"Africa Towards Hope and Dignity"

This was the theme of the keynote of Rev. Dr. André Karamaga, General Secretary of the All African Council of Churches on June 25. Karamaga, an ordained minister in the Presbyterian Church of Rwanda, suggested that this theme could fruitfully be explored by taking account of the possibilities represented by the churches of the continent. Indeed, the development of Christianity in post-colonial African shows interesting (and sometimes fraught) relations with movements of democratization.

But who are the churches of Africa? Karamaga identified six distinct "types" of churches on the continent. The oldest churches, the Ethiopian and Coptic orthodox, represent continuity with the very beginnings of Christianity, and extend across the north. Africa is so closely identified with missionary activity that it's helpful to remember that by the fourth century 20 percent of all Christians in the world were African. [I need not remind my faithful readers that the greatest theologian in the history of the church was a fourth century African bishop... and a catholic]. The stereotypical African Christianity comes onto the scene in the 19th century in the churches established by converted slaves who, on emancipation, returned to Africa and shared their faith in the Gambia, Sierra Leone, and of course Liberia. This is a form of Christianity with great indebtedness to African American slave religion. A third type of African Christianity is that brought by European settlers during the 19th and 20th centuries. [When I studied under John de Gruchy and Charles Villa-Vicencio, the term used was "settler Christianity", and its ideal was to transplant the church hymns and worship styles, architecture, doctrine and so forth that had been grown in Europe onto African soil. However, as Barbara Kingsolver's Poisonwood Bible demonstrates, nothing remains purely European on African soil, and so distinctively African Anglicanisms, Presbyterianisms, and even Catholicisms flourish throughout the continent.]

The fourth type of church, like the third, has the activity of Europeans at its origins. The missionary churches, however, were geared toward translating rather than transplanting the Gospel. I can't talk about how generally true this is on the continent, but in South Africa the third and fourth types (e.g. settler and mission Presbyterians) merged into unified denominations during the 20th century. The African Initiated Churches (AICs) differ from the mission churches in their refusal of European forms of Christianity. While it wouldn't be fair to say that this fifth type represents innovation where the others don't. However, it's clear that the AICs represent a form of Christianity that demonstrates a far greater continuity with African than it does with European cosmology, spirituality, and cultural life. Prior to the advent of the sixth type, the AICs were by far the fastest growing churches in southern Africa. But they're being supplanted now by the Pentecostals.

It's become a truism to say that Christianity is growing explosively throughout Africa, especially the last two types. But what Karamaga wanted to draw attention to was the cooperative and collaborative relations among churches, and the way ecumenism is analogous to the African (political) Union. Indeed, the AACC was formed in Kampala in 1963, a month before the Organization of African Unity (OAU), and represented the tremendous optimism of the day. Sadly, the energies of the movement were wasted early in identity issues vis-a-vis Europeans. "Africans could be creative and innovative Christians (just like Europeans)" and "Africa is not new to the Judeo-Christian traditions" were two not uncommon refrains. The development of an African theology didn't require breaking radically with African religiosity and culture (the ancestors of African Christians were also monotheists). Even as archaeologists were identifying the origin of human life as being African, it seemed like African Christians were struggling to understand how "the first could now be last."

And yet, he continued, there's no question that Africa's post-colonial history was something of a miracle. From the first meeting of the Pan African Congress in England in 1945 to the last African state to gain independence from the control of Europeans (South Africa in 1994) was a mere 50 years. The churches had been independent much longer. That's only looking at one dimension of the African situation, of course. When the AACC met in Maputo in 2008, it could celebrate the centre of gravity of Christianity moving to Africa. But while the church was preaching "fullness of life," it was only seeing "fullness of misery."

