The influential Dutch Reformed Church has moved closer than ever to campaigning against apartheid, but leaders of black sister churches remain unsatisfied and threaten a final split after years of conflict over the issue. In two recent meetings, white Dutch Reformed leaders issued the church`s strongest-ever denunciation of the government policy on race, calling statutory racial separation a sin and its teaching a heresy.
In an emotional private session this month, white church officials admitted guilt for helping justify and maintain apartheid, and begged forgiveness of their black and mixed-race brethren.
However, the church`s governing body last week watered down these declarations and outraged clerics such as Rev. Allan Boesak, leader of the mixed-race Dutch Reformed Mission Church, by shelving a program that was to have been the basis for further interracial cooperation.
”Our enthusiasm to work with the white church is gone,” responded Rev. Boesak. ”I am very deeply disappointed.”
The core issue is the extent to which the church will join other Protestant denominations in leading resistance to government racial policy and in pushing for political reform. Government repression of antiapartheid groups has left clerics such as Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu in the forefront of the struggle against the state.
”They (church activists) say they do not have any party political mechanism to use; organizations are banned, and therefore the only structure is the church,” said Dutch Reformed Church Moderator Johan Heyns. ”That`s not my view.”
Rev. Boesek and other church activists propose that the church`s branches reunite as a multiracial body to work toward dismantling apartheid. At a meeting this month, they called on the government to repeal four key apartheid laws, lift the 33-month-old state of emergency, release all political prisoners and detainees, legalize all antiapartheid organizations, and ”as a matter of urgency start negotiations with the authentic leaders of the (black) majority in our country . . . that will lead to a transfer of power to the majority by free and fair elections.”
The black and mixed-race branches of the church also declared that apartheid could not be reformed, but must be eliminated entirely.
The white delegation would not go that far. It ”expressed concern”
about the continuing state of emergency and asked the government to ”lift it at the earliest possible occasion.” The statement committed the church generally to ”strive for justice for all people in our country.”
”We are also against the practice of detention without trial (but) as a church we cannot say to the government, `Cease immediately,` ” said Heyns.
”It is up to the government to decide when the time is ripe.
”My church in the 1940s not only supported apartheid but even tried to give it an ethical justification. It would be completely wrong for any church to prescribe to the government. The Bible is not a political handbook.”
That`s not good enough for critics like Rev. Nico Smith, a former Dutch Reformed minister who joined the church`s black branch and moved to a black township to preach against apartheid.
”It`s very clear that the Dutch Reformed Church hasn`t rejected apartheid unequivocally,” he said. ”They want to reform apartheid and not eliminate it. The relationship of mutual understanding between the Nationalist government and the church prevents the church from taking a position.”
This month`s meeting, held in the industrial city of Vereeniging south of Johannesburg, also split over church unification. The black and mixed-race churches have pledged to become a single body for southern and central Africa by 1991. The white delegates said cultural and language differences must be respected, but that local churches should cooperate or merge if they care to. The Dutch Reformed Church has opened its membership to all races but there has been little desegregation, partly because race laws dictate residential segregation.
A follow-up last week of the General Synodical Commission, the church`s governing body, did not rule on the position of the black churches toward government, instead referring the so-called ”Testimony of Vereeniging” to a four-member committee. The panel`s findings will be put to a General Synod, the church`s highest body, next year.
The Dutch Reformed Church can wield a great deal of influence. Its members include only 1.5 million of South Africa`s 5 million whites, but it is known as ”the National Party at prayer” because it includes 90 percent of the Cabinet ministers and 70 percent of the members of Parliament.
As international opposition to apartheid has grown, the church has come under increasing pressure to renounce racism explicitly. A 1984 meeting in Chicago of the Reformed Ecumenical Synod, an organization of 35 world Reformed and Presbyterian churches, condemned support for apartheid as a sin.
Under Heyns, the church has steadily moved away from the government`s racial policy. In 1986, after 40 years of defending apartheid, the synod issued a long tract declaring racism ”a sin” that cannot be justified by the Bible. Any attempt to justify apartheid must be ”recognized as an error and be rejected,” the document stated.
That document, titled ”Church and Society,” led right-wing clerics to organize their own whites-only church in 1987. Heyns said the new Afrikaans Reformed Church had attracted 30,000 members and about 50 ministers.
The world synod again was threatening to expel the church last year when Heyns agreed to a proposal that the Dutch Reformed ”family” of churches meet in Harare, the capital of neighboring Zimbabwe. During that meeting, Heyns strengthened the denunciation of apartheid, calling it a heresy.
”We tried to define apartheid in `Church and Society,` but that seems to be not very satisfactory to the outside world,” Heyns said. ”People saw in that definition a sort of unresolved ambiguity. The result was a statement specifically rejecting apartheid as sinful.”
