APARTHEID RESISTANCE AND CHRISTIAN THOUGHT

It is well established that the Christian responses to South African apartheid have ranged from unquestioning support to the demand for revolutionary overthrow of the Nationalist government, and a myriad of more nuanced positions between (De Gruchy and De Gruchy Reference De Gruchy and De Gruchy2004, 170).Footnote ¹ Within the discourse of resistance this has often meant that the strongest political rhetoric was directed at other church leaders and scholars. Even among those who denounced apartheid there remained disagreement about the extent to which it should be resisted and the way in which Christians are empowered to act against “state” authority. And while the extent of state-supported ideological interference calculated to foment division cannot be understated (Brews Reference Brews1986), the churches themselves were confronted by deep questions about their relationship to state authority and political resistance. Across the spectrum of views two broad sources of authority were appealed to. The first can be loosely described as “theological” and relied on doctrines, creeds, and confessions to illustrate the heresy of apartheid. The second involved an appeal to the insights of modern biblical studies, particularly as they qualified and contextualized the “historical Jesus” in and against the political authorities of Rome. In this article, these authoritative appeals are contrasted with a Marxist approach which uses the notion of “class-struggle” to challenge the bourgeois intellectual enterprise itself. As representative examples of these different approaches, Boesak, Nolan, and Mosala were nevertheless united in their interest in the Bible and the dismantling of apartheid.

TRADITIONAL THEOLOGIES AND THE RESISTANCE OF ALLAN BOESAK

Allan Boesak's work grows out of a theological appeal to Christian texts — creeds, doctrines, and confessions — in the name of apartheid resistance.Footnote ² Boesak's reformed (Calvinist)Footnote ³ roots and his position at the head of the World Alliance of Reformed Churches (Boesak Reference Boesak1983, 7–8; Fortein Reference Fortein2013, 311ff) both contributed to a theologically coherent and public expression of Christian resistance. Often indebted to others, Boesak nevertheless collects significant responses to apartheid and contrasts them directly with the protestant support for apartheid of the (white) Dutch Reformed Church.Footnote ⁴

The most systematic example of Boesak's thinking can be found in Black Theology, Black Power. Herein, Boesak takes up the challenge of the emergent Black Theology of North America and searches it for applicability in apartheid South Africa.Footnote ⁵ For Boesak, the notion of Black Theology is inherent in the theological project; a kind of internal and intentional, almost dialectical, reflection, and critique of theological discourse prompted by the material and historical realities of a particular context (Boesak Reference Boesak1978, 30). Yet, while exploring whether Black Theology should be considered a subset of liberation and contextual theologies more generally (Boesak Reference Boesak1978, 7), Boesak refuses to let this question hijack his interrogative and rhetorical agenda. Ultimately, the historical reality of colonialism and its debt to European Christendom has resulted in sites of oppression based on a mix of racism, white theology, and a material imbalance of power (Boesak Reference Boesak1978, 31–39). Because oppression is a reality, and is particularized in the experience of black people,Footnote ⁶ any Christian reflection on God must necessarily begin from this point.

In Black Theology, Black Power, Boesak relies on the discourse of James Cone,Footnote ⁷ Martin Luther King Junior, and Joseph Washington. Drawing from these sources, Boesak suggests that the experience of slavery and oppression in the United States and the experience of apartheid in South Africa can be linked through the notion of “blackness.” Moreover, for Christians in these contexts of oppression, it is this “blackness” which mediates and tests all other theological inheritance. Christ must be recognized as the one who “lived on earth very much the same way blacks are forced to live … He is the Black Messiah” (Boesak Reference Boesak1978, 44; Reference Boesak1984a, 10–15). A Christological re-framing, so common to subaltern and liberation readings (Goba Reference Goba1986a, 64–65; Maimela Reference Maimela1986; Rowland and Corner Reference Rowland and Corner1990; Sobrino Reference Sobrino1988), sits at the heart of the ongoing incarnation of God in the South African black experience. A new Christ emerges who is both cosmic and contextual, and it is in relation to this Christ that the creeds and confessions of the Church must be read.