For Karamaga, the credibility of the Christian message is at stake in all this. The Christian gospel is a proclamation of peace--wholeness--in a broken and violent world. That there has been much proclamation but little peace is a theological problem. Specifically, he named four challenges to peace in Africa: (1) the ongoing problem of ethnicity, especially the way blood ties are more primary than common Christian identity; (2) the ongoing conflict between Christianity and Islam, especially the way fighting in the name of God invariably reduces God to an idol; (3) disputes over access to land and economic justice; and (4) disease, particularly HIV/Aids. Karamaga suggested that the key to addressing the last three lay in attending to the first: that African solidarity required a repudiation of the national churches inherited from European missionaries. Links to the wider ecumenical community through the World Council of Churches helps in this. The challenge is to move from many churches to one body of Christ bearing witness in the struggle for life.

A couple of critical questions followed the presentation. The first concerned Karamaga's failure to speak to the question of how churches can aid governments in transition, a crucial problem in contemporary Africa as the transfer of power rarely proceeds without incident or violence. His reply pointed first to the "physician, heal thyself" problem, that is, that churches experience the same problems. But churches have also played important roles not only in democratization movements (Malawi and South Africa are well-known examples) but in reminding newly elected governments of their commitments (in Africa, it's not a problem to get people to sign agreements; it's a problem to ensure they keep them).

The second question concerned gender, and here Karamaga's answer was more terse. "I am a convert" to the awareness of gender struggles, he said. Speaking from the perspective of his own church, half of the Synod of the Presbyterian Church of Rwanda are women. While there is a long way to go on the continent with regard to women's rights, the programs of the AACC offer an encouraging beginning.

Overall I was impressed by Karamaga, and thought that the link between African ecumenism and intra-African collaboration worth thinking further about. But I was especially honoured to be sitting in a room listening as African brothers and sisters shared, sometimes with pain, the hopes and struggles of this continent that so desparately--in spite of its over-evangelisation--the good news.

"An Economics of Enough"

This was the title of Denise Ackermann's keynote at the Theological Society of South Africa meeting on June 25. Ackermann is a well-respected South African Anglican feminist theologian, founding member of the Circle of Concerned African Women Theologians, and mentor to many of my friends. I have to be honest, though. When I saw the title of her lecture I immediately thought, "well, I've heard 'more than enough' on this particular topic. And surely Ackermann's 'preaching to the choir' at this kind of event." But in the end I thought what she said was very refreshing coming from a distinguished theologian with impeccable liberationist credentials. Moreover, it was good to hear this in a South African context, especially since she didn't take the typical route of much public theology in allowing secular sociology to set the agenda for the church. To this end, I she made good use of three of my favourite 'post-secular' theologians: the contemporaries Bill Cavanaugh and Charles Mathewes, and their mentor the classical St. Augustine (yes, Augustine is 'post-secular'--or at least 'post-secularist').

Ackermann began by stating the obvious: South Africa is a place of great contradictions. While it spents a high proportion of its GDP on social welfare, South Africa still displays one of the worst GINI coefficients (the gap between the richest and the poorest) in the developed world. Born in the hope of revolutionary redistribution, the New South Africa soon took its place firmly within the modern world in its reliance on the market as a generator of revenue. The best way to address inequalities was to join the global marketplace. And yet the marketplace benefits only those at the top of the 'GINI pool'.

"The market created modernity." This was a key statement for Ackermann to make, for it names the problem at its root. It implies that modernity, its values, its institutions all spring from and give nourishment back to to the market. And just as modernity represented the suspension of teleology (the idea that there's a proper, given destiny for creation), so the free market has no substantive concept of the good. In other words, what's "good" is that we freely choose... whatever we happen to desire. Things only have meaning insofar as they serve as attainable objects of our desire. Paradoxically, Ackermann suggested, we're told we have free choices, but our choices are actually limited, shaped by market forces. Multinationals have the power to move our desire toward whatever products they have to offer. (Don't believe anyone who says "we're just giving the people what they want". If you need more encouragement, watch this documentary.)

The mantra of capitalism is that "a rising tide lifts all boats." But beyond the fact that not all humans even have boats, it's simply not possible to maximize human flourishing by maximizing profit. Even more radically, Ackermann continued, when all value becomes a matter of exchange, "what I can get for something," it becomes impossible to live as God's image. Our lives, our selves, our identities fragment as we come to indwell different niche consumer worlds, each customized ad infinitum.

