Attitudes to race laws split Reformed Church

Press, 29 June 1987, Page 10

Attitudes to race laws split Reformed Church

NZPA-Reuter

Johannesburg Bitter divisions over South Africa’s race laws have led to a split in the Dutch Reformed Church, spiritual home of South Africa’s white Afrikaner elite.

About 4000 white dissident members of the Church met in Pretoria on Saturday to decide how to combat what they regard as harmful liberalism in the Church.

They voted by four to one to break away and form a new Afrikaans Reformed Church which will admit only whites of Dutch-descended Afrikaner stock. The other dissidents decided to stay in the old Church and work for change from within.

The new Church will immediately begin accepting members, founding parishes and ordaining ministers. The main cause of the break, which could pre-

sent many conservative whites with a difficult choice, was a document adopted by the Dutch Reformed Church last year which accepted the idea of opening its doors to all races.

The document, called Church and Society, criticised South Africa’s apartheid system of racial segregation and said attempts made by its own theologians in earlier times to justify forced separation on biblical grounds were wrong. The dissidents hit back with a booklet condemning racially mixed marriages and arguing that “separate development of nations” was in accordance with the scriptures.

The leader of the dissidents, a Right-wing theologian, Willie Lubbe, said eight months of negotiations had failed to settle differences. The Dutch Reformed Church leader, Johan Heyns, described the break as sad but said he

saw no future for the new Church. “Their Church is ... not based on scriptural grounds but on political and cultural grounds,” he said.

The splinter Church would have no significant influence on the Dutch Reformed Church because only a small proportion of its one million members had left, he said. Beyers Naude, an antiapartheid clergyman who left the Dutch Reformed Church in 1980 to join its Black sister Church, said the schism paralleled the political moves which gave rise to the far-Right Conservative Party. The Conservatives quit the ruling National Party in 1982 in protest against President P. W. Botha’s plans to reform apartheid. They increased their support in all-white elections this year. Mr Naude told Reuters that the split would have a psychological effect on Afrikaners although it was

difficult to foresee how broad the repercussions would be. The South African Anglican Archbishop, Desmond Tutu, has called for international help in ending apartheid, saying its continued existence could provide the spark to start World War 111, the national news agency of Mozambique, A.1.M., reported. The report, from Maputo, says Bishop Tutu has dared the South African Government to charge him with treason for statements he has made in his two-week pastoral visit to southern Mozambique. He has criticised South African policies and accused the Government of destabilising neighbouring countries. He said the normal method of removing an unpopular Government, through the ballot box, was not applicable in South Africa because the 25 million black majority cannot vote.