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What makes me sympathise is that I know what he’s talking about.
Perhaps I can illustrate it by an exercise in narrative theology, quoting something from my own journal nearly 30 years ago. It was at a consultation called by the South African Council of Churches (SACC) to evaluate ten years of the World Council of Churches’ Programme to combat racism.
13-Feb-1980, Wednesday
Hammanskraal: Consultation to evaluate WCC Programme to Combat Racism
We began in the morning with a Eucharist, and then I went to breakfast and sat next to Rykie van Reenen, the reporter for Beeld and Rapport, and I told her how much I had enjoyed her reporting of Sacla, and talked to her about various things. I told her how I saw the world as enemy-occupied territory, and how Jesus had come to bind the strong man, as in Luke 11, and set the prisoners free.
As we began Desmond Tutu said he had been praying, and that the Lord had given him no peace about the fact that the Dutch Reformed Churches were hardly represented at all, and said that he had been given something that he was sure the Lord wanted him to say to our brothers in the Dutch Reformed Churches. He read out this statement, and a number of blacks got up and asked that it be accepted as a message from the consultation as a whole. Roelf Meyer, the only white member of the Dutch Reformed Church present, objected, saying that the Dutch Reformed Churches were on the other side of the struggle. It seemed to me that he was not concerned to be Christian at all, because even if one does perceive them as enemies, we must still love our enemies, but he seemed to be full of bitterness, possibly at the way his own church had treated him.
Desmond Tutu said that the government had stopped talking to him after he had said in Denmark something about boycotting South African coal exports, and though I don’t think I heard what he said, there was apparently a great big tizwoz in the press and in government circles about it. In my cynical way I suspect that the fuss was because many cabinet ministers have coal shares, and so they stand to lose out where it hits their own pockets. For the same reason they are not encouraging ethanol as a motor fuel, because they’ve got their money in Sasol. Personally, I think that in view of the energy crisis, we should not be exporting coal anyway, even if it were not something that might hurt apartheid.
There was a Bible study by Charles Villa-Vicencio, and then we went into groups again. Our group was supposed to discuss church structures, organisation and membership, but Ben Ngidi said he thought we ought to discuss the formation of a black confessing church. He said that the time had come to form a black confessing church. I said that if that were so, then we should be leaving this consultation right now, because it would be an admission that racism had defeated us, and that we saw absolutely no point in combating it at all. Certainly it seems to contradict all that we had discussed so far. as it would be attempting to entrench racism in the church. Furthermore, it carried the suggestion that blacks were orthodox because they were black, and that whites were heretical because they were white, and therefore the whole idea is
racist from the start. Ben said blacks responded to the gospel from a situation of poverty and oppression, and whites from a position of power and privilege, which I thought was a gross oversimplification — one of yesterday’s groups had reported back saying that they thought it was evil that the government should be trying to form a black middle class. I was trying to point out that this was, in worldly terms, a middle class consultation, but that was too difficult to see. I pointed out how members of the black middle class exploited the black poor, for example by building bottle stores in resettlement areas like Nondweni. But all the blacks present seemed to think that that was quite legitimate. One said “maybe he gives bursaries”, and so showed their middle-class bourgeois nature, and I wanted to laugh. There was an earnest American lady who had joined us for the day, whose name I didn’t catch, but she spoke to me at lunch and was very patronising. She spoke of “us” and “them”, and said that while she agreed with what I was saying, I couldn’t tell “them” that, because “they” wouldn’t listen to me. I thought that if we could not be honest with each other, and say what we really thought, and perceived people in the group as “us” and “them” on the basis of colour, then we were in fact part of the disease.We continued group work in the afternoon, and then I spoke on biblical and theological categories. Ann Hughes accused me of being “academic” and that for me sums up the whole trouble with this consultation. For many of the participants the Bible and the Christian faith are not experiential realities, but are something external to themselves, things which they have had to study as a prerequisite to holding a certain office or position within the ecclesiastical structure, but of little use to them in interpreting the reality of their lives. But I see everything in South Africa in biblical and theological terms. I know of no other way of dealing with them.
Yesterday, when one of the groups reported back on the causes of racism, Dr Gomedje from Swaziland commented that the whole report could be summed up in one word — sin. And several people sniggered. Desmond Tutu said that that showed that we had nothing different to offer the world, and again last night at the group leaders’ meeting he appealed that the groups should come up with solutions rooted in scripture and prayer, because we were meeting as
Christians. But people, certainly in our group, were showing themselves incapable of doing this.We finally decided to list a few practical recommendations for combating racism in church structures, organisations and movements. But they all came from my own suggestions and nobody else in the group came up with anything positive or concrete. They just wanted abstractions. I suggested that the basic thing was membership, and that baptism and confirmation instruction should stress the importance of renunciation of the standards of the flesh, of which racism was one, and one of the most significant in South Africa.
I’ve quoted quite a large chunk because it gives background to the main point — where the man from Swaziland said that everything we were talking about could be summed up in one word — “Sin”. And a lot of people sniggered at this naive country bumpkin.
