The reality of Christ in the life of the local Church

Stuart C Bate¹ OMI

A local church lives in a historical time and in a socio-cultural context. As Jesus did, so the church has to respond to the needs of the people in this human reality. During the years of apartheid, which are sometimes said to begin in 1948 with the coming to power of the Nationalist Party and to finish in 1994 when the current ANC government took power, only between five and ten percent of the population of South Africa belonged to the Catholic church. In other words the Catholic church represents only a very small part of the population of this country which is extremely rich in terms of both culture and religion.

In the history of this local church we can observe some of the responses that that church has made to the social life of Southern Africa. In the first part of the talk I'm going to give some examples of how the church in South Africa tried to discover the presence of the suffering Christ but also the risen Christ in the context of the struggle against apartheid. In the second part of the paper I will try to illustrate how a historical and paschal Christology deepens the response of South African Catholic church in the choice of its own pastoral priorities. Finally to respond to the emphasis of a Christology which is based on the paschal event and on the uniqueness of the Christological mediation for salvation I would like to offer some examples of current African Christological research which focus on trying to discover the presence of Christ in local African cultures. This is a particularly fruitful area of Christological inculturation in Africa at the present time.

Christological reflection which is situated within the living transmission of a local church is always a historical and cultural event. Its product is evangelisation. How was it possible to do such evangelisation in the context of South Africa in the years of apartheid? This was the challenge of the church here.

The Catholic hierarchy was erected in South Africa in 1951. From the beginning it was concerned with the so called racial problematic. It is interesting to see that in the seven pastoral letters written by the Bishops up to 1974, six were on the theme of race relations: "a phenomenon in church history and marks the racial question in South Africa as the special test of charity, or love in Christ which we [in South Africa] have..." (italics in original). (Synnott nd:9). The bishops emphasised the fact all are created in the image of God and that Christ has come for the salvation of all human beings whatever their race or culture. Here we see a recognition of human dignity in Christian discourse, a dignity which is affirmed by the incarnation of the word and transformed by the life of Jesus and the paschal event in Christ (PL 1:1-2).

The bishops presented the teaching of Christ on the reality of the kingdom of God which comes as a gift for all, but which also has to be accepted by a life of faith and morality. "Christ teaches us that we have to seek first the kingdom of God and its justice and then all shall be given to us" ( PL1:25). That is, Christian life is also a moral life in which it is necessary to understand where and what sin is and how we can avoid it. An important part of the journey of the Christian churches in South Africa was the task of identifying the presence of sin and of evil in the society of apartheid. It was only a gradual recognition, under the influence of the Holy Spirit, that in apartheid we are in front of a true evil and that those who believe in and promote this system, sin. A fact which is not well known is that it was the Catholic bishops who took this position first. Already in their Pastoral letter of 1957 they prophetically make a "condemnation of the principal of apartheid as something intrinsically evil"(PL1:15). Here is the first time that a South African church condemns the evil of apartheid as such (Villa Vicencio 1988: 36). The same letter asks a little later: "do we not make a mockery of Christianity in calling ourselves a Christian nation following a policy which is so contrary to the word of Christ?" (PL1:16).

Ad gentes(22) teaches that an emerging local church has to develop its own theological reflection. An important contextual theology during the years of apartheid was Black Theology. This theology situated itself as one of the theologies of liberation. In the context of apartheid, the principal category of sin for black theologians was that of oppression. It was the most important because it was the most urgent and also because it was often the category which was most forgotten by the Christian community. Black theology developed the Christological category of the Black Messiah which was linked with the affirmation that God always takes the part of the poor. Black people ask themselves if this God revealed to them by whites, colonialists and racists could also be the God of blacks: the victims of a history which has lead to the reality of apartheid. The Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu whilst he was still a simple parish priest gave this example of the cry of black people:

Black theologians wanted to make the statement that God is really on the side of black people in South Africa. The God of the Bible is the God of the poor and of the oppressed. He is the God who will liberate them from their suffering. So for black Christians, in the racist world of apartheid, Jesus as Black Messiah is "the only true confession for our time" (Goba 1986:58).

These are examples of how the community of faith had to reflect under the influence of the Holy Spirit on how to respond as people of faith in a social situation of evil structures. The response was a prophetic response but this prophetic response was not always accepted joyfully neither by the authorities nor by all the people. Today it is clear to nearly everybody how the way of apartheid was one of destruction, suffering and slavery for all. But in those days it was not so clear for many.

The revelation of God in Jesus Christ carries with it a narrative of contextual, historical events. This means that the Word was incarnate through the Holy Spirit in the womb of a woman living in historical time and in a social and cultural context. The local church today has to discover its own mission by entering into the Christ narrative under the influence of the Holy Spirit in order to find, within its own context, the path of its own journey towards the kingdom of God. In this second part I would like to present, as an example of this ecclesial process, the way in which the local South African church came to the decision to develop a specific pastoral plan as a response to the human, social and cultural experience in Southern Africa after 1977.

