Special Hearings — Faith Community Hearings — 1997-11-17

DOUGLAS BAX: I was going to explain that in consultation, my colleague,   Pakiso Tondi ruled that I should begin for two reasons. One, that he belongs   to a generation thathe is of the generation to which the present and the   future belongs, whereas I belong to the generation that is passe. And   secondly, because as he put it, "You as a white Presbyterian have much   more to confess for white Presbyterians than I do as a black Presbyterian!"
But I would like to point out, Mr Chairperson, that he is the man who is wearing   the gold socks, if you are able to see underneath the table! Let me say that   everything that I will now say is qualified by the recognition which we all   have that the witness of the Presbyterian Church, like the witness of all the   mainline churches against Apartheid, was weakened by internal dissent, lacked   appropriate outrage and vigour, and apart from a few things, failed to move   beyond mere protest to action. At the same time, it is also true, that like   the other mainline churches there are, we did make a stand to some extent for   justice. Although we may now very much wish that it had been far more resolute   and heroic. 
When our church was formed in 1897, it was the bringing together of a number   of white congregations and Presbyteries, with some of the congregations and   Presbyteries of the Scottish Mission Churches. That led to the fact that we   actually started off as a church that was to some extent separately organised   in that for a long time the Presbyterian Native Missions Committee supervised   the black congregation. Sometime before 1940, the name of this was changed to   African Missions Committee, but it still remained a somewhat paternalistic way   of doing things and only ended in 1962/3. Even then, congregations continued   to be racially designated until 1970. On the other hand, from the very beginning,   all regional courts in the Presbyterian Church of South Africa have always been   fully integrated and in principal all congregations have always been open to   all races. We hesitated for a long time to elect black leaders, partly because   of this way of running things and one of the causes for shame, really, in our   church is that such an outstanding black leader in the Presbyterian Church as   George B. Molefe, who was a very prominent educationalist and community leader   in Port Elizabeth, was elected only to be Moderator of the Presbytery of Port   Elizabeth and never succeeded in Moderator of the General Assembly, which is   the denominational Synod. The first black Moderator of the General Assembly   was elected only in 1972, to serve in 1973/4 and he was Dr. James R. Jolobe,   a prominent Xhosa writer and poet. He was incidentally, originally a member   of the so-called, of what was then the Bantu Presbyterian Church. 
We have recently elected the seventh black Moderator of the Assembly and he   is a black lay-person, a Professor at Umtata. Economically the PCSA has remained   a church in which there is a great deal of discrimination in the payment of   its ministers. The Assembly sets minimum stipends, but unlike the Anglican church   for instance, each congregation pays its own ministers, except that those ministers   whose stipends fall under the minimum are assisted from central funds. As most   black congregations though much larger are much poorer than white congregations,   many black ministers are on the minimum stipend or close to it. By the early   1960's in some qualification of that, it had at least been ruled by the church   (SIDE TWO) [inaudible] even whether the ministers had contributed or not.   Because in some of the black congregations, they could not contribute. But it   remains true that this was the system and only in 1981 was there a move actually   to implement the principle of equal stipends. The next year, however, the whole   idea was dropped, partly because no black Commissioner would stand up and support   it. One must therefore recognise that to some extent that education and certainly   the money and the majority factor, because whites have always been the majority   in the Presbyterian Church of South and later Southern Africa, led to basically   white control in the denomination. Now, before 1948, as far as protests against   racial injustice are concerned, I think we have to confess that the Presbyterian   Church of South Africa as it was then, was really more concerned with issues   like temperance and Sunday observance, than racial injustice as it purports   to the Assemblies and Assembly resolutions. Nevertheless, in 1941, the Assembly   did appoint a committee to contact other churches to draw up a joint statement   calling for a reconstruction of the social order based more fully upon the moral   principles of the Christian religion and to present this to the government.   And made other statements as well. In 1948 of course, when the white electorate   elected to government the National Party with its more crudely racist platform   of apartheid, this provoked the Presbyterian Church to more frequent, more outspoken   criticisms of the racial situation beginning, let's say in 1949 by supporting   the statement of the Christian Council of South Africa opposing Apartheid and   in 1950 with the attacking of the disenfranchisement of the coloured voters.   