Hope and Forgiveness
Tutu Jonker Memorial Lecture
The Faculty of Theology and Religion
Equitas Auditorium, University of the Free State
The Most Revd Dr Thabo Makgoba
Anglican Archbishop of Cape Town
23rd October 2024
Fellow theologians,
Fellow students of the Gospel (because all of us, no matter how well qualified, remain students of the Gospel all our lives);
Sisters and brothers in Christ;
Honourable guests, particularly from the Vrije Universiteit;
Good morning. And for those from other parts of our country, our continent and the world, welcome to our beautiful country – South Africa. It is exciting for me to join you virtually from Eswatini this morning.
Thank you for the invitation to give this prestigious address, it is a great privilege and honour. I am particularly grateful to Prof John Klaasen and his colleagues at the Faculty of Theology and Religion for all they have done for this lecture. The joint recognition of Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu and Professor Willie Jonker, which I will refer to towards the end of this lecture, is a wonderful gesture, commemorating as it does the grace which helped to save our country from a bloody civil war.
My task today is to speak about ‘Hope and Forgiveness: Prophetic Witness in response to Poverty’. I will address the topic not as a professional or academic theologian but as a pastor who criss-crosses the region frequently, from the Western Cape to Limpopo to KwaZulu-Natal, from Lesotho to Eswatini, and sees and hears about the lived experiences of our people and congregations.
But before I do that, allow me to reflect briefly, as I did at a conference at Stellenbosch some years ago, on doing “theology from below”. i There is a sense that every doctrine in theology is part of the doctrine of God. Thus, systematic theology is not only about creation, providence, salvation and consummation but also about God creating, God providentially governing, God saving and God consummating creation to be the temple of his Triune glory. Our theology, our wisdom regarding God and all things in relation to God is social and historical.
For this reason, it is our collective responsibility through faith to seek to understand the mysteries that God has revealed in God's Word. While the church cannot know what it must confess in our day and age unless it knows what the church has confessed in other days and ages, based on scripture, it is also true that our theology should be concerned with teaching what the church must believe and do now – not simply what the church has believed and done in the past.
History teaches us that inequality and injustice need to be addressed for the common good, and real change and true justice can only come from a full understanding of God and of God’s meaning for us in the here and now. As disciples of Jesus, we must promote truth and justice, equality and life at all costs, even if it creates conflict, disunity and dissension along the way. To be truly biblical as church leaders and theologians, we must adopt a theology that millions of Christians have already adopted – a theology of direct confrontation with the forces of evil rather than a theology of reconciliation with sin and the devil.
Turning to the first part of my theme, there is no doubt that right now, 30 years after our political liberation, there is a crying need for South Africans to draw on our faith to experience the transforming, life-changing reserves of hope that it offers to us today. In his important recent reflection on the role that Jürgen Moltmann’s Theology of Hope, could play in our current situation, Prof. Jacobus Vorster of North-West University summarises our plight accurately:
“Today, the hope of 1994 has mostly dwindled in South Africa despite the promising new constitution, the dismantling of Apartheid, the end of traditional colonialism, and free elections and other rights enshrined by the rule of law. South Africans are ranked 101 on the recent happiness report, well below some countries where highly unstable politics and economic instabilities reign (World Happiness Report 2023). The notion of tangible hope has faltered after nearly three decades of African National Congress (ANC) rule. Large scale joblessness, corruption, poor service delivery and crime shattered the hope created by the liberation of 1994–1996.” ii
Perhaps the last time we faced such a situation was during the turmoil of our transition to democracy, after the release of prisoners and the unbanning of the liberation movements in 1990, and before the 1994 elections. Those of you who are old enough to remember the time will recall how grim the situation was; when people were massacred on suburban trains almost weekly, and when we were relieved to wake up and hear that “only” – only, mark you – five or 10 people were killed in political violence last night. My wife, Lungi, and I were living in an old church house isolated on the western edge of the Joburg city centre, near taxi ranks and a migrant workers’ hostel, and there were times when we locked ourselves into our home, listening to the gunfire and keeping an eye on the street outside the hostel, praying for protection against stray bullets.
