During the Sunday morning coffee hour, the Confession of Belhar probably isn’t at the top of the conversation list.
It’s not in the Book of Confessions of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A), so lots of Presbyterians have probably never read it.
But this confession — adopted in 1986 in South Africa during the heart of the struggle over apartheid — is beginning to draw renewed interest among Reformed Christians in the United States and internationally. South African churches have been urging the rest of the world to read it for years, saying it has a message Christians need to hear.
For while it was written in a particular time and place, its themes are unity, reconciliation and justice — exactly, some contend, the issues confronting American churches in the 21st century.
So some are starting to pay closer attention to Belhar.
At Union Theological Seminary-Presbyterian School of Christian Education in Richmond, this year’s Sprunt Lectures are being given by H. Russel Botman and Dirk J. Smit, two South African theologians who were involved in writing the Belhar Confession.
In 2004, the PC(USA) General Assembly, responding to a task force studying the issue of reparations, commended the Belhar Confession to the church for study and reflection. It’s been posted on the PC(USA) Web site https://www.pcusa.org/theologyandworship/confession/belhar.pdf , where Joseph Small of the Office of Theology and Worship says it’s receiving a respectable number of hits. (The complete text is available here in this Outlook issue.) Some study materials on Belhar should be ready for the church by this summer’s assembly in Birmingham, Small said.
And in the Reformed Church in America, which began a study of the Belhar Confession in 2000, grassroots support is building to make Belhar an official confession of the RCA, according to Douglas W. Fromm, a pastor from Ridgewood, N.J., who also is the RCA’s associate for ecumenical relations.
If that happens, that would mark the first time in the denomination’s history the RCA had added a confession to the three sixteenth-century confessions it already claims (those being the Heidelberg Catechism, the Belgic Confession and The Canons of the Synod of Dort).
Internationally, the Belhar Confession is making an impact too.
The World Alliance of Reformed Churches — a group of nearly 220 denominations of which PC(USA) Stated Clerk Clifton Kirkpatrick is president — has strongly recommended that Reformed churches discuss Belhar. Many of the WARC churches come from the Southern hemisphere, where there is deep concern about globalization and economic disparities — and the Belhar Confession includes potentially transforming language such as: “God is the God of the destitute, the poor and the wronged. The church is called and therefore must stand by people in any form of suffering. The church must stand where God stands.”
And Kirkpatrick said he hopes the PC(USA) will give the Belhar Confession serious consideration too.
In speaking of race, Belhar has much to say to “a society that’s been wracked by racism, to a multicultural world needing to find unity and reconciliation,” Kirkpatrick said. “It also deals with a lot of the issues the Theological Task Force is addressing. How at a deeper level do we find unity in Christ? … I think it has real relevance” to the PC(USA).
Many think of the Belhar Confession only in terms of race — thinking it has to do with apartheid in South Africa and its history of discrimination, Fromm said.
But “it has everything to do with us,” he said. In the confession, “there are three major themes — unity, reconciliation and justice. Those are universal themes … that speak to our time.”
Belhar history
First, a bit of history.
The Belhar Confession was first proposed in 1982 by the Dutch Reformed Mission Church, then led by Allan Boesak. Boesak asked the World Alliance of Reformed Churches to “declare apartheid a heresy.”
The Alliance did, and with the Dutch Reformed Mission Church declared that apartheid constituted a “status confessionis,” a situation so imperiled that the heart of the Gospel itself was at risk.
And the Dutch Reformed Mission Church began drafting a confessional statement — what became the Belhar Confession, which was adopted in 1986 after long conversations with the white Dutch Reformed Church in Southern Africa (DRC). In 1994, when the Dutch Reformed Mission Church (considered the “colored church”) joined with the Dutch Reformed Church in Africa (the “black church”) to form the Uniting Reformed Church, the Belhar Confession became a founding document — because it “came out of the crucible of the journey together,” Kirkpatrick said.
But the white DRC has never formally adopted it, although some congregations and regional synods within the denomination have. That denomination has been readmitted to the World Alliance of Reformed Churches, has theologically repudiated its former support of apartheid and is studying the Belhar Confession, Kirkpatrick said.
And the RCA got involved because it has longstanding ties to the Uniting Reformed Church, Fromm said. In the mid-1990s, when an RCA delegation was visiting Capetown, its members asked, “What can we do to work with you?”
According to Fromm, the Uniting church representatives replied: “You can study our confession.”
Belhar today
So why is the Belhar Confession important today?
Within the RCA, some are interested in Belhar because it goes beyond what other confessions have said, according to Fromm.
While “timely in their context and of great value and significance for the faith of the church, these ‘standards of unity’ say very little about the unity of the church,'” he has written. Fromm sees Belhar as having the possibility of helping to complete the historic confessions of the sixteenth century.
Next, “it deals with the whole issue of race within the church,” Small said. And “it’s a confession that really looks at the life of the church internally and tries to deal honestly with the imperatives that the gospel presents to the church itself. … These issues endure. I think that’s why Belhar has endured. It’s a confession that is not so wedded to its particular context” that it can’t speak to the church more broadly, in other times and places.
The Belhar Confession can be a door to discussing a wide range of issues involving unity and justice — from race relations to the kinds of economic disparities revealed in the U.S. by Hurricane Katrina to the treatment of immigrants and women.
Eunice McGarrahan, who is working to prepare study materials on the Belhar Confession for the PC(USA), said in an e-mail interview that “on a worldwide level, Reformed folks are interested in the unity aspects because of the violent fragmentations all over the world.”
And there is interest as well in how voices from other cultures, other times and places can help guide the Christian community today.
“Obviously, Reformed people have defined their faith, their life, their convictions through confessions,” Kirkpatrick said in an interview. Often those confessions were worked out at times of real risk, as with the Barmen Declaration, written in 1934 in protest over the actions of Nazi Germany.
“Probably equally critical for the shaping of the world has been the Belhar Confession,” Kirkpatrick said.
It’s important, he said, for the church to “hear the witness of Reformed Christians in different ages and under different pressures to mine the core concepts.” But the blind spot in the PC(USA) Book of Confessions, Kirkpatrick said, is “these are all confessions that come out of Europe and North America.”
McGarrahan would like the PC(USA) to keep two things in mind as it considers Belhar.
First, “what does it mean to confess something?” she asked. The PC(USA) places the Book of Confessions in its constitution “because they are supposed to constitute us,” to shape how we think and act. “But we treat them as museum pieces or occasional ammunition. We don’t engage them. So again, we have to ask ourselves, what does it mean to be a confessional church? If we can’t hear the voices long-silenced from the past, how will we hear voices long-silenced from another part of the world?”
Second, McGarrahan asked, “What is unity and what does it require of us? We think that it is measure of our collegiality or our ability to suppress our differences. But Belhar, in its strong biblical unfolding of its theology of unity, is clear that unity is God’s gift to us and that we are to maintain it for the sake of our witness to Christ, who is the One who overcomes all our hostility …
“This is a matter of our obedience to our Lord who prayed for our unity just before he went to the cross and it was so that the world would know that divisions and hostility can be overcome in Christ.”
