Transcript
And welcome to the Frederick Neumann lecture for the 2000-2001 academic year. Let me say a word first about Frederick Neumann. Frederick Neumann was born in Austria of Jewish faith. He went to Freiburg for his Ph.D., studied under Husserl and Heidegger. And through reading Kierkegaard, became a Christian. His wife, now his widow, Edith, was born into a Jewish Christian home in Austria as well. They met and married and carried on a ministry to Jews in what
is today Yugoslavia for a decade. And then went to live in Haifa for a number of years. And then after the Second World War, immigrated to the United States, where he became the pastor of the Bushwick Congregational Church in Brooklyn, a post he held until his death in his seventh decade. Edith Neumann is herself something of a story. This is the first year that she has not been able to be with us. She is in her
98th year. And she sends her regrets. She just didn't feel well enough to make the trip down from New York City. But it is through her generosity that the Neumann Lecture has been established. And it's been a very popular lecture series in our seminary. I think that Paul Ricoeur was a Neumann lecturer. Incredible, that's what you are. But anyway, we're delighted that you're here tonight. And as I said, Mrs. Neumann sends her regrets. It's my personal,
as well as professional, privilege tonight to introduce our Neumann lecturer for this year, the Reverend Dr. D. Allen Maker, the pastor of St. Columba's Presbyterian Church in Johannesburg, South Africa since 1971. There are many things, I'm going to give you what I have written, and I'm going to tell you about the man. Hush. Born in Durban, South Africa, Dr. Maker was educated at Natal University in Durban for his bachelor's degree, at Rhodes University in Grahamstown, South
Africa for his BD, and he holds the doctor of ministry degree from Princeton Theological Seminary. His thesis in the Neumann program was The Effect of Oppression in the Oppressor, subtitled The High Cost in Psychological and Emotional Terms of Apartheid on the White Population of South Africa. He is a former moderator of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church of Southern Africa. He is currently convener of maintenance of the General Assembly's Ministry Committee, which is responsible
for 11 Presbyterian schools, high schools in Zimbabwe, one of which I have had the privilege of visiting and a very, very impressive technical school. He's the author of three books. You can tell he plays golf. One is called As It Lies. That's a book of sermon. I could have fun with that. A Stroll Through the Old Testament and A Stroll Through the New Testament are other volumes he has published. He's also a DJ, a disc jockey.
Only in South Africa it has the much more dignified name of presenter. He has a daily hour-long program on radio today, a community station broadcasting throughout the Johannesburg area. Dr. Maker and his wife Margie, who is in the audience tonight, have three daughters and three granddaughters. It was over 30 years ago that I first met Alan Maker when I was a young pastor and he was a very young pastor. We were in Burlingame and I
received a phone call from a friend of mine in La Jolla who said there's a group of young South Africans here, an integrated group that would like to come to the San Francisco Bay area. Can you host them for a week? And so we did. And it was a memorable week indeed. And from that almost chance meeting, we have stayed in touch across the years. And then when I came to the seminary, it was not long
afterward that Dr. Maker received his DEMAN degree from here. He has had Barbara and me. They have had Barbara and me into their home in Johannesburg. They have a small lectureship in their church and we've been privileged to do that for them as well. I've seen Dr. Maker at our General Assembly from year to year because he has represented the Presbyterian Church of South Africa to our assembly and thus our friendship has continued. There's one thing
that's very impressive to me and that is when the government changed from the apartheid government to the new democratically elected government in South Africa, there was a transitional government composed of 12 people, six from the African National Conference and six white South Africans, three Afrikaans speaking, three English speaking. The three English speaking members of the transitional government were all all members of St. Columba Presbyterian Church. Presbyterians are not numerous in Southern Africa, but obviously they can
be influential. Our speaker has had a marvelous pulpit ministry and a broader ministry in his church and in his country. And if anyone ever has the notion that you cannot exercise influence upon a community from the pastorate, you need to have an evening with this man. I am very proud to know him. I'm delighted to bring him here. And without further ado, please join me in welcoming Dr. Alan Maker. I guess it's important to talk about
politicians on a day like today. I don't know too much about Lyndon Johnson, but he was once introduced and at the end of the beautiful introduction, he got up to speak and said, I'm so sorry my parents aren't here today. My father would have loved it. My mother would have believed it. If it is true that we are saved by grace, then the only appropriate response is graciousness in return. And Margie and I have had nothing
but graciousness since we've been in Princeton. And we're not quite sure what we've done to deserve it, but then you're not supposed to. And we've had a marvelous few days one way or another. And I guess the only response to that correctly is gratitude. And I hope a simple thank you can be sufficient. I'm sorry Mrs. Neumann is not here today. Tom frightened the living daylights out of me. It's a case of brook-stand-still-your
-bosses-ni-bunny. That's just South African. That means pants-stand-still-your-owner-is-not-afraid. Tom sent me a list of these eminent people who'd given the Neumann lecture in the past. And I remember them. Their names were engraved in my heart. Paul Ricure, Richard Niebuhr, Hans Kung. That was enough to frighten the living daylights out of anybody. But then I bought one of Dr. Neumann's sermon books. And so it would appear to me that
up to now you've had the professors and the academics. Tonight you've got the preacher. And I make no apology for being a preacher other than my daughter one day said to me when I was telling her something, daddy is that the truth or is it just preaching? So maybe we'll have a mixture of the two as we go along for the evening. The title that I gave out and then forgot what it was because I'd been
rather severely eaten by a spider and was severely ill for a week as a result of that. But I think it was fairly clear it was something new out of Africa and trying to look at African and Christian spirituality meeting and providing some hope. So there we are. A long time ago a proverb came into common currency from a rather elongated original statement by Pliny. Africa semper aliquid nova. There is always something new from Africa. Well
such a saying wouldn't garner too much support in today's world because what seems to and predictable. Wars between nations, tribes in murderous conflict, hunger in impoverished countries, corruption in high places, an alarmingly high death rate from HIV AIDS, and constant requests for financial assistance from you rich. So conflict and corruption and poverty become the criteria through which anything coming out of Africa tends to be judged. For example the cynical have claimed that the current request for