If the Black Messiah constitutes the theological starting point for Boesak's re-imagined theology, it is the analysis of power which typifies his method (Boesak Reference Boesak1978, chap. 2). Yet, for Boesak, power is not a disembodied or de-historicized concept. It is, rather, a collective measure of material control by some over others. For Boesak, white power differs from Black Power because it tends to be realized in oppression over others. Black Power, on the other hand, is both an example of a necessary reaction to this oppressive power and a potential alternative way of understanding power itself. If Black Power is not different from white power, it risks causing anew the suffering it resists.

Boesak's argument here departs from his claimed fidelity to the detail of historical analysis in two main ways. First, he decouples the word “Black” from skin pigmentation. “Black Consciousness does not primarily designate color of skin, it enables black people to form new alliances on a basis completely foreign to the oppressors’ way of thinking” (Boesak Reference Boesak1978, 65). Thus, Black Consciousness, despite its historical particularity, may be regarded analogously to the consciousness of other oppressed groups.Footnote ⁸ Black Power, then, must also look for relationships with others for the sake of mutual empowerment (Boesak Reference Boesak1978, 81ff). This acknowledgement moves Boesak outside the immediate historical pressures of skin-color segregation in South Africa in order to find extra-contextual ground on which to stand. Such a theological and inter-subjective grounding in turn contextualizes liberatively-hopeful responses to the particular historical circumstances Boesak faces.

Second, Boesak parts from explicit historical analysis in his dual-definition of “power.” For Boesak, the discourse of power is not confined to the simple (vulgar) idea of power “down the barrel of a gun,” as this is not truly power at all (Boesak Reference Boesak1978, 56, 70–71). Instead, Boesak embraces the language of power to indicate the capacity of humans to influence and change their world. Power is concerned with the determination of self and the liberative project, as realized in the context of apartheid South Africa and the texts of the Christian tradition, relies upon the effective power of the human subject. This power is qualitatively distinct from the abusive power of the apartheid regime. When the Church supports, tacitly or otherwise, those who use this distorted power, it must be called to repentance.Footnote ⁹

Boesak's attention to the material results of power imbalances has been a critical tool in disassembling the ideological apparatuses of apartheid. Yet, framing of the power analysis primarily in terms of “black and white” overlooks deeper issues of wealth, class distinction and economic benefit. Physical pigmentocracy, cultural imperialism, and nationalistic loyalty are often convenient tools for realizing economic goals.Footnote ¹⁰ The competition for resources undergirded racism and gave it power. For instance, the early challenge of European settlers planting fields on the traditional lands of the Khoikhoi and San people in the Cape (De Gruchy and De Gruchy Reference De Gruchy and De Gruchy2004, 2ff), the importation of labor from outside South Africa into the gold mines of the Witwatersrand and the establishment and enforcement of racially divided “homelands” and their concomitant pass laws (Sebidi Reference Sebidi1986).Footnote ¹¹ This is not to suggest that Boesak was not opposed to economic disparity (Damon Reference Damon2009) but, rather, that he regarded this disparity in terms of formalized institutions of “pigmentocratic” division.

Boesak's response to apartheid brings together Christian doctrine (Boesak Reference Boesak1984a, 23–27; Reference Boesak1984b, 5–10, 32–33, 40–41; Reference Boesak1987b, 19; Reference Boesak1989, 6–7) with the historical and analytic demands of his time. Dealing directly with the legal institution of apartheid on the basis of its immediate consequences proved, eventually, a sound tactic in garnering international support and the downfall of a particular state system. As a tactic,Footnote ¹² therefore, this kind of focused resistance has proved effective in changing the power structures within South Africa, while essentially maintaining and extending the inherent injustices and systematic problems of any capitalist state.

ALBERT NOLAN AND THE BIBLICAL JESUS

The broad theological discourse against apartheid in the churches in South Africa had a number of audiences including, importantly, those churches who supported or acquiesced toward the apartheid regime. Convincing all South African churches of the sinfulness of apartheid and calling them to resistant action depended upon appeals to shared sources of authority. Alongside Boesak's confessional stance, scholars like Albert Nolan invoked modern scholarship in order to disentangle the “real historical” Jesus from the proclaimed Christ of the Church — at least the Christ of the white churches and their obedience to the state.Footnote ¹³ Drawing on “historical Jesus” scholarshipFootnote ¹⁴ Nolan locates Jesus in a context of systematic oppression and retribution.

