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The Bible Actually“How can I trust the Bible when some churches used it to support Apartheid?”
Introduction
Good morning to you all and thank you for joining us this morning.
Today, we are dealing with part 2 of a 3 part series that I’ve titled
“Tough Stuff”. The purpose of these 3 talks is to probe some difficult
questions that we often raise from our reading of the Old Testament.
As you well know, we’ve been studying the book of Exodus over the
last few months in our morning services, looking at the story of how
Israel was rescued by God from slavery in Egypt in order to bring
them into the worship of God and thinking about what it all means
for us. That story of Israel of course continues to their possession of
the Promised Land and then to their exile and then their return until
we finally arrive at the coming of Jesus Christ. As the Old Testament
unpacks this story, questions arise from us the contemporary readers
that we don’t always have the opportunity to address; hence this 3
part series.
Now last week we dealt with the question “How can a good God
commission Israel to kill other people?” because that’s what Israel’s
possession of the Promised Land entailed, right? They didn’t just
walk into an open piece of land and live there. Under God’s
command, Israel killed inhabitants of the Promised Land.
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And for those of you who weren’t here, the main take away from last
week’s message was read the whole story before you make a
decision about a part of the story that makes you feel
uncomfortable. Whether you’re a Christian or a non-Christian here
this morning, it won’t help you in the long run to read snippets of the
Bible and not pay attention to the wider story in which those
snippets belong. That’s the path to distortion.
So the key to last week’s question was what scholars call, literary
context; which is simply taking into consideration the wider story.
The question we want to handle this morning is, “How can I trust the
Bible when some churches used it to support Apartheid?” This is
another difficult question that actually goes back to the reading of
the Old Testament and the story of Israel and it is a prevalent
question in our country and unsurprisingly so. This week the
difficulty is not so much with what the Old Testament directly says
like last week, right? It’s the use of what the Old Testament says or
the consequences of what the Old Testament says in our society.
And South Africa is not the first country to have to deal with this kind
of difficulty:
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The Crusades, between the 11th and the 15th century, were
essentially Christians killing others because Christians were the
people of God and the others were not; like Israel wiped out the
Canaanites. Reports say over a million people were killed at that time
in the name of Christianity, particularly in the name of defending the
Holy Promised Land. How can you trust the Bible when it’s used that
way, especially when you’re on the receiving end of that violence?
The Spanish Inquisition resulted in thousands of deaths and it was
about, again the church, punishing by death those who denied the
faith.
In North America, the killing and destruction of Native Americans by
Europeans and their enslavement of Africans was supported by this
notion that they were the people of God coming to settle in their
God given land. A few wars down the line they would pen a national
anthem that reads, “Blessed with victory and peace, may the
Heaven-rescued-land, Praise the Power that hath made and
preserved us a nation! Then conquer we must, when our cause it is
just, And this be our motto: 'In God is our trust.'”
People had to deal with the kind of difficulty with Christianity and the
Bible that we also face in our country.
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I could go on and on citing many examples of Christians down the
centuries throughout most of the history of the church using the Old
Testament, particularly parts of the story of Israel as justification to
commit the most unbelievable atrocities.
But this morning we are focusing our attention on Apartheid which
occurred just yesterday from a historical point of view and is
obviously much closer to home and the legacy of which continues to
affect us in various ways.
Now it’s important for me to say this from the onset. There are a
number of players and factors that were responsible for the
construction of Apartheid and the church was one of them. It would
be dishonest and futile for me in my capacity as a minister of the
church to deny this. It would also be dishonest and futile for me in
my capacity as a minister of the church to say but I Solanga was not
there and I didn’t do anything. Go and take up your issues with
Groenewald and Du Toit who were the chief theologians at the time
formulating the underlying doctrines that undergirded Apartheid.
That would be disingenuous of me: I want to represent the church
and I want to be associated with the church so long as it looks good
and it suits me but I want to shun it and make myself an individual
that is detached from it whenever it looks bad. That’s shocking
hypocrisy.
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I am a part of the church; both as a believer and as a minister who’s
been called to serve in it. I must own the church, warts and all and
stand for Christ through it all!
If we don’t, it’s a little bit like us as South Africans saying, we won the
rugby world cup in 1995 and in 2007 and then saying eish… “those
rugby players”, those hooligans that wear green and gold were
horrible last year! We can’t do that. I was on cloud 9 last year when
we whitewashed the Aussies in the cricket, remember that? Feels
like forever ago now doesn’t it? But I sobbed in the 1999 world cup
when Klusener and Alan Donald… I can’t even bring myself to saying
what they did. I might just start crying again. I was broken hearted.
