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Confessions as a way of making explicit cultural faith expressions

What was Apartheid?

I first learned about Apartheid when I was a boy. A South African pastor was a guest in our home. He was in the states to talk about Apartheid as an evil in the church in South Africa. I was old enough to be curious about other cultures so I asked him questions and learned about the practices of separateness.

Apartheid was a political practice. It was a social practice. It was an element of South African culture and it had a theological manifestation in some Reformed South African churches. These churches developed a theology based on their reading of the Bible to justify and promote the practice. Some South African churches that practiced Apartheid were confessionally, culturally and historically close to the Christian Reformed Church. Practices and the theology that supported these practices became a sort of confession for these Apartheid churches. Their practice and theology shaped their reading of the Bible.

Not just a Hermeneutical Conflict

The conservative Dutch Reformed churches that practiced Apartheid believed that their position was not only in alignment with the Bible but also in some ways derived from it. These churches probably had nearly identical, conservative hermeneutical practices as their Christian Reformed relatives in the United States and Canada. “Hermeneutics” are the rules by which Christians scholars believe themselves to be interpreting Scripture. Their hermeneutics didn’t keep them from reading not just a justification for Apartheid in the Bible but also a mandate for it. I would like to say that Apartheid, it’s practice and its theology became a “confession” for those churches and whether or not they formally wrote and subscribed to an Apartheid confession it was a confessional practice.

A confessions did arise out of that struggle. They were having a confessional conversation in dealing with Apartheid. A confession that arose out of it was the Belhar Confession.

There was an effort to have the Christian Reformed Church adopt the Belhar Confession as a confession but it failed. There were a number of reasons why it failed. Part of why it failed I believe was because despite our years of practice surrounding subscription and our current confessions we have not used this framework or tool to govern ourselves and struggles.

I believe that approaching theological conflicts, conflicts of practice, and different ways of understanding the Bible as confessional conversations are a helpful way of processing these disputes. Because the struggle with Apartheid was seen a confessional matter it was able to be processed and out of it arose documents and learnings which could be helpful for other segments of the church.

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