Abstract
“It is not enough,” says John Calvin in his commentary on Isaiah 58:6–7, “to abstain from acts of injustice, if you refuse your assistance to the needy.” In other words, it is not just about not doing injustice as if that is the fulfillment of God’s commandment, Calvin says. It is about two things: the undoing of injustice and the doing of justice. Moreover, it is not about those we find acceptable for some reason; it is about all God’s children, created in God’s image and therefore our flesh and blood:
By commanding them to “break bread to the hungry,” God intended to take away every excuse from covetous and greedy men, who allege that they have a right to keep possession of that which is their own… And indeed, this is the dictate of common sense, that the hungry are deprived of their just right, if their hunger is not relieved… At length he concludes—And that you hide not yourself from your own flesh. Here we ought to observe the term flesh, by which he means all men universally, not a single one of whom we can behold, without seeing as in a mirror, “our own flesh”. It is therefore proof of the greatest inhumanity, to despise those in whom we are constrained to recognize our own flesh.1
It is a compelling insight, and for apartheid South Africa, driven as it was by a racist, oppressive, and utterly exclusivist ideology that claimed to be Christian and, more specifically, Reformed in the tradition of John Calvin, entirely indispensable. These are words my heart could sing to, and a Reformed theology I could aspire to, but I did not meet or come to know this Calvin in the Dutch Reformed Church theology I was taught in South Africa. It would be years before I could claim this Reformed tradition as truly mine.2
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Notes
John Calvin, commentary on Isaiah 58:6–7 See also Nicholas Wolterstorff, “The Wounds of God: Calvin’s Theology of Social Justice,” in Mark R. Gornik and George Thompson (eds.), Hearing the Call, Liturgy, Justice, Church, and World (Grand Rapids, Ml/Cambridge, UK: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2010), 114–132. The quotation is on pp. 126–127.
Cf. Danie Langner, Teen die Héle Wêreld Vry—Knegte van die Allerhoogste: Koot Vorster—Segsman of Trofeet? (Pretoria: Griffel Publishers, 2007), 103.
Langner, Teen die Héle Wêreld Vry, 104, 105. For the peculiar term “Boere-Calvinisme” (“Boer Calvinism,” perhaps better understood as “Afrikaner Calvinism”), see Langner, 103, 153, 154. In Afrikaans though, the term “Boer,” and Langner’s use of it at this particular historic moment would have added significance, reflecting the reemergence of Afrikaner ethnic nationalism in South Africa after 1994. For a very useful discussion of the roots of Afrikaner Calvinism see T. Dunbar Moodie’s classic, The Rise of Afrikanerdom, Power, Apartheid, and the Afrikaner Civil Religion (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975), 22ff.
For a discussion on this issue see Allan Boesak, Running with Horses, Reflections of an Accidental Politician (Cape Town: JoHo! Publications, 2009), Chapter 1.
See the testimony of Prince Dibeela, younger generation theologian from Botswana, until 2014 Secretary-General of the United Congregational Church in Southern Africa, cf. Prince Dibeela, “In Pursuit of a Liberating Humanism, Reflections in Honour of Allan Aubrey Boesak,” in Prince Dibeela, Puleng Lenkabula, and Vuyani Vellem (eds.), Prophet from the South, Essays in Honour of Allan Aubrey Boesak (Stellenbosch: Sun Media, 2014), 226: “I am part of the generation that came into theological consciousness in the eighties, at a time when Southern Africa was groaning and experiencing the birth pains of liberation. It was a difficult time to be a Christian, let alone a Reformed Christian because of the farcical and supposedly Calvinistic hermeneutics of the Dutch Reformed Church in South Africa at the time. The scandalous, systemic justification of apartheid did a great blow to the church as a credible community of transformation and liberation.”
See Allan Aubrey Boesak, Black and Reformed, Apartheid, Liberation and the Reformed Tradition (New York: Orbis Books, 1984).
See David P. Botha, “Church and Kingdom,” in Margaret Nash, (ed.), Thy Kingdom Come (Johannesburg: SACC, 1988) who makes a virtually unassailable argument for not only this fact, but for the irreplaceable role of the DRC in the preparation for apartheid rule.
