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To Suffer or to Reign?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 April 2024

Terry Cyprian S.S.F.
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Because of the prominent role of individual Christians in South Africa who have opposed apartheid and exposed its brutalities, we are accustomed today to think of the South African Church as one of the most unrelenting opponents of racial oppression in that country. From the gadfly missionary Dr. John Philip of the 1820’s to Dr. Beyers Naude of our own time, there stretches a tradition of bold prophetic speaking. However, a closer look at the role of the Church, especially from the viewpoint of some Latin American theologians, raises some disturbing questions about the South African Church’s past history and present situation, the more so when the comments of those who are speaking prophetically today are taken into account.

There are interesting parallels between the development in society of the Churches of Latin America and South Africa. Argentinian theologian Jose Miguez Bonino writes that regarding his subcontinent:

“. . . there is no doubt that the Christian faith, co-opted into the total Spanish national-religious project, played the role of legitimizing and sacralizing the social and economic structure implanted in America. It served as an ideology to cover and justify existing conditions. God in his heaven, the king of Spain on his throne, the landlord in his residence: this was ‘the order of things’, God’s eternal and sacred order.”

Protestantism was a late arrival in Latin America, entering between 1870-1890. Its arrival helped undermine the overwhelming predominance of Roman Catholicism, but in a way that far from liberating the poor, instead subtly imprisoned them further.

Type
Research Article
Information
New Blackfriars , Volume 59 , Issue 694 , March 1978 , pp. 127 - 132
Copyright
Copyright © 1978 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers

References

1 Bonino, J. M., Revotutionary Theology Comes of Age London 1975, p. 7Google Scholar

2 Bonino, p. 12

3 But initially no minister would accompany the Voortrekkers as it was feared the emigration would “lead to godlessness and the decline of civilisation“. See The Oxford History of South Africa, Wilson, M. and Thompson, L., editors, Oxford 1969, p. 407Google Scholar.

4 Broadcast by Beyers Naude on BBC Radio Four, 20 November 1977.

5 Guttierrez, G., A Theology of Liberation, London 1974, pp. 265–266Google Scholar.

6 Leslie Paul, “Why Black Priests are Worried Men”, Church of England Newspaper 11 November 1977.

7 The Times 6 December 1977.

8 Inauguration Sermon preached by Dr. M. Buthelezi in Johannesburg, December 1976.