Various assemblies appointed took fairly strong protests against various bills   and policies of the government, but I don't want to go into that too much because   as Bishop Dowling said in the previous submission, the government didn't really   take notice of that and in any case, I would add, it to some extent served as   a kind of sock to the conscience of the church as well as to the conscience   of its members and in a sense almost strengthened the government because the   church was doing nothing. The church at this stage, never thought of moving   from the comfort zone of such statements of protest to the more difficult and   costly path of action. For instance, there was no thought of joining the early   demonstrations against apartheid, like the defiance campaign in 1953. The leaders   of the church were white and conservative and they would have seen that as dirtying   the church's hand with too direct a hand in politics. But there was one man,   one Presbyterian minister who wished to go further, in particular that I want   to mention, perhaps particularly because this was in this very city of East   London. Under the impact of apartheid legislation after 1948, only a very few   integrated congregations survived in South Africa, and nearly all of these were   in the Anglican and Catholic Cathedrals in the large cities, and even in some   of those the races sat separately. But Rob Robertson, the minister in this,   at that time very conservative city, resolved to start a congregation that would   specifically seek to be a congregation bringing into fellowship across the racial   divide white and black and rich and poor. And so he resigned his post in the   church that he had here, and started a new congregation in the poor and still   racially mixed suburb of North End, in 1962. Dr Dawid Venter, sociologist in   the Dutch Reformed Church, and an academic, has said in a thesis that he has   written on this, that this was the first deliberate move by any denomination   to establish an integrated congregation and so reverse the whole trend towards   greater segregation that had been underway for so long. This project received   a lot of support from the denomination but unfortunately there was not enough   support for it in East London and eventually in 1970 the members of the congregation   decided to close down the congregation and joined other congregations in East   London in order to make them multiracial. In 1975 Rob Robertson moved to Pageview,   Johannesburg, to run a similar congregation there, St Anthony's, and that was   to become a spiritual base for christian activists against apartheid and for   objectors to military conscription. 
From 1968, and particularly from 1979 onwards, the criticisms of apartheid   made by the General Assembly became sharper and sharper. In 1970, also, I need   to mention that the Presbyterian Church came under tremendous pressure because   it was the first church that had to decide its response to the programme to   combat racism grants. And the government brought great pressure not only on   the churches in general, but particularly on the Presbyterian Church precisely   because it was the first one that had to make the decision. To the extent that   Mr B.J. Vorster actually invited the incumbent moderator and the previous moderator   to go and have dinner with him, where he treated them to a great meal and also   some alcohol, in the hope that this would soften things up. And one of those   ex-moderators actually led the debate to leave the World Council, but in the   end what happened was that the Presbyterian Church, although it decided to cancel   its subscription, and we can't really use the excuse that the government had   said that it would not allow any money to go to the World Council anymore, because   I think most of those present actually felt that they wanted to do this, but   it did at least take a swipe at the government that was harder than that of   its criticism of the WCC and it also said that it wanted to invite, it extended   an invitation to the WCC to send people out to explain its point of view on   this. In 1973 the Assembly invited all sessions to display a notice outside   their churches that people of all races were welcome to all services, and in   1977, that was interpreted as a directive. In 1973, the Assembly took a step   further in its opposition to apartheid by approving the declaration of faith   for our church today. But the whole reaction of the church to that was fairly   typical, because there was an attempt to make this an official confession faith,   or declaration of faith by the church. And out of its conservatism, feeling   that it already had a declaration of faith, a confession of faith, Presbyterian   confession of faith, there was resistance to this until thirteen years later.   Partly as a result of the fact that this was now being used by Presbyterian   churches overseas. This was actually made an official confession of faith of   the church and so the Presbyterian Church became the only church besides the   Dutch Reformed Mission Church, with its Belhar Confession in 1982, to adopt   a confessional statement against apartheid, and in that sense officially declare   that apartheid was a hierarchy, because this was a statement against the kind   of pietism which tries to separate faith from politics by emphasising the lordship   of Christ over the political area and also by emphasising the fact that the   gospel opposed apartheid.