I could hear strong Augustinian overtones in Ackermann's words. Common space and a true public requires a different kind of freedom: a true freedom in which I am free not merely of constraints to the exercise of my will in attaining the object of my desire, but in which I am free for the other, and for God as tout autre. Biblical freedom, in other words, cannot be understood apart from responsibility for my neighbour.

Ackermann then turned to globalization, one of the great hype words of our time. It's a word, she thinks, almost "magic" in its seeming ability to conjure benefit for the world. Magic... and illusory. For the assymetry of globalization means that it's primarily the global north (and, I would add, elites in the global south) that cast the spell, and consequently are the beneficiaries of the result. In fact, what the majority of the world sees is "a casualization of labour" and "the feminization of poverty." Globalization needs to be demythologized, and Ackermann made a start here.

Now of course Ackermann knew she's treading on familiar theological ground here. After all, globalization and Christianity cannot be separated. The Gospel embraces all nations; it's scope is "all the world". Here she invoked that other favourite theologian of mine: Bill Cavanaugh. Globalization is a parody of the Christian eucharist, where Christ is the concrete universal whose presence is fully available in each locality where his Body gathers. Globalization's is a false catholicity which seeks to efface the particularity of the local by evacuating it of meaning and turning it into a consumer product in the playgrounds of the global north.

OK, so I added a bit of flavour to that last point. But I think it deserves underscoring. Someone suggested recently that a good example of globalization as false universality is the food court at your local shopping mall. Here you've got the world at your disposal, and you can mix and match at will. An Indian main course and a Thai dessert? You can do that within the collapsed space of the food court. But the cost is that all cuisines (and the cultures they represent) are hollowed out and reduced to different versions of the same thing: a consumer product. It's the culinary version of channel surfing or net-browsing. But no more real. Sorry to break the news fellas, but Taco Bell is only a simulacra of "Mexican food." But I digress.

Spirituality is liable to the same "marketization," said Ackermann. In fact, consumer spirituality is "self-centred, immature... a form of religious tourism." It can never be satisfied because it doesn't seek a true Other outside the self. Consumer spirituality (what Reg Bibby calls "religion a-la-carte") is not the same as the quest for God classical theologians have described, a quest that requires discipline of the self and the shaping of desire God-ward. The highest human desire is the desire for God (here she summarizes Augustine's dictum "one is as one loves"). But this desire for God cannot be separated from the desire for the Reign of God. In other words, authentic spirituality thirsts for the justice that characterizes God's presence.

"Can we make a difference?" Ackermann asked. [I was disappointed here, because "can we make a difference?" seems the wrong question to ask. Saints are not those who tried to make a difference; rather, they are those who strove to be faithful where they were, trusting that God could make something of their obedience. I often find with my students that they're so passionate about "making a difference" that they end up paralyzed--or cynical--when they realize how the principalities and powers organize the world. However, once again I digress.] Her pithy saying from the Dali Lama, "if you think you're too small to make a difference, you've never been in bed with a mosquito," indicated however that if there's a "difference" to be made, it will be on the order of a subversion, of covert tactic, not overt strategy.

We have to move beyond simplistic rhetoric in order to understand what "enough" means. But even more: we have to learn from those who don't have enough how to live in reliance on God, all the while without romanticizing poverty. A tall order indeed.

But we start with ourselves and our own implication in the running of the market. The first keyword is discernment. Being attentive to the inner promptings of the Spirit which move us toward God and God's reign will help us see the falsehood of desire's manipulation by the market. So again, the starting point is spirituality (in the full-bodied, traditioned sense, I think she'd say). The second move is resistance--resistance especially to the fatalism that says "the world is thus." This resistance (and here I was completely with her) means spawning those subversive acts that make us long for the reign of God. Thirdly, such a spirituality that issues in resistance means nothing other than continual conversion.

