(2017) Maar we wisten ons door de Heer geroepen. Kerk en apartheid in transnationaal perspectief (original) (raw)
Related papers
The Awkward Positioning of a Dutch Reformed Missionary in Apartheid South Africa
Studia Historiae Ecclesiasticae, 2020
The Rev. D. P. (David) Botha was a lifelong apartheid critic and minister in the Dutch Reformed Mission Church (DRMC) and later the Uniting Reformed Church in Southern Africa (URCSA). Early in his career, he served as a “missionary” in a DRMC congregation in Wynberg, and subsequently in other congregations in the Western Cape, South Africa. During his career, he wrote an important book and engaged in public discourse through contributions in newspapers and other mainstream publications. Focusing on these sources, most of which now form part of his private collection in the Dutch Reformed Church (DRC) Archive, this article traces Botha’s growing agitation regarding the implementation of apartheid policies, in the aftermath of the institution of the 1950 Group Areas Act. Among other things it illuminates the early apartheid-era white view of the other, as experienced and critiqued by this insider-outsider minister with respect to his assessment of general white perceptions of so-calle...
Stellenbosch Theological Journal, 2021
This article will provide an overview and analysis of developments in the Dutch Reformed Church's (DRC) General Synod concerning race, racism, and racial reconciliation from 1986 until 2019. It seeks to extend the multiple accounts of the DRC's adoption and rejection of apartheid theology by tracing its further attempts at grappling with questions of racism during and after the transition to democracy, into the present. Three primary discourses are explored, namely the search for an inclusive ecclesiology, the commitment to community involvement in the reconstruction of South Africa after apartheid, and the transformation of interpersonal ethics towards greater respect and care for others. Thereafter, the article highlights four territories that remain largely unexplored within the DRC in the past quarter of a century and argues for their future exploration. These trajectories could contribute to a deeper transformation and conversion from the white Christianity historically tied to the DRC.
Reforum: A brief but not unimportant chapter in the Dutch Reformed Church’s apartheid saga
2021
In 1985 when storm clouds were gathering over South Africa, and a state of emergency was declared, a group of members of the Dutch Reformed Church (DRC) Family, clergy as well as laity, founded an organisation, Reforum. The two-fold aim of Reforum was to provide a prophetic witness against apartheid, calling the DRC to take leave of its theology of apartheid, and, secondly, to work towards the reunification of the DRC Family. The article researches the original Reforum documents, minutes, reports, conference material and letters, that hitherto laid untouched in the DRC Archive, in Pretoria. The programme of Reforum, especially the national and regional conferences held by the organisation over the 7 years of its existence, is discussed. The initial negative reaction of the DRC officials and synods, as well as the critique from some in the Dutch Reformed Mission Church and the DRC in Africa that Reforum was not radical enough in its approach, are recorded. The summation, at the end, ...
Revista de História da Sociedade e da Cultura, 2024
Focusing especially on writings by the theologian Abraham Kuyper and the impact of two Dutch born clergymen with substantial careers in South Africa's Dutch Reformed Church in the late 19 th century, this article develops a perspective on the intertwined relationship between groups and cultural factors involving the Netherlands and South Africa during this period. This intertwined relationship went far beyond Reformed theology, but the literature produced by Reformed theologians and pastors is one area or lens through which one might perceive this relationship quite clearly. The article's thesis is that both the Netherlands and parts of South Africa during much of the colonial period experienced themselves as on the margins of a British Empire perceived with varying degrees of apprehension and hostility and that both the first and the second Anglo Boer Wars of the late 19 th and early 20 th century catapulted such shared sentiments into overdrive. Yet Dutch sympathisers often had to counterbalance their identification of shared culture and religion that they had with the Boers with their more general, perhaps growing, sensibilities regarding racial equalization and democracy, which created tensions in this complex relationship, as this essay will show.
Religions, 2021
During the first few decades of the 20th century, the Nkhoma mission of the Dutch Reformed Church of South Africa became involved in an ecumenical venture that was initiated by the Church of Scotland’s Blantyre mission, and the Free Church of Scotland’s Livingstonia mission in central Africa. Geographically sandwiched between these two Scots missions in Nyasaland (presently Malawi) was Nkhoma in the central region of the country. During a period of history when the DRC in South Africa had begun to regressively disengage from ecumenical entanglements in order to focus on its developing discourse of Afrikaner Christian nationalism, this venture in ecumenism by one of its foreign missions was a remarkable anomaly. Yet, as this article illustrates, the ecumenical project as finalized at a conference in 1924 was characterized by controversy and nearly became derailed as a result of the intransigence of white DRC missionaries on the subject of eating together with black colleagues at a communal table. Negotiations proceeded and somehow ended in church unity despite the DRC’s missionaries’ objection to communal eating. After the merger of the synods of Blantyre, Nkhoma and Livingstonia into the unified CCAP, distinct regional differences remained, long after the colonial missionaries departed. In terms of its theological predisposition, especially on the hierarchy of social relations, the Nkhoma synod remains much more conservative than both of its neighboring synods in the CCAP to the south and north. Race is no longer a matter of division. More recently, it has been gender, and especially the issue of women’s ordination to ministry, which has been affirmed by both Blantyre and Livingstonia, but resisted by the Nkhoma synod. Back in South Africa, these events similarly had an impact on church history and theological debate, but in a completely different direction. As the theology of Afrikaner Christian nationalism and eventually apartheid came into positions of power in the 1940s, the DRC’s Nkhoma mission in Malawi found itself in a position of vulnerability and suspicion. The very fact of its participation in an ecumenical project involving ‘liberal’ Scots in the formation of an indigenous black church was an intolerable digression from the normative separatism that was the hallmark of the DRC under apartheid. Hence, this article focuses on the variegated entanglements of Reformed Church history, mission history, theology and politics in two different 20th-century African contexts, Malawi and South Africa.
The Journal of African History, 2013
The armed struggle of the South African national liberation movement played out over the thirty years when the African National Congress (ANC) was illegal and based largely in exile. The development of an army, Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK), made the ANC and South African Communist Party (SACP) close comrades in arms, a relationship that has vo l. , n o.
The Catholic Church in contemporary Southern Africa. …, 1999
We have noted elsewhere how the Catholic Church in this period tended to exist as two largely separate entities: a settler church for whites and a mission church for blacks. 1 The settler church reflected the racist attitudes of white people in South Africa. In 1947 racism permeated all aspects of white society as it did, in greater or less degree, in all the colonies of the far-flung European empires. The separation of society and social institutions in a racially divided way was an unquestioned cultural value. White people did not want, nor expect, to mingle with black people on any level at all other than in a master servant relationship at work or in the home. There was very little difference in white racial attitudes amongst the different Christian churches. Perhaps the Catholic church's non racial stance affected some Catholics but this was limited.