 a group of theologians who had first met in Soweto in July issued the Kairos Document, dated from Johannesburg on 25 September (Kairos Document (1985), preface). It called the theological justification of the status quo “State Theology” and judged it “not only heretical” but blasphemous (Kairos Document (1985), chapters 1–2). It also criticised the “Church Theology” of the English-speaking churches for making reconciliation an absolute principle where one side is an armed oppressor (Kairos Document (1985), chapter 3). An editorial note in the copy cited counts 156 signatories from over twenty denominations (Kairos Document (1985), editorial note after the conclusion); the commission reports that some churches rejected its analysis and that not all Christian leaders opposed to apartheid signed it (Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Report, vol. 4, ch. 3, para. 90).

The commission found that the Dutch Reformed Church had given apartheid theological and biblical sanction, which began to be officially questioned only in 1986, and that the church confessed before it to having “misled” its members by presenting “apartheid as a biblical instruction” (Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Report, vol. 4, ch. 3, para. 31). In November 1990 a national conference of church leaders at Rustenburg agreed in rejecting apartheid as a sin and confessed: “Some of us actively misused the Bible to justify apartheid” (Rustenburg Declaration (1990), preamble and 2.5.1). By the account of the Dutch Reformed Church’s archive, that church publicly confessed its support of apartheid there, and Tutu accepted the confession in a spirit of forgiveness (Rustenburg Declaration (1990), introductory note). The commission adds that two churches which in 1986 made the rejection of apartheid a matter of confession claimed in essence that the church in South Africa stood to apartheid as the German church had stood to Nazism (Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Report, vol. 4, ch. 3, para. 92); see the Barmen Declaration and the letter from Birmingham jail.