The divisions within the South African church are rooted in South Africa's long and complex history. It is a history of conflicts between ethnic, racial and cultural groups in which the church struggled to find its place within this divided and confusing society. Many Christians look back on this history from today's vantage-point and see the church's role negatively. Within the past several years, a consensus has been growing around the use of the word "heresy." It is now said that the separation called for by apartheid, which the churches have supported either vocally or in practice, is more than merely wrong. Because it distorts the very heart of the gospel, apartheid and the churches' practice of it is heresy.

Heresy is a strong word, a word to which the churches must respond. With their differing views of the role of the church, they will respond in a variety of ways. As Mennonites involve ourselves in this confusing mixture which is South Africa, we need both to be aware of these differing responses and to understand the history which has led Christians to speak of heresy.

Addressing himself to the "all-pervading heresy" of apartheid, Professor Charles Villa-Vicencio recently emphasized that "South African society has always been an intensely religious one. The church always operated on the central stage of the political debate..." (de Gruchy and Villa-Vicencio, 1983: 70). He holds that the Christian church in South Africa is not starting on a new ethical venture when it addresses itself to the political dimension of the current crisis. The church in South Africa has always involved itself with politics. What is new is the realization that today's crisis has its roots not only in political arrangements but also in theological thinking. Apartheid's doctrine of separation is more than just a bad or impractical political system: it is wrong theology, and thus heresy. Because of this, the church must go beyond just responding to current violence or seeking quick reconciliation; the church must purge itself of its own contribution to the cause of so much suffering.

Heresy is not completely falsehood. Rather, a heresy can be defined as a partial truth which is taken to be the whole truth. Often it takes some time before it becomes clear that the element of truth has indeed been eaten up by evil. Retaining and developing an ethnic identity is a valuable activity. The particularity and value of one's cultural heritage is surely a part of God's good creation. But when one group's survival is made more important than the survival of any other group, when the methods for maintaining such an identity become law, and when the laws are made by one group for all other groups, the result is oppression.

Although South African people have lived with apartheid for nearly four decades and with other forms of segregation much longer, only in recent years have Christians worldwide come to such a consensus about this situation. In theological language the word "heresy" is now used frequently in South Africa to define that against which Christians are struggling and that in which the church must confess involvement. This differentiates the Christian's struggle against apartheid from a civil rights campaign or a call for economic justice. Apartheid is a basic flaw in the Christian understanding of the nature of life and humankind and leads systematically to the undoing of community and the loss of faith.

The origins of such an "all-pervading heresy" must certainly run deep. In a brief look at these origins we will follow two parallel but interdependent tracks: 20th century South African society, and the growth of the South African church.

20th-century South African society

Nineteenth-century South Africa brought into sharp focus two divergent world views influential at that time. British world imperialism had moved into high gear and asserted its role as a confident, paternalistic organizer of the world under its control. Under the cover of military might and domination, the British were also willing to discuss human rights, tolerance for local aspirations and the gradual unfolding of democratic institutions. This veneer of respectability allowed the British to pride themselves as world civilizers. Therefore, the British in South Africa were able to define themselves as part of a world British empire, so that, for example, British opposition to slavery in South Africa drew strength from much more than just the daily realities of South African life.

A second force, developed from within the Afrikaner settler communities (descendants of Dutch, German, and Huguenot settlers), had its origin in a very different experience. Cut off from any possible identity as a world imperial power holding to lofty ideals of worldwide responsibility, the Afrikaner self-image was formed from the earthy struggle for the survival of a small white tribe in the midst of larger black tribes. Survival was for the Afrikaner a prominent motivating drive which differed from the more confident and arrogant British domination for the purpose of "civilization."

At the end of the 19th century, these two forces clashed violently in a bitter Anglo-Boer War: 1899-1902. The imperial British army needed three years to track down and defeat the numerous and highly mobile Boer commandos. The war was bloody and fierce, and the British were frequently accused of resorting to "uncivilized" methods of fighting. Concentration camps for Afrikaner women and children saw thousands of deaths due to disease and exposure. Afrikaner towns and farms were destroyed and burned in order to flush out the elusive commandos.

By the end of the war the Afrikaners, though defeated, were more obsessed than ever with the fragility of their own self-preservation. The societal myth of a "swart gevaar" (black danger), created in the 19th century through the struggle of this small white group in the midst of black groups in competition for land, was complemented by the need to resist the control of a competing white imperial power seeking to establish early 20th century ideals of civilization and domination.

