“Rediscovering
and Building Hope for All”
The
Most Revd Dr Thabo Makgoba
Archbishop
of Cape Town & Metropolitan of the Anglican Church of Southern
Africa
Opening Lecture for the
Hope Symposium
Vrije
Universiteit Amsterdam/ University of the Free State/ The Vatican
Rome, June 2, 2025
Your Grace,
Your Excellency,
Distinguished Professors,
Fellow Theologians,
Friends:
What a privilege and honour
it is to be here with you all, at such an exciting and challenging
time for the church and the world. My heartfelt thanks to you for the
invitation to me and my delegation to join your distinguished
company.
Thank you to the Vrije
Universiteit, the University of the Free State, the
Vatican
and the Embassy of the Netherlands for getting us together
to reflect on how to rediscover and build hope for our common future.
I
am especially pleased to be in Rome in a Jubilee Year. I had reason
recently to reflect on an address which my predecessor-but-one,
Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu, gave in an early contribution to
the debate which led up to the Jubilee 2000 campaign for debt relief.
In that address, Archbishop Tutu pointed out, and I quote, that
“the Jubilee year described in Leviticus 25 propounds theology
that—like all good theology should do—has profound implications
for how we should order our political, economic, [and] social
relations.”
The success of that campaign, which is credited with cancellation of
more than $100 billion dollars of debt owed by 35 of the world's
poorest countries, augurs well for a Jubilee year inviting us to be
“Pilgrims of Hope”.
Looking
at our history, the South African story is of course one that is
often seen as a reason for hope in the world. For most of the last
half of the 20th
century, it looked as though we were headed for a racial war, but we
avoided disaster as a result of a largely peaceful struggle, waged
through means such as sanctions against apartheid, and the exemplary
leadership of Nelson Mandela and the last white president, FW de
Klerk. Madiba, Nelson Mandela, is universally recognised as an
extraordinary leader, an icon of peace and reconciliation who
appealed to a sense of common humanity among all people. While he was
not without fault—he was, after all, a man—he was a symbol of
holiness, by which I mean he was a leader set apart, able to hold
himself and others accountable to a greater Being, and to draw people
together based on a vision for the common good.
Under
his leadership, our first democratically-elected Parliament set up
our Truth and Reconciliation Commission to help us deal with the
atrocities of apartheid. The commission, chaired by Desmond Tutu, has
been praised across the world, from leaders as diverse as former
President Roman Herzog of Germany and Shimon Peres of Israel, as
something new in the life of nations, embodying as it did amnesty in
exchange for the truth, and healing in the place of retribution.
But nowadays the commission is, as Jesus said of himself when he
returned home to Nazareth, a prophet without honour in its own
country (Mt 13:57). That is mainly because the truth and
reconciliation process has not delivered economic justice to South
Africa, which it was never mandated to do, and because our government
has not acted on the commission’s key recommendations. Despite the
high regard in which we hold Madiba and Archbishop Desmond, we
nevertheless need to avoid romanticizing or distorting their legacies
in ways which will leave us ill-equipped to meet the challenges of
times very different to those in which they lived. Their approach to
the challenges of 30 and 40 years ago is not necessarily an approach
which will work today. However one judges their legacies, the fact
remains that their examples no longer inspire hope for the changes
that are necessary if South Africa is to avoid new turbulence, even
violent revolution in the future.
Our
forebears in South Africa brought us out of the wilderness of
colonialism and apartheid into the Promised Land of a non-racial
democracy; it is now up to us to build that Promised Land. In order
to do that, I have been advocating for the last decade what I call
the New Struggle, a new struggle which replaces the old struggle
against apartheid. This is a struggle that we are waging to eradicate
the corruption that has blighted our democracy, a struggle to regain
our moral compass, a struggle to bring about economic justice, a
struggle to realise the promises of our Constitution. This New
Struggle cannot be for a new, multiracial middle class to live as the
white elite lived under apartheid. No, the struggle now must be for a
new society, a more equal society, a society of equality of
opportunity in which the wealth that comes from economic growth is
shared equitably among all. We need to put justice at the heart of
what we seek to achieve, and those of us with financial means need to
be prepared to make sacrifices to redistribute that which God has
given us to ensure that we benefit the poorest of the poor.
A
decade ago, I took part in the first Ecumenical School on Governance,
Economics and Management in Hong Kong, an initiative of the World
Council of Churches and other international ecumenical organisations.
There, we discussed how we could promote an alternative to the
current global governance of money and financial systems, replacing
it with a system that would be less exploitative and would distribute
resources and income more equitably. In my own church in Southern
Africa, I urged our people to explore a theology and ecclesiology of
generosity—focussing on the Incarnation as hermeneutical
conversation of theology and economy, developing if you like a social
teaching on the economy.
Since
the meeting in Hong Kong, whenever I have advocated this initiative,
I have tried to reflect the interests of those in the Global South
who have been victims of the global financial and trading systems,
whether through the export by multinational corporations of raw
materials from developing countries, and the resultant failure to
invest in local manufacturing, or in the pernicious system of
“transfer pricing”, in which multinationals transfer profits
earned in one country to a country with a lower tax rate, thus
denying tax revenue to the governments of developing countries in
which they make their profits.
But recently, I have come to realise that those of us in the Global
South are not the only victims of the current ordering of the global
economy, and that the average man or woman in the Global North is
just as much the victim of self-serving elites who wield economic and
political power for their own benefit.