One of the worst moments during the transition came on the night of June 17, 1992, when more than 300 men from a hostel in the Vaal triangle descended one night on the community of Boipatong and the neighbouring shack settlement of Joe Slovo, wielding spears, axes, pangas, shotguns and handguns, and massacred 46 people, including a nine-month-old boy, a pregnant woman and an eighty-year-old woman. And, as Prof John de Gruchy wrote at the time, Boipatong was not an isolated incident. “It is,” he wrote, “one of a series of seemingly endless and horrific events which have turned the black townships and squatter camps into the killing fields of South Africa. This has caused such a desperate sense of cumulative hopelessness that the euphoric expectations set loose on 2 February 1990 have been dashed and replaced by anger and fear.” iii
Whatever our country’s present difficulties and struggles, I think we can agree that the situation we face now is nothing like as serious as that after Boipatong. That, perhaps, is the first sign of hope we can draw on in an examination of its importance and power as we approach the second quarter of the 21st century.
I will return to Prof de Gruchy’s 1992 reflection, and to the book of which it was part – a book which sought to find hope in the situation we faced then – but first let me draw on the wisdom of one of our leading Anglican educators of recent times in examining hope from a biblical perspective.
I once asked the late Prof John Suggit, one-time Professor of New Testament Studies at Rhodes University, to help me reflect more deeply and theologically on hope.iv He explained to me that, especially in Latin and Greek, the verb “hope” often means “trust”, “expect”, or even “think”, and the Hebrew words associate it with the meaning of “confidence”, “safety” or “rock”. He said that the true meaning of “hope” is given poetically in Hebrew, Greek and English in Psalms 42:2 and 63:1, where the phrase “My soul thirsts for God” is a vivid expression of hope yearning to be realised.
In the New Testament, citing Paul’s words that “... [N]ow faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love” (1 Cor 13:13), Prof Suggit said that in Paul’s thinking, these three “theological virtues” must be considered together. Because Paul was assured of the living presence of Christ, he was equally certain that since Christ had risen from the dead, so the future was filled with hope – a hope based on what God had done. Prof Suggit noted that of these three virtues, hope has often been called the “Cinderella”, but that it is wrong to do this, because we are talking not simply about a personal hope, but also the hope that there is a purpose in the universe which will be fully realised when “God shall be all in all” (1 Cor 15:28). He added that this is continually expressed throughout the New Testament, so that we have the paradoxical statement “it was by hope that we are saved” (Rom 8:24), where the sentence which follows makes it clear that though our being justified, and thus put right with God, was a past act, resulting from our response in faith to the grace of God, the hope which it engendered is so strong that it is seen as already realised while still in the future.
To return to the desperation which we felt in 1992, especially in areas such as the killing fields of KwaZulu-Natal, hear what the theologian Denise Ackermann had to say in a collection, entitled A Book of Hope, published that year in response to the Boipatong massacre:
“I cannot begin to understand what hope means to the black rural woman sleeping in the bushes with her children to avoid the carnage around her, bereft of her meagre possessions, fearful, hungry and shocked as the gunfire and burnings continue. How can one speak of hope when survival is the priority in the face of murder, arson, intimidation, loss of loved ones and loss of property?” v
We may not face a national threat as serious as that in 1992, but that does not mitigate the sense of hopelessness we experience now as we realise that too many of our liberators seem to have been struggling to improve their own material welfare rather than the common good of all South Africans, illustrated by the Eastern Cape politician who said in 2004, “I did not join the struggle to be poor.” vi In 1994, we put our trust in these people. Little did we imagine that they would allow endemic corruption, nepotism and greed to rob the people of South Africa of the fruits of their hard-won freedom, gained over many decades by the old struggle against apartheid. Little did we imagine that in municipalities around the country, members of governing parties would give contracts to their friends and associates, irrespective of whether those awarded the contracts were capable of delivering that which they were contracted to provide. Little did we imagine that we would be faced today by mafias in the construction and transport industries who hold to ransom, sometimes under the threat of assassination, the provision of the services to our people which democracy promised us.
Above all, given the theme of this paper, little did we imagine that so many of our people would be living in poverty, with one in every three South Africans—nearly eight-and-a-half million people—unemployed and four out of every five of those having given up even looking for a job. Little did we imagine that inter-generational inequality would be so deeply embedded in our society, with the sons and the daughters of the elite remaining privileged, while the sons and daughters of the poor are trapped in a self-perpetuating spiral of poverty, inadequate education and denial of opportunity. There is a sense in which hope betrayed is worse than hope never promised.
