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An American Looks at Kairos
By A. Roy Eckardt

"According to a long-standing Christian tradition relating to oppression, a particular tyrant or a particular tyrannical regime forfeits the moral right to govern and the people acquire the right to resist.' And this is the state of affairs in today's South Africa…. Radical South African liberation thinking-praxis goes much farther than the nonrevolutionist Social Gospel tendencies of much American black liberation thinking."

THE racist condition in the Republic of South Africa reverses that of the United States at a fundamental place. In South Africa, a white minority of fewer than five million people dominates and persecutes a majority of over twenty-two million blacks. White control extends as well to over 2.6 million mixed-race "coloreds" and over 800,000 Asians (mostly of Indian descent). About sixty percent of the whites are Afrikaners of Dutch and French Huguenot descent; the remainder have British roots. Simply put, the whites have the vote, and they have the guns.

The guilt and the uneasy consciences of white South Africans combine with massive foreboding of tomorrow, when the tables will be turned and white overlordship brought to an end. Whites will do everything possible to retain their privileges and forestall a feared day of reckoning. Their anxieties hold them captive. Un numbered white Christians live upon the edge of existential despair and forlornness, because they are not ready or able to subject their own self-interest and privilege to the shattering gospel demands of love and justice for the oppressed. White South Africans, as John W. de Gruchy of the University of Cape Town puts it, are "the victims of a set of historical circumstances for which they may not all be personally responsible but for which they have now become responsible." But de Gruchy feels that white racism is pretty much the same everywhere. Without justifying the South African situation in any way, one can argue, accordingly, that criticisms of that country by whites outside it have double roots: a concern for the black

A. Roy Eckardt is Professor of Religion Studies, Emeritus, Lehigh University, and Visiting Scholar at the Centre for Postgraduate Hebrew Studies, Oxford University. A former Editor of The Journal of the American Academy of Religion, he has written several volumes on Jewish-Christian relations, such as Your People, My People (1974) and (with Alice L. Eckardt) Long Night's Journey Into Day (1982). In this present article, Dr. Eckardt examines the revolutionary theology of the South African "Kairos Document."

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plight, and a correlative sense of white guilt.¹ In any case, what follows is from the perspective of an American interpreter long involved in issues on the boundaries of the churches and social justice.

I

The Republic of South Africa is a police-military state presided over by whites who, as Winnie Mandela's father always reminded the children, "invaded our country and stole the land from our grandfathers." Or as Mrs. Mandela herself says, the introduction of Christianity into South Africa "is identified by militants with the whole system of oppression: the white man came with a Bible in one hand and a gun in the other; he gave the black man the Bible while taking his land. He taught the black man that when master hits the one cheek, you turn the other."² Bishop Desmond Tutu has described South African apartheid as the most evil system since Nazism.

The story of South Africa and its oppression of the blacks and others of that land has been told many times.³ It is a tale of continuing and even intensifying horror: death squads; preventive detention without trial and without legal recourse; torture of detainees; killings of unarmed children and young people; deprivation of political rights; starvation; mass unemployment; "banning" or silencing of black leaders and those in sympathy with the black cause; suppression of institutions and groups fighting for justice; and, perhaps most satanic of all and fundamental to apartheid, forced removals of blacks to remote, unlivable dumping grounds called "homelands." There is in force a progammatic destruction of black family life. Millions of people "have been uprooted from their homes and dumped in other areas, usually impoverished and without facilities,... torn from loved ones" and "broken by migrant labor in dehumanizing conditions, to provide the whites with wealth." As one such victim cried, "I am a woman: a black woman: a woman of the soil of Africa. I love laughter and singing and noise, Love them! And I love my man, I want my man. I want my man to have me and give me a child. And I cannot have my man because my man is not here. Not ever any more because I must leave my country."⁴