I’ve never quite gotten over that moment and I don’t like thinking
about for too long. But you get the point? We are the Springboks
through the thick and the thin. We are the Proteas and on a much
deeper and on a much more profound level we are the church. I
grew up with my mother saying to me, “watch yourself out there
because you represent me. You represent us.” Sometimes my wife
doesn’t like the way I’ve dressed and she tries to fix me up because I
reflect her. So whether it’s sports teams, or family or religion, there’s
an extent to which we are related and rightly identified with that
team or family or religion.
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And it’s disingenuous and dishonest and futile to try and pretend
otherwise or to play down our association. Jesus says for example to
people in the 1st century, “you killed the prophets”; Prophets that
died hundreds of years before they were born (Matt 23:35-36). You
will not at all be helpful as a Christian in our country if you choose to
go down a road that will absolve yourself from the church’s deeds.
So what I will do with the little time we have this morning is I will give
a quick-fire, rough sketch of what Apartheid was and what it
entailed, then I will I talk about how the church used the Bible to
justify it and then we will consider ‘The Bible Actually’. That is my
title for this sermon.
So what was apartheid?
It saddens me to know that many people in our country know the
histories of other nations better than we know our own. If I were to
ask you for example, how many Jews were killed in the holocaust?
You’ll be able to answer me without even thinking. That history sits
on your fingertips. The teaching of history in our schools to this day is
still very disappointing. Still today you find South Africans who can
tell you far more about Hitler and Churchill than Albert Luthuli or
Hendrik Verwoed. So it’s important that I unpack what Apartheid
was because no doubt, there will be things that I will say that too
many of us will hear for the first time this morning.
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First of all, we need to understand that Apartheid was a culmination
of a system of thought that began, not in 1948 when Apartheid was
legislated, but with the first European settlers that arrived in this
country in the 17th century. From the beginning, the settlers had a
very particular attitude towards people that lived outside of Europe.
One historian writes that, “indigenous peoples were not considered
to be human beings and that the colonisers were shaped by
"centuries of Ethnocentrism””. You thus had this tendency towards
separateness, which is what this word Apartheid means, right from
the beginning. It’s birthed by this notion of being superior to
another. That’s the basic tenet of colonialism. The Historian De
Gruchy writes, “Settlers held the view that native South Africans
were meant to be God’s “hewers of wood and drawers of water” as a
result of their culturally inferior position and the raised status of
those they were to serve which, according to the Dutch settlers, was
them”. “hewers of wood and drawers of water”. That was the classic
17th century designation of the African by the European. Even
missionaries, Gospel men and women, came with this superiority
complex and referred to Africans in their writings as untamed wild
savages. It’s devastating to read these things.
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These were the attitudes, right from the beginning, concerning the
supremacy of the European and the place of the native South African
which contributed to exploitation, segregation, and eventually, the
development of apartheid theology and apartheid planning.
South Africa of course is rich in natural resources and over the next
three centuries, Europeans, primarily of British and Dutch origin,
would expand their presence in South Africa to pursue the land’s
abundance of these resources such as diamonds and gold. This is
what they did in many other parts of the world as well. In 1910, they
founded the Union of South Africa, an independent arm of the British
Empire that gave the white minority control of the country, control
that they used effectively to completely disenfranchise the natives.
It was really in 1913 that the more formal beginnings of Apartheid
ensued with the signing into law of the Land Act. Although South
Africa was majority black, the white minority passed a series of Land
Acts that resulted in them occupying 80 to 90 percent of the
country’s land and pushed black people into peripheral territory.
That’s why today, you can live your whole life in Port Elizabeth
without ever coming across a township for example. It’s Apartheid
planning. So 1913 really marks the unofficial launch of the Apartheid
system from a formal institutional point of view. Officially, the policy
of Apartheid was legislated in 1948 and led to the development of
over 300 separate laws.
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Forced removals of people that began in 1913 were aggressively
carried on to the extent that it is estimated that there were about 5
million people who were forcibly uprooted from their homes and
deposited into what were called the Bantustans, where they were
plunged into poverty and hopelessness. There’s this one family in
Cape Town that attends the same church as the family that took over
their land and property. These are really hard things.