De Gruchy, The Church Struggle (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1985), 9, 10 also refers to this fateful decision and calls it a theological position “somewhat removed from the theology propounded by the reformer from Geneva.” Botha is much more direct.
Cf. Steve Biko, I Write What I Like, a Selection of His Writings (Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1996), 58–59.
Helmut Gollwitzer, Die Kapitalistische Revolution (Munich: Kaiser, 1974), 45.
In the Sunday Times, November 8, 1970, cited in Charles Villa-Vicencio, “An All-pervading Heresy: Racism and the English-speaking Churches0,” in Charles Villa-Vicencio and John De Gruchy (eds.), Apartheid Is a Heresy (Cape Town: David Philip, 1982), 59.
See John De Gruchy, “Toward a Reformed Theology of Liberation,” in David Willis and Michael Welker (eds.), Toward the Future of Reformed Theology, Tasks, Topics, Traditions (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans; Cambridge, UK, 1999), 106.
Raymond Beddy, Inleiding tot die Geskiedenis van die Khoikhoi en San as Afrikane, vanaf die Evolusionêre Ontstaan in Noord Afrika tot die Hede in Suid Afrika (Bloemfontein: Handisa Media, 2007), 48.
Richard Elphick, “Evangelical Missions and Racial ‘Equalization’ in South Africa, 1890–1914,” in Dana L. Robert (ed.), Converting Colonialism, Visions and Realities in Mission History, 1706–1914 (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans; Cambridge, UK, 2008), 112–133. The quotation is on p. 112.
See Walter Brueggemann, The Prophetic Imagination (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1978), 13.
See, Allan Boesak, Running with Horses, Reflections of an Accidental Politician (Cape Town: JoHo! Publishers, 2009), 9. This Calvinist bent has sometimes been misunderstood as with e.g. Michael Walzer, who calls Calvin an “ideologist” rather than a theologian because of Calvinist theology’s capacity “to activate its adherents and to change the world,” cf.
Walzer , The Revolution of the Saints, a Study in the Origins of Radical Politics (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1966), 27. In my view this misunderstanding arises because of a lack of insight in the meaning of Calvin’s view of the world “as the theatre of God’s glory,” his understanding of God as a God of justice, as well as his understanding of the Lordship of Jesus Christ over all of life, and the supremacy of the Word of God as these must find practical expression in the life of the believer. For a brilliant explication of this see Nicholas Wolterstorff, “The Wounds of God: Calvin’s Theology of Social Justice,” in Nicholas Wolterstorff, Hearing the Call: “What characterized the Calvinist movement as a whole,” writes Wolterstorff, “was its dynamic restlessness; much of that can be traced to Calvin himself—to his actions in Geneva, but also to his words,” op. cit., 128.
Cf. Allan Aubrey Boesak, The Tenderness of Conscience, African Renaissance and the Spirituality of Politics (Stellenbosch: Sun Media, 2005), 203–204.
See also Nicholas Wolterstorff, Until Justice and Peace Embrace (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1983),
and Wolterstorff , Justice, Rights and Wrongs (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008).
Calvin, Institutes, IV, XX, 4. Even though some call the Romans 13:1–7 passage “rhetorical hyperbole” from Paul (see William Bouwsma, John Calvin, a Sixteenth-Century Portrait (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), note 9, 286, there is no question of the universal impact of this view since the sixteenth century, and not just within churches of the Reformed tradition. Besides, we read this not as “rhetorical hyperbole” but rather as a vital critical notion built into the expectation of government displaying in its actions the image of God. A government that does not respond to this expectation as “servant of God for your good” loses its legitimacy, opens itself to fundamental critique and should be resisted,
see Allan Boesak, “What Belongs to Caesar? Once Again Romans 13,” in Allan Boesak and Charles Villa-Vicencio (eds.), When Prayer Makes News (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1986), 138–156.