But there is no reason to despair. I love the saying attributed to that great African saint, Augustine of Hippo, that “Hope has two beautiful daughters, anger and courage. Anger at the way things are and the courage to ensure that they do not stay that way.” It’s been said that the attribution of these words to Augustine is apocryphal, and that no one knows their true origin, but it doesn’t take away from the truth they express: that our anger at the betrayal of our hopes must spur us into courageous action to recover them and set us back on the path which our political liberation promised us. vii
Back in 1992, John de Gruchy asked in his contribution to A Book of Hope: Could the Boipatong massacre become a “door of hope”? At that stage it was too early to say for sure, he wrote, but his answer was “Yes” – if the massacre had shocked the nation enough to set it on a path to a peaceful settlement. “Terrible as it may sound and seem,” he wrote, “the only way to the promised land is through the disgrace and disaster of Boipatong. We cannot take a detour around its horror...” viii Writing at the same time, Denise Ackermann added: “Hope is our human response to evil, adversity and destruction. It is our refusal to accept defeat... Hope is resistance. It actively resists the void of hopelessness... While acknowledging the realism of violence, brokenness, of anger and despair, to hope means to engage hour by hour with life in such a way that one’s deeds express that which one hopes for.” ix
Desmond Tutu, who – having visited many massacre sites, including that at Boipatong – was more exposed than most pastors to the despair of those days, famously reminded us that “hope is being able to see that there is light despite all of the darkness.” In a different era in a different country, Martin Luther King Junior said in the face of vigilante violence in his country: “If you lose hope, somehow you lose that vitality that keeps life moving, you lose that courage to be, that quality that helps you go on in spite of all.” x
Prof. Jacobus Vorster, to whose reflection I referred earlier, makes a powerful point: that as South Africans we pinned our hopes on the liberation event of 1994 – that is, our first democratic election and the coming to power of a liberation movement – rather than on the ongoing liberation process which the methodology of Jürgen Moltmann’s Theology of Hope encourages. Pointing to what we can learn from Moltmann, Prof Vorster 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.”
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 in South Africa 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 South Africa today.”
Hope, as I told the Anglican Provincial Synod last month, is not a nebulous, pie-in-the-sky concept:
“No, hope is 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. We need to be cautious though, because it is not simply about ‘good deeds or works’, it is about those deeds infused with love, which in the public domain means deeds infused with justice. If I might quote St Augustine once more: ‘Charity is no substitute for justice withheld.’” xi
Turning to the second part of my theme, where does forgiveness fit into a world burdened by conflict, inequality and poverty? To address this issue fully, we must recognise that forgiveness is but one part of an extensive, rigorous process, and that is the process of working for reconciliation. That is key, and it bears repeating: when we refer to forgiveness, the heart of what we are talking about is not forgiveness in isolation, it is forgiveness as just one of the steps we must take towards being reconciled, and reconciled in the fullest sense: reconciled with one’s fellow human beings, reconciled with our environment, for in the end, that is the only way in which we can become reconciled with God. Reconciliation is actually what we are talking about.
That brings me to the famous exchange between Desmond Tutu and Willie Jonker in November 1990 at Rustenburg, now in North-West Province, which is embodied in the title of this lecture series. For those unfamiliar with the exchange, it occurred at a conference early in our transition which brought together an unprecedented range of churches, including those which had supported apartheid and those which had fought it, to chart the way ahead. In his opening sermon, Archbishop Tutu told the church leaders present they could not credibly preach reconciliation to the country if they were not reconciled among themselves. To achieve this, he said, those who had provided the theological justification for apartheid had to confess their sin to the victims of apartheid. In response, he added, the victims were under a “gospel imperative” to forgive. But the process did not end there. In response to the forgiveness, those who had done wrong had to make restitution.