debt relief is the begging bowl once again coming to the fore. But isn't there another perspective on that? Colonial Arab and Western powers ripped millions of men women and children from their native homes to work as slaves on their plantations. Greedy nations snatched as much of Africa's raw materials and precious metals and minerals so that they could enrich their own economies and their own people. And whilst it's unfair to judge previous generations by the moral standards
of a current one certainly it would be noble ethically sound and politically wise to make some gesture towards the African continent to help people break out of its circle of poverty that is destroying so many of them. A recent edition of Time magazine carried a letter from a young African in Nairobi. Despite fighting and corruption there is still a lot of hope in Africa. Don't write us off because of some problems. We Africans are saddened by
what is happening in Sierra Leone and not all of us support the illegal takeover of white farms in Zimbabwe. We love our continent and our diversity. No we don't all speak Zulu or Swahili and I've never worn a shikhi in my life. Stop viewing all of us with pity. We are not all starving or child soldiers or AIDS patients. Now most people of course wouldn't want facts to distort their own perceptions and prejudices. Nevertheless we ought
to stop for a moment to look at some of the positive sides of the dark continent. As Christians we at least should be aware of the tradition that St. Mark established the church in Egypt in 42. Within the first two centuries of the modern era North Africa became one of the most powerful strongholds of Christianity producing theological giants of the stature of Augustine of Hippo to Italian and Cyprian and some of the most eminent Christian apologetic
thinkers came out of Africa, Clement, Origen, Athanasius. Antony and Pecomius introduced monasticism which found its home in the arid deserts of Africa long before spreading to Europe and South Africa through its own pain I believe has produced two of the giants spiritual giants of the 20th century in my dear friends Desmond Tutu and Bozno Di. It is both interesting and amusing for us to note that when President Clinton and Prime Minister Blair find it necessary to
bolster their own popularity they invite Nelson Mandela to visit their countries on some pretext or another. You can always tell when Blair and Clinton are in trouble Mandela is there and when photographs of these two leaders appear it is very easy to see that it is the aging black man who is truly the revered world statesman. Now there are some 54 countries on the African continent only 10 of them are in serious trouble. The Republic of
Botswana with which the Gillespies are very familiar the Republic of Botswana has the fastest growing economy in the world admittedly off a very low base but it's the fastest growing economy in the world. Negative is he's obviously about but we do need to look beyond them to what is positive and what is hopeful and maybe we should dig deeper than the appearances and try to discover what the African psyche has to teach the rest of the
world and when you consider what Africans have done to Africans what colonial western and African powers Arabian powers have done to Africans when you look at the regular cycles of drought hunger floods and fire that bring devastation to millions of people doesn't it surprise you when you see pictures of African people coming up smiling and dancing. Slaves torn from their native soil transported in appalling conditions and forced to work almost to death sang their pain and
they gave to the world the spiritual jazz the blues and whilst the prophet could only ask winsomely is there no bomb in Gilead these slaves could sing positively there is a bomb in Gilead to make the wounded whole. The truth and reconciliation commission in South Africa revealed atrocities beyond the knowledge of even those of us who thought we knew something of what was going on and what was astonishing at the end of it all was the
lack of desire for revenge and the almost complete absence of bitterness in those who had suffered so much. The requests for reparations have not been as astronomical at all but rather for education for the children of those who had died or medical attention or most poignantly a tombstone to commemorate someone lost loved one. So I'd like you just for an hour or so to divert your attention from Africa's metals and minerals and raw materials from its
gold and from its diamonds to its spirit and maybe there is something new still to come out of Africa but where did it all begin? Paleoanthropology is a remarkably new science not all scientists accept that it is a science by the way I have scientists in my congregation not very happy about them nevertheless some of its practitioners have earned worldwide fame Raymond Dart, Robert Broom, the Leakeys and Philip Tobias and the science has made extraordinary discoveries
and opened new doors to the understanding of human prehistory and the search for the origin of our genus homo sapiens sapiens I've never figured out why we have to repeat the sapiens I thought the one was superfluous anyway the the search for the origins of our genus reads like a murder mystery story it's full of intrigues personal animosities scandals fortuitous findings and now a most remarkable conclusion and paleoanthropologists have for a long time been in agreement
that the first humans appeared in Africa and early work indicated that they came from the eastern part of the continent but recent discoveries have shifted the locus further south to the southwest cape coast now dr. lee berger who is himself an american from Kansas where you're not allowed to teach these things in the schools he is professor of paleoanthropology at the university of the waders run and he has written of the excitement of finding well-preserved
footprints on the beach at the langabon lagoon which is about an hour and a half by car north of capetown dave roberts a geologist discovered these footprints in the sand in 1995 they have been dated as having been imprinted in the sand 117,000 years ago and of course after this discovery the popular press immediately called them eve's footprints i'll let dr. berger speak for himself eve of course refers not to the biblical eve but to
a mitochondrial eve the proposed genetic progenitor of all living humans the concept of a mitochondrial eve is a scientific theory first coined by geneticists at the university of california during the 1980's the term is used to illustrate the theory that all the world's peoples are descendants from a small population of anatomically modern humans that existed between 100,000 and 200,000 years ago their arguments were based on studies made in molecular biology particularly the occurrence of
mitochondrial dna genes that are inherited only through the female lineage the california team devised a statistical model to measure the rate of mt dna mutation over time what they found was that different populations of humans living in diverse areas of the world exhibited different degrees of variation the variation between africans was found to be greater than that between any other population grouping indicating that people from that continent are older than those from anywhere else their genes