The
global financial crisis of 2008 gave us some warning of this, but it
is especially since attending that meeting in Hong Kong that the
devastating consequences of inequality and the hoarding of power and
resources for the benefit of a few have become apparent not just to
the Global South but to economically developed nations as well. As I
have been saying in Geneva and New York in recent months, we are
seeing across the world—including Europe and the United States—the
phenomenon of what I call the “left-behinds”; those who stand on
the margins, watching elites prosper while their standard of living
is eroded. We see those people turning toward solutions reflecting
economic chauvinism, xenophobic political nationalism, woven in with
resurgent racism and even the stirrings of a new kind of fascism. And
in an age-old pattern, elites—through their dominance of the media
and public debate—exploit divisions and divert people's anger so
that it targets not those responsible for inequality and injustice,
but the vulnerable, the poor and the weak; those even less fortunate
than they.
Like
a cancer, economic inequality is metastasising across the world. And
we see the rise to power of oligarchs in countries which we imagined
were democracies, flawed democracies as they might have been, but
democracies which aspired to reflect the views and the interests of
all their people. These phenomena eat away at our social compacts,
threatening to devour our very being, everything that makes us human.
We face, I have said, a kairos
moment for humanity.
In
the face of these challenges, how do we summon up the hope that will
empower us to overcome them?
I
want to begin by drawing on a paper to which I referred in a lecture
some of you will have heard last year at the University of the Free
State. In the paper, published in 2023, Professor Jacobus Vorster of
North-West University, argues that Jürgen Moltmann’s
ground-breaking work, based on his 1964 book, Theology
of Hope,
can provide “tangible hope” for South Africa.
While the context in which Prof Vorster locates his paper is
obviously confined to our experience in South Africa, I believe his
thesis can be applied to our role as theologians in the global
context I have outlined.
Professor
Vorster warns us against basing our hope on single episodes in our
history—in South Africa he refers to the liberation event of
1994—and encourages us instead to focus on the ongoing processes
which the methodology
of Moltmann’s Theology
of Hope encourages.
He writes:
“Moltmann’s
thesis is that the biblical message of hope as founded in revelation,
promise and historical eschatology under the reign of the living God
is that hope does not lie primarily in historic events, but in the
movements brought about by the spirit of the living God founded on
the crucified and resurrected Christ. There were many events of
liberation in the history of Israel such as the exodus and returns
from exile. But hope rooted in historic events soon faded also in
their case.
“Consistent
hope is to be found in the movement brought about by the reign of God
in the history of humankind flowing from the resurrection of Christ
and the guidance of the Spirit. This movement cannot be caught up in
a single event but manifests in signs where good is victorious over
evil, peace over enmity and love over hatred. Due to God’s movement
in history, these signs are there to be seen and appreciated and are
the real foundations of hope that would not fade away.”
Allow
me to quote from my Free State lecture, slightly amended to make my
remarks applicable to our global context:
“Prof
Vorster goes on to suggest that hope as
a process is built on the often small signs of what he describes as
‘the
living, moving God’
working through small acts that are the witnesses of God’s Kingdom;
acts of compassion and care for the poor, justice in policies and
public life, a just economic system and the care of creation, all of
which we can consciously give expression to in our daily lives. He
sums up his thesis beautifully
when he writes that ‘To
find hope... is to see and testify about the moving God who
continuously grinds out of the hard rocks of evil the visible and
touchable signs of goodness that can serve as the solid foundation of
hope. The
Theology of Hope strikes a chord with this truth that can be a guide
in our quest for hope in [the world]... today.’”
The implications of adopting
this approach are that as theologians we can indeed summon up hope,
simply by refusing to be daunted by the challenges we face, but
instead by intensifying our efforts to do what we know those
challenges demand of us. We know that if all
are to have life, and to have life in abundance,
we have a shared responsibility—across the regions of the world,
across political divisions, across cultural and religious diversity,
and across economic and social differences—to transform the global
economic order into one which serves the interests of all and thus
guarantees a future for the coming generations. The challenges we
face across the world are similar and related: poverty and
inequality; rapid technological changes; protection of the
environment and natural resources; interfaith and inter-cultural
cooperation; strengthening democracy and social justice; addressing
the causes of migration and displacement. Through dialogue and
conversations with leading religious, political, business and civil
society leaders, we must strive to foster a better understanding of
the complexity of the challenges we face, strengthen mutual
cooperation and trust and facilitate common action through
partnerships.
Above
all, we have to make our priority the interests of the poor. As Pope
Francis said: “As long as the problems of the poor are not
radically resolved by rejecting the absolute autonomy of markets and
financial speculation and by attacking the structural causes of
inequality, no solution will be found for the world’s problems or
for that matter, to any problems.”
It goes without saying that we must focus on the materially poor, but
I would also urge us to give attention to the spiritually poor,
because I would argue it is the spiritually poor in the developed
world, and among materially wealthy elites in the Global South, who
neglect the materially poor. Perhaps we can take that up as a
challenge in this symposium: What is it that we ought to be doing to
address not only material poverty, but also the spiritual poverty
which generates both material poverty and the blindness which ignores
the desperate suffering of the people of Gaza, of Sudan, of Ukraine
and around 40 other places of conflict in the world?
Finally,
let us not forget during this season of Eastertide that the message
of Easter is at heart one of hope. As Desmond Tutu used to say,
“Easter says to us that despite everything to the contrary, God’s
will for us will prevail. Love will prevail over hate, justice over
injustice and oppression, peace over exploitation and bitterness.”
And as I have said at home in South Africa, “hope is
not a nebulous, pie-in-the-sky concept. It is, instead, the driving
force which motivates our determination to name our problems, to
identify solutions to them and to mobilise people to overcome them.
Hope must be what drives us to work to fulfill the promise of
societies based on democratic values, social justice and fundamental
human rights. Small steps taken in hope can become islands of hope
and as they come together we can in turn create landscapes of hope.”
May
God pour out God’s wisdom and blessings upon these proceedings.
Amen.
