Beyers Naudé
A representative of the Dutch Reformed Church at the Cottesloe Consultation of 1960 who was marginalised in his church after it. He went on to found the Christian Institute, which the South African state banned in 1977.
South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission reports that the Cottesloe statement of 1960 led to the marginalisation of some of the Dutch Reformed Church’s own representatives, Beyers Naudé among them, and that he went on to establish the Christian Institute, at first to press for change in that church (Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Report, vol. 4, ch. 3, para. 87 and note 37). It names him among those members of faith communities who opposed apartheid as individuals, often despite the institutions to which they belonged (Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Report, vol. 4, ch. 3, para. 64).
The commission records that the Institute was declared an “affected” organisation in 1975, which cut it off from funds from abroad, and was banned two years later together with its executive leadership, and that the churches which had supported it in words gave it little material help (Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Report, vol. 4, ch. 3, paras. 65 and 67). See the Churches and Apartheid.
In the timeline
- 1982 to 1986, firm dateThe Churches and Apartheid
Between 1982 and 1986 the Reformed world alliance calls the theological defence of apartheid a heresy, the Dutch Reformed Mission Church adopts the Belhar Confession, and the Kairos Document appears. The Dutch Reformed Church, which had sanctioned apartheid, later confesses it.