Open Day : University of Stellenbosch
The Christian Identity of Congregations and the struggles of the DRC:
past, present and future
Danie Mouton
March 2007
The metaphor, “struggle”, is indeed appropriate for the long and chequered history of the Dutch Reformed Church in South Africa. In brings Paul’s admonition in his letter to the church in Philippi to mind:
“Live your life in a manner worthy of the Gospel of Christ, … standing firm in one spirit, striving side by side with one mind for the faith of the gospel. … For he (God) has graciously granted you the privilege not only of believing in Christ, but of suffering for him as well - since you are having the same struggle that you saw I had and now hear that I still have” (Ph 1: 27-30, NRSV).
The Christian identity of congregations, conceived in a trinitarian, missional way (as Paul does in his letter to Philippi), indeed implies struggle. This struggle must always be accompanied by spiritual discernment, in order not to go astray. We need to earnestly pray Paul’s prayer at the outset of the same letter, as we ponder the Christian identity of congregations and the struggles of the DRC: past, present, and future:
“And this is my prayer, that your love may overflow more and more with knowledge and full insight to help you determine what is best, so that in the day of Christ you may be pure and blameless, having produce the harvest of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ for the glory and praise of God” (Ph 1: 9-11, NRSV).
Let us then endeavour to enquire discerningly about the Christian identity of the DRC and it’s past, present and future struggles.
1. The Christian Identity of Congregations
In order to link my analysis to the growing, world wide, emerging, trinitarian, missional praxis of being church, I want to share vital discernment regarding the Christian identity of congregations.
In this regard Alan Hirsch writes eloquently about the heart of the missional church. Asking why the early Christian church (and the Chinese underground churches) grew so remarkably, he answers: “All genuine Christian movements involve at their spiritual ground zero a living encounter with the One True God ‘through whom all things came and through whom we live’ (1 Cor 8:6)…. A God who in the very moment of redeeming us claims us as his own through Jesus our Savior” (Hirsch 2006:84).
Hirsch explains how underground Christians movements are stripped form religious clutter, e.g. institutional conceptions of the ecclesia, and are forced back to the core of the message, which they then are able to communicate along primarily relational lines. The core is found in the “substance of genuine biblical monotheism - an existential encounter with the one God who claims and saves us” (2006:86).
Given the Hebraic context of the New Testament confession of Jesus as Lord and Saviour, Hirsch convincingly demonstrates that the confession is grounded is Israel’s belief that Yahweh is Lord. Shema Yisrael, “Hear O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength” (Deut 6:4). In the Hebraic world this represents a radical departure from the polytheistic world-view. While polytheists can compartmentalize life and distribute it among many powers, Yahweh’s lordship is at once complete and graceful salvation as total, unqualified demand. In biblical faith, salvation and lordship are inextricably linked (2006:89).
All of life is placed under God - biblical faith does not know a distinction between secular and holy, between some inherently godly and other non-godly things. Hirsch argues that the instruction of the Torah is clearly designed to orientate us toward this natural, all-inclusive claim of monotheism, namely: Yahweh is Lord! Any and every aspect of life is correlated by the Torah towards the external purposes of God (2006:91). That is true of the whole Old Testament. Hirsch calls this practical monotheism.
The incarnation informs and restructures the practical monotheism around the central character of the New Testament, Jesus Christ. Our loyalties are now to be given to the Revealer and Saviour. In Jesus’ message the kingdom is the triune God’s claim upon us. Hirsch calls the realignment of our loyalties to God around the person and work of Jesus Christ Christological monotheism. It is expressed in by confession: Jesus is Lord. This has serious implications for the church:
Our identity as a movement, as well as our destiny as a people, is inextricably linked to Jesus, the Second Person of the Trinity. In fact, our connexion to God is only through the Mediator… That is what makes us distinctly Christ-ian.
At its very heart, Christianity is therefore a messianic movement, one that seeks to consistently embody the life, spirituality and mission of its Founder. We have made it so many other things, but this is its utter simplicity. Discipleship, becoming like Jesus our Lord and Founder, lies at the epicenter of the church’s task. … It also means that in order to recover the ethos of authentic Christianity, we need to refocus our attention back to the root of it all, to recalibrate ourselves and our organizations around the person and work of Jesus the Lord. It will mean taking the Gospels seriously as the primary texts that define us. It will mean acting like Jesus in relation to people outside of the faith…” (2006:94)
The confession of Jesus as Lord thus lies at the heart of what it means to be a missional church, to take part in God’s mission to the world.
This thumbnail summary of Hirsch’s brilliant description of missional identity provides us with a hermeneutical framework to analyse the past, present and future struggles of the DRC in relation to its Christian identity.
Christendom Church
In the sense used here, the technical term Christendom Church refers to the privileged position of the church at the centre of power in society, a position the church in the West enjoyed since the Roman Caesar Theodosias declared the Christian faith the official state religion of the Roman Empire at the end of the fourth century (391 A.D.) Due to a series of setbacks in the ensuing decades and centuries, it became more and more the church’s responsibility to maintain the culture, which led to a complete fusion of Christianity and civil kingdom, Christendom. The reformation did not change this basic position (Keifert 2006:30v).