have had more time to mutate the inescapable logic of this argument is that all modern humans are in fact descended from a female living in africa over a hundred thousand years ago and he goes on to make this conclusion combined combined with archaeological evidence the research now strongly indicates that not only are all humans african in their origin but our roots may well be in southern africa where the most consistent archaeology archaeological traces of the emergence
of modern humans are to be found along the south african cape coast a bit of a devastation for a patriarchal society to know that all life began with some woman in the western cape we call capetown the mother city because it takes nine months to achieve anything there and and now dr. berger is not only an eminent scientist but he is a great enthusiast for his subject and of the students here you mustn't ever be enthusiastic
for your subject because you'll become immediately an egotist that's the way we're judged but i i performed his wedding ceremony so i know him very well and and he's a dear friend and he graciously gave me a lot of his time and experience in conversation and he told me that on that same coast there is evidence of the first use of terrestrial and marine resources which opens the question to who at the first oyster is there
is evidence there also of the earliest art but most particularly there is evidence of the use of red ochre which might have been used for suntan lotion but probably for ritual purposes so in his book he states emphatically the roots of our family tree are undeniably and firmly planted in the soils of africa every critical event that has molded us physically technologically and spiritually has an african origin bipedalism enlargement of the brain tool use fire the
modern human mind and body are all african inventions it is thus also now i want you to pack this away in mind to pull it out later on please it is also our time machine to the future for what is happening in africa today is a signpost for the future of the human race now our ancestors found themselves in an ambiguous world sometimes it was friendly at other times it was frighteningly hostile the sun that helped
the plants to grow scorched the skin and caused deep distress rain that brought life to a parched earth also led to floods that swept everything before them the life body that one day could track animals and kill them for food on the next lay mortally ill reduced to impotence life forces us to find explanation nature can be very cruel fate capricious the world lonely and slowly and tentatively our ancestor ancestors would have been forced to try
to find some meaning in life they knew what they could control but so much was beyond their power it was as if an unseen hand was at work maybe it could be persuaded to work for their good rather than for their detriment Barbara Tyrrell comments on the development of African beliefs and religion a society conceived of as an entity can be said to present its members with a worldview designed to stimulate behavior patterns that will perpetuate
it J.D. Lewis Williams believes that the earliest San art was Bushman painting was not art for art's sake but showed a deep spirituality this is what he says if we are to comprehend and truly appreciate the full flowering of San rock art we shall have to pluck it out root and all for the soft delicate flower cannot be explained without reference to the gritty root the roots of San rock art lie behind the crannied walls of
the rock shelters in another transcendent world these roots should not be separated from the more easily appreciated depictions now in a popular book on stress management Donald tubasing suggests that the basic questions of life are unchanging only the answers vary from person to person and from time to time he claims that our first ancestors asked them and our last descendant crawling towards oblivion will be confronted by the same questions and these are questions of goals and
values faith and self-identity put together the answers give us our belief system now I'm a little frightened because I see Patrick Miller and my friend Jim Roberts here but we are unlikely to arrive at the exact date of the calling of Abraham fair enough but according to the chronological table in the Jerusalem Bible it took place around about 2,000 years before Christ before the Christian era and John Bright concurs with that so I take two
two nothing is okay if Lee berger is correct that eve made those footprints on the beach in the lagoon 117,000 years ago then African people have been wrestling with life's most crucial questions for more than a hundred thousand years before God called Abraham we regard him as the father of faith now dr. berger told me that the first fossils of homo sapiens sapiens to be found outside of Africa have been found in Israel 45,000
years later now we've just made a big fuss of a millennium 45,000 years a fair length of time now all South African Bantu speaking people believe in a God in a creative force the Zulus called God in Kulin Kulin or more recently and more correctly to the vendor God is the suited people refer to God as Modimo in East Africa the people call their deity in guy a modern Roman Catholic missionary makes this comment for
the Messiah there is only one God in guy but he goes by many names sometimes they call him male sometimes female a little out ahead of us when they when he is kind and propitious they call him the black God when he is angry the red God sometimes they call him rain since this is particularly pleasing manifestation of God but he is always the one true God now in an extraordinary way when Christian missionaries came to
sub-saharan Africa they were bringing religion through a full circle they were bringing the good news of God's perfect revelation in Jesus the Christ to Africa where faith had its first stumbling beginnings it should have been deep calling to deep but unfortunately they came with the arrogant assumption that their version of Christianity was the only pure religion whilst what they met was mere superstition at best to be disregarded and at worst destroyed now it took the
courage of us and poor to move Christianity away from its roots in Judaism into the Greco-Roman world he was determined to fulfill Christ's commandment to take the gospel into all the world and it met with stern opposition resolved only partially even at the first council of Jerusalem the Judaizes never really gave up and they continued to plague his ministry nevertheless the apostle to the Gentiles persisted he took Christianity into the Greek and Roman world and
to succeed he had to preach the gospel in a language and an imagery that those people could both understand and relate to his efforts met with a lot of disapproval at the time and still later it led to the judgment of John Stuart Mill I holds and Paul to being the first great corruptor of Christianity now despite that kind of criticism Christianity's greatest asset has been its ability to contextualize its eternal truth so that the living
God is able to meet women and men of all cultures in terms that they can easily understand now unfortunately every gift of God is a double-edged sword it can be used for good or bad that Christianity proclaims truths unlimited either by time or place has made it possible for the faith to spread throughout the world the distaff side of that of course is that the truth can be misappropriated and it has been the truths have