In Jesus Before Christianity, Nolan outlines his view of the historical Jesus of Nazareth. Here Nolan's view of history is rather nuanced noting that “it is very easy to use Jesus for one's own purposes — good or bad” (Nolan Reference Nolan1992, 5) and that, though “historical objectivity without a perspective is an illusion,” nevertheless “one [historical] perspective, however, can be better than another” (Nolan Reference Nolan1992, 6). It is Nolan's view, then, that the context of oppression in apartheid South Africa affords a deeper sensitivity to the historical reality of first century Palestine primarily because both ancient and modern contexts were situations of oppression. And, though Nolan engages in historical “sifting” (Nolan Reference Nolan1992, 174–191), the modern contextual criteria for his analysis are clearly elucidated. For Nolan, then, Jesus is an apocalyptic religio-political preacher and a non-violent protestor who is executed for insurrection.Footnote ¹⁵

Albert Nolan's re-appropriation of Jesus of Nazareth in the cause of the struggle is a helpful contribution to the discourse of resistance. Importantly, it succeeds in circumventing much of the language and texts of creedal and confessional Christian theology in favor of a more “biblical” Jesus. Nolan's hermeneutical insight — that the context of 20th century South African oppression can enable a clearer understanding of the situation faced by Jesus — utilizes historical scholarship while, at the same time, rejecting its tendency to absolutize. This means, in turn, that the effect of Nolan's work depends upon his audience and their interest in the historical, theological, and literary character of Jesus. Nolan (Reference Nolan1992, 1) is writing primarily to those who hold Jesus in high regard, and though he hopes that faith will be “our conclusion,” his work seeks to re-shape an already established faith rather than illicit new faith. Moreover, the appeal to “history” and the insights of modern scholarship suggest an audience that is both Christian and open to the product of the modern (liberal) intellectual project. Nolan is not writing primarily to fundamentalists or to the many Pentecostal, Apostolic, or African Independent Churches. Indeed Nolan's work is, perhaps by necessity, an admixture of contextual advocacy for the oppressed and the western Christian, ideational and rationalist inheritance of European South Africa. The rhetorical weight of his work was felt most keenly by those acquiescent and sedentary (predominantly English) white churches of the apartheid era (compare De Gruchy and De Gruchy Reference De Gruchy and De Gruchy2004, 53).Footnote ¹⁶

After outlining his portrait of Jesus, Nolan demonstrates that the confrontation with the Romans that Jesus endured helps us to understand the parameters of confrontation with political oppression in apartheid South Africa (Nolan Reference Nolan1992, 13ff). The rhetorical structure of Nolan's argument moves from characterization to consequence, first in terms of the particularity of occupied Judea in the first century ce, but also in terms of the anti-apartheid struggle. Here, Jesus is shown to conflict with the oppressive powers of his day and with the suggestion that this same character would necessarily conflict with the oppressive powers of apartheid domination. In turn Christians, who claim Jesus’ lordship, must do the same. Hermeneutically, the relevance of an ancient character to the 20th century is assumed. “The history of Christianity is the history of those who came to believe in Jesus and who were inspired to take up the challenge of his death — in one way or another” (Nolan Reference Nolan1992, 162). A more subtle step is taken when Nolan concludes that Christians are compelled to embody Jesus’ character and undergo themselves the subsequent confrontation with power that this entails. There is no explicit explanation offered as to why people who “believe” in Jesus must emulate him — simply that they tend to do so. “The beginning of faith in Jesus, then, is the attempt to read the signs of our times as Jesus read the signs of his times … We cannot merely repeat what Jesus said; but we can begin to analyze our times in the same spirit as he analyzed his times” (Nolan Reference Nolan1992, p. 170). Even if 20th century Christians are hesitant to see themselves in imitatio Christi, the obedience which Jesus demands of his disciples in the biblical texts should, ideally, be justified if that obedience carries through to Christians in later ages. In this sense, Nolan writes to an audience who already agrees with the importance of imitating Jesus.