Much of South Africa is run as, in effect, a penal colony. Particularly

¹ John W. de Gruchy, Bonhoeffer and South Africa: Theology in Dialogue (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1984), pp. 73, 69.
² Winnie Mandela, Part of My Soul Went with Him, ed. Anne Benjamin, adapted by Mary Benson (New York: W. W. Norton, 1985), pp. 48, 123. For particulars of the South African police/military state, consult Dan O'Meara, "South African Political Impasse," Christianity and Crisis 45 (1985), pp. 445-449.
³ Consult, e.g., Allan Boesak, Black and Reformed: Apartheid, Liberation, and the Calvinist Tradition (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 1984); Marjorie Hope and James Young, The South African Churches in a Revolutionary Situation (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 1981); Mandela, Part of My Soul Went with Him; and especially Cedric Mayson, A Certain Sound: The Struggle for Liberation in South Africa (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 1985).
⁴ Mayson, A Certain Sound, pp. 51, 11.

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since 1984, when the white regime acted wholly to exclude blacks from a cosmetically altered legislative arrangement, the country has been torn by civil strife. "The new 'power-sharing' constitution provoked a ferocious and uncontrollable explosion of black anger." Hundreds of blacks have been killed and continue to be killed. Black collaborationists are often attacked by blacks. A special target of popular anger is the network of paid informers. It is often asserted that the segregated, depressed black townships have become ungovernable. The regime's authority can be "enforced" only by heavily-armed militiamen in armored cars.⁵

There is ongoing debate concerning the ultimate origins and character of apartheid. For Cedric Mayson of South Africa, class warfare is the key: at the heart of "racist" exploitation lies human greed. "What are the people like who govern this country and direct armies of soldiers and police and officials to strangle the life of millions? Are they fascist thugs wearing jack boots and carrying whips? No. They are the rich elite. They sit in the Cabinet Room in Cape Town or the Prime Minister's office in Pretoria, or in the sumptuous surroundings of Anglo-America, or Barlows, or Barclays, or Volkskas, or the great church committees, and there, with their natty suitings and polished accents, they make the decisions that pillage and enslave and colonize and destroy."⁶

The above view will engender either hope or hopelessness, depending upon where we stand on the question: "Is human greed eradicable, or at least controllable?"

Although the system of apartheid did not become official until 1948, racial exploitation was hardly invented by the Nationalist Party. Apartheid was built onto and served to implement an already-present "segregationalist system of racial capitalism." The basic features of apartheid had been developed by the mining industry and consolidated by the British before 1920.⁷ Whether or not South African racism can be reduced to classism, we may yet agree that politico-economic forces suffuse the system-the land of apartheid is "a microcosm of the global struggle" between haves and have-nots⁸-and hence that political and economic weaponry is the only responsible means for fighting the system. There is no way to deny the racist character of apartheid, if only for the stark and powerful reason that the economic, political, and human rights of South Africans are determined by skin color. Nevertheless, the classist argumentation of Mayson and others must persist, on such stern grounds as the spatial fact that the "white" eighty-seven percent of the country contains all the best farmland, and all major

⁵ Les Payne, "For 20 Minutes, Apartheid Vanished," Christianity and Crisis 45 (1985), p. 40; O'Meara, "South African Political Impasse," p. 448.
⁶ Mayson, A Certain Sound, pp. 38, 41-42.
⁷ O'Meara, "South African Political Impasse," p. 445.
⁸ Hope and Young, South African Churches, p. 225.

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mining and industrial areas, while the very permission for an African to enter such territory is solely dependent upon his or her ability to supply labor.⁹

II

Scrutiny of the church situation in South Africa will furnish added background and data leading up to certain specifics of the war upon apartheid.¹⁰ A two-sided truth blows the mind. (Or does it?) On the one side, South Africa is constitutionally and self-identifiably a Christian land. On the other side, it "is the one country in the world that officially proclaims and harshly enforces a nakedly racist theory of human nature and human governance."¹¹ Accordingly, some South African Christians seek to justify upon Christian grounds the contemporary socio-political "arrangement." They are able to do this only through recourse to ideology-an ideology that can be very "sincere." For "like the grand Inquisitors, they believe themselves to be essential to the preservation and furtherance of the things of God on earth."¹² They are, after all, God's elect-in contrast to non-whites, who, from a white (human) perspective, are non-persons.¹³