You see, the government forcibly removed black South Africans from
areas designated as “white” without reimbursement or
compensation to the homelands, and sold their land at low prices to
white buyers. Of course it could be sold at very low prices because it
wasn’t bought, it was taken.
Just to give you a few highlights of what Apartheid achieved:
Population: 80% black, 20% white
Land allocation: 13% black, 87% white. That means 87% of South
African land was allocated to 20% of the population while 13 percent
of the land was allocated to 80% of the population. That’s why if you
drive into any township today it feels extremely cramped and
claustrophobic. That’s because it is.
Ratio of average income: A black person earned R1 to a white
person’s R14.
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Minimum taxable income: R360 for a black person, R750 for a white
person.
Doctors to population size: 1 for every 44000 blacks, 1 for every 400
whites.
Education expenditure: For every R6 spent educating a black person,
R100 was spent educating a white person.
Teacher to pupil ratio: 1 teacher for 60 black pupils, 1 teacher for 22
white children.
These are stats compiled in 1978. You’ve got to feel the weight of the
horror of this stuff…
And you need to understand that this is not mismanagement, or
maladministration, or undercover dealing. What I’m describing to
you is what was legally put in place. It is what was carried out by
design. This is what was considered right and proper. There’s still the
massacres and detentions without trial, the murders, the theft and
the same old government corruption! What I’m describing is what
was considered right and proper.
So for example, P.W. Botha towards the latter stages of Apartheid
amid greater and greater opposition to Apartheid, said:
“I am sick and tired of the hollow parrot-cry of "Apartheid!" I've said
many times that the word "Apartheid" means good neighbourliness.”
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Botha even said this when it came to medical services: “I am not
against the provision of the necessary medical assistance to
Coloureds and natives, because, unless they receive that medical aid,
they become a source of danger to the European community.” The 1
doctor that was spared for the assistance of 44 000 blacks was to
protect the European communities. This was considered good
neighbourliness.
As far as prohibiting education for Black people was concerned,
Hendrik Verwoed said, “Blacks should never be shown the greener
pastures of education. They should know that their station in life is to
be hewers of wood and drawers of water”, echoing the sentiments
of the 17th century settlers.
A politician named J.N. Le Roux put it nice and simply when he said,
"We should not give the Natives any academic education. If we do,
who is going to do the manual labour in the community?" It’s by
Apartheid design, for example, that the domestic worker is black and
the garden worker is black. It’s not by chance or just the way things
worked out or whatever. That’s the black person’s “station in life”, as
the popular saying went.
This kind of oppression of black people for the benefit of white
people was considered the right thing to do for centuries.
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And it’s very very hard to escape the thinking that a white person is
superior to a black person. It’s hard for a black person and it’s hard
for a white person.
That’s because it’s been conditioned in the whole world’s
consciousness over centuries and reinforced economically. And to
show you that this is still the kind of thinking we have in our society,
one of my lectures at Bible College confessed to me with great
contrition of heart that he is not at all phased or affected when he
passes a black beggar on the street because that’s what’s normal.
But when he passes a white beggar on the street then all of a sudden
he feels that something is wrong and feelings of empathy come
about. It’s very hard to escape the notion of white superiority and
that instinct of separateness, or apartheid. In our schools and in our
neighbourhoods, and in our shopping malls for example you know
what happens when black start coming in. What happens? White
people tend leave. The effects of Apartheid socially, economically,
vocationally, educationally and psychologically are very very hard to
undo and to escape. And burying our heads in the sand about them
simply will not do.
In 1986, the South African economy then took a significant hit when
the United States and Great Britain finally decided to change their
attitude and actually impose sanctions on the country because of its
practice of apartheid.
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And then 3 years later F.W. de Klerk became president of South
Africa and dismantled many of the laws that allowed apartheid to
become the way of life in the country.
That’s just a brief sketch of Apartheid. It’s important that you keep
studying our history and seriously engage it and not burry your head
in the sand about it. That does nothing to help.
Now how did the church use the Bible to justify it?
Well, the use of the Bible to justify apartheid was quite unique in the
world and I’ll tell you how. Let’s use America as an example. The
Bible was used to justify the slave trade in America, initially as a
defensive counter argument to Christians who were challenging the
slave trade on the basis of the Bible. With Apartheid, the Bible was
used as a point of departure. In other words, the Bible was used as
the textbook for Apartheid in the first place and not merely for
countering scripture-based arguments against Apartheid. Are you
following?
