Abstract This essay places the Confession of Belhar in conversation with the Kairos Document and Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s Ubuntu theology. Although all three theological responses offer a critique of the injustice of apartheid, they do so from distinct methodological vantage points and respond to different aspects of the multifaceted problem of apartheid. Broadly speaking, one might say that the Kairos Document emphasizes structural injustice with an eye toward prophetic action, while Ubuntu theology challenges the underlying cultural assumptions of apartheid by offering an African framework for healing the nation, and the Belhar Confession focuses on pointing to and confessing against the heresy of apartheid theology. In the process they offer distinct yet complementary perspectives on the sin that was at the heart of the apartheid system, thereby offering valuable insights for the continuing work of public theology beyond the South African context.
Abstract Although the Barmen Declaration and the Belhar Confession are celebrated within Reformed Protestant history, they tend to be relegated to the margins of Reformed political theology. This is due in large part to their being misunderstood as anomalous due to their social context and/or incongruous due to their political content. I argue that their political content is neither idiosyncratic nor illegitimate. These confessions are not merely responsive to contingent features of Nazi and Afrikaner ideology. They are expressive of essential factors internal to Reformed theology. To do so, I situate them in the context of Karl Barth’s normative paradigm of Reformed Confession, which is inherently political and intrinsically democratic. I demonstrate that the operative praxis of Barmen and Belhar conforms to Barth’s paradigm. And on that basis, I articulate a “politics of Reformed confession” defined by an “analogy of citizenship” by which the rule of faith is a pattern for the rule of law and the freedom of the Christian is a prototype for the freedom of the citizen.
This essay is a translation of Jaap Durand's autobiographical reflection on the struggle against apartheid and the origins of the Belhar Confession. It traces his own journey as an Afrikaner who became convinced that apartheid was not only sociopolitical injustice but also theological heresy. And it recounts the work he and his students at the University of the Western Cape undertook to draft the first formal theological declaration in opposition to apartheid within the Dutch Reformed Mission Church. This statement, drafted in one of Durand's theology seminars in 1978, was adopted by the General Synod of the DRMc that same year. It then was carried to the 1982 General Assembly of the World Alliance of Reformed Churches, where it became the basis for WARc's declaration that apartheid was a heresy. It then returned home to South Africa, where Durand and Dirk Smit incorporated it into the Belhar Confession in 1982.
Abstract The 2015 and 2016 #feesmustfall protests in South Africa highlighted protest as a way of resisting injustice by naming injustice specifically and publicly, particularly by young female voices of protest. This contribution argues that confession is not only a grammar of faith that articulates truth claims for and within the public entities of church, academy, and society, but is also a possible means of resisting injustice. In this article, such confessions as Mary’s Song and the Belhar Confession are read together with the more recent speeches by Lovelyn Nwadeyi as an illustration of a possible theological trajectory wherein confessions might resist injustice by the very act of confessing, in which such resistance could be embedded in and articulated by confessional grammar.