Here is the opposite point of view: "When a government with the record and the policy of the South African Government declares that these are done as a result of its Christian principles, that is not sin which could be forgiven, but heresy which must be stamped out. It is the task of Christians to be totally unreconciled with this evil, to make clear that there is no possibility of them attempting to adjust or normalize it, but only to abolish and exterminate it."¹⁴ Then, in between the one pattern of ideological self-justification and the contrary eventuality of revolutionary condemnation and warfare, we are met by various religio-moral efforts at reform-a view dominated by fealty to "non-violence." As we consider these outlooks, we remind ourselves that the South African church as a whole is predominantly black. Hence, the question of how a certain minority is to be treated is not the salient one. Yet, this does not in and of itself weaken the objective bonds between white South African Christianity and white South African power and oppressiveness.

(1) Pro-apartheid radicalness. Colin O'Brien Winter, former bishop of the Anglican Diocese of Namibia, has declared:

The churches in South Africa today wield enormous power. The white Dutch Reformed churches, over a period of 300 years, were instrumental in helping to devise, to promote, and to propagate, with leading Afrikaner

⁹ Jennifer Davis, "The Illusion of Reform, the Reality of Resistance," Christianity and Crisis 45 (1985), p. 9.
¹⁰ On the history and description of the various churches and church institutions of South Africa, consult Hope and Young, South African Churches.
¹¹ Editorial, "Seize the Moment in South Africa," Christianity and Crisis 45 (1995), p. 5,
¹² Mayson, A Certain Sound, p. 3.
¹³ See Boesak, Black and Reformed, p. 4.
¹⁴ Mayson, A Certain Sound, p. 99.

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politicians, those policies of nationalism, the foundation stones of which were based on the myth of racial superiority and its ultimate logic, racial segregation and oppression. Without the backing of these white churches, apartheid would have clearly lacked national credibility and religious support. With the unflinching backing of the Dutch Reformed churches, it has achieved an amazing transformation from a political theory into a religious creed.¹⁵

Bishop Winter is portraying a Christian theology that has been ravaged by the ideologically legitimating forces of apartheid. The process he describes finds current embodiment in the Nederduitse Gereformeerde Kerk (NGK), which boasts forty-two percent of South Africa's white church population, and which, while criticizing multiracial churches for involving themselves in politics, itself constantly "takes stands on political issues and engages in activities of a political nature." To be specific, the NGK has traditionally "played a key role in winning acceptance for the [political] view that there is no fundamental contradiction between Christian principles and apartheid."¹⁶ This takes us back to our sub-head, pro-apartheid radicalness. Ernie Regehr writes that it is wrong to identify the white Afrikaans Reformed churches as conservative; in truth "they are a radical force that rejects [Christian] tradition, challenges the collective wisdom of the international church, and amends dogma to suit social and political conditions."¹⁷ However, we have to remember that it has been precisely upon the foundation of accepted tradition that Christian collectivities have sometimes persecuted human beings (compare, for example, the wholly traditionalist Christian practice of applying church dogma in the attack upon the life and faith of Jews).

(2) Christian spirituality. Our second alternative, as also a third, are shared benefactors of the black theology and black consciousness movements that in the late 'sixties began to transform the South African social scene, a challenge that endured through the 'seventies and has manifested increasing power in the 'eighties. The plaguing, dehumanizing notion of black subservience is emphatically renounced. In point of fact, as far back as the nineteenth century, independent church leaders already articulated black consciousness.¹⁸

Practitioners of what we here characterize as Christian spirituality have been affected by the above influences as they have also been by the naked evil of black persecution. There is, however, considerable variation among these people, ranging all the way from limitation to an advocated praxis of petitionary prayer, to a stress upon the positive social effect that transformed individuals may reputedly have, to the

¹⁵ Colin O'Brien Winter, as cited in "Front of the Book," Christianity and Crisis 41 (1981), p. 306.
¹⁶ Hope and Young, South African Churches, p. 169.
¹⁷ Ernie Regehr, Perceptions of Apartheid (Scottdale, Pa.: Herald Press, 1979), p. 279.
¹⁸ De Gruchy, Bonhoeffer and South Africa, p. 8; Mayson, A Certain Sound, p. 62; Hope and Young, South African Churches, p. 196.

