Richard Burridge, who wrote a remarkable work on the genre of the gospels, has a new book called Imitating Jesus - An Inclusive Approach to New Testament Ethics. While I have yet to discover what he means by 'inclusive' - a word that normally makes me reach for my gun, because it is a such a loaded term - I have been impressed by his determination to recover the role of the Bible, and of the Biblical Jesus, in ethics. He relates the problem to the apartheid era in South Africa, when genuine Christians prayerfully earnestly and intelligently reading their Bibles decided that it supported racism. Does this mean that the Bible ought to be rejected, because it is open to such uses? By no means: though merely appealing to the Bible does not guarantee good reading of it.
Interestingly, he quotes CESA Bishop Frank Retief's submission, made in 1997, to a hearing of 'Faith Communities'.
...when the government made legislation that accorded with our moral or biblical understanding, we supported them. However, on the great issue of justice for all, we were often insensitive. We had not made the connection between gospel and society...We were witnesses to how the Bible and its message can be misused to support an evil ideology. National government used the Bible to support its policies, to give the impression that they were a Christian government. But then so did some liberation theologians who finally supported violence as a means of continuing the struggle...Where we have been negligent, careless and insensitive to biblical injunctions and mandates as we have been, may the Lord graciously forgive us....The fact that the Bible was used in the past to condone injustice does not mean its true message may be ignored today...It is our belief that this day and hour calls for men and women of conviction and integrity to apply the message of the Bible more accurately and faithfully to our emerging society... p. 397-8
I have met Bishop Frank and heard him speak, and I find this an impressive and moving statement. But, Burridge asks, what gives him and others (and the rest of us) confidence that we aren't making similar mistakes now?
Burridge gives an analysis of how the South African churches got into this mess - and notes on the one hand a lack of self-criticism and on the other a theology which overlooked the central place of Jesus for all Christian ethics. Could a church that was actually prioritising Jesus - the Jesus of the gospels, but also the Jesus of Paul and the other authors of the NT - have allowed itself to lapse so badly? Make no mistake, there was some sophisticated theological and exegetical work done in the theological faculties of South Africa in the apartheid era... but, says Burridge, the voice of Jesus was strangely silent even so.
So, argues Burridge, if churches want to avoid falling into the group-think which has resulted in such terrible misusing the Bible, they need to practice self-reflection and self-criticism as a matter of course. And also, they ought to pay attention to Jesus.
[Note: to any South African readers - I am only here reporting from Burridge. I cannot know and do not pretend to know what it was to live in those times and to be a Christian in those times. Nor do I know what it is to live as a Christian with this as a legacy - though Australian Christians have made their own mistakes of course.]
8 comments:
…makes me reach for my gun, because it is a such a loaded term.
(((((GROAN)))))
For what its worth, as a South African who grew up in that era in a conservative evangelical context, I think that the primary problem was not that Christians were convinced that the Bible supported apartheid, but rather that they were convinced (conveniently of course) that it taught that they should not get politically involved, although for some reason this only applied to political involvement against the regime. As a child in a Baptist context I had Romans 13 quoted to me whenever I raised any questions. CESA also fitted precisely into this mold - and in their case became more entrenched in it by the fact that they attracted disaffected Anglicans who didn't like it when the CPSA began to question the regime and epecially when Desmond Tutu became archbishop.
It was the (Afrikaans speaking) Dutch Reformed Churches who believed that the Bible actively supported apartheid but this emerged more in the earlier part of the twentieth century (and was related to Dutch calvinist developments, the details of which I forget). By the seventies and eighties they were also questioning this but continued to support the state on the basis of the submitting to legitimate authority argument.
Those Churches that did, however tentatively, begin to oppose apartheid were the more ecumenically orientated mainline Protestants, the Anglicans (who in South Africa have a fairly Anglo-Catholic tradition) and the Catholics and I think that it is true to say that they were able to reflect on Christological and ecclesiological principles that went further than proof texting from Scripture. But they were literally demonised by the evangelicals.
Yes, I think this is what Bishop Frank is apologising for in this quotation: not that their reading of the Bible was racist, but that it was non-political. As he points out, the liberationist use of scripture was not always much of an improvement on the old apartheid reading...
There were numerous factors contributing to the various denominations stance towards apartheid. Macrina has summarized them well. In the case of CESA Bishop Frank has mentioned a few times that they were so opposed to liberation theology because of its removal of the more evangelical elements of the gospel that they refused to involve themselves in 'liberation' activity.
In response to Burridge - I don't think Bishop Frank has a naive confidence that evangelicals will never misuse the scriptures - I think rather he's calling on us not to stop trying to apply the scriptures as accurately as we possibly can in the contemporary arena.
The reality is that sinful people have sinful blindspots and always will - yet somehow Jesus, through complete grace, still rocks up on the scene and calls people to worship him - and so today, unlike many other major denominations in SA, CESA is actually growing steadily preaching a Jesus both from the gospels and Paul.
Thanks to both Stephen and Macrina for their first-hand points of view. And congratulations to Stephen on his engagement!
"inclusive', a word that normally makes me reach for my gun" — yes, absolutely!
Thanks to all for some fascinating discussion.
I'm still not quite clear how it was Jesus that was missing from the conservative evangelical theology in South africa under apartheied, which is what MJ seems to paraphrase Burridge as saying. How can Jesus be absent if we carefully study the Bible? What can Jesus say to us that we don't find by studying the Bible?
I occasionally wander if UK conservative evangelicals might not have to make similar apologies to Retief over the way they support conservative policy on areas such as taxation and welfare, rising gaps between rich and poor, decline in equal access to education... The Bible has a lot to say about providing for the widow and orphan.
It wasn't for Burridge that Jesus was absent: it was that the person of Jesus and his teaching were not prominent or prioritised.
As for UK conservative evangelicals - well I can't judge, really. Though it is interesting how prominent members of the upper middle class are in the movement.
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