Leaders of both the British and the Afrikaners realized the need for these two white communities to find some means of collaboration for the sake of order. They also realized that if whites were to retain control, some kind of peace would need to be established between them. In 1910, therefore, the Union of South Africa was formed, and attention rapidly turned to the need to control the power and movement of the vastly larger black population. The union's constitution contained a color-bar clause excluding blacks from parliament, and subsequent rulings quickly set out to establish African tribal areas or reservations. In the decades that followed, Afrikaners strengthened their hold on the political system, until in 1948 their Afrikaner National Party was handed power by the white electorate. The National Party platform was apartheid, the systematic separation of the races.

The electoral victory was the culmination of a long defensive struggle by Afrikaners to resist both British domination and the long-established image of a "swart gevaar." In a successful effort to counter British influence, the humiliation of their defeat in the Anglo-Boer War was followed by Afrikaner maneuvering within the new political system. Afrikaners were about 60 percent of the white population, and electoral arithmetic suggested they would capture the government if Afrikaner nationalism was consolidated.

The first half of this century witnessed this process, at first around the white Dutch Reformed churches and a language movement which produced Afrikaans dictionaries, grammars and a body of literature. One result was that in 1925 Afrikaans replaced Dutch, joining English as an official language. In addition, an Afrikaner National Party was launched in 1913 and an Afrikaner secret society, the "Broederbond" (Brotherhood), coalesced in 1918 and dedicated itself to cultural, economic and political regeneration of Afrikaner people. The goal was to establish Afrikaner hegemony. In other words, the "Broederbond" accepted a moral imperative to maintain Afrikanerdom at all costs and came to idolize the white nation (Walshe, 1986; Moodie, 1980).

This spirit of ethnic Afrikaner identity was progressively nurtured around the theme of Afrikaner nationalism. Toward the end of the 1930s an influential minority of leaders joined pro-Nazi groups as both a statement of support for a purer ethnic identity and a statement of continued anti-British sentiments. The current state president of South Africa, P.W. Botha, joined such a Nazi organization, and an earlier prime minister, J.B. Vorster, was detained during World War II because of pro-Nazi activities (Vatcher, 1965). Afrikaner student organizations, insurance companies, banks, industries and welfare organizations were initiated to institutionalize this rising nationalism and to combat British influence.

The strengthening of this broad movement of cultural, political and economic nationalism led to the electoral victory of 1948, which brought the South African state under Afrikaner control and ushered in the era of apartheid. The failure of the Afrikaner military effort during 1899-1902 was now turned around. This turnaround did not come, however, from a retaliatory military campaign. The strategy this time was the organization of a host of community, cultural and industrial associations that acted to lay the groundwork for a new political victory. This is similar in some ways to the strategy many black communities are today using to resist apartheid, a theme we shall return to later.

South Africa had long been a segregated society, but in the years following 1948 a new, grand strategy of apartheid was developed, one that was legitimized for Afrikaners by the Dutch Reformed churches (de Gruchy, 1979: 31-36). The original version of apartheid envisaged the territorial, economic, cultural and political separation of the country's ethnic groups. The long-established economic integration of the races was to be reversed so as to protect the Afrikaner nation from dependence on black labor and the inevitable political challenge that would follow. Native Africans were to be returned to the 13 percent of South Africa allocated to them. Whites would retain control of the remaining 87 percent, including all major metropolitan centers. Many of these goals were dropped as time went on, and today the government admits that South Africa has "outgrown many original, now outdated, goals of apartheid." Established economic patterns and a well-entrenched path of industrial development provided tough resistance. Nevertheless, many efforts were made and the scars of dislocation and anger remain.

Although the major forces shaping early 20th century South African history were primarily the British-Afrikaner tension and the consequent rise of Afrikaner nationalism and power, the rest of South Africa's people were taking significant steps that are perhaps only now coming to fruition. Opposition to white domination dates back to before the 19th century with the struggle of the various tribal leaders to protect their land. African nationalism as a supra-tribal movement is a more recent phenomenon, the result of mission education and a response to the emergence of white power and politics in the first decade of the 20th century. When the Union of South Africa was formed in 1910 with its color-bar constitution, and when the new white parliament established territorial segregation by limiting the African majority to 7 percent of the land (later increased to 13 percent), African leaders were outraged. Their response was to gather in Bloemfontein in 1912 to form the African National Congress (ANC).

For 40 years, as South Africa drifted ever deeper into legalized segregation, the ANC issued moral appeals, sent delegations and presented petitions to successive white governments. Time and again their spokespersons warned that persistent discrimination would alienate the black majority and lead to violence. Eventually, after 1948 when the white electorate reasserted its determination to maintain an exclusively white state and voted for the National Party's platform of apartheid, the ANC in desperation turned to passive resistance in the Defiance Campaigns of the 1950s. These were led by the President-General of the ANC, Albert Luthuli, who was to receive a Nobel Peace Prize in 1961 for his nonviolent efforts to end apartheid in what was in some ways the South African equivalent to the U.S. civil rights movement (see Walshe, 1986, for a more detailed review).