been misappropriated so often to justify so many systems of unjust government in South Africa we have just suffered 40 years of a government that constantly referred its critics to Romans chapter 13 they never read any further than there because we never once had anybody saying you need to take seriously the condemnation of tyranny to be found in revelation 13 and those early missionaries please understand this I'm not being critical of them that they were honest and
sincere people accomplishing much that was good and noble it would be unjust and unfair to say that all they did was harm but nevertheless they were unable to understand that they had too easily equated Christian truth with their own civilization of course Christianity had had a profound influence on their way of life but it did not mean that their way was the only way sadly that didn't seem ever to appreciate that in the duff lectures of
1935 Dietrich Westermann still clung to the opinion of those early missionaries however anxious a missionary may be to appreciate and retain indigenous social and moral values in the case of religion he has to be ruthless he has to admit and even to emphasize that the religion he teaches is opposed to the existing one and the one has to cede to the other this merely followed the judgment of world missionary conference which concluded that all african religions
were animism containing no preparation for christianity well i'm not going to go through the whole of africa for which you can be relieved can we just stay in southern africa where i might know something about it the dutch east india company dispatched young fun rebeck to the cape in 1652 not to establish a colony but to plant a market garden to provide food for the ships on the long voyage from holland to the dutch east india
the spiritual needs of those early people in the cape were provided by a sick visitor and only when johann von arkel was there in 1685 did they have the privilege of an ordained minister and missionary work was not a high priority amongst those people because the bergers believed that the sand the bushman people the koi people the hot and tots were so dissolute and depraved that they were unlikely vessels for the christian gospel in 1737 the
united brethren of moravia sent george smith to work amongst the koi people after some time he established a moravian community on the european principle at canardendal it was originally called bavianskluif which means a valley of the baboons he didn't think that was the right name for a missionary statement station so he called it canardendal place of peace mercy or grace but unfortunately smith fell fell of the authorities he baptized people when he wasn't supposed to baptize
them and he decided it was better to leave the country before he was kicked out we have a long history of this and he decided to leave long before he was kicked out and smith also expressed the disappointment that he had not been more successful with the in his words unstable hot and tots christians fall very easily prey to disappointment and discouragement probably because we set our our hopes too high and maybe and if there are
any students listening please listen and model your whole life on this it may just be that we're always doing a little bit better than we think almost 50 years later 50 years later three moravian messengers returned the canardendal area where they found mother lena the last survivor of schmidt's baptized first fruits still teaching the same old bible truths that she had learned from him it was christmas eve when they met her and her joy at their
coming was boundless and carefully she unwrapped a new testament encased in a cover of pear bloom pearwood i've held this book in my hand it's the most beautiful book and she unwrapped this new testament and because her eyesight was failing she gave it to another young woman who'd been taught to read by the other converts and she asked her to read on that christmas eve the story of the coming of the three wise men so much
for the koi being too depraved for the christian gospel to take successful route amongst them a missionary activity increased towards the end of the dutch occupation of the cape dutch east india companies control of the cape and it moved on rapidly apace with the arrival of the british in the early 19th century for the second british occupation of the cape the london missionary society spread its work rapidly eastwards the wesleyans and the glasgow missionary society came
soon afterwards now many of these missionaries felt a very deep social concern the conditions under which the indigenous people lived horrified these godly men and women the slave trade at that time was under threat throughout the british empire opposition being led in britain by many of the evangelical christians john philip and other missionaries made themselves thoroughly unpopular through their long and bitter struggle on behalf of the koi koi people and the colored people those of 1828
of ordinance 50 which placed every free inhabitant in the cape colony on a level in the eyes of the law so that each could enjoy personal freedom and security of property but despite their concern for social responsibility the missionaries still still did not accept or respect local customs and local spirituality monica wilson in the very fine history of south africa edited by her and lennard thompson makes this assessment but the missionaries were mostly british and they
were victorians imbued with the conviction of the value of their whole manner of life a conviction matched since 1980 only by communists and they pressed all sorts of peripheral changes which later generations of not only did they preach the protestant doctrine of work but they expected their converts to wear a western style of clothing to build square houses rather than round ones to settle in a village around the church rather than in scattered homesteads to change
the division of labor between men and women which was a severe mistake and to abandon ancient festivals which were judged by whites to be lewd now we may believe that their disregard of indigenous spirituality was misguided but don't you ever question the sincerity of those early missionaries and i think monica wilson makes a very fine conclusion but the force compelling the christian to action was religious conviction not cultural chauvinism the lives of men like funda kemp
robert moffat eugene casillas or james stewart were not intelligible on any other hypothesis the story of missionary movements can record countless missionaries who were resented as bringing with them an alien and uncongenial culture not infrequently this led to them suffering violence often they were in fact offered but their own self-offering was not in the name of their culture it was in the name of him who had died for them david livingston was utterly convinced that
if he could open africa to christianity civilization and culture it would help to heal the open soul that had been created by the inequitous slave trade and where such things are a scarcity there remains a tarred road to the place where livingston's heart is buried and whilst after the end of colonial africa many of the names have changed in the names of cities one way or another the city in zambia that was given livingston's name retains