The Dutch Reformed Church landed on South African soil with Jan Van Riebeeck in April 1652. It was the only church allowed in the new Dutch outpost, and remained in this privileged position until 1795, when the colony fell into British hands. The political authority always had the upper hand in the Christendom-fusion and regulated the church in no uncertain terms. Even after 1795, government continued to appoint a political commissioner to attend all church council and other governing meetings to ensure that government’s interests and policy prevailed. This situation came only to an end by 1843.
Though formally disestablished, the DRC remained for all practical purposes a prominent, publicly privileged church. With the rise of Afrikaner nationalism in the 20th century and the gaining of political power by the Afrikaner, the DRC enjoyed the de facto status of a Christendom state church.
The ministry of the DRC therefore traditionally focused strongly on the maintenance of the parish flock. Although missionary activity was present in the church, evangelism and mission mostly took a back seat in the ministry programme.
A Christendom church is far removed from the ecclesia as a missional Jesus movement, so eloquently described by Alan Hirsch. It does not need to cross boundaries, to build relationships with outsiders, or to cultivate apostolic leadership.
The new political dispensation from 1994 led to a radical and sudden disestablishment of the DRC. Because of its close ties to the previous government, and its chaplaincy of government policies, numerous apartheid laws, and military ventures aimed at maintaining political power, the DRC had to endure tremendous shame when the full extent of state sponsored violence, crime and thuggery surfaced during the truth and reconciliation process. These evil realities are still often denied or reframed in a more self-justifying way by DRC-members.
The struggle to come to terms with this disestablishment still defines present reality in the DRC. A loss of membership, social status and financial hardship, illustrated by congregations struggling or dwindling and dying in areas where the church once flourished, underlines the painful reality of its marginalisation. The power to shape public reality in partnership with government remains a nostalgic memory for some, and a shame-filled memory for those that are prepared to admit the church failed society at large by its support for a unjust political dispensation.
One way of coming to terms with new realities is to disengage public responsibility by fleeing into faith as privatised, spiritual-religious experience. This goes hand in hand with a individualised understanding of faith. Many congregations go this way.
A responsible church will embrace its liminality, allow itself to be stripped of its institutionalised view of the ecclesia, and rediscover its identity as messianic movement. It’s a time to willingly embrace the dessert, where we can re-connect with the gospel-story, can rediscover the missional God, can be refreshed by a renewed calling, and from where we can be sent into to world on a newly discovered mission.
I pray for a new apostolic age for the DRC. As Pat Keifert puts it:
This Apostolic Age was characterized by local churches understanding themselves to be mission outpost within the mission of God; communities called, gathered and sent in God’s mission, the very movement of God towards the world (Keifert 2006:28).
Church, missionary work and ethnic diversity
It is also true that the DRC understood itself right from the beginning as responsible for missionary work. It was expected of pastors and comforters of the sick to share the faith with heathen. It took, however, more than a century for strategically structured missionary work to start.
At first, individual members took responsibility to instruct the Hottentotte in God’s Word. The first Hottentot to baptised, a woman called Krotoa, took the name Eva at her baptism in 1662. Slaves were instructed in the Christian faith at the daily family devotions. Slave-owners were generally not eager to have slaves baptised, for the simple reason that adult slaves were set free after their baptism and public confession of faith (Marais 1984:30v).
Towards the end of the 18th century the dawn of missionary zeal manifested in Europe and spread to the Cape Colony. Rev Helperus Ritzema van Lier, born in the Netherlands, was ordained as pastor in Cape Town in 1786 at the age of 22. He was responsible for renewed missionary interest, energy and vision in his short ministry of six years until his death at the age of 28 in 1793.
Van Lier’s initiative was carried forward by Rev MC Vos and others. Various missionary agencies, mostly from abroad, but also a South African mission society (founded in 1799), took the missionary calling seriously.
For the first two hundred years new converts from the Hottentotte, Bushmen and slaves to Christianity became members of the local church. No special provision was made for separate ministry to them, and they shared in table community.
A new pattern in missionary work and ministry to converts was established by the mission societies. The effect of their mission strategy was to establish separate ministry establishments for heathen converts. The first Synod of the Cape Colony (1824) instituted a special missionary office, with an ordination to administer the sacraments to heathen converts in the congregations formed through their missionary endeavours. These converts (all of them people of colour) would now become members of separate congregations.
Since 1824 two ministry strategies towards converts existed: the one was to assimilate converts into existing congregations, and the second one to differentiate - the formation of separate congregations with separate buildings or foundations. The second pattern soon became the primary way of ministry to heathen converts (Marais 1984:80; Van der Watt 1980:112).
The missionary regulation adopted in 1834 specifically provided for separate congregations. IT was not seen as a separate church, for when a member departed to an area where no such congregation existed, his membership was transferred to the local DRC congregation.
During the 19th century prejudice against people of colour, always present right from the beginning in 1652, rose dramatically. Many congregations made separate provision for the table communion in order to separate whites and people of colour - sometimes in the same building during the same church service, or in separate facilities.
It was at the Synod of 1857 where the principle of separate places of gathering for people of colour became official church policy, due to the infamous “weakness of some”. This “weakness” was e.g. the refusal of white people at Balfour in the Kat River Valley to celebrate the holy communion in the presence of people of colour. The decision of 1857 embodies a major religious root of the policy of apartheid, to which we will turn our attention a a next paragraph.
The concession of 1857 soon became standard practice, and eventually determined the church order. The policy of separate ministry led to the NG Mission Church (founded 1881) and later the black DRC in Africa (1915) and the Reformed Church in Africa for people of Indian ethnic origin.