Unlike that in the United States, however, this growing movement of nonviolent black protest stirred up the old white fear of the "swart gevaar" instead of pricking the consciences of whites. It is this sense of being persecuted and beleaguered that perhaps explains the Afrikaner response to black nonviolent protest. The Afrikaners could not respond generously; they perceived themselves to be fighting for their survival. Events came to a head at Sharpville, a steel town not far from Johannesburg, where in 1960 the police opened fire on a crowd of passive resisters, killing 69 and wounding over 200. In the aftermath of this police violence, the ANC and another more recently formed group, the Pan-Africanist Congress (PAC), were declared illegal and forced to go underground. The ANC subsequently established a strong exile organization and continued to coordinate resistance to apartheid. Today it remains an important focal point in such resistance. Many organizations look to the ANC with allegiance, although to be a member of the ANC is illegal in South Africa. The ANC also initiated and continues to sponsor a small but effective military and sabotage effort that functions underground in South Africa.

Themes in the growth of the South African Church

The Christian church in South Africa has from an early time struggled with the ethnic, cultural and racial differences that are a part of it. To this day, strongly held points of view have their origin in one or another part of this historical mix and are the backdrop to the denominational and ecumenical tensions surrounding leadership choices, church structures, and the content of the church's witness in the world.

Many differences date back to the origin or early development of churches in the 19th century. Professor de Gruchy identifies the different styles of "settler" churches and "mission" churches as one tension. Settler churches had as their base European settlers and a European style of church. From these mother churches, "native" or "sister" churches were frequently started for different sections of the surrounding black population.

The initial plan was not for people of different ethnic groups or races to worship separately, however. Even in the Dutch Reformed Church, which is often held responsible for providing a theological grounding for systematic separation, not until the mid-19th century were separate worship services officially approved for white and "coloured" people. Although the official policy of the church may not have reflected the practice of the church (see Chris Loff, 1983), not until the Synod of 1857 did the Dutch Reformed Church officially agree that separation would be allowed, "due to the weakness of some." Several synods prior to this one had rejected such an allowance. This 19th century concession to separation was recognized as having a base in human weakness and frailty and not in a well-grounded theological argument. Theological articulation for separation would come at a later time.

Other settler churches, though perhaps never officially having made the same type of decision about encouraging or discouraging integrated worship and congregational life, nevertheless struggled with similar tensions. The Methodist Church, though having integrated circuits in some places, allowed racially separate congregations within these circuits. The Anglican Church for years maintained "parishes" in white areas and "missions" in black areas. Differences in lay participation, leadership support and voting power frequently fell along these lines. Not until well into the 20th century were such differences addressed, and then only due to concentrated pressure from a more confident and articulate core of black leaders.

The struggle with the tension of race in the churches was not the only issue the South African church faced. Also important during the church's history was the matter of what happens to the Christian faith as it grounds itself in a new culture. In the Anglican Church this was one part of the tension between two articulate and influential bishops, Archbishop Gray and Bishop Colenso, during the mid-19th century. Their questions touched on whether Christianity should be a leavening influence within African culture and society or a process that takes people out of culture and tribe. Bishop Colenso held that "what was required was the transformation of African society, not the detribalization of individuals by turning them into black Europeans" (Hodgsen, 1975, quoted in de Gruchy, 1979: 18).

This discussion went much deeper than the issue of whether people of European descent, as members of a European-style church, were willing to sit beside and take communion with people of a different racial complexion. In 1907 a French missionary pleaded that

Christianity is here far more foreign and exotic than it ever was among the Saxons and Slavs. If it is ever to have the same attraction for the Native races as it once did in Europe, so as to draw them into its bosom, it will need to become thoroughly African and present itself to the Africans in such a way that they will be able to understand it and accept it as something of their own (Wilson and Perrot, 1973: 379).

These new ideas were important, but they were also dangerous. While they opened up new ways to think about culturally authentic Christian expression, they could also be used by those who were eager to keep the races apart. In fact, apartheid's language of "cultural identity" and of preserving a people's heritage, which has become a justification for making the majority of South Africans into second-class citizens, echoes these concerns. What we now identify as heresy has some roots in this honest and well-meant attempt to fit Christianity into a cultural context.