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preparing of public statements criticizing or condemning apartheid and seeking or pleading for socio-political reforms. Some well-meaning, concerned Christians contend that the church, as custodian of a spiritual gospel, cannot become involved in public political issues. Christian political action is to be undertaken only by devoted Christian individuals in their responsibility as citizens. This stance serves to contribute to political futility and irrelevance. For without political contextualization and sophistication, the Christian teachings of love of neighbor and enemy become a drag upon public, moral effectiveness, and end up defeating themselves. Moreover, as one South African interpreter puts it, to urge people to love one another, without calling upon them to change a society that institutionalizes the very separation and selfishness that prevent love is a cop-out. "Because the churches often refuse to tackle the real problems of structural change required in South African society, they deal themselves out of the game.¹⁹ All this points up the reason that so many young blacks have given up on the churches as being at once irrelevant and futile.

While the passing of resolutions and the issuing of public statements are often futile, they do not have to be. It is usually impossible to gauge their consequences. With respect to both personal danger and social attention, much depends upon the identity of sponsors and signatories. As far back as 1973, one hundred black clergy of the Nederduitse Gereformeerde Kerk in Afrika (NGKA) declared their total rejection of apartheid as un-Christian, later stipulating that such rejection "must avoid all forms of violence or bloodshed." The Alliance of Black Reformed Christians in South Africa (ABRECSA) asserts in its charter that "Christ is Lord of all life," that government is to be obeyed only when it does not conflict with the Word of God, and that "the indivisibility of the body of Christ demands that the barriers of race, culture, ethnicity, language, and sex be transcended." ABRECSA has done a great deal to prosper the message that apartheid must be deemed a heresy--on the very basis of Reformed tradition.²⁰

Tom F. Driver makes an essential point. When Christians emphasize the lordship or centrality of Christ, everything turns upon their particular socio-moral station. When the blacks of South Africa speak this way, they are also testifying, in effect, that the South African government "is not the center: Christ is the center of something that is not now in power." But whenever white Christians who are committed to apartheid affirm Christ as center, they are also placing the governmental regime close to Christ and giving its christic legitimation.²¹ As has been suggested, this might be called "situational christology."

In August 1982, the World Alliance of Reformed Churches, meeting

¹⁹ Mayson, A Certain Sound, pp. 115, 34.
²⁰ Hope and Young, South African Churches, p. 176; de Gruchy, Bonhoeffer and South Africa, pp. 135-136.
²¹ Tom F. Driver, review of Paul F. Knitter, No Other Name?, in Christianity and Crisis 45 (1985), pp. 451-452.

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in Ottawa, adopted wholeheartedly ABRECSA's identification of apartheid as a Christian heresy. Accordingly, the Alliance suspended from its membership two white Afrikaner churches, the Nederduitse Gereformeerde Kerk and the (Nederduitsch) Hervormde Kerk ([N] HK).

In December of 1985, a meeting of world church leaders convened in Harare, Zimbabwe. The conference was co-sponsored by the South African Council of Churches and the World Council of Churches. The delegation from South Africa comprised forty-five persons. The Harare Statement calls for the release of Nelson Mandela and all political prisoners, the lifting of bans upon all banned movements, the return of all exiles, a "transfer of power to the majority of the people, based on universal suffrage," the resignation of the South African government, international economic and political sanctions against South Africa, church support inside and outside the country of movements to liberate South Africa, and support of "recent developments within the trade union movement for a united front against apartheid."²²

John de Gruchy makes the extreme statement that "the churches in South Africa have been almost unanimous in declaring apartheid unjust."²³ it appears much more apropos to concentrate upon the internal split within the white churches over apartheid, together with the fundamental divisions between black and white churches.²⁴ Furthermore, we are still left with the perennial disparity between words and action, and, worse, with the gulf between religious sentiment-even if of a majority kind-and the persisting structural inequities of a minorityengineered apartheid.