Jesus Before Christianity gives grounding to Nolan's ongoing work within the Christian Institute and in particular to his key influence in the formation of the Kairos Document (De Gruchy and De Gruchy Reference De Gruchy and De Gruchy2004, 197). Though multi-authored, Nolan played a central role in the formation of this challenging call to apartheid resistance. In no small part, the Kairos Document reflects the criticality of a materially-realizable alternative ordering within the promise of Christian eschatology. Moreover, this utopian ideal can be realized in a specific moment in time — in the “kairotic” now — not to be constantly deferred into God's ultimate, but always distant, future. As an often unacknowledged forerunner to political readings of Jesus (Myers Reference Myers1988, 451, 463, 483), Nolan's Jesus Before Christianity, despite its methodological weaknesses, is a clear and powerful hermeneutical appropriation of biblical texts in favor of liberative resistance. Being both a call to action and a call to confession, the rhetorical strength of the work clearly exposes and challenges the discourse of apartheid.

ITUMELENG MOSALA AND NARRATIVES OF RESISTANCE

The anti-apartheid approaches represented by Boesak and Nolan are challenged and extended by the work of Itumeleng Mosala. Mosala's textual exegesis is a complex mix of contextual religious and spiritual factors, the cultural, history, and practice of Black Africans, economic class analysis, scholarly findings, and reading “against the grain” for the sake of the suppressed and oppressed (Mosala Reference Mosala1986, 67ff; Motlhabi Reference Motlhabi1986a; Witbooi, Reference Witbooi1986). In his use of recent biblical scholarship and his commitment to resist apartheid, Mosala's work methodologically Nolan's. There is less common ground, however, with the creedal and confessional work of Boesak. If Nolan and Boesak find common ground in the Christological affirmation of justice and resistance found in the New Testament, and Nolan and Mosala in the scholarly analysis of biblical contexts “from below,” Boesak and Mosala are, methodologically speaking, the furthest apart. What links them, however, is the specific contextual experience of, and resistance against, apartheid. Despite Mosala's Christian roots this shared experience is best characterized by the term Mosala prefers (Mosala Reference Mosala1989, xi), “hermeneutical.” Eschewing the demands of creedal and confessional theology, Mosala uses the tools of resistant reading, materialist and otherwise, to find narratological alliances in the texts of the Bible. Biblical Hermeneutics and Black Theology in South Africa contains, then, a coherent exposition of Mosala's biblical and hermeneutical interests.

Biblical Hermeneutics arises out of Mosala's call for a resistant contextual “theology” to assist the struggle against theologies of the status quo. A “specifically black theology of liberation is needed, in spite of the existence of opposition theologies in traditional Christian circles” (Mosala Reference Mosala1989, 4). Yet, his theological product differs markedly from the confessional/creedal perspectives of Boesak. For instance, Mosala's work resembles a literary-Marxist analysis far more than a theological treatise. Even when he wrestles with the affirmation of scripture as the normative “Word of God,” he avoids affording it independent or transcendent authority. Instead, he works on the basis that biblical texts retain rhetorical weight in the strongly Christian context of South Africa. This contextual response is shaped far more by “extra”-ecclesial texts insofar as he draws upon social-scientific inquiry, historical-critical analysis, and the shape of a Marxist-materialist reading (Mosala 2008, 89ff). While Nolan and Boesak share Mosala's call for the end of (economic) exploitation and alienation, it is only Mosala who sees the reading of scripture in the cause of apartheid resistance primarily in terms of class. This, in turn, shapes his analysis of biblical texts against Marxist categories such as modes of production.

Within his materialist approach, Mosala depends heavily upon what he calls “social-scientific” approaches to the text (Mosala Reference Mosala1989, 43ff). Interestingly, however, the tools of history, sociology, and archaeology are not apolitically disconnected but always used in the service of class and other conflictual interests. Importantly, this appropriation must never give way to a “Weberian sociological idealism” for “it ceases to refer to questions of class conflict and of the material conditions of production of the Christian literature and theologies. Instead, it confines itself to the subjective reflexes of Christians… For they themselves purport not to be engaged in their scholarly labors in the interests of any specific social class today. In other words, they conceal their real class commitments” (Mosala Reference Mosala1989, 56ff, 60). Mosala, therefore, advocates an interested application of the social sciences, attuned to material and ideological oppression in the ordering and presentation of the “facts” of history. As he moves from context to text, Mosala's reading follows a similar pattern, reading “against the grain,” in order to expose the interests of economic exploitation and with the muted or sub-textual voices. At this level, Mosala's preparedness to sift the texts of scripture, especially in the Hebrew Bible, puts him at odds with other anti-apartheid theological and biblical scholars. For example, Mosala criticizes Boesak's “appropriation of the text of Genesis 4:1–16, the story of Cain's killing of Abel,” because it “is in complete ideological collusion with the text and its rhetorical intentions: to legitimate the process of land expropriation by the ruling classes of David's monarchy from the village peasants in the hill country of Palestine” (Mosala Reference Mosala1989, p. 33). As Boesak's approach to scripture is shaped more by creedal orthodoxy in support of a Black Theology of resistance, in Mosala's view, Boesak overlooks the internal conflict and oppression inherent within the biblical text itself (McEntire Reference McEntire2000; West Reference West1990).

