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When Prayer Makes News The Kairos Document: Challenge to the Church The Voice of Black Theology in South Africa

When Prayer Makes News
Edited By Allan A. Boesak and Charles Villa-Vicencio
Phildelphia, Westminster, 1986. 189 pp. $10.95.

The Kairos Document: Challenge to the Church
Foreword by John W. de Gruchy
Grand Rapids, Eerdmans, 1986. 80 pp. $4.95.

The Voice of Black Theology in South Africa
By Louise Kretzschmar
Athens, Ohio, Ohio University Press, 1986. 136 pp. $10.95.

Anyone who seeks to understand what is happening in South Africa today must turn to theology for help. Events in that troubled land play themselves out, of course, on other levels as well: cultural conflict expressed in terms of race, economic development and massive oppression, political domination and resistance, military power and guerrilla tactics. The press is full of these struggles. They are the stuff of daily life. But underlying the whole tragic conflict, its worst oppressions and its highest redeeming moments, is the continuing public reference of all that happens to the sustaining or the judging will of God.

South Africa, save for small minorities, is a country of Christians. Its unity as a nation can be doubted; the faith of its people cannot. This faith furthermore cuts across all races. Black people, on the whole, are more active church members than whites. In a curious reversal of the Marxist dictum, the social existence that determines the consciousness of the people as a whole is not their relation to the forces of production but

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When Prayer Makes News The Kairos Document: Challenge to the Church The Voice of Black Theology in South Africa

their relation to God and to one another, focused in the churches where they worship. Here the basic issues are defined and theology for action is worked out.

These three books are part of this basic drama. They are episodes in the effort of the people of South Africa to define themselves as Christians and, at the same time, to distinguish themselves from the false definitions-the heresies-so common in the land. They all reflect the controversy that this self-definition involves. There is an unfinished agenda here that is theirs first, but ours as well.

When Prayer Makes News deals with a particular event: the call to prayer on June 16, 1985, the anniversary of the Soweto uprisings of 1976, issued to the church by a number of well-known Christian leaders: "We have continually prayed for the authorities, that they may govern wisely and justly. Now, in solidarity with those who suffer most, in this hour of crisis we pray that God in his grace may remove from his people tyrannical structures of oppression and the present rulers in our country who persistently refuse to heed the cry for justice, as reflected in the word of God." The call was justified by appeal to a long church tradition of intercession for good government and Christian action to make such government possible. It was, as Allan Boesak put it, following Karl Barth, a call to resistance for the state against the unjust use of power by those who now control the state. It was not a call to violent revolution: "We would not dare to prescribe to God how such a change should occur." The authors declare their own commitment to work for peaceful change. Nevertheless, the implications were radical.

The call aroused a storm of controversy in the white and inter-racial English speaking churches, most of whom have a long history of opposition to apartheid. Their statements are recorded fully in the book's appendix. All expressed the need to pray for an end to oppression and injustice in the land, for the elimination of unjust laws and arbitrary police action, in short for an end to apartheid. But how, asked Archbishop Russell of Cape Town, can one expect to negotiate for these things with a government whom one has asked the Lord to remove? What relationship is possible with authorities whom one simply repudiates? Is it Christian to engage prayer in such a direct political purpose? Not all statements were so clear. That of the Catholic bishops' conference was a marvel of generally supportive ambiguity. The general feeling of church leaders as recorded, however, was that the specific call for prayer to remove the authorities from power had gone too far.

Not so the black theologians who contributed to this volume. Allan Boesak was an author and principal exponent of the call. Gabriel Setiloane, in a critical appreciation of W.A. Visser't Hooft, found it to be a continuation of the great ecumenical prophetic tradition. And Shun Govender saw it as a moment of kairos for Christianity in South Africa, the start of a new ecumenical movement that would engage in a radical critique of South African churches.

We are left by this whole debate with the profound question: What is the responsibility of the church in prayer and in action for just and

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When Prayer Makes News The Kairos Document: Challenge to the Church The Voice of Black Theology in South Africa

humane government? The issue is bypassed in most Latin American liberation theology, informed as it is by a curious combination of Roman Catholic ecclesiocentrism and Marxist romanticism about the spontaneous community of the poor. How do Christians take the function of government seriously before God while resisting effectively the tyranny of its power? How does the church proclaim and serve the judgment of God on oppression and injustice without exalting itself or another social movement as the sinless agent of liberating political power? The authors of the call to prayer in South Africa have made a good start on questions such as these. They have not solved them.