You’ve got to know that formal segregation of people according to
race was begun within the Dutch Reformed Church in the 1800’s. As
the church evangelised and grew and became multi-ethnic, black
congregants were separated from white congregants and so a
theology of segregation was then developed to justify that move.
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The political segregation that followed was following the model that
was already established by the church. So the church was not
watching and supporting Apartheid to a lesser or larger extent, it was
part and parcel of the pioneering process and it transferred its
congregational theology of separate racial congregations to the
national social sphere as well.
The Dutch Reformed Church used this rationale to do this: They said,
“It is the primary task of the church to preach the Word of God and
to equip its adherents for service in all spheres of life, which includes
their own society. In fact, wherever the Word of God should demand
it, the church should fulfil its prophetic function in spite of popular
opinion.” So if you had any problems with the implementation of
Apartheid, that doctrinal principle solved it for you.
You see then, once members of the church were happy that it was
Biblical and right for the congregations to separate on the basis of
race, it was then an easy logical step to accept its application to the
society as a whole.
The leading Apartheid-justifying-theologians as I mentioned earlier
were 2 guys named Groenewald and du Toit. And Groenewald is
famous for saying this in Biblically justifying apartheid: “I don’t have
a single Bible text to justify apartheid… I’ve got the whole Bible.” And
sure enough beginning with Genesis 1 he started tracing out a theme
of separation in the Bible.
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In the beginning God separated the day from the night, the waters
below from the waters above, the sea from the land and worked his
way through finding the virtue of separateness throughout the Bible
(the tower of Babel in Genesis 11 and so on). So that was one angle.
But the other significant angle was this: What happened was that the
Afrikaner community was theologically identified as having been
chosen as the ‘new Israel’…
And what did God say to His people Israel when He had formed them
into a nation? “Look, I am giving all this land to you! Go in and
occupy it, for it is the land the LORD swore to give to your ancestors
Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and to all their descendants.'" Deut 1:8
Now you ask yourself, how could they have thought of themselves in
this way? Well they could identify with Israel’s story: They saw
connections between themselves and Israel. You know the story.
They pursued Afrikaner national identity and preservation and
flourishing after oppression from the British… so did Israel! Israel
also was in pursuit of establishing its nation having kicked off the
shackles of Egyptian rule. Afrikaners gained their independence from
the English just as Israel had also found independence from Egypt.
And what did God say to Israel with regards to the people in Canaan
in the land? “Get rid of them and do not mix with them. Conquer
them and separate yourselves from them.”
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When congregants with a conscience objected and said but “unity in
diversity is all over the Bible”, they said “mixing puts you at a greater
risk to sin”, obviously referring to what God said to the Israelites
about mixing with the Canaanites. A whole host of other gymnastic
manoeuvres were done on the Biblical text to suit the political
agenda.
One scholar writes, “the Apartheid architects had an in-depth
analysis of selected biblical texts which were obviously read with the
view to justifying the racial ideology that was being mooted by the
Nationalist Party.”
Apartheid was so bound with theology that in 1982, the World
Alliance of Reformed Churches declared Apartheid a heresy! For
something to be declared a heresy by a group of churches it must be
a teaching from the Bible, however false it might be.
Now Israel of course was to repeat this oppression of people in the
Promised Land just a few decades ago. This time it was the Arabic
Palestinians who were there, not the Canaanites. That oppression
carries on to this very day. It’s referred to as Israeli Apartheid.
Interestingly, In 1961, there was a vote taking place at the United
Nations about Apartheid in South Africa and Israel voted against
Apartheid. This was a shock to the South African prime minister at
the time and architect of South Africa's apartheid policies, Hendrik
Verwoerd, because he was following Israel’s lead!
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And He was quick to point out their hypocrisy at the United Nations
when he said, "Israel is not consistent in its new anti-apartheid
attitude ... they took Israel away from the Arabs after the Arabs lived
there for a thousand years. [And] In that, I agree with them [of
course]. Israel, like South Africa, is an apartheid state."
All this is to say that Apartheid justification was entrenched in
theology, especially this notion that the Afrikaner community is this
special community, the New Israel that has been given this land
flowing with milk and honey by God.
And how do we as the church respond to this today?
How do we respond to the mistrust of the Bible because of how it
has been used? I’m going to make 3 main points.