INTERNAL AND TEXTUAL CONFLICT

Mosala reads Micah and Luke in order to demonstrate a sociologically — and historically — informed reading of scripture against oppression from the context of apartheid South Africa. Mosala's approach to the text of Micah clearly outlines his hermeneutical process.Footnote ¹⁷ He situates the composition of the text within the Davidic monarchy. At this time, the “tributary mode of production” dominated the Israelite “nation,” and involved a surplus extraction by the ruling class through tithes, taxes and, importantly, rents on those with “no regular access to land.” Micah, as a production of this time, is imbued with the “structural elements of this mode [of production]” (Mosala Reference Mosala1989, 108–118). Moreover, Mosala believes that these structural elements can be identified and explicated with recourse to history and social-science (West Reference West2000, 89). The ideology of the text may, then, be read against its socio-economic context, highlighting the tension and conflict between competing classes in the tributary mode of production. Mosala proceeds to disassemble the text of Micah along these competing lines. The Micah-C text, for example, affirms the ideology of the monarchy, its approval by God, and its promised might over its enemies.Footnote ¹⁸ Against the Micah-C texts stand a number of resistant strands. Importantly, the A/B-stage particularises general moral objections against evil into specific material responses of justice and resistance (Mosala Reference Mosala1989, 143 and especially 153). For those fighting oppression in Mosala's reading-site of apartheid South Africa, the words of Micah, prized away from their ideologically-oppressive context, might “provide a positive hermeneutical connection with the struggle of black workers” (Mosala Reference Mosala1989, 153).Footnote ¹⁹

Mosala's reading of Micah illustrates his hermeneutical approach more clearly than his reading of Luke 1–2. Yet the attention to competing class and social interests remains central in his reading of the Gospel. For example, Mosala suggests a three-tiered “social formation” of first century Palestine comprising the ruling classes (including the Roman Imperial classes and the “comprador Palestinian royalty and nobility, for example, the Herodians”), the “free but dependent” dominated classes of artisans, peasants and so on, and the underclasses of “casual labourers, bandits, petty criminals, prostitutes, and beggars” (Mosala Reference Mosala1989, 159–160; see also Horsley and Hanson Reference Horsley and Hanson1985). Mosala claims that, by “turning the experiences of the poor into the moral virtues of the rich, Luke has effectively eliminated the poor from his Gospel” (Mosala Reference Mosala1989, 160–161, 163). Because Black Theology is on the side of a materialist reading for a “dispossessed people” (Mosala Reference Mosala1989, 165), Luke must be regarded with suspicion. Indeed Mosala asserts that Luke's first aim is to make the Gospel palatable in order to achieve his second aim of repentance. Thus Mary's connection to Elizabeth and Zechariah is understood as dealing “with the embarrassing social-class origins and position of Mary” (Mosala Reference Mosala1989, 166), Joseph's (muted) place in the text is included to “invoke a royal connection for Jesus,” and that, overall, “Luke's ideological co-optation of Jesus in the interests of the ruling class is an act of political war against the liberation struggle.” Presumably Mosala means to include with emphasis the liberation struggle in South Africa. Mosala rejects those scholars who affirm the supposed “transparent historicity” of Luke's writing in order to justify Luke's portrayal of wealth and poverty (Mosala Reference Mosala1989, p. 179). From Mosala's reading location, then, Luke 1 and 2 must be read against the grain (Reference Mosala1989, 183), especially on matters of wealth and poverty, and also “in a projective way” (Mosala Reference Mosala1989, 185 italics original), that is, in a way which looks to utopian alternatives. In Mosala's specific example of Luke 1:5–25, this means using the text to analyze the culture and rhetoric of ruling power. Reading the prophecy about John the Baptist's birth to the priestly Zechariah is, then, an exercise in unpicking the rhetorical tools used by the ruling elite. Though Mosala does not say so explicitly, the account of divine favor upon a member of the religio-political establishment in order to justify exploitative temple-economy arrangements, unlocks a parallel critique of South African white Christians who use the language of God's blessing and divine favor to cement their control, both over the means of production, and over its associated political structures.