Reacting to Tutu’s sermon, Prof Jonker declared not only, as he said, “my own sin and guilt” but added that “vicariously I dare also do that in the name of the Dutch Reformed Church of which I am a member, and for the Afrikaner people as a whole.” When Tutu accepted Jonker’s confession, some – particularly black members of the Dutch Reformed family – questioned his right to do so, but Jonker’s action nevertheless caught the imagination of many in the white Christian community, including the Revd Ray McCauley and a number of Pentecostal pastors. It enraged right-wing Afrikaners and then-President PW Botha angrily phoned the Moderator of the Dutch Reformed Church to protest, but to no avail—the Conference went on to adopt the Rustenburg Declaration, which included eloquent statements of confession. While the main focus was on white South Africans confessing their support of and complicity in apartheid, the declaration included confessions by men that they had often disregarded the human dignity of women, and by black South Africans that many had responded to apartheid “with timidity and fear, failing to challenge our oppression.” xii
Achieving reconciliation is directly relevant to ending inequality and poverty, because we will not overcome them without addressing the historic fact that they are a legacy of colonialism and exploitation, as expressed in the structuring of both the South African and the global economy.
Desmond Tutu told the conference at Rustenburg, “If I have stolen your pen, I can’t really be contrite when I say, ‘Please forgive me,’ if at the same time I still keep your pen. If I am truly repentant, I will demonstrate this genuine repentance by returning your pen.” In South Africa, we have recognised that we will not achieve our economic liberation until those who held economic power in the past confess that this was wrong and take serious steps to make restitution. Nor will we achieve our economic liberation until we deal with the accumulation of wealth by a corrupt elite which has grown up since the end of political apartheid, an elite which has enriched itself at the expense of much larger numbers of people who have not benefitted in any way from the system. This development demands that we confront the forces of greed and self-accumulation which have characterised parts of both the public and private sectors.
The challenge of inequality may be particularly acute in South Africa, where by some measures we have the worst gap between rich and poor in the world. But it is of course also a challenge to you all as well, whether you are from a more impoverished part of Africa than South Africa or from the materially wealthy societies of the Global North. For that reason, anyone concerned with hope and forgiveness must address theologies of the economy and their implication for restitution. Some years ago, I took part in the first Ecumenical School on Governance, Economics and Management, in Hong Kong, where we asked how we could establish 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. As I said at the time, this sounds impractical, but as stewards of God’s creation we know that nothing is impossible with God. If we are to “return the pen” to the Global South, we need to restructure the global economy.
I conclude with an extract from a chapter on the question of reconciliation in church and society which I added to the British and American editions of my 2019 book, Faith & Courage: Praying with Mandela. I was responding to the question: Why, given the suffering inflicted on my and other societies by Western nations who proclaimed themselves Christian, do I choose to be a Christian? My answer [and I quote]:
“I am a Christian and I remain a Christian because I remember that our faith begins with a young Palestinian on a donkey. I draw this phrase, and some of my reflections on it, from the memoir written by Denise Ackermann entitled Surprised by the Man on the Borrowed Donkey. The image conjured up by Denise’s title tells me that since Roman times we have perverted the Word and the mission of Jesus Christ, and its message about what God is up to in our world. Over the centuries we’ve allowed ourselves to be pointed to imperial agendas. Christ’s message has been attached to national flags, to military might and to the AK-47.
“But that is not the Gospel. Christianity is not imperialism. Christianity is not colonialism. Christianity is how do I love my neighbour as myself and as others. The man who links us to God is he who enters Jerusalem a nonentity, riding a borrowed donkey. He is humble and he is marginalised, but his message of love and simplicity is powerful; powerful enough to challenge the perversion of common humanity that empire engenders.” xiii
Thank you for listening to me, and God bless you.
i https://archbishop.anglicanchurchsa.org/2019/03/theology-from-below-personal-journey.html
ii Vorster, J.M., 2023, “Six decades of Moltmann’s Theology of Hope and tangible hope in South Africa today”, HTS Teologiese Studies/Theological Studies 79(1), a8988. https://doi.org/10.4102/hts.v79i1.8988
iii De Gruchy, John W. Boipatong: A Door of Hope? In A Book of Hope, (Cape Town: David Philip), 1992, 62
vAckermann, Denise, The Alchemy of Hope in A Book of Hope (1992), 29.
vi https://allafrica.com/stories/200411160474.html
vii https://www.firstthings.com/article/2021/03/hope-and-her-daughters
viii Ibid, 62, 63
ix Ibid, 29, 30
xhttps://onbeing.org/blog/martin-luther-kings-last-christmas-sermon/
xii https://scielo.org.za/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S1017-04992014000300007; Allen, John Rabble-Rouser for Peace (New York: The Free Press), 2006, 342; E-mailed account from the Revd Dr Barney Pityana, October 21, 2024; The Rustenburg Declaration (1990).
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