Firstly, by acknowledging our complicity as the church. It pains me as
a believer and it should pain you too as a believer that the church of
which I am a part, could construct the rationale for wickedness of the
magnitude of apartheid. When someone says to you how could your
church do this Christian? Express deepest regret for those actions of
the church. Don’t automatically switch to defensive mode. Admit
that Christians have done atrocious things, including supporting
apartheid theologically. Share your own heartbreak over that.
The second response is this. The evil actions of Christians do not
prove that the Bible is untrustworthy or inherently evil.
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If you look at all the atrocities committed by people throughout
history you’ll discover that most of those people didn’t need a Bible
to be able to do the things they did.
The common denominator in all the horrible things that people have
done across history is not the Bible, it’s the human being. The fact
that Christians in this country used the Bible to justify Apartheid does
not prove the corruption of the Bible but the corruption of the
human heart. Think for a moment about things done by people in
history who hated the Bible, people who were Atheists.
Napoleon , who claimed that “all religions have been made by men”,
during his 17 year reign was responsible for the bankruptcy of France
and six million dead Europeans in just one generation.
Kim Jong il: former leader of the Democratic People’s Republic of
Korea: responsible for the deaths of four million of his fellow
Koreans. His son is busy starving His people and preparing to wage
war any day now.
J effrey Dahmer , the infamous serial killer and atheist who was
sentenced to 900 years in prison, reasoned “if a person does not
think that there is a God to be accountable to, then what’s the point
of trying to modify your behaviour to keep it within acceptable
ranges?”
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Mussolini is notorious for his war crimes as a dictator during World
War II. In 1935, he invaded Ethiopia, using poison gas, bombing Red
Cross hospitals and concentration camps to kill civilians and destroy
“inferior” cultures.
Mao Zedong the notorious leader of China has been blamed for the
death of between 20 and 67 million people.
How about Stalin? In total, estimates of the total number murdered
under Stalin’s reign, range from 10 million to 60 million. His
government promoted atheism with mass propaganda in school, and
held a terror campaign against the religious. He crushed the Russian
Orthodox Church, destroying thousands of churches and shooting
more than 100,000 priests, monks and nuns between 1937 and 1938.
I list all these things because it’s become popular today to say that if
it wasn’t for Christianity or religion in general, the world would be a
great place. That’s simply not true. The Christian apologist Gregory
Koukl wrote that "the accusation and assertion that religion has
caused most of the killing and bloodshed in the world is empirically
false.”
It is reported that Atheistic Communism is responsible for between
60 and 260 million deaths in the 20th century alone. Just in the last
100 years.
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So the first thing to do when asked about the complicity of the
church in Apartheid is to be humble and admit the fact and express
your horror and regret over what happened. Do not try to distance
yourself from the church simply because it was not you personally
who was there and personally came up with the justifications.
The second thing is to show that the Bible is not what’s common
among all the horrible things that have ever been done, as if the
Bible is the source of the evils in the world. It’s obviously not. The
common denominator among all the horrible things that have ever
been done is people! The rational conclusion to the question of the
Bible’s use to justify apartheid is that human beings are really wicked
creatures. And they need a Saviour.
The third thing is this and it’s crucial. Christians justified Apartheid in
spite of the Bible not because of it. Christians justified apartheid in
spite of the Bible not because of it. I’m gonna make 4 sub-points
here.
Firstly, nowhere in the Bible are Christians or race groups told that
they are now the new Israel and they must copy Israel’s conquest of
the Promised Land in the Old Testament in their present day
circumstances. If you want to understand Israel’s conquest of the
Promised Land and its significance today, you must come here last
week! We discussed it then.
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Nowhere in the Bible are Christians or races groups told that they are
now the new Israel and they must therefore copy Israel’s conquest of
the Promised Land.
Secondly, the lesson we must learn from our history is that it is
extremely dangerous to use your experiences to interpret the Bible.
You cannot read yourself into the story where it seems convenient
for you to do so. The Bible is telling its own story which is not firstly
about you but about Jesus Christ. So whether you are reading Exodus
or Deuteronomy or Joshua the most important question is what is
this telling me about Jesus? It’s not how closely does your experience
resemble the passage that will help you understand a passage of
scripture in the Old Testament, it’s how closely does the passage
resemble Jesus. What did Jesus say in Luke 24? “How foolish you are
and how slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken!