it but changes were coming in 1864 samuel ajave krauter was consecrated as the first african bishop of the anglican church in west africa and despite concerted opposition from some missionaries he pressed ahead determinedly to indigenize the christian faith so that christians could accept christianity without having to renounce their traditional spiritual and cultural values around about the same time a desperate controversy was engulfing the little british colony of natal john philip was a controversial appointment as the
first bishop of natal and he had been an arithmetician would you believe and he used his skill and arithmetic to prove that a literal translation of the scripture didn't hold any ground calculating how much dung there must have been in nozak for example now his books on arithmetic were in fact used said for a long long time after his death a very profound man but calenzo had already begun to question the prevailing methods and results of
biblical criticism nevertheless for some reason or other he chose to tell the world that his decision to re-examine the bible was the result of a question that his zulu assistant had asked him concerning the validity of the story of nozak now this inquiry only served to focus calenzo's attention on what had been exercising his mind for quite some time and when of course he told the story in 1862 you can imagine he became the butt
of a large amount of joking because he was depicted as the fool who had been sent to convert the heathen only to be converted by them now it might have been funny and it might have been acceptable for a heathen to question the validity of the or the veracity of the bible it was quite another thing for a heathen out of his own background to question the morality of the bible now william nigiri was helping calenzo
translate exodus 21:20 and 21 if a man smite his servant or his maid with a rod and he die under his hand he shall surely be punished notwithstanding if he continue a day or two he shall not be punished for he is his money now that's in the big black book i didn't write it calenzo told of his zulu assistance reaction i shall never forget the revulsion of feeling with which a very intelligent christian native
with whose help i was translating these words into the zulu tongue first heard them as words said to be uttered by the same great and gracious being whom i was teaching him to trust in and adore his whole soul revolted against the notion that the great and blessed god the merciful father of all mankind would speak of a servant or a maid as mere money and allow a horrible crime to go unpunished because the victim of
the brutal usage had survived a few hours my own heart and conscience at the time fully sympathized with his nigiri had found the bible hard to believe in parts but worse still he judged it as a guide to new life as bloody immoral and presenting a god whose nature was inferior to what he had been worshiping now calenzo's new position part of the responsibility for which nigiri must claim some effect led to huge controversy archbishop of
grey archbishop grey of capetown tried him for heresy you sing the church is one foundation as jesus christ that's a direct result of that arch archbishop grey wrote a defense of orthodoxy this so moved a minister in england a priest in england that he wrote a church is one foundation as jesus christ to the lord this helps has an african connotation it has apparently about 733 stanzas and many people had fainted before they to the end
he was found guilty he was deposed and on an appeal to the privy council in england he was reinstated now the literal interpretation of the bible then in vogue had not only forced calenzo into making new methods of biblical criticism but it also had brought great difficulty upon his missionary endeavor now i'm sure he was a difficult man my wife is sitting here and it's hard for me to say that most english people are uh he
was a difficult man but he troves he strove to be spiritually and intellectually honest and he perceived clearly that the attitudes of the zulu people they claimed to have a superior christian civilization but they had proved to be patronizing offensive and downright dishonest now all this came to a head with the outbreak of the zulu war in 1879 the zulu king ketchwire didn't want war but the local british authorities were determined to force him into it
and after a series of and lies they forced on the zulus an impossible ultimatum after the deadline had expired lord chelmsford led his troops across the buffalo river from natal into zulu land because of his contempt for the zulus he wandered off away from his headquarters leaving a staff officer in command the zulus descended upon the gathering at is on duana and inflicted upon the british the biggest defeat in british military history at to that point
900 white british soldiers were killed and an equal number of black levies later on in the same day a group of zulus who hadn't washed their spears in the blood flanked around and came to drift where they attacked a group of welsh fusiliers and they were repulsed in a very heroic defense and more victoria crosses were won in that one single action than in any other day in british history now the little colony of natal was
in near panic the governor declared a of humiliation in his words to confess our sins and ask god for victory calenzo had his great chance he has a chance for civic religion all you have to do is get up and tell people what wonderful men and women they are and what dreadful heathens are the zulus and they will surely receive god's judgment not calenza he ripped into his congregation telling them that they had not behaved as
a people who belonged to the christ they claimed to represent a superior christian act a civilization but they had not acted justly nor loved mercy nor walked humbly before their god and if you never read another sermon in your life would you get hold of that sermon and just read bishop calenzo's sermon after the battle of this anduano and rourke's drift bishops krauter and calenzo were thus in the vanguard of those who realized that a spirituality
existed amongst the people living in sub-saharan africa prior to the arrival of western colonial powers no longer could you denigrate the spirituality of the indigenous people once again christianity had to be contextualized kasuki kyama i don't know if he's still alive but he was in new york i think he marvelous man he writes of the conversion of his grandfather one of the few things i heard and i still remember from my grandfather about his conversion
to christianity from buddhism was that he was impressed by this man who was able to say that jesus christ is lord without ever making derogatory comments about japanese culture or buddhism that made me to follow christ now in the wake of this of an african indigenous indigenous of the attack on of in the wake of the attack on african indigenous religion all kinds of separatist sects have come to being one is called the zionist church which
is created by ignatius lakani and that that has something like two million followers that spread rapidly through south africa into botswana and into zimbabwe and two million of these people gather every year at mariah that's their headquarters in the northern province of south africa and they they give him his weight in in gold it's it's a very successful church now syncretism is the danger that's the problem that's what lakani has done but i don't believe that's
the only possible approach to our problem john and b.t. of kenya points the way forward the strength and uniqueness of christianity do not lie in the fact that its teachings practice and history have all the major elements of the other religious traditions the uniqueness of christianity is jesus christ it is he and he alone who deserves to be the goal for individuals and mankind now the author of the letter to the hebra's calls jesus the pioneer