III

(3) Militant anti-apartheid Christianity.The line between words and political deeds is not hard and fast. The document known as Kairos could be placed under the previous item. In part, it repeats affirmations made in other public statements. However, it is distinguished by the special constituency behind it and also by the fact that it skirts the very boundary of, or perhaps moves over the edge into, overt revolutionist praxis. Integral political action embodies the kind of behavior that may lead to real appropriations of power, on behalf of one or another human collectivity. It is one thing to declare apartheid a Christian heresy, and it is quite something else to call for discrete acts of civil disobedience and revolution. In the same way, pleas for non-violence hardly belong in the same moral category with calls for violence. The out-and-out damning of apartheid-as much more than a Christian heresy-is a declaration of war, insofar as it entails sedition against South African legal structures.

²² Gail Hovey, "In Harare, New Strategies for South Africa," Christianity and Crisis 45 (1986), p. 539.
²³ De Gruchy, Bonhoeffer and South Africa, p. 117.
²⁴ John A. Coleman, "Kairos Document of South Africa," The Ecumenist 24 (1986), p. 33.

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Everything will be finally contingent, of course, upon whether the language declarations are fulfilled by means of actual revolutionist action on the part of individual human (physical) bodies.

On September 25, 1985, some 150 South African theologians and church leaders issued Challenge to the Church: The Kairos Document, a, Christian biblical and theological comment upon their country's political crisis. The material originated against a backdrop of killings, maimings, and imprisonments; the document has a life-and-death air to it: "There we sit in the same church while outside Christian policemen and soldiers are beating up and killing Christian children or torturing Christian prisoners to death while yet other Christians stand by and weakly plead for peace. "²⁵Distinctively, the signatories run the gamut: black and white, women and men, evangelicals, pentecostals, mainline Protestants, and Roman Catholics. Those initially signing the document represent twenty-seven denominations, including five persons from the NGK. The declaration is not regarded as a finished or final text, but as an instrument for further discussion.

The Kairos Document ranges itself against the "State Theology" of South Africa, that "theological justification of the status quo with its racism, capitalism, and totalitarianism," a theology that "blesses injustice, canonizes the will of the powerful and reduces the poor to passivity, obedience, and apathy." The State resorts to the concept of "law and order," but "this law is the unjust and discriminatory laws of apartheid and this order is the organized and institutionalized disorder of oppression." Again, the State makes use of the label "communist":

Anything that threatens the status quo is labelled "communist." Any one who opposes the State and especially anyone who rejects its theology is simply dismissed as a "communist." No account is taken of what communism really means. No thought is given to why some people have indeed opted for communism or for some form of socialism. Even people who have not rejected capitalism are called "communists" when they reject "State Theology." The State uses the label "communist" in an uncritical and unexamined way as its symbol of evil.

"State Theology" like every other theology needs to have its own concrete symbol of evil. It must be able to symbolize what it regards as godless behavior and what ideas must be regarded as atheistic. It must have its own version of hell. And so it has invented, or rather taken over, the myth of communism. All evil is communistic and all communist or socialist ideas are atheistic and godless. Threats about hell-fire and eternal damnation are replaced by threats and warnings about the horrors of a tyrannical, totalitarian, atheistic, and terrorist communist regime-a kind of hell-on-earth. This is a very convenient way of frightening some people into accepting any kind of domination and exploitation by a capitalist minority.

As a climax of their judgment upon "State Theology," the Kairos theologians equate the State's use of the name of God with the praxis of Satan. "The god of the South African State is not merely an idol or false

²⁵ Challenge to the Church: The Kairos Document (Braamfontein, South Africa: The Kairos Theologians, 1985), p. 2.

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god, it is the devil disguised as Almighty God-the antichrist." This means that much more than heresy is involved. "State Theology" is not only heretical, it is also blasphemous. "As Christians we simply cannot tolerate this blasphemous use of God's name and God's Word." "Here is a god who exalts the proud and humbles the poor-the very opposite of the God of the Bible who 'scatters the proud of heart, pulls down the mighty from their thrones and exalts the humble"' (Lk. 1:51-52).²⁶