Mosala's contribution to the ongoing study of Luke-Acts and political powers, especially the Roman Empire, is interesting. On one level he assumes that the Lukan text is suspicious of the domination of Rome. Yet, by in seeking to establish a “kingly” Jesus in the line of David, and to make the gospel palatable to the rich by excising the experience of the poor, the Lukan text undermines any liberative moves by the early messianic community. A rhetorical call to replace one set of oppressive overlords (the Romans) with another (the mythic Davidic monarchy) exhausts any hope of “real” liberation. In this sense, Mosala's work is more subtle than much recent scholarship on Luke-Acts and Empire which interrogates the text largely in terms of a simple duality, namely: do these texts support an integration between the gospel and the Empire, or do they refuse to legitimize Rome and resist participation in its oppressive regime? At one end, Christina Petterson suggests that “the method of subjection in Acts and early Roman writings are the same, which indicates a deeper ideological relationship between the two types of literature” (Petterson Reference Petterson2012, 13). At the other end, the collection of essays edited by Rhoads, Esterline, and Lee (Reference Rhoads, Esterline and Lee2011) — especially Warren Carter's (Reference Carter2011) contribution — emphasize the resistant strands within Luke-Acts. Kazuhiko Yamazaki-Ransom's position is, perhaps, most balanced: “while … Luke's portrayal is mixed … Luke's attitude toward the Roman Empire is negative. However, this is not primarily because of the Roman rulers’ political oppression of the people of God but because of their failure to acknowledge God's sovereignty and Christ's lordship” (Yamazaki-Ransom Reference Yamazaki-Ransom2010, 202). Mosala's work extends this discourse by suggesting that, in terms of liberative responses to Empire, Luke is to be resisted because it advocates a renewal of God's sovereignty through the re-instatement of the oppressive Davidic monarchy.

Mosala's work on a black biblical hermeneutics in the context of apartheid South Africa opens the door to a critical appropriation of the biblical texts in and for the purposes of liberation. Mosala's method, indebted as it is to Marxist thought and the importance of class struggle and material consequence, displays a coherent ideological framework (Mosala Reference Mosala1989, 188). Unfortunately, despite this insightful hermeneutical formation, Mosala too often gets caught up in narrow characterizations of contextual oppression against which to rebel. On the one hand, this is seen in the textual dissection of Micah into the ideological layers of an 8th century monarchic formation. His rather sharp division of texts belies the reality that people of all classes live with a mix of liberative and oppressive ideologies, and the suggestion that “oppressive” texts can simply be excised from the corpus of ideological identity is questionable. Certainly, the black Christian experience in South Africa, for all its problems, has resisted re-canonizing the canon, whether on the terms of the liberal-humanist traditions of historical criticism or on those of the more radical, but yet still highly Eurocentric, Marxist position. In Mosala's work on Luke, the portrait of the evangelist as a representative of the wealthy ruling class has merit and allows the text to be read against the grain. Yet, the extent to which Luke's identification is caricatured can be seen in the failure of Mosala to give due credit to the Magnificat or the Benedictus as rhetorics of resistance. Moreover, once Luke embodies the ideological mores of the ruling class, nothing in Luke-Acts can be read ironically.Footnote ²⁰ That Luke 1 and 2 reflect the multi-faceted positions of Christians in the latter parts of the 1^st Century cannot be adequately described by Mosala's method. Certainly the Magnificat and Benedictus, alongside the powerful anti-Imperial prophecy against the collusion of the Jewish elite with the Romans in Luke 3, must be held in creative contrast to Luke's problematic position on wealth.