During the nineteen seventies the social and political situation of South Africa went from bad to worse. In this situation, under the inspiration of the 1974 Synod of Bishops in Rome on the theme of Evangelization, the South African Bishops decided to call a pastoral consultation (Bate 1991: 72). In 1979 in a first step, the consultation was made at diocesan level where the needs and priorities of the local groups were collected. These were then listed in a document prepared for a conference of 178 delegates coming from organizations, groups and dioceses of the territory of the Bishops conference. The meeting was held in 1980. In this second step more than a hundred recommendations were made. The sheer quantity of the work coming from the consultation required the setting up on an ongoing process of consultation and planning at the level of the conference. This eventually led to the drafting of a Pastoral Working Paper, published in 1984. This document was sent back to the local level for discussion in groups, in the parishes and also at personal level, for those who wanted. The answers and the comments led to a document entitled Pastoral Plan Working Paper published 1987. The following four points were the major issues emerging from this whole reflection (CSH 1987:4):

1. that the basic element in the pastoral plan must be Formation; that is, the education and evangelisation of all people in the church.

The plan was launched in 1989 and remains in force today as a sign of the way that the church in Southern Africa sees its mission today as a community of service. In a book published as a reflection after seven years of the pastoral plan, I tried to collect some examples of how the pastoral plan has inspired different groups in different fields of pastoral service such as prayer, healing, social development, inculturation, women’s ministries, ecumenism and evangelization ( Bate 1996). If the Kingdom of God is a vision and a power in human society, it must be even more so within the Christian Community. All Christians are called to live a new life, to help and to serve others. It is only in this way that we become the body of Christ.

The uniqueness of Jesus as saviour must enter the fulness of people's everyday life. For this reason Christology has always tried to open the richness of this singularity into the complexity of Christ of all nations. This is the very aim of evangelization, as St Paul shows us in the episode of Athens (Acts 17: 22-34). For the majority of the African sub-Saharan churches this is part of the discourse on inculturation.

Seeing Jesus Christ as saviour of Africa carries with it the narrative of the Christ event as interpreted by the African Christian Community where he has become one of us. In fact Christology is probably the more developed area of African theology and in this work African theologians have toiled in developing inculturated expressions of Jesus Christ. In the first part I have already mentioned the category of the Black Messiah. Here I would like to present the approach which tries to compare the ways of the life and the ministry of Jesus with the life and work of significant persons in the social and cultural context of Africa. As examples I will present just two of the many categories of African life on which African theologians have worked: the ancestor and the traditional healer.

The example of Jesus in his life corresponds in a certain way to the criteria of a good human life of an African person who is designated to become an ancestor within the community. The ancestor is the model of how human life must be lived in the majority of African cultures. According to Nyamiti (1984) Christ is our ancestor because he is the model of the fulness of how African life should be. The ancestors have the responsibility of mediating a full and good life to the community and this role can be compared to that of Jesus who is supreme mediator of salvation between God and us. Bujo (1992:80) prefers the term Proto-ancestor for Jesus, noting the fact that the mediation of Jesus works at a different, deeper and more unique level.

The traditional healer is a very important character in the African society. Since healing played a very important part in the mission of Jesus on earth, we should not be surprised that this category has become important in African Christology. Mbiti ( in Nyamiti 1991 ) speaks of the idea of Christus Victor. But Kolie (1991) has warned about a too simplistic assimilation of this African category given the reality of death, sickness, and suffering in African everyday life: a continuing oppression for the people of the continent today. Healing must respond more effectively to today's sicknesses.

Jesus did not come into the world in order to the object of our intellectual speculations. His goal was much more profound. Here we are concerned with the salvation of the world and reconciliation between God and humanity. Through Christ we have access to life with the Father. The scriptures were written so that you "may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the son of God and believing have life in his name" (John 20:30). The reflection of the church as community of faith brings us to the definition of theology given by St Anselm: Fides quaerens intellectum (cur Deus homo 1,II,c.1) (Faith seeking understanding). This must be a reflection which moves us to take another step in our common journey towards the kingdom of God. We are moved by the breath of the Holy Spirit and the power of the only son of God died and risen for the salvation of the world. If we do not take the way we are not in Christ, the one who is the way. So Christology serves the mission of the church which is the mission of Christ. Each one of us is called to play his or her part in this mission. In my presentation I have tried to give examples of the community of faith in Southern Africa and of our own journey during the last few years. I do it because it is also your journey. The church is one just as the way is one. We are involved with one another and all of us are in Christ.

AG Ad Gentes Divinitus. Decree on the Church's Missionary Activity. Vatican II.

EA Ecclesia in Africa. Apostolic Exhortation of Pope John Paul II, September 14 1995.

PL1 nd. Pastoral letters. Pretoria: SACBC.

Bate, S.C 1995. Inculturation and Healing. Pietermaritzburg: Cluster.

Bate, S.C ed. 1996. Serving Humanity. Pietermaritzburg: Cluster.

Bujo, B 1992. African Theology in Its Social Context. NY: Orbis

Nolan, A 1976. Jesus before Chrsitainity . Cape Town: David Philip.

Tutu, D. 1971. God - Black or White? Ministry 1:111-115.

Villa-Vicencio, C 1988. Trapped in Apartheid. NY: Orbis.