Challenge to the Church is, in addition, denunciatory of what it identifies as "Church Theology," as put forth within the so-called English-speaking churches. This theology is "in a limited, guarded, and cautious way critical of apartheid," but its shortcoming, indeed its tragedy, is its uncritical reliance upon certain stock ideas: reconciliation (or peace), justice, and non-violence. The trouble with "reconciliation" is that in South Africa today there are not, morally and Christianly speaking, two sides to the story. There is only a wrong side, "a fully armed and violent oppressor," and a right side, people who are defenseless and oppressed. Therefore, it is "totally un-Christian to plead for reconciliation and peace" until the present injustices are removed. The summons to reconciliation is not in fact that; it is sin. "It is asking us to become accomplices in our own oppression, to become servants of the devil… . What this means in practice is that no reconciliation, no forgiveness and no negotiations are possible without repentance." And the apartheid regime does not as yet show signs of genuine repentance. The Kairos theologians are maintaining, in a word, that more than the State is in league with Satan; "Church Theology" is likewise, in effect, practicing "reconciliation with sin and the devil."

With respect to the norm of justice, "Church Theology" does no more than envisage "the justice of reform, that is to say, a justice that is determined by the oppressor," the white minority, rather than by the people of South Africa. This approach, at its heart, means no more than a "reliance upon 'individual conversions' in response to 'moralizing demands' to change the structures of a society. It has not worked and it never will work. The present crisis with all its cruelty, brutality, and callousness is ample proof of the ineffectiveness of years and years of Christian 'moralizing' about the need for love. The problem that we are dealing with here … [is] structural injustice…. True justice, God's justice, demands a radical change of structures. This can only come from below, from the oppressed themselves."²⁷

The document's arraignment of "Church Theology" reaches a moral height in its judgment upon the posture of non-violence. Non-violence, which is "expressed as a blanket condemnation of all that is called violence," has not only failed to curb real violence but has actually helped, if unwittingly, contribute to the escalation of State violence. The propaganda of the State calls violent what some people do in the

²⁶ Ibid., pp. 3, 5-7.
²⁷ Ibid., pp. 8-11.

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townships (as they struggle for their liberation) in ways that seek to obscure "the structural, institutional, and unrepentant violence of the: State." Church statements claim to condemn all violence. But where is; the legitimacy in using the one word violence to cover both the acts of the: State and the desperate attempts of the people at self-defense? "Throughout the Bible, the word violence is used to describe everything that is done by a wicked oppressor (Ps. 72:12-14; Isa. 59:1-8; Jer. 22:13-17; Amos 3:9-10; 6:3; Micah 2:2; 3:1-3; 6:12). It is never used to describe the activities of Israel's armies in attempting to liberate themselves or to resist aggression… . There is a long and consistent Christian tradition about the use of physical force to defend oneself against aggressors and tyrants…. To call all physical force 'violence' is to try to be neutral and to refuse to make a judgment about who is right and who is wrong."²⁸

In a situation that has already become one "of civil war or revolution," what are faithful Christians called to do? According to a long-standing Christian tradition relating to oppression, a particular tyrant or a particular tyrannical regime "forfeits the moral right to govern and the people acquire the right to resist." And this is the state of affairs in today's South Africa. "The apartheid minority regime is irreformable." Any "regime that has made itself the enemy of the people has thereby also made itself the enemy of God." True, Christians are summoned to love their enemies. But as Christians, "the most loving thing we can do for both the oppressed and for our enemies" is to "remove the tyrants from power." The Christian church cannot collaborate with tyranny; "the moral illegitimacy of the apartheid regime means that the church will have to be involved at times in civil disobedience."²⁹

IV

Many issues and causes vie for consideration and dedication. These include: (1) The pros and cons of disinvestment and related politicoeconomic instruments that may further the struggle against the South African regime. (Support of disinvestment is a treasonable offense in South Africa.) (2) Western dependence upon South Africa for raw materials and minerals. (3) Black Africa's requirements of trade with South Africa. (4) South African dependence upon oil. The country lacks any domestic supply. Most South African oil imports are purchased from Arab members of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries. (5) Multinational corporations. "The multinational compa.nies, as far as we are concerned, are political criminals in this country. We wouldn't be where we are today-politically-if it hadn't been for these foreign companies…. We know that foreign companies have literally financed our oppression."³⁰(6) Burgeoning black unionization.