These concerns aside, Mosala's work highlights a number of important hermeneutical approaches to the texts of the Bible missing from the work of Nolan and Boesak. First, texts should be viewed as multi-faceted ideological constructions which, despite any particular authorial intention, reflect the material and economic patterns of their contextual formation. In order to appropriate these texts in the name of Black Theology or the struggle, an overtly material analysis of the consequences of competing class ideologies is necessary. Second, these texts will often be read “against the grain,” not so as to simply reject them, but so as to read them as ambivalent products of competing material interests. Third, texts which support the status quo or interests of the ruling class are important to analyze because the rhetoric of ideological self-affirmation must be identified before it is resisted. Texts which abstract, in categories like good and evil, the “real” material concerns of justice and oppression may be liberated from their abstraction and re-situated in the immediacy of particular liberative situations. Finally, texts which offer solidarity for the oppressed, and offer an alternative “classless” vision for the future, may be welcomed as allies in the struggle.

AFTER APARTHEID

The primary intention of this article is to track three significant approaches to using the Bible in the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa in order to highlight their differences and complementary possibilities. Space does not permit a thorough exploration of the subsequent, post-apartheid use of the Bible nor detailed biographies of Boesak, Nolan, and Mosala. Yet, there are a number of key ways in which the approaches of these thinkers have affected the ongoing use of the Bible in South Africa.

The importance of a renewed Christology, and the notion of the imitatio Christi as a means of shaping Christian ethics, has carried through in the South African context to Richard Burridge's (Reference Burridge2007) Imitating Jesus: An Inclusive Approach to New Testament Ethics. In this work, Burridge utilizes the idea of biblical and historical constructions of Jesus to shape Christian ethics, on both and individual and collective level. In an extensive reflection on the use of the Bible in apartheid South Africa (Burridge Reference Burridge2007, chap. VIII), Burridge surveys the work of Boesak and Mosala to conclude that, despite all sides making claims of scriptural authority, the pro-apartheid positions were theologically inadequate because: “No imitation of Jesus could justify such violence and oppression” (Burridge Reference Burridge2007, 409). This position resonates most closely with that of Nolan though his work remains largely unacknowledged (only through reference to the Kairos (Document 2007, 118)). Burridge's work highlights that in conflictual contexts, where all sides claim scriptural authorization, some uniting hermeneutical frame is necessary. While the general call to contextual theology is a step on the way, it is the specific focus on Jesus that is a more promising basis for unity against oppression. Boesak's Black Messiah and Nolan's biblical Jesus both arise from the struggle and may be brought into constructive interference to unite resistant efforts and connect with other resistant movements around the world.Footnote ²¹

Along with from the centrality of imitatio Christi as a unifying force emerging from anti-apartheid uses of the Bible, the more general category of contextual theology has given rhetorical support to undertakings like the Contextual Bible Studies movement (West Reference West2013). The assertion that reading location is critical in liberating appropriations of biblical texts is, of course, not unique to Black Theology (Segovia and Tolbert Reference Segovia and Tolbert1995; Reference Segovia and Tolbert2000). Nevertheless, there is a clear connection between Boesak's borrowing of Black Theology and the distribution of interpretive authority now present in some Christian traditions in South Africa (West Reference West2013). In post-apartheid South Africa, the tension between central and local authority remains present in both political and ecclesial arenas. Replacing the Nationalist government did not disassemble the state itself and hierarchies remain in both traditional-denominational and independent churches (West n.d.). However, the hermeneutical shift which placed the locus of interpretation in peripheral, resistant contexts, so necessary in the apartheid era, cannot be completely reversed. Since 1994, the ongoing liberative moves involving the churches and biblical interpretation have depended in no small part on reclaiming context in interpretation.