and perfecter of our faith jesus himself says if you've seen me you've seen the father for christian people christ is the perfect revelation of our god he therefore becomes the standard of our judgment there's no standard exterior to him by which we judge him if we call jesus the sinless son of god there's no exterior standard of sinlessness because he himself was regarded as a sinner in time he broke the laws he healed the sick he
touched the leper he allowed his disciples to get some wheat on the sabbath and john's gospel records some saying after jesus healed a man who'd been bored blind how can a man who is a sinner perform such signs we do not have some outside against which we measure sinlessness against jesus he is the standard all else is measured by him now as we come to approach the spirituality of africa the same thing applies we do not
accept indiscriminately what is there we look for what is christ like desmond tutu said african theologians have set about demonstrating that the african religious experience and heritage were not illusory and that they should have formed the vehicle for conveying the gospel verities to africa and so we look for christ going ahead of us in other faiths in no faith at all doesn't it fascinate you that the best people you know wouldn't darken the doorway of a
church in no faith at all and in the world and what we need to be doing is to identify his presence and work together with anybody who is prepared to struggle for what we call the kingdom of god and its righteousness now i want you to come with me to the south african situation i want to try to tell you what happened and then i want you to try with me to make some preliminary theological judgments
about it okay i want to say to you from the beginning that i know that there are books out on this subject and there are many of them written by well-meaning evangelical christians this comes from the mouth of the businessman who headed up the business forum in in south africa i i went to see him i spent hours with him at his nice retreat down in nysna and this comes from him a churchman yes not
a minister and he says to me alan it is a quaint story so be prepared for a quaint story is this preaching daddy or is it the truth the events leading up to the one man one vote election in south africa the elections themselves and the immediate aftermath of all that some five years later at least have been described by even my golfing friends as miraculous now it's true that there was a low-grade civil war
in action at the time but it had very little chance of success the ruling power was immensely strong with huge military resources it seemed that only with the result of an enormous loss of life would there be any change more or less a full-scale war with devastating consequences yet in south africa for the first time in history a totalitarian government allowed itself to be voted out of office and we got the results in one day
i want you to contrast all that with what has just happened in yugoslavia just remember that in the back of your mind a totalitarian government allowed itself to be voted out of power now there are plenty of room for bit players in all this but i think there were three or maybe four major role players in the process how did it happen well there were three of them who had very clear links between african spirituality and
christianity there's mangasuta butalezi who is a zulu and an anglican there is nelson mandela who is a clausa and a methodist but there was also a mysterious kenyan who had met dr. butalezi at a prayer breakfast or more than one prayer breakfast in washington he played a pivotal role but there's a fourth one that i think we've got to take into consideration i don't sound it but i am afrikaans i want you to know and i'm
very proud to be afrikaans but the fourth leading player in the drama is fwd clerk the then state president of south africa now cynics make the judgment rather quickly without allowing the facts to cloud the issue that he capitulated not because of any moral sense but because he could see the writing on the wall they claimed that he acted against his own character and inclination they may be absolutely and utterly right but could i appeal to
you to think that there may be another side in 1985 as moderator of our general assembly i had a long and acrimonious meeting with the same fwd clerk who was then minister of home affairs at the time p.w. buerter was firmly in command there was no possibility of him relinquishing office and even if he did there were many other pretenders way out ahead of fwd clerk you know the minister of home affairs is quite far down
the pecking order at that time when we met he didn't have a whisper of being president and as our debate developed it made the extraordinary mistake that after dealing with the business he said do many minister what do you think of the country now i i've not been able to keep my mouth shut ever so it was a fatal question and that led to the fight when he could get a word in he proceeded to lay
before me proposals that left my own general secretary and myself absolutely speechless and all i could manage at the end was to comment that if what he proposed transpired then he would make the official opposition redundant now from the moment that mr de klerk became state president events proceeded exactly as he had told us and so there was not one minute of surprise for me until the time of the election maybe but it was in that
order now fwd clerk is not a member of the most powerful african-speaking church in south africa the nearer dates here for me to care he is a member of a smaller splinter denomination that saw the light of day in the south african republic the transvaal now 10 the most famous member of that denomination was paul krueger it's the for me at the cap the doppelganger now the booze these guys and half of me we we
decided that we had had enough of the english and in 1838 began to trek into the hinterland and you know it's pretty rugged territory your setters did exactly the same it's almost impossible to think of how they got over these mountains in their wagons they were intrepid people and they went into what later became the orange free state in the transvaal simple people simple needs carrying only necessities with them but the bible and they took their
faith with them into this unknown country and it's hard and it's a rugged nature that shaped their culture and shaped their religion and it wasn't surprising that many of them couldn't cope with what they regarded was the effete liberalism that was coming out of the western cape and eventually the split came and the new denomination may well have been much influenced by the netherlands i've no no question about that but it maintained a very strict conservative
morality an earthy morality now i have many family members who are members of that denomination they don't tolerate greatness it's black or it's white and once you convince them of the correctness of their actions nothing will turn them now the energy had become sadly the sacral pillar of apartheid's temple giving theological credence to the government's theology ideology and there were a few giant souls men like bears nor d and johan haynes but by and large ministers