Ackermann concluded by concretizing these three words with seven points that point to a "sustainable community" modelled by the church:

1. Self-examination of our own habits of consuming, and especially the way we interpret the world (where are we and what do we need to flourish).
2. "Tactical choices" that can engage the market, for instance choosing "fair trade" products. However, we must be careful as "green consumerism" is a growing niche in the market.
3. Developing a "theology of work," and resisting labour practices that exploit. Integral to this is an ecclesiological understanding that understands collective task but not at the expense of the giftedness of each person.
4. Sharing with the needy as developing out of the principle of solidarity. In so doing, we make God visible.
5. Nurturing a sacramental imagination. This means going beyond simple criticism of consumption to address the way we see and interpret the world.
6. Theologians that speak in understandable terms. [What? Don't we always?]
7. The Eucharist as core Christian resource. [I wish she'd used different words, though. "Resource" is far too pragmatic. The Eucharist is not a means to an end; it's the end itself. We're made for communion, and Eucharist names our telos, our proper destiny as being consumed into God. I think in what follows, however, she reflects this more catholic understanding]. Again she gestured toward Cavanaugh: our consumption of the Eucharist turns things inside-out as we become food for others.

Invoking Charles Mathewes (and Augustine), Ackermann stated in summary that we love the world in God by participation in God's love of the world. Here's the link between sacramental imagination and political practice. On the other side of the Eucharist, we see in a radically different way. She left us with a memorable image: the image of a poor man on a borrowed donkey as counter to global capitalism. That's where the reign of God begins. That's the example we're called to follow.

Steve de Gruchy made a very important observation in the discussion that followed. The market in and of itself is not the problem. Markets (and trade) can be good or bad. And the particular kind of market that's arisen in Africa (my example for this are the informal traders on the streets outside Claremont's Cavendish Square--a posh shopping mall in Cape Town's suburbs built on land appropriated from displaced "non-whites" during apartheid--who sell all kinds of "fake" brand-name goods) points to a version of the mosquito bite. Well, de Gruchy didn't refer to the Dali Lama quote, but I think it was implicit. This is an unusual but "stinging" undermining of the control of globalization by multinationals.

I certainly appreciated Denise Ackermann's talk--not because it said much that was new, but because it represented a robust theological engagement of the shape of our modern world that actually put ecclesiology and sacramentality at the centre.

A "Communal Wafer"?

That's how one popular culture expert on CBC Radio described the funeral of Michael Joseph Jackson. One of the throng watching the proceedings in a Toronto plaza claimed, "Only Michael could bring the world together." Many agreed with this sentiment, perhaps best expressed in the Anthem "We are the World" sung at the climax of Jackson's memorial service yesterday. Yet others cynically disparaged the shirking of its responsibility by the global media, claiming that there were far more important things happening in the world (for a sample, see Michael Trapido's catalogue here), and that the memorializing of "the king of pop" was better left to the dedicated entertainment channels--a distinction increasingly anachronistic in today's world. Indeed, the "event" of MJ's memorial service becoming a mass-mediated site of global communion invites some theological reflection, and I can't resist the temptation.

I grew up with MJ's music, and can remember him with "The Jackson 5" on the Ed Sullivan Show as a 12 year old, as the front man of "The Jacksons" as a teen in the disco years, and of course the transcendent pop genius of his solo careerin the 1980s. I especially remember sneaking into the room in Bible College where they kept the recording machines for Homeletics class (we weren't allowed TVs in our rooms) with some of the other guys. The contraband tape was not porn, but the extended video of "Thriller." It was one of the first videos I'd ever seen, though I'd never, indeed no one had ever, seen anything like it. We watched it again and again, mesmerized by MJ's ability to narrate, to colour narrative with a range of emotions, with his body. (If you haven't seen it, go. Watch it. Now). The day of his memorial service I downloaded about 40 songs from his extensive catalogue, and remembered.

The iconic music can't be easily separated from the iconic man. Nor should we try, even though the arc of his life (that included Thriller) could not have been plotted easily in that Bible College room. And Jackson's life, especially in the past decade, if nothing else has had an air of carnival about it. The seclusion punctuated by brief and sometimes bizarre public appearances, the media frenzy around child-abuse allegations, and the theme-park attempts to recapture lost childhood were the marks of someone for whom the limelight was both toxic and invigorating. And the memorials to that life, near and far, while celebrating the music did so with an air of carnival. There was a troupe of Newfoundlanders, for instance, who had made a video performing the dance moves from Thriller in St. John's by the harbour. And outside the Staples Center, as one reporter averred, it was indeed a circus. People dressed as Michael moonwalked as others bought T-shirts and special commemorative hot dogs. Elephants joined the funeral procession (well, actually they'd arrived the night before as part of a real circus), featuring a gold-plated casket covered in red roses.