Another aspect of resistant biblical hermeneutics in post-apartheid South Africa is the important and problematic role of Marxist analysis in addressing the ongoing disparities in South Africa. In Biblical Hermeneutics the concepts of “modes of production” and “class struggle” are explored by Mosala, in keeping with the Marxist elements of the struggle more generally. Since 1994 and the collapse of the Soviet Union, however, the place of explicitly Marxist analysis has become largely muted in South African biblical exegesis. Socialism has developed in the form of the trade union movement and centralized attempts to eradicate poverty, often supported by the churches. Yet, despite some notable exceptions (Masango Reference Masango2014; Methula Reference Methula2014; West Reference West2008; Reference West2009; Reference West2011), the role of the Bible has been largely overlooked as a rhetorical partner in addressing economic struggles. For some, following on from Mosala, too many of the biblical texts are inherent reflections of oppressive relations of production in the ancient world and are, therefore, of limited use in a contemporary class struggle. Yet, the potential of materially-liberative readings of biblical texts, even those that “read against the grain,” have been regularly sidelined. As Gerald West suggests, however, there is potential for extending and deepening liberative and contextual readings of the Bible by bringing the class analysis of Mosala into conversation with more traditional modes of liberative biblical reading – particularly those of Boesak (West Reference West1995, 64–74).

Finally, the role of the institutional government in the liberative project takes on a renewed focus in South Africa after 1994. Whereas the legitimacy of the apartheid regime was roundly rejected on the basis of democratic principles, justice and equity, the subsequent state reflected liberal democratic ideals such as “the bill of rights” and constitutionally-protected representationality. Yet, due to tactical necessities such as the “sunset-clauses” and avoiding civil war, the deep economic disparities inherited from the apartheid past were unable to be addressed directly (Botman Reference Botman2000, 112). Moreover, in the heady exuberance of the “New South Africa,” many churches retreated from vigorous public engagement through exhaustion or a tacit acceptance of the legitimacy of the new regime. In this environment, the materialist analysis and resistance represented by Mosala was largely absorbed into the state machine. Indeed, Mosala himself took up a roll as a senior public servant. Of course, Mosala still advocated for a more materialist conception of liberation for South Africa. Yet, by acknowledging the legitimacy of the new regime undergirded by capitalist economics, overt resistant efforts were constrained. Involvement in party politics (as a member of the Congress of the People), by Boesak was less surprising, perhaps, but also exhibited an acceptance of the legitimacy of the new political system. In this sense, Boesak follows the reformed tradition of participation in legitimate political structures including those of capitalist inequity. Footnote ²² Nolan's direct involvement in party-politics after 1994 is less obvious (like Tutu) and yet both Nolan and Tutu continued to operate from within the formal hierarchies of the Roman Catholic and Anglican churches. This is not to criticize the decisions of these anti-apartheid thinkers but rather to acknowledge the deep ambiguity of their positions after 1994.Footnote ²³ In a changed rhetorical frame, where the “enemy” against which to struggle is less well-defined, the relationship between resistant interpretation and institutional power is far more difficult to clearly delineate (West Reference West2007; Reference West2010). Into this mix then, the ongoing elevation of contextual readings, combined with a (Marxist) hermeneutic of suspicion towards institutional power seems critical for ongoing movements of resistance that rely on biblical texts. Moreover, some sense of a reversed “class betrayal” against the ruling elite, may be necessary to sustain liberative rhetorics within a liberal and legitimated state that rests on the profound alienation and class inequity inherent in capitalism.

IN SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION

In biblically-located texts of apartheid resistance, authority and method cohere different ways. In the work of Allan Boesak the confessions and creeds of (reformed) church dogma are mined for their liberative lode. Albert Nolan, while also assuming a dogmatic starting point on the importance of scripture and the biblical Jesus for the Church in South Africa, seeks to merge this with the authority of historical and socio-historical methods. Itumeleng Mosala is only fleetingly interested in the historicity of the specific detail of biblical texts preferring, instead, the more circumspect position that the texts in question are both productions of, and influencing discourses upon, particular historical contexts. In this, Mosala helpfully avoids sifting biblical details on the basis of historicity. Rather, he focuses on the ideological class struggle at play in and around the text, and the interpretive authority of Marxist class sociology becomes clear. Yet Mosala's analysis of apartheid may need to be extended further, and a more nuanced reading of apartheid South Africa, with its peculiar capitalist mode of production and colonial political ordering, might lead to a more complex image than the simple taxonomy offered by Mosala allows. As an alternative to this, I suggest that a materialist analysis of apartheid South Africa and the Bible should, ideally, spend more time examining coercive and ideological (state) apparatusesFootnote ²⁴ and tap into the “hermeneutical energy” found in reading the Gospels explicitly as texts of resistance. In the disillusionment and revolutionary exhaustion of the New South Africa such an exploration may be liberatively generative.