Dr. Martin spent most of the 1990s in South Africa, where he witnessed the inauguration of Nelson Mandela and worked on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. In June 2009 he revisited the country with a group of Christian scholars and recorded these images of the church.
Once the seat of apartheid South Africa’s Calvinist, intellectual elite, Stellenbosch University is yet another site of social transformation. Its School of Theology is evidence of this. While it once trained pastors for the Dutch Reformed Church (DRC), the school now provides theological education to members of the DRC’s former “daughter” or mission churches, linked together under the rubric of “The Uniting Reformed Church of Southern Africa.” But in addition to providing theological education, the faculty retains its identity as a “think tank” for the church. And there’s perhaps no better example of this than the Beyers Naudé Centre, headed by Prof. Nico Koopman.
Beyers Naudé was an Afrikaans pastor, serving the DRC in the 1950s and early 60s, when he encountered the conditions under which black South Africans were living. He spoke out, not just about the complicity of the white church in apartheid, but exposing the way the Afrikaner establishment had wended its way into all aspects of South African society. What resulted was the formation of the Christian Institute: an organisation that openly engaged in dialogue with the emerging Black Consciousness movement, led by Steve Biko, as counter to the all-pervasive ideology of apartheid. The Christian Institute called for the white churches to embrace the aspirations of black South Africans, but especially to repent, materially, of their racism.
Beyers’s was a kenotic move: in the process, he was defrocked, disowned, and eventually “banned”—that notorious practice of forcing “affected” persons into exile within their own country, forbidding the publication of their work, and even the use of their name in public—by the apartheid government. Banned persons were non-persons. As far as “the public” was concerned, they simply did not exist. As Winnie Mandela once said of him, Oom Bey (as he was affectionately known) became “one of us.” Suffering “outside the gate” (Heb. 13:13), he became “black.”
Several of South Africa’s current religious and political leaders were directly involved in the work of the Christian Institute, which was doing “public theology” long before the term became fashionable. And so it’s not surprising that the Naudé Centre at Stellenbosch has “public theology” as its mandate.
In his presentation to our seminar, Koopman told us that the task of public theology is to reflect on “the inherent public nature, character and thrust of Christian faith; the public rationality of Christian faith; and the public implications of Christian faith for politics, economics, environment, civil society, public discussions, debates, opinion-formation, and policy-making.”
As one can imagine, this makes a lot of reflection! It also, arguably, makes a lot of reflection… in the sense that it contrasts with the active embodiment of the Gospel in churches like Central Methodist and J.L. Zwane. One might be tempted to quip that “the kingdom of God is not words but power.” But that would be too easy. There’s an important need to interpret the significance of embodied action, as well as to “read” the theological significance of the Constitutional Court and other (nation) building sites.
And this is the sort of interpretive work the centre does. But it also extends the reach of the Gospel into the language of policy-making and criticizing, providing resources for initiatives such as the Alternative Budget Process—which forms a “people’s budget” in consultation with progressive economists, churches, and labour unions. The centre also coordinates dialogues about development with its international partners—again something that Naudé fostered during the 1960s and the 1970s.
My own interest in the centre (where I‘ll be doing my sabbatical research in 2010) is in the “Congregations and public life” focus. Here the public significance of ecclesial practices (Eucharist, baptism, polity, and so forth) is fruitfully explored. In my own research I hope to look more at how in academic public theology, the “public” is constructed by a set of political elites, or defined within a static constitution as a “structure” of society. If this is the case, the church (and theology) in order to be considered “public” must play by the rules of such elites. But if there’s something that the above examples teach us, it’s that “publics” are constituted, contested, and sustained or transformed by ordinary people sharing their lives.
The fact that all this rich and diverse work can now be explored within the former elite corridors of Stellenbosch University signals an important change in South Africa. Of course, the name of Beyers Naudé is no longer “black” in the sense Mrs. Mandela used it in the 1980s. Nor does the centre have the marginal identity the Christian Institute did. Yet its work remains in prophetic continuity with the man for whom it is named. As Naudé called the church to conform to its professed, baptismal vision, so does the centre call the New South Africa to realize its promise of a better life for all.
