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Calvin and Anti-Apartheid Memory in the Dutch Reformed Family of Churches in South Africa

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Calvin and Anti-Apartheid Memory in the Dutch Reformed Family of Churches in South Africa CHAPTER EIGHT CALVIN AND ANTI-APARTHEID MEMORY IN THE DUTCH REFORMED FAMILY OF CHURCHES IN SOUTH AFRICA Robert Vosloo Introduction In his well-known book, Naught for Your Comfort, Father Trevor Hud- dleston gives a moving description of his diffi cult but rewarding ministry as an Anglican priest in the township of Sophiatown, Johannesburg from 1944 to 1956. In one of the chapters Huddleston addresses the role of the Dutch Reformed Church (Nederduits Gereformeerde Kerk) in legitimizing apartheid. He comments: “The truth is that the Calvinistic doctrines upon which the faith of the Afrikaner is nourished, contain within themselves . exaggerations so distorting and so powerful that it is very hard indeed to recognise the Christian faith they are supposed to enshrine. Here, in this fantastic notion of the immutability of race, is present in a different form the predestination idea: the concept of an elect people of God, characteristic above all else of John Calvin.”1 According to Huddleston, this “Calvinistic” understanding is narrowed even further within the South African context to adapt to existing pre- conceptions and prejudices by maintaining that the Afrikaner people (volk) had a divine mission and unique destiny that set them apart—like Israel in the Old Testament. They are a chosen nation called to rep- resent the purity of race, since whiteness is divinely ordained. Hence Huddleston’s conclusion: “Calvinism, with its great insistence on ‘elec- tion,’ is the ideally suitable doctrine for White South Africa. It provides at the same moment a moral justifi cation for White supremacy and an actual day-to-day reason for asserting it.”2 I briefl y recall these remarks by Huddleston because they underline the fact that it is not an easy task to speak about the role of Calvin in anti-apartheid memory, since Calvinism is most often seen as the 1 Trevor Huddleston, Naught for Your Comfort (London, 1957), p. 50. 2 Ibid. 218 robert vosloo religious worldview which provided the theological underpinnings for the worldview that supported Afrikaner nationalism, and more specifi - cally the ideology of apartheid. At the same time, without denying the power of Huddleston’s critique, one can also assert with the Cape Town theologian John de Gruchy that students of Calvin’s theology may be forgiven for asking some critical questions “about the too easy identifi - cation between Calvin and Calvinism with apartheid that is popularly held both inside and beyond the border of South Africa.”3 This essay wants to acknowledge the complex and problematic discussions surrounding the relationship between Calvinism and the Afrikaner nationalism associated with apartheid. The aim, however, is not to deal primarily with this issue, but rather to chart some of the traces of theological attempts to invoke an “other Calvin” that served in some ways as a rival to the way the legacy of Calvin has been appropriated within apartheid discourse and subsequent collective memory. The idea that the reception of Calvin and his legacy is not merely limited to the generally perceived form of Afrikaner Calvinism is also expressed by John de Gruchy in an article signifi cantly entitled “The Revitalization of Calvinism in South Africa: Some Refl ections on Christian Belief, Theology, and Social Transformation.” In this essay, published in 1986, De Gruchy argues that Calvinism was experiencing something of a renascence in South Africa. He then refers specifi cally to two different and distinct forms. There was, on the one hand, the work of the Institute for Reformational Studies at the University of Potchefstroom which, although it also broke new ground, could largely be viewed as a programme in continuity with the received tradition of Afrikaner Calvinism. There was also, on the other hand, a strand of Calvinism in South Africa—and this is the main focus of De Gruchy’s article—in which Calvinism “is being revitalized, even radicalized, as a theology of social transformation.”4 In his important book Liberating Reformed Theology: A South African Contribution to an Ecumenical Debate, published in 1991, De Gruchy again refers to the presence of a more prophetic “alternative Calvinism” in 3 John W. de Gruchy, Liberating Reformed Theology: A South African Contribution to an Ecumenical Debate (Grand Rapids, 1991), p. 5. 4 John W. de Gruchy, ‘The Revitalization of Calvinism in South Africa: Some Refl ec- tions on Christian Belief, Theology, and Social Transformation,’ Journal of Religious Ethics 14.1 (1986), 22–47, here 27..
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