See Boesak, “What Belongs to Caesar?”; see also especially the whole body of recent New Testament studies dealing with this subject, e.g. Richard A. Horsley (ed.), Paul and Empire, Religion and Power in Roman Imperial Society (Harrisburg, PA: Trinity International Press, 1997);
Richard A Horsley (ed.), Paul and Politics, Ekklesia, Israel, Imperium, Interpretation (Harrisburg, PA: Trinity International Press, 2000), and the bibliography cited there.
See Don Compier, What Is Rhetorical Theology ? Textual Practice and Public Discourse (Harrisburg: Trinity International Press, 1999); see also Dirkie Smit, “Resisting ‘Lordless Powers’?”, in Prince Dibeela, Puleng Lenkabula, and Vuyani Vellem (eds.), Prophet from the South, Essays in Honour of Allan Aubrey Boesak, 33–68;
also Serene Jones, Calvin and the Rhetoric of Piety, Columbia Series in Reformed Theology, Columbia Theological Seminary (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1995). In the introduction to her work, Jones describes Calvin’s Institutes as follows: “Here, the reader finds Calvin, a master of both French and Latin eloquence, skillfully practicing his talent for sharp and enlivening prose. Here, one also discovers Calvin’s theology unfolding as more than a straightforward summary of doctrine; it unfolds as carefully detailed and rich language, wrought by the pen of one of early modern Europe’s most powerful rhetoricians” (p. 2).
Cf. Walzer, Revolution of the Saints, 67ff. I first raised this issue in a paper read at a symposium on the 150th anniversary of the Great Trek at the University of the Western Cape, Bellville, during the second state of emergency in 1988, see Allan Boesak, Trektragiek: ’n Histories-Teologiese Perspektief op Diaz, die Huguenote en die Groot Trek, unpublished paper, 1988.
Commentary on Exodus 5:12. Calvin understands the boundaries: “[The Pharaoh] is deaf to every excuse of his officers… there is no more feeling in him than in a stone.” Bonhoeffer, in his rejection of the decision to (still) seek discussions with Hitler by sending Barth to him, understood these boundaries as well as Calvin, and it would lead to another kairos moment and a different kind of decision: “From now on, I believe, any discussion between Hitler and Barth would be quite pointless—indeed, no longer to be sanctioned. Hitler has shown himself quite plainly for what he is, and the church ought to know with whom it has to reckon…,” Bonhoeffer in his letter to Erwin Sutz, see Eric Mataxas, Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy, (Nashville: Nelson Thomas, 2010), 249. Return to this important insight in chapter 3 below.
See Nicholas Wolterstorff, The Mighty and the Almighty, an Essay in Political Theology (Cambridge, UK, and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 67–82.
See John Witte, The Reformation of Rights: Law, Religion, and Human Rights in Early Modern Calvinism (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), Chapter 1.
See Richard A. Horsley, Jesus and the Powers, Conflict, Covenant, and the Hope of the Poor (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2011), 51–54.
See Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, Vol. 8, quoted in John De Gruchy, “In Praise of Courage,” in Ernst Conradie and Christoffel Lombard, Discerning God’s Justice in Church, Society and Academy, Festschrift for Jaap Durand (Stellenbosch: Sun Press, 2009), 62.
David Held and Anthony McGrew (eds.), The Global Transformations Reader (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000),
cited by Jonathan Sacks, The Dignity of Difference, How to Avoid the Clash of Civilizations (New York: Continuum, 2006), 29.
Paul Lehmann, The Transfiguration of Politics (New York: Harper & Row, 1975), 39.
“Calvinism understood that the world was not to be saved by ethical philosophizing, but only by the restoration of the tenderness of conscience,” see Abraham Kuyper, Six Stone Lectures (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1931), 123. For the way in which I understood and worked this out see my The Tenderness of Conscience, Chapter 7.
See William Stacy Johnson, John Calvin: Reformer for the 21st Century (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2009), 109.
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© 2015 Allan Aubrey Boesak
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Boesak, A.A. (2015). At the Heart of It All: Kairos, Apartheid, and the Calvinist Tradition. In: Kairos, Crisis, and Global Apartheid. Black Religion / Womanist Thought / Social Justice. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137495310_3
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