The establishment of such an African church was the goal of missionary societies from Europe and North America which also worked in South Africa. Because these missions stood outside the direct influence of settler churches, they did not have to contend with the difficult problems of racial discrimination in the same way. White people were usually missionaries, and their families, though often paternalistic, did not feel threatened by a black majority. Whether their work addressed itself to the second issue we are raising, that of a truly African church in style and culture, is another question. These churches include the Bantu Presbyterian Church (now the Reformed Presbyterian Church) established by Scottish missionaries, the Tsonga Presbyterian Church (today the Evangelical Presbyterian Church) established by the Swiss, the Evangelical Church of Lesotho begun by French missionaries, and the Bantu Congregational Church among the Zulu, which was a product of the American Board of Missionaries. They have not had to contend within their structures with the differences between white and black education levels and styles of leadership as have the churches which have both settler and mission components.

This need for an African expression of Christianity, probably also prompted by paternalistic white control, led to the formation of what are known as African Independent (indigenous) Churches. The first Independent Church was formed in 1884, when a group left the Methodist Church to set up their own church. Independent churches proliferated throughout the early 20th century, and these churches as a group are now the fastest growing churches in South Africa. They are often small and poorly resourced, however, and so tend to remain on the fringes of the larger, more organized church discussions in South Africa.

Today remnants of settler or mission origin remain, although there have also been mergers and occasional new alignments. Separation has remained most entrenched within the Dutch Reformed family of churches and is defended most strongly by the white Afrikaans-speaking churches within that group. The cluster of so-called "English-speaking churches," represented largely by the SACC and the South African Catholic Bishops' Conference (SACBC), has for the most part held to an ideal of racial integration. The goal of integration, however, has all too often been worked at from the base of a European, frequently settler, establishment. Although blacks have increasingly taken leadership roles, many remain skeptical about the seriousness of the churches in combatting racism. They point to a wide range of discriminatory practices that have existed over the years and that are only now being slowly and painfully removed.

This healing process is not an effort that always holds racial integration as the issue of foremost importance. For the past decade the Reformed Presbyterian Church, a black church started by Scottish missionaries, had held merger discussions with the mostly white Presbyterian Church of South Africa. After prolonged work, however, the Reformed Presbyterian Church discontinued its involvement in these discussions. In an informal discussion, one of the participants in this negotiation explained that when a black church and a predominantly white church come together, the black experience and African expression sacrifice most. "Our historical experiences and contemporary society prohibit us from coming together as equals. Financial resources, levels of education, experience in church administration -- all of these things are weighted in favor of white people and of European cultural expression. In any joint venture most trained theologians will be white and most experienced administrators will be white. In that kind of structure, there is not much room for African expression" (Finca, 1983).

Partially for these reasons, the Reformed Presbyterian Church and the Evangelical Presbyterian Church are now working on a church unity merger. As two black "mission" churches, they are able at this point to work at greater unity without a disproportionate sacrifice of cultural or racial identity.

Heresy expressing itself as racial discrimination or oppression in the South African church is something that many in the world can see and understand. Many societies, such as Canada and the United States, have to struggle continually against residual feelings of white superiority when relating across racial divisions. In South Africa this struggle is complicated by the clash of different cultures. The issues that these differences raise for the churches will continue to be on the negotiating table in the future, though the initiative in setting agenda is in the process of shifting from the white, European culture, to that of the black majority.

Though described above as two separate movements, the history of the church and that of South African political development are of course one history, with parallel themes and developments. The "civilizing" aim of the imperial colonizers is echoed in the mission discussion of what the gospel consists of and how it enters another culture. The recognition by the churches of the importance of ethnic identity and cultural expression finds its echo in the extreme doctrine of separation which is now proclaimed a heresy. The growing awareness within the churches of the injustice of apartheid perhaps is echoed by the changes taking place throughout the 20th century in political opposition to racial discrimination. As the consciousness of black leaders grew in the early years of the ANC from requests for limited rights or for an end to discrimination to the recognition of the right for a say in the governing of the country, the churches' understandings have also grown. In part, such growth is a product of the church and of mission, with the Western-style education they brought to several generations of black people. In part, it is a product of the general world rise of colonialised peoples asserting their right to self-determination.

Throughout this complex process, the church continues to deal with two layers of agenda, at times overlapping and at times seemingly in conflict. The problem of the oppression of the black majority by the white minority in South Africa, which the church has addressed internally as a heresy, is the agenda most easily grasped and obvious both to South Africans themselves and to others outside South Africa.

The second question, of differences in culture and of what black styles and expression mean for the society and the church, remains more hidden. This agenda is being explored elsewhere in the post-independent states of Africa. Perhaps for South Africa it can only come in the future, once the heresy of apartheid has been eliminated.