White Theology's Last Bastion

The Afrikaans churches are shunned abroad, isolated at home

At the somber granite monument to South Africa's Boer pioneers near Pretoria, at Krugersdorp where the Boers defied the British and re-established their republic, and at other sites across the nation, white Afrikaners gathered to mark the Day of the Covenant, their Thanksgiving. It was on Dec. 16, 1838, that 470 Afrikaner farmers fought off a raid by 15,000 Zulu warriors, killing 3,000 of the attackers without losing any of their own number. On the eve of the battle, the Afrikaners vowed that if God granted them victory they would ever after commemorate the day as a Sabbath.

For more than 1.8 million whites in the three Dutch Reformed churches that dominate in South Africa, this year's Sabbath marked the end of an especially perplexing year. The churches continue to provide the moral underpinning for the nation's policy of racial separation, a role that has left them increasingly isolated from the mainstream of Christianity, not only abroad but at home.

The Afrikaners have long believed that their nation struck a special covenant with God ordaining them to preserve a Christian civilization. South Africa is, in a sense, the last Protestant theocracy on earth. In a country where American-style separation of church and state is as foreign as interracial marriage, Calvinist piety pervades schoolroom and board room.

The Afrikaans churches are also the last major bastion of the theological view that racial segregation is the Creator's will. The doctrine is a relatively new one. At first, the Afrikaans churches made no distinction between God's white and black children. The church remained integrated for about two centuries and, mainly through zealous missionary efforts, growing numbers of nonwhites entered the fold. Only in 1857 did the Afrikaans God formally become a prime divider of men.

Such a policy has made the Dutch Reformed churches pariahs in most of the Christian world. Those who were members of the World Council of Churches quit in 1961 over W.C.C. criticism of South African racial policies. The dominant Afrikaans church this year cut its last direct link with Protestantism in Holland over support there for W.C.C. grants to African revolutionaries. The only remaining international tie is with a group of orthodox Calvinist churches. Now relations with the nonwhite Reformed churches within South Africa are deteriorating.

Of the three Dutch Reformed churches, two are relatively small (combined membership: 338,000). Ironically, the one with the more liberal theology takes the hardest line on race, while the more doctrinally conservative church has a group of members who signed last year's Koinonia Declaration, a rare Christian Afrikaner protest against South African racial policies. By far the most important of the three churches is the Nederduits Gereformeerde Kerk, or N.G. Church, which is often sarcastically called "the National Party at prayer." It claims the allegiance of 1.5 million of the nation's 2.5 million Afrikaners, including Prime Minister P.W. Botha and his predecessor John Vorster, now President. English-speaking Protestant and Roman Catholic organizations, both white and black, are quick to criticize government policy, but they have minimal influence on the Afrikaner-dominated regime. When the N.G. Church speaks, however, the government listens.

Not that it ever hears anything unpleasant. Official N.G. Church policy, issued after a 1974 synod, has dropped old racist theology in favor of nominal support for racial equality, but holds that South Africa's system of apartheid is morally acceptable. "The New Testament does not regard the diversity of peoples as such as something sinful," the policy statement says, and the teaching in Galatians 3: 28 that "there is neither Jew nor Greek" in Christ relates to overall spiritual unity, not "social integration."

Church-state unanimity runs deeper than doctrine. The liberal Johannesburg Sunday Times this year published a major expose on the Broederbond, the secret clan of 12,000 leading Afrikaners sworn to uphold apartheid and considered to be more powerful than Parliament. The Sunday Times reported that 750 Afrikaner ministers, fully 40% of the clergy, were Broederbond members.

The N.G. Church is, confusingly enough, not one church but four. N.G. missionaries years ago set up three "daughter" churches, one each for black Africans, "Coloreds" (those of mixed race) and the small Indian community. The three nonwhite satellites together have 1.3 million members. Though divided racially, the four groups have identical doctrine and are all members of a powerless umbrella body called the Federal Council of Dutch Reformed Churches.

Last March, the federal council bowed to nonwhite wishes and proposed that the four churches, establish a joint governing body with far-reaching power over doctrine, discipline and issues of "general concern." Leaders of the Colored daughter church rejected the plan in favor of one even more daring: unification of the four churches. The white church, at its quadrennial synod a few weeks later, flatly rejected any accommodation to its nonwhite Reformed Christians. (The obvious fear: the church might gradually integrate at regional and local levels, and also lay the moral grounds for giving blacks a say in secular government.) The delegates also rejected a suggestion that they rename the nonwhite factions "sister" rather than "daughter" churches. The synod elected as the church's new moderator E.P.J. Kleynhans, who believes that church integration is an "indefensible policy" and takes pride that the church has been "a century ahead of the state" in developing apartheid.

The synod did not discuss the violation of elemental civil rights in South Africa or the squalid living conditions of black workers in urban areas, and it shouted down a professor who had the temerity to ask a question about the numerous deaths of black political prisoners. All this makes a schism between the white N.G. Church and its three nonwhite factions appear inevitable. Said the Rev. Ernest Buti, moderator of the black daughter church: "We have offered the hand of friendship, but we were informed that the white church is not interested in us." Nonwhite churchmen are mulling a plan to create a multiracial church of their own and invite white liberals to join them. White church leaders say they can block that revolt, since they provide three-fourths of the daughter churches' $10.3 million yearly budget.

Yet the nonwhites may have no choice but to secede. For one thing, growing black nationalism in southern Africa is making it difficult, even dangerous, for black clergy to continue to be affiliated with pro-government whites. For another, the nonwhites are simply fed up. "Black Reformed Christians are tired of being associated with an apartheid church," says Allan Boesak, a prominent young Colored theologian. "In four or five years we will have a united church following the tradition of Reformed churches around the world, rejecting all forms of ethnic separation." Laments Ben Marais, a former University of Pretoria professor and a major force among white liberal reformers for more than 30 years: "I believe the church has taken a step backward that can possibly never be regained."

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