“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.”1 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”.2
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.3 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.4 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.5 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.’”6
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,7 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.”8 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.”9
May God pour out God’s wisdom and blessings upon these proceedings. Amen.
1 Desmond Tutu, Kairos and the Jubilee Year, Uppsala, 20 August 1993.
3 Allen, J. Rabble-Rouser for Peace, The Authorized Biography of Desmond Tutu. (Rider/Free Press: London/New York). 2006, 369.
5 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
6 Makgoba, TCM. Hope and Forgiveness: Tutu Jonker Memorial Lecture, The Faculty of Theology and Religion, University of the Free State, 23rd October 2024.
7 Jn 10:10.
8 EVANGELII GAUDIUM of The Holy Father to the Bishops, Clergy, Consecrated Persons and the Lay Faithful on the Proclamation of the Gospel in Today’s World, 2013, 160. https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/apost_exhortations/documents/papa-francesco_esortazione-ap_20131124_evangelii-gaudium.html
9 Makgoba, TCM. Charge to the 37th Session of Provincial Synod, Anglican Church of Southern Africa, September 25th 2024.