²⁸ Ibid., pp. 11-13.
²⁹ Ibid pp. 16-20, 23-24.
³⁰ Mandela, Part of My Soul Went with Him, pp. 124,125.

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This is sometimes regarded as a major hope, For the entire South African "way of life" rests perforce upon an abundance of cheap labor, an abundance that has created a rate of return upon investment often exceeding twenty percent. Four of every five members of the South African work force are black. (7) Participation in or rejection of the "homelands" policy. (8) Competing ties for the South African liberation movement: the Soviet Union? China? the West? (9) Inclusion or exclusion of whites from the war for liberation. (10) The very real danger of a coup by the South African army. (11) The politico-economic frame of reference for the future: Capitalist? Communist? African socialist? (12) The new political dispensation: Federation? Consociation? A unitary system founded upon "one person, one vote?" "One person, one vote" is increasingly the non-negotiable core for blacks.³¹

Penetrating and underlying the entire situation is the all-crucial and all-fateful challenge of revolution (thinking, commitment, action). As the persecution of the people of South Africa has intensified, corresponding moves have taken place away from peaceful resistance to a truly revolutionist stance. Radical South African liberation thinkingpraxis goes much farther than the non-revolutionist Social Gospel tendencies of much American black liberation thinking. The revolution that (as of this writing) is in its formative stages in the Republic of South Africa meets in principle the accepted understanding of a "forcible overthrow of an established government or political system."³² The specific politico-economic identity and consummation of that revolution (Marxist, democratic, socialist, etc.) cannot as yet be identified.

The Kairos theologians do not specifically counsel taking up arms against the South African State. But in rejecting all conventional distinctions between non-violence and violence, and in identifying the present regime as totally irreformable, the Kairos Document surely means to say that revolutionist hostilities (the full gestalt of resort to arms, guerilla warfare, industrial and other mass strikes, stayaways, demonstrations, acts of sabotage, bombings, assassinations, boycotts, etc.) are in this situation a duty for Christians as for anyone. The very issuance of this document opens its signatories to charges of high treason.³³ These people are certainly reasoning along the same line as John de Gruchy's commentary upon Dietrich Bonhoeffer's participation in the conspiracy against Adolf Hitler. Bonhoeffer's "action remains a powerful testimony of what may be required of those who seek to be faithful to Jesus Christ."³⁴ What else could the Kairos people possibly be conveying? The black South African remains voteless; normal political processes could never succeed in replacing the government. In today's South Africa, history has simply banished the liberal idealisms, reformist hopes, and behavioral niceness of Christians and others. This history

³¹ Hope and Young, South African Churches, pp. 166, 225, 197, 215.
³² The Random House Dictionary of the English Language (unabridged), 1966.
³³ Coleman, "Kairos Document," p. 37.
³⁴ De Gruchy, Bonhoeffer and South Africa, p. 118.

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has also hacked out a single, common front of obligation and policy as between Christians and non-Christians. Increasingly, the majority South African outlook is suffused with moral outrage, a precondition of revolution.

"Reform is not an option in South Africa. Apartheid cannot be reformed or improved, or changed: it must be scrapped. It cannot be domesticated for human use: it is a people-eater by nature. It cannot be cured with a careful treatment: it is a cancerous growth that must be cut out and put into the oven and incinerated out of existence. It is not something to be forgiven and redeemed, but something to be destroyed and buried." The one alternative to apartheid is found in the commitment of the outlawed African National Congress, a commitment shared by multitudes: a united non-racial democratic South Africa.³⁵

"The South African regime is like a house owner besieged by a cyclone…. When he closed the front door, the wind blew in the back. And when he shut the windows, the roof blew off. And when he erected a temporary covering for the roof, the walls fell in."³⁶ Is this metaphor empirically compelling, or is it only a hope? We cannot yet say.

³⁵ Mayson, A Certain Sound, pp. 86, 64.
³⁶ An African National Congress speaker at a Mozambique-South Africa Solidarity gathering in Maputo, as cited by Davis, "The Illusion of Reform, the Reality of Resistance," p. 13.