Did not the Christ have to suffer these things and then enter His
glory? And beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he explained
to them what was said in all the Scriptures concerning himself…
Everything must be fulfilled that is written about me in the Law of
Moses, the Prophets and the Psalms.” He is saying the whole Old
Testament is about Himself. And it’s only when we see it’s relation to
Jesus that we can understand and appreciate its significance for us.
Thirdly, what Apartheid hoped to achieve was the exact opposite of
what Jesus died to achieve.
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Apartheid was designed to oppress some people for the benefit of
others. Jesus died for our sins to free all people. Free them from
what? Free them from the very power of sin which leads to
oppression from the oppressor and bitterness, hatred and anger
from the oppressed. Jesus bore our sins and took the punishment for
them so that sin might not have power over our thinking and our
feeling and our doing anymore. Apartheid came and separated and
created a wall of hostility between blacks and whites. Jesus died to
unite people and to get rid of these fake stupid black and white
divisions among human beings who are created by God in His own
image. Ephesians 2 says this: “For Jesus Himself is our peace, who
has made the two one and has destroyed the barrier, the dividing
wall of hostility, by abolishing in his flesh the Law with its
commandments and regulations. His purpose was to create in
Himself one new man out of the two, thus making peace, and in this
one body reconcile both of them to God through the cross by which
He put to death their hostility.”
Jesus died to achieve unity amongst peoples. There isn’t a black Jesus
and a white Jesus. There is one Saviour of both. Both have sinned
against God. Both are freely forgiven because Jesus died for them.
Both belong to the same Father and have the same Spirit. Both are
part of the same family of the forgiven sons and daughters of God.
Both share the promise of eternal life together.
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You cannot have a deeper basis for unity than that. It is eternal.
Apartheid is indefensible from the Bible. It couldn’t be more contrary
to the Bible’s message. It’s the complete opposite of what the Bible
is about. Yes some churches used it justify apartheid but the abuse of
something good does not prove that that thing is evil, it just proves
that you are abusive.
So the third point I am making here is that Christians justified
Apartheid in spite of the Bible not because of it. Christians justified
apartheid in spite of the Bible not because of it.
(1) The bible does not command any group of people to copy Israel’s
conquest of the Promised Land, (2) you can’t use your experiences to
make it say what you want it to say. It’s not firstly about you, it’s
about Jesus and (3) what Jesus died to accomplish was unity amongst
us, not Apartheid.
Fourthly, although we don’t deny that Christians badly used the
Bible, there were also Christians who did not abuse the Bible to
rationalise the Apartheid political agenda theologically. They were
there right from the beginning. There were Christians who were
using the Bible to fight against Apartheid from even within the
Afrikaans community. One of the leading voices was Rev Ben Marais.
In 1947 writing for “Op die Horison”, he beautifully said:
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“I want to point out that our usual reference to the Old Testament in
defence of apartheid is based on highly dubious grounds. We cannot
simply transfer the prescriptions to Israel regarding ‘separateness’ to
us or the English or the natives.” Spot on! And then in his book called
“The unsolved problem of the West” he went on to say, “What
Scripture emphasises is not racial apartheid, but apartheid as a result
of sin.” There were dissenting Christian voices arguing against the
abuse of the Bible right in the thick of Apartheid.
Conclusion
Let me close with a word of warning for us today as Bible believing
Christians today. Listen to this quote:
“It seems too easy to challenge the proponents of the biblical
justification of apartheid as simply immoral or evil, or bad exegetes,
or people who were merely pawns in the hand of politicians. The
more haunting questions are: Why were these ideas received so
favourably in the church? And: Why were the dissenting voices not
heard more widely and, when they were, often scapegoated? And:
Are we aware of our own ideological distortions as we appropriate
the Bible for our seemingly good causes today? The need remains to
grapple with these questions as we reflect on the uses and abuses of
the Bible in public discourse today.”
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Can I say that if you are not part of a Bible study here at St. James as
someone who considers this church your home church, may I
strongly encourage you, in this new term, to be a part of one… make
a fresh start so that you can be sharpened in your reading of your
Bible. That’s our responsibility now: To be careful readers of the
Bible. Apartheid was yesterday, just over 20 years ago and we the
church contributed significantly to it through bad Bible reading! For
the future of our country and the glory of the Gospel, we want St.
James church to be part of the people of God who are handling the
Word of God correctly so that the good that Jesus died for in this
world might be manifested through us.
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