It is not surprising, given this debate, that kairos became the title of a document produced later in the same summer by a group of predominantly black pastors and theologians. This, too, was not a church pronouncement, but as de Gruchy in his foreword puts it, "a people's document," part of the on-going effort of a group stimulated by the Institute for Contextual Theology to find their way theologically in the South African situation. It was intended to be, not a manifesto, but a cry of protest out of the living experience of black churches and a stage along the way of South African Christianity's discovery of its message. The version Eerdmans has published has already been revised in the light of many criticisms and suggestions. It appeared almost at the same time as another statement, The National Initiative for Reconciliation, which, with more participation by white Christians, emphasized more the call to repentance and the need for the church to accept in concrete ways the judgment of God on the evils of apartheid society. Shortly thereafter, a group of "evangelicals" from Pentecostal churches, both black and white, responded with a detailed critique of their own community, theology, and practice and a call to ecumenical and radical witness. All of this is part of the theological ferment of contemporary South Africa.

Nevertheless, The Kairos Document has had a wide and unique influence both at home and abroad, just because of its spontaneity, its hope, and its call to action. Its description of "state theology" is a concise critique of the religious pretensions of the white establishment. Its critique of "church theology" is a poignant protest against well-meaning but compromising anti-apartheid Christianity that cannot clearly join the issue even in a day of prayer. Its call to action is unqualified yet measured: the appropriate but limited use of force, civil disobedience to a morally illegitimate regime, resistance without hatred, and hope for a future that will liberate both oppressor and oppressed.

There are still many problems with the statement as it stands in this edition. Is it fair or fruitful to label as church theology what is really the timidity and unfaithfulness of some church people and leaders to their own confession, goals, and standards? Is the work of the South African Council of Churches and of many other Christian people and groups resisting, undermining, softening, exposing, and sometimes negotiating away the worst evils of apartheid society not also part of the witness of the church? Is the lack of social analysis with which the kairos people

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When Prayer Makes News The Kairos Document: Challenge to the Church The Voice of Black Theology in South Africa

charge the churches not also true of themselves? There is almost no discussion in the document of the strategy of social change and no picture of the world that might be built on the ruins of apartheid. Finally, what of the absolute division of good and evil and the total enlistment of the church on one side alone? Is there any room here for the forgiving mercy of God toward those who, in struggling against evil forces, sin themselves?

All these questions, however, may miss the deeper point. This document was a cry of pain and protest leavened by hope that a time of change was at hand. Sadly, however, there was no kairos. Instead, South Africa has settled back into a long period of oppression and resistance. How does one find resources for living in such an oppressive time? How does one proclaim the promise of Christ in a world whose unjust structures are not changing? Christian hope, Christian freedom, and Christian resistance have never been needed more than now when political hopes are fading.

This turns us to a historical perspective, which is what Louise Kretzschmar provides in her brief but thoroughly documented history of the development of black theology in South Africa up to 1982, complete with twenty pages of bibliography at the end. For the reader who knows something of South African history, there are no surprises in her treatment. There is, however, a great deal of solid information in brief compass. Kretzschmar traces the influence of traditional African culture, American black theology, Latin American liberation theology, and theology from the rest of Africa on black South African Christian thought. She also gives some attention to the African independent churches lying outside this ecumenical ferment. On the whole, she concludes that South African black theology is a unique combination of African, black, and liberation theologies, that ideological and partisan influences are in it but that they reveal the hidden bias of the white theologies they confront. "Having acknowledged this, theologians are then freed from enslavement to these interests and are able both to utilize and criticize the questions and solutions which arise out of their varying contexts."

Much has happened in black South African theology since 1982. It reveals a more intimate interaction with the great ecclesiastical traditions, especially the Reformed, the Catholic, and the Pentecostal than Kretzschmar's book shows. It also shows a continuation, however, of the themes and influences she describes. South Africa today is a scene of theological as well as social conflict. But it is more than that. It is a place where the theology of the whole Christian church is being worked out in intense and often confrontational dialogue. The process will bear close watching.

Charles C. West

Princeton Theological Seminary
Princeton, New Jersey