chose to travel the route taken by many lutherans during the second world war to escape into pietism and i don't think that that denomination was going to provide much moral leadership but somebody from outside could now at the time of the elizabethan settlement queen elizabeth the first said she wasn't about to build windows into people's souls i wish we were so wise we should cut that out we have no right to examine the motives of other
people i have no doubt like you or me president the clerk had mixed motives but would you concede with me that he had at least become convinced that apartheid was indefensible and morally wrong he's on the outside mangasuta butalezi he has the quaint story can you bear to hear it mangasuta butalezi is the head of the encarte freedom party the zulu zulu as a zulu he had painted himself into a corner he represented eight million people
he had painted himself into a corner he wanted to be part of the election process but he couldn't get into it without losing face now if encarte were not involved then the likelihood of violence was extremely high and so they brought out the big guns henry kissinger lord karrington came out to negotiate they stayed 24 hours packed their bags and went home the delegates wended their disappointed way home convinced that there was no hope all except
one washington okumu kenyon who had met dr. butalezi at these prayer in washington and he was convinced that a solution was possible all the main players were christian who ought to know how to live together in love and he believed that christianity made an agreement a necessity the african method would make it a reality and he arranged to meet dr. butalezi at lanceria airport about 20 minutes away from johannesburg and to talk it over with him
but one of the marks of african life is that time is not important and he was late and dr butalezi's plane was disappearing into the blue it was all over the elections were eight days away there was no chance the plane developed engine trouble jet aircraft over johannesburg developed engine trouble came back to johannesburg and landed and dr. okumu was waiting and he and dr. butalezi spoke they reached an agreement my friend murray hofmeyer was one
of the disappointed people had gone home he'd gone to his cape resort with only his casual clothes when he received a phone call to say you better get to cape town anglo-american corporation put an airplane at dr. butalezi's disposal flew him to cape town now it is not easy to get from george or port elizabeth rapidly to cape town hofmeyer roared down to see nelson mandela and together they decided that it was okay mandela said
could he make a couple of phone calls he didn't phone tabo and becky strangely he phoned other people and they agreed and then carter freedom party appeared on the ballot sheet that's what happened right at the last minute the election took place and against all predictions that took place in a carnival atmosphere and the government gave way to the government of national unity in which members of the old regime held cabinet positions something new had come
out of africa totalitarian government had allowed itself to be voted out of power had been replaced by a new democratically elected one one of the first actions was to set up the truth and reconciliation commission and it tried primarily to deal with the deep pain and anger that was felt by so many people it gave a chance to some of those people who had committed the most dreadful deeds most dreadful atrocities to confess and they confessed
publicly and once the truth was known and judged amnesty and forgiveness was granted and it was a painful process it's a is the use of nelson mandela is a statement statesman all over the world where there are conflicted circumstances and in a recent radio program alex berrain who was the co-chairman of that actually said that he'd received a number of phone calls asking him to try to establish a truth and reconciliation process in the balkans
and in northern ireland now i'm not telling you the south african situation is perfect it isn't crime is too high violent crime is astonishingly high corruption in business in business and in government is ridiculous but please don't concentrate on the distaff side for every example you can give me of where it's failing i'll give you another one where it's succeeding and most south africans would testify that the transition has taken place not because of the machinations
of politicians but because of the commitment of ordinary south african people to work for peaceful coexistence a black theologian sipo mpisa said south africans are slowly rediscovering their common humanity gone are the days when people were stripped of their dignity through harsh laws and i suggest that the transformation of an apartheid south africa into a democracy is a rediscovery of ubuntu i am going to give you this at the end and i hope you can still
stomach it but i'm dying of heat in here i'm losing weight i guess peter i think that's the key what is ubuntu joe's professor tefo says the ethos of ubuntu is one single gift that african philosophy can bequeath on the other philosophies of the world now you can't define define ubuntu in abstract terms it means humanness it means morality it means honesty it means a concern for the well-being of other people it's summed up in
a zulu maxim a person is a person through other persons or in another definition a human being is a human being through the otherness of other human beings now the understanding of who persons are extends to the ancestors if you've ever been at a process or a ceremony where africans are drinking beer you'll notice that they always pour a little bit of beer on the ground it may seem like a dreadful waste to you but it
is for the ancestor ian player who is gary player's brother i guess you'll know gary player ian player is the founder of the wilderness leadership school and he has a remarkable book in which he talks about his extraordinary zulu ranger mokuba intumbela and he tells the lovely story of intumbela going to the hospital in durban from zululand to the hospital in durban where his father had died and he carried with him a branch from an impila
tree a buffalo thorn tree and he asked for the bed where his where his father had died and then he took the impila tree and he took it down the bed from top to bottom capturing the soul of his father and then he took the bus into town buying two tickets and then he caught the train back to zululand for which journey he had also bought two tickets because he was taking his father home and ubuntu
also deals with the animal kingdom intumbela says this after the royalty other people were permitted to eat the sweet berries but we always left something for the baboons in times of great drought we all suffered because of water and food but we would take maize from our granaries which as you know are under the ground and the cattle crawl yes we took the melees that's caught on the cob and spread them out on the ground beyond
the fields so that our the baboons could eat too why is it that when it appears in the bible it's the inspired word of god when it appears here it isn't and that gives you the gist of the term but the first black woman judge appointed to our constitutional court said it is one of those things that you only know when you see it we have just appointed a zulu speaking receptionist at sin columbus and i