But inside was a different story. There was an air of dignity, solemnity, and reverence. And that venue was transformed into a church by the performances which included not only pop music, but hymn, speech, and procession. Perhaps there was ambiguity in the singing of "soon and very soon, we are going to see the King" as the casket was brought in. But the meaning was soon shifted from the "king of pop" to the King of Kings; the sentiment no-one dared challenge was that Michael was already in the presence of that King. But the slippage was not entirely resolved. Speaker after speaker sought to remove ambiguity from the "circus life" of Jackson, displacing it onto the mass media. Rev. Al Sharpton, addressing the Jackson children, opined: "Wasn't nothin' strange about your daddy. It was strange what he had to deal with." [I have to confess that while the addresses of MLK's children were deeply moving in this regard, Marlon's farewell at the end and Paris Michael's coda alike tear-wrenching, I found the "America at its best" speech by Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee nauseatingly self-serving and transparently partisan.] Even "behind the wall," the myth-making continued as the king of pop was transformed Saint Michael the Martyr.

Of course, this was too much for some--witness the diatribe of another politician, Peter King. Indeed, that Jackson himself was and is a site of struggle has continued to be evident through the coverage of his death. This was addressed not only in moral questions about the goodness of his actions, but in the very nature of Jackson's ambiguous racial identity. While one African American fan spoke of how his dictum "it doesn't matter if you're black or white" empowered her as a public person, Jamie Foxx claimed Jackson as "one of ours... that we shared with the world." Paradoxically, the same body could be a site of both non-racialism and Black pride. While Foxx is right in saying that Jackson's was music rooted in Motown, soul, and gospel, it's also true that Jackson's was perhaps the last and best true "popular" music, a music that transcends barriers of race, class, and religion.

I don't want to add interpretive excess to what is already an event of excess, but I think Jackson's struggle--the disappearing nose, the bleached skin, the straight hair, the ageless and strangely asexual appearance of his latter years--can be read as a struggle to embody a genuine catholicity (which we might define theologically as "a wholeness that brings wholeness") which draws all particularities into itself. Certainly the desire of his fans which coursed through MJ's body--and body of work--for a "we" that makes up humanity can only be realized in another body: the broken, disfigured, and Jewish body of Jesus Christ.

I'm arguing that "We are the World"--with its symbols of cross, cresent, and Star of David morphing into each other like so many consumer choices in a global shopping mall--must give way to "the world in a wafer." For the Eucharist, writes William Cavanaugh, gathers all times, all places, all particularities together in a way mass culture can only parody. For Cavanaugh, the eucharistic gathering is not a virtual gathering mediated electronically, but a real gathering in and through the real presence of the triune God in each locality. Such a gathering does not efface difference, cosmetically removing the marks of particularity ("difference," in Kenneth Surin's phrase, "as mere difference"), but affirms it. This affirmation of difference doesn't thereby invoke identity wars, for in Christ's body dividing walls (Jew-Gentile; male-female; slave-free; black-white; young-old) are broken down. And we see, experience, participate in this performance of the Body of Christ not through twittering comments to a web site in cyberspace, but by sharing real bread and wine under trees in the African veld, inside the tin shacks of a township, surrounded by the cold stone of a cathedral, or any other space "where two or three gather" in Jesus' name. This is a performance that brings us close in memory to the origins of the people of God in God's covenant, and in anticipation to the consummation of history.

In the performance of the Eucharist--and in extending that performance into works of mercy and justice--we share in the sufferings of the body of Christ around the world, and await the time--indeed participate in the time--of global healing of God's world.

Update on Dandala

http://www.mg.co.za/article/2009-07-07-ditch-the-bishop-and-take-a-stand
I fear this expresses a growing view among COPE supporters, and I'm sad for the Bishop who deserves better than to be "ditched."