Another important Presbyterian document against apartheid was drawn up in 1979.   That year, the World Alliance of Reformed Churches organised a conference for   all its member churches in South Africa on the "Church and Social Responsibility   in South Africa" and the Dutch Reformed Church sent out to all the delegates   its official memorandum for the conference as its official memorandum, copies   of its report adopted in 1975, the so-called Landman Report, "Ras, Volk   en Nasie en Volkere Verhouderinge in die Lig van die Skrif" which had a   much more innocuous title of "Human Relations and the South African Scene   in the Light of Scripture". Well, what happened then was that I as one   of the delegates to the Conference drew up a statement which examined the whole   basis of this document and was then officially endorsed by the Executive Commission   acting on behalf of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church, and so   it became an official church document that was presented to the conference.   It caused consternation and great anger amongst the Afrikaans Reformed Church   delegates, but in the end, partly because it was a bit controversial, or very   controversial amongst some sections, the conference decided to focus on practical   issues instead of facing the underlining theological differences and so got   nowhere. This was published in 1979, that same year, in a revised form with   a title, "A different Gospel - A critique of the Theology behind Apartheid"   and distributed to all ministers to study. It was the first and indeed the only   published in-depth examination and debunking of the biblical ...[inaudible]   with which the Afrikaans Reformed Churches for so long sought to justify their   support for apartheid. And it was used as the basic document by Dr Alan Boesak   and others when the General Council of the World Alliance Reformed Churches   met in Ottoway in 1982, to get that body to declare apartheid as a hierarchy,   or the theological justification as a hierarchy. Pierre Rossouw, the ecumenical   officer of the Dutch Reformed Church also later admitted that it had played   a significant part in moving the Dutch Reformed Church away from that Landman   statement to its later formulation called "Kerk en samelewing" which   for all its faults, did at least recognise that the apartheid ideology was a   mistake. 
In 1979, the Assembly took a very strong stand against the information department   scandal. One of the interesting things that happened was that the business committee   of the Assembly and the General Secretary at the time refused to print some   of the proposed resolutions because it was afraid of government action and asked   the convenor of the committee please to reformulate them. He refused, however,   and the Assembly supported him by voting in favour of all of those proposals.   But I think that the basic issue that the churches had to face, and this was   recognised by some of us, was at that we had to move off the safe ground of   statements or fairly safe ground of statements, into the area of action. And   that was why we began to think a great deal about the issue of military service   and conscientious objection. Because so long as christians in our churches protested   against apartheid, but still were willing to serve in the police or especially   in the defence force, which was there to back up the police by its presence,   by its threat of force and by its use of force and still keep the political   status quo in place, nothing would change. So in 1971 and repeatedly thereafter,   it was proposed to the General Assembly that it should support the right of   conscientious objectors on political grounds, that is on so-called Just War   doctrine, as well as on passive grounds. And in 1973 it called on congregations   to pray not only for servicemen but also for those fighting on the side of the   liberation fronts. In 1974, occurred the Hamanskraal Resolution, at the annual   national conference of the SAC, which was proposed by myself as a Presbyterian   delegate and seconded by Dominee Beyers Naude, that was fought tooth and nail   by very prominent members of other churches represented here, whom I will not   name now, and in fact was not supported at all by the General Secretary of the   SACC, even though Bregalia Bam has mentioned this as a resolution of the SACC,   because John Reece was very unhappy about it and blocked communication between   us and the newspapers, so that they could not get much copy. This caused an   uproar in the Afrikaans newspapers particularly, and the government reacted   very sharply and B.J. Vorster saw that they quickly passed a special law that   any person who used any language or does any act or anything with intent to   recommend, encourage, aid, incite, instigate, suggest or otherwise cause any   other person to refuse or fail to render any military service (that sounds typically   Nationalist Party Government) [intervention]