And Desmond Tutu, then General Secretary of the SACC, who was chairing the meeting, intervened to point out quite forcefully that we came to this meeting as Christians, and so we should not be ashamed of Christian language. If we could not speak to the world as Christians then we couldn’t tell the world anything different from what it had already decided to do without us.
And that’s the point at which I sympathised with what Russell D. Moore said on the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary web site, especially when he said,
Preachers will always be tempted to bypass the problem behind the problems: captivity to sin, bondage to the accusations of the demonic powers, the sentence of death. That’s why so many of our evangelical superstars smile at crowds of thousands, reassuring them that they don’t like to talk about sin. That’s why other evangelical superstars are seen to be courageous for their culture wars, while they carefully leave out the sins most likely to be endemic to the people paying the bills in their congregations.
But though I could sympathise to some extent, I think there is something wrong.
Moore is trying to balance two things, and say “a plague on both your houses”. The trouble is that in expressing such pious neutrality, we often end up siding automatically with the stronger.
And I’m not sure that the two things are as balanced as that. For all its faults (and there are many), the “left” liberation theology does talk about sin. Despite the sniggers, I think most would say that ultimately, yes, we were saying that things like racism are sinful. The trouble with the “right” is that they are saying that things like greed are not sinful.
The balance is not equal.
4 Comments
27 March 2008 at 9:09 pm
Wow. This is an excellent post. It’s interesting how devastatingly repetitious history can be. Thanks for highlighting the underlying point…
28 March 2008 at 3:38 am
Well, I was raised among Southern Baptists, and I’m still surprised when I agree with their seminarians. (I abandoned the church as a teenager.) But then my father went to Southern Baptist Theological Seminary when it was a rather more liberal place than it is now, and he was raised a Quaker on a tenant farm, so he doesn’t quite fit your stereotype. (Nor do most of the Southern Baptist preachers and missionaries I know.)
I think you’re seeing the two sides as less equal because you feel far more strongly about the sins preached about by those on the left (racism, greed, etc.) than about the sins preached about by those on the right (abortion, adultery, temperance, gambling, etc.).
My father preached his first sermon–on temperance–to the back end of a mule, who didn’t react the way the deacons in his first church did, who told him to lighten up just a bit, him being such a young whippersnapper and all. He did lighten up quite a bit over the years, and has also preached quite a bit on racism to Southern Baptist congregations and on internationalism to Japanese congregations, though he is not a liberation theologist of left or right.
28 March 2008 at 9:48 pm
It seems to me that part of the problem is that “Liberation theology” has become such a blanket term. If one is talking about the original Latin American liberation theologians such as Guittierez, Sobrino etc, then it seems inconceivable that one can accuse them of ignoring sin. And if one considers the South African context, probably the most obvious expression of liberation theology would be the Kairos Document, which, even if you don’t agree with everything it said, certainly didn’t ignore sin – if my rather hazy memory serves me correctly!
I suspect that the problem on the ecclesial left, certainly in South Africa, was more that of opportunism, that the churches offered a space for resistance that was not available elsewhere and thus attracted people who’s theological convictions were not necessarily deep rooted. (After all, getting funding to study theology was often easier than getting funding for other studies as foreign church agencies were at some points pouring money into theological education – which I shouldn’t complain about as I also benefitted from it, but the point is that there was a climate in which a certain opportunism certainly played a role).
29 March 2008 at 9:26 am
Macrina & Joel,
Yes, it is personal. I suppose one of the problems I have with this stuff is that I developed a theology of liberation about the same time as Gutiérrez, or even before, in the period 1964-1969. The only problem was, he published first
Not quite — it was more my personal discoveries as an undergraduate theology student and political activist in that period that helped me to get it together in my own mind.
It wasn’t an original creation on my part, just the discovery that all Christian theology was liberatory at its core, and I got into a pattern involving Anglican Evensong on Sunday nights, university lectures on Doctrine and New Testament in the week, and political party meetings on Saturdays. The materials were to hand, it was just a matter of getting them together in my head. G.B. Caird’s book on Principalities and powers was seminal. One of my great disappointments in later years was to talk to my NT lecturer who had recommended the book, Vic Bredenkamp, and to realise that he had not the slightest idea of the dynamite he had given me. To him it was nothing more than an academic text that did not touch his life at all.
Going to study in England, with its boss nation theology, made me aware of the need for a “theology of revolution” to counter it. I reproduced an article I wrote about that time in my other blog Notes from underground: Christianity, North and South
So I suppose the fact that I used the term “liberation theology” to describe my own understanding of theology means that I do tend to see it more narrowly than some. It is theology that is more likely to appeal to oppressed and downtrodden people than to boss nations, which is why I get a bit annoyed with distortions of it, like A conservative blog for peace, which describes liberation theology as
Admittedly that is the result of a misleading headline and selective quoting, and is not quite what the original said, but nevertheless saying that those suffering from ostracism, banishment and liquidation at the hands of an oppressive State want to make the state the cynosure of their existence is a very strange inversion indeed.