John de Gruchy: A Christian Humanism

The opening keynote of the Joint Religious Societies’ Conference at Stellenbosch University (left) was given by my doctoral supervisor, Prof. John de Gruchy. John was co-founder of the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Cape Town, founding editor of the Journal of Theology for Southern Africa, and an internationally respected Bonhoeffer scholar. He’s written more books than I can count, one or two of which I was privileged to work on as a research assistant. The latter include Christianity and Democracy: Theology for a Just World Order (Cambridge, 1995) and Christianity and the Modernisation of South Africa (UNISA, 2009). His most recent work is on Christian humanism: On Being Human (Fortress, 2007).

It’s exciting to have been able to keep up academic contact with John de Gruchy in the ten years since completing my PhD. I’m currently involved in a research project of he’s leading called “Transforming Traditions,” which situates moments in the history of Christianity within the debates on social transformation in South Africa. It was this project that formed his point of departure for the address.

Tradition, de Gruchy began, is both outside us and given to us. Tradition shapes our Christian identity. But tradition is also dynamic, and constantly rediscovering itself. The new always grows out of the old; tradition constantly quests after new wineskins. This is an outworking of the Johannine idea that the Spirit is guide into truth. Tradition—and traditions—grow organically in continuity with the past. But they are also contested in the present, and especially contested within the church. De Gruchy signalled toward Alisdair MacIntyre’s idea of traditions as “continuities of conflict.” Christians are participants in historic debates.

But we also negotiate the boundaries of tradition by engaging those outside the broad Christian tradition as conversation partners. These might include academic critics of Christianity (Nietzsche comes especially to mind). But theology is not simply a dialogue within the academy, nor is it a conversation about written texts alone. The locus for theological reflection and Christian conversation is—as it has always been—the contemporary world.

Theology, de Gruchy continued, is faith in action. South African theology has a catholic, or universal scope, but also speaks from a particular context. So it attends to the word, “today.” What does it mean to be a believer, to practice Christian faith, now? The two seminal theological statements produced by South African theologians during the anti-apartheid struggle were the Belhar Confession and the Kairos Document (both of which, I might add, have had considerable international influence. The Kairos Document led in 1989 to “The Road to Damascus,” a call for repentance from theologians in the poverty-stricken global South to wealthy Christians in the North. Recently, the Reformed Church of America has moved to adopt Belhar as one of its confessions, while the Christian Reformed Church is beginning to debate whether to follow suit.). These signalled a contextual theology which reflected on Christian faith by social location (black, feminist, African) as well as by received tradition (Catholic, Reformed, Pentecostal). South African feminist, Black, and African theologies are now part of the great stream of Christian tradition—which means that they cannot be kept “artificially” alive. They are now also part of the contestation of tradition, and are subject to the dangers of conservatism. So the theological task is to discern what de Gruchy calls their “transforming trajectories” for the present situation.

While this idea of “transforming traditions” sounds like a new theological strategy, it’s actually very old. St. Paul retrieved Abrahamic faith in a way Abraham would likely not have recognized. And were Paul able to read what Luther would write about his doctrine of justification, he’d probably have found it strange indeed. Faithfulness in one generation can turn reactionary in another. The norm is always the transforming power of the Gospel which opens human life to its divine calling in each particular, historical time.

But we shouldn’t think that change itself is good. As also implied above, change can be good—or bad. When Christians think of change, we understand it as metanoia, of becoming something other, but also closer to God. So as Bonhoeffer wrote from prison to his friend, Eberhard Bethge, metanoia meant “sharing God’s sufferings in the world. Thus one becomes a human being, a Christian.” The prayer and action which shapes Christian activity in the world takes eschatological vision—which always goes beyond what is possible—into account. But Christians, along with their secular interlocutors, can find common ground for action in penultimate matters. These penultimate matters point to the ultimate transformation, the final metanoia for which Christians hope.