said to lindy we in tembu lindy we what is ubuntu she said alan you remember the day it was a saturday afternoon you were sitting smoking your cigar with your little bell that says leper but but but you were sitting outside smoking your cigar at the fountain at the church and i came to you it was hot and i was tired and you asked me to sit down and i told you that i didn't have money
for the rent and i couldn't find a job and you asked me what my favorite soccer team was and i told you orlando pirates and then your appointment came and you took me into the office and disappeared for a moment and then you came back and you paid my rent for three months and you gave me money to go and watch orlando pirates and then you said can you answer this and she said i can learn
i said you'd be here monday and you've got a job she said you'd never seen me before you didn't know who i was but you trusted me to be there on monday that's ubuntu and it's a vital part of african spirituality community is there john vanier i'm sure you've read john vanier he said that when he goes to african villages they don't talk about community they live it intensely and when and when african people vote we
don't look for consensus we don't reduce democracy to mere majority vote and there may be a hierarchy of importance but let me tell you everybody's got to speak even if you agree with the previous speaker you must speak this is called the endaba method you know what it does to whites and ubuntu arises out of a scarcity of resources so it sharing is a very important and and in south africa there are 800,000 stockfells these
are community organizations like burial societies now burial societies meet they have a fellowship you contribute to the burial society you meet to hear how that each other's doing and who's drawing on it and and and and and and and and you meet for that purpose their burial societies their savings clubs all sorts of cooperatives 800,000 of them and and even allowing for original sin you've got to allow for that i guess these groups don't try
to exploit their members it's important to make a profit then it's shared on an equal basis now unfortunately african communities whilst they've shown themselves to be internally strong tend to be externally xenophobic dreadful war between the hutus and the tutsis the dislike of the matabele for the mishana in zimbabwe the tribal wars the inter factional wars in south africa speak volumes now isn't that where christianity speaks the scourge of modern christianity is this dreadful spread of
the cult of individualism of course individuals are important i know that but the individual is always in community and we have sadly the rise of the me religion and feel-good faith i think the most disgusting corruption of that that i've heard is of the drive-in church where you can drive to church with your windows hermetically sealed against any possibility of talk with your neighbor you can see the service on a giant screen and listen
to it on the local radio station and they probably take the collection through swiping your card on some machine on the way out i don't know if you ever saw the book how to be a bishop without being religious did you ever see that it's a terrifying book terrifying book and he said when you when you choose your hymns don't choose a safe stronghold our god is still choose i walk in the garden alone because that
has the personal pronoun 25 times the judgment is people don't come to church to worship god they come to worship themselves dreadful isn't it harvey cox in the secular city said anonymity is the mark of of the city life i think he's right and i think it's good but the distaff side of that is alienation and loneliness and haven't your schools seen some of the greatest tragedies in your country because of the the alienation of young
people i i i don't know edward farley is he a well-known theologian in your country but i love what he says human history being what it is exclusiveness of a sort is natural and even valid a family requires a certain privacy and isolation a nation survives protects its people and serves its own self-interest by attending to its borders a bridge club a book club a country club or all are bounded along social lines dictated
in part by class and economic interests we may like or dislike those kinds of boundedness but at least closeness of a sort is not contradictory to their existence boundedness of some sort is in fact an inevitable and legitimate feature of every human group except ekklesia ekklesia is the one form of human community which begins to destroy itself the moment that is bounded and provincialized when a religious community turns away the stranger because he bears the mark
of one of the human divisions it is transformed into a provincial community and loses its ecclesial character lest we forget the issue is still the presence of god according to the gospel god himself chooses to be present in an open community a community open when all other communities are closed to be saved by faith means in part that no conceivable ethnic or cultural membership is a requirement for god's presence salvation by faith and ekklesia are correlates
if ekklesia does not if ekklesia becomes bounded it ceases to be a closure of jesus and courts the loss of god's presence spot on isn't it jesus came preaching the kingdom of god the reign of god in that kingdom each person is so valuable that even the hair on her head is but it's the kingdom of love and therefore the kingdom of right relationships and the ethic of the kingdom has got to be of disinterested disinterested
love and self-sacrificial love and maybe ch dodd and the others are right that it has been realized but we're still in the in between times it's not yet perfectly and i believe that we live in that in between world in which every act of self-sacrificial love every decision or action that brings harmony amongst human beings is a brick in the building of the kingdom now however no human action is absolutely pure no motive is
absolutely clean and all you and i can hope to do is to achieve one small faltering footstep along the way my dear friend earnest campbell says that any victory on the moral ground is never permanently one it has to be continually defended nevertheless in one brief bright moment the practical spirituality of africa the spirit of ubuntu and the values of the kingdom met in south africa those who had wielded absolute power for decades relinquished it others
who had been terribly persecuted seldom sought revenge and displayed very little bitterness the rainbow nation comprising mainly of christian people please understand this that 70 percent of members of the south african communist party are also members of christian churches the communist minister of labor is an elder of the presbyterian church of southern africa so africa is a strange place but this comprises largely of christian people the rainbow nation took its first faltering footsteps forward and it
gives the hope to a world in conflict that it can achieve something similar something new and something good has come out of africa and if dr. berger is correct that africa is our time machine to the future for what is happening in africa today is a signpost for the future of the world then the whole world will be watching in fear and trembling how this new dispensation develops because it brings some hope to a weary and
a conflicted world god bless africa god her children guide her leaders and give her peace thanks for your patience you're going to have a reception in the private dining room for everybody