So then a question presents itself: what is the transforming trajectory that can inform theological thinking in South Africa today? And how can that trajectory faciliate the kind of collaborative action—and mutual criticism—around penultimate concerns Bonhoeffer talked about? For de Gruchy, it’s the Biblical tradition of wisdom as tied to the late Renaissance idea of a Christian humanism. Such a tradition has the merit, de Gruchy thinks, of speaking in terms of “unchangeable truths which provide common ground for a common humanity” (in the words of the South African poet, Antjie Krog).

What is humanism? Classically understood, humanism is the study of texts—that “return to the sources” which provided the foundation of the 16th century Protestant and Catholic Reformations. But de Gruchy sees a broader scope for humanism, embracing church, society, and academy. (Readers who hear echoes of David Tracy’s Analogical Imagination would be correct. Indeed, de Gruchy indicated a conscious, though not uncritical, debt to Tracy’s 1981 formulation of the “three publics” of theology.) The core of Christian humanism, and what differentiates it from its “secular” counterpart, is its attendance to the tragic, as well as its claim that the knowledge of humanity is bound up with the knowledge of God in Jesus Christ—words taken from that first, great Protestant humanist, John Calvin. Thus Christian humanism is also, I think de Gruchy would say, a Christological humanism. Jesus reveals God and humanity to us. On the other hand, however, God is only understood as related to humanity in Jesus Christ. Here is a reiteration of Karl Barth’s classic statement in The Humanity of God. Indeed, Barth, Bonhoeffer, and Calvin name for de Gruchy three exemplars of the Christian humanist tradition. (In a conversation we had prior to his talk, de Gruchy suggested that Rowan Williams would be a worthy addition to that list. I think this is especially the case with regard to what follows.).

But what of the tragic? De Gruchy invokes the recent work of Terry Eagleton—the Marxian literary critic—in this regard. “Tragic humanism” contrasts “liberal humanism,” for Eagleton. The liberal myth, present in the polemics of “Ditchkins” (i.e. “new atheist” prophets Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens), claims that by getting rid of “religion” humans will finally be able to flourish. This is mistaken, as is every other humanism that substitutes something else (the candidates are legion: capitalism, socialism, America) for “religion” in its formulation. No. Tragic humanism insists that self-dispossession is integral to being human. And religion at its best, writes Eagleton, provides precisely this. What we have, interposes the theologian de Gruchy, is not secularist utopias, but the Christian doctrine of hope. In this doctrine, the future is both beyond, and present in anticipatory ways within, history. Thus even the tragic has its limits. And the name of those limits, I would add (and I’m sure de Gruchy would agree), is “the reign of God.”

So de Gruchy’s own “transforming traditions” project is the idea of “Christian humanism.” And he’s presiding over a meeting of secular, African, and Christian humanists at Stellenbosch next month. It promises to be an exciting encounter.

De Gruchy closed his address with six affirmations toward a new, Christian humanism. I list them in conclusion:

1. Christian humanism is inclusive. “Being human” names our primary identity.

2. Christian humanism affirms dignity and responsibility.

3. Christian humanism is open to insight into our common human condition wherever it is to be found.

4. Christian humanism claims that the love of God is inseparable from the love of others.

5. Christian humanism heralds a justice that transcends material and sectional well-being.

6. Christian humanism insists that goodness, truth, and beauty are inseparable.

My own view of Christian humanism is quite positive, as long as it retains the Christological centre de Gruchy suggests. In fact, I would want to make that even stronger, referencing Christology not to a generic human nature (as Chalcedon might be accused) but to Jesus the Jew. I think Bonhoeffer is indeed a good model here. Only this way can the church resist a vague, liberal "universal values" talk (which I think is also the problem with tying humanism to the Biblical wisdom tradition, especially inasmuch as that tradition tends to structure legitimation).

The church is called, first and foremost, to embody its humanity precisely in terms of its baptismal confession: that the new humanity is given in Jesus Christ, and that any attempt to subject it to sectionalism, ethnicism, classism (or any other "ism") is fundamentally at odds with the Gospel. As the twentieth century tragedies of [Christian] apartheid and the holocaust made clear, that's a lesson Christians have yet to learn. De Gruchy's challenge is thus deeply important.