DeGruchy, John W.I Have Come a Long Way. Cape Town: Lux Verbi2015.

Abstract

John W. de Gruchy is a white South African theologian who has made an immense contribution to ecumenical life and thought both within and well beyond his own country. This autobiography really tells two life stories: his own personal journey and that of South Africa from the mid-20th century as seen from the inside. To many people, de Gruchy first became well-known as one who interpreted to the wider world the South African church situation under Apartheid in his seminal book The Church Struggle in South Africa (1979), a title that indicates the resonances he and others saw with the German Confessing Church's witness in Nazi Germany, and also his lifelong interest in Dietrich Bonhoeffer of whose theology he is a major interpreter. De Gruchy tells his own story vividly and honestly. He was born in Cape Town in 1939 in a liberal white environment. After a somewhat narrow youthful evangelicalism, his mind was opened through university studies at Cape Town and Grahamstown and he was ordained to the Congregational, his first pastorate being in Durban. His interest in Bonhoeffer was ignited during a year of postgraduate study in Chicago, when he perceived the relevance of Bonhoeffer's witness to the South African scene. Back in South Africa, he became a close associate of Byers Naudé, who founded the Christian Institute (CI) in 1963 as a form of Confessing Church. De Gruchy's account makes clear how, with the Cottesloe consultation that followed the Sharpeville massacre of 1960, the involvement of the WCC was vital in encouraging an ecumenical response to Apartheid in South Africa. Although closely identified with Naudé and his work, de Gruchy's own full-time ecumenical role was with the South African Council of Churches (SACC), in which he worked as director of communication and studies from 1968 to 1973. The SACC, along with the CI, was by now thrust into the forefront of the churches’ response to the growing crisis, and de Gruchy was directly responsible for the SACC-CI report The Church and Apartheid. At the same time he wrote his doctoral thesis on the ecclesiologies of Barth and Bonhoeffer as a frame of reference for the South African church struggle. It was while thus engaged that a close friendship grew with Bonhoeffer's friend and biographer Eberhard Bethge and his wife Renate, and it was de Gruchy who invited them to South Africa in 1973. Eberhard Bethge's South African lectures were published as Bonhoeffer: Exile and Martyr (At one of the lectures, someone in the audience, so impressed with how Bonhoeffer seemed to speak directly to the Apartheid scene, asked when it was that Bonhoeffer had visited South Africa!). In 1973 de Gruchy left the SACC to teach at the University of Cape Town, where he remained until retirement in 2003, first of all teaching Indian religions and then becoming professor of Christian Studies. Far from this move being a retreat from public involvement into academia, de Gruchy remained as committed as ever to the churches’ engagement with apartheid and interpreting that engagement theologically. His founding of the Journal of Theology for Southern Africa provided a much-needed tool for the kind of committed reflection that was needed. In the face of ecclesiastical timidity, his own writings uninhibitedly flaunted the argument that Apartheid was a heresy, just as Bonhoeffer had declared the racism of the Nazis and so-called “German Christians” to be a perversion of Christianity. He was a signatory to the courageous Kairos document of 1985. During the uncertain yet crucial years of transition from 1990, he sought to answer how, after so many years of saying “No!” to Apartheid, a “Yes” had to be uttered to democracy and if so on what theological basis – an interest that took him to see first-hand the countries of eastern Europe in their emergence from communist totalitarianism. Not surprisingly, he acted as a consultant to the process setting up the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Many readers will be struck – perhaps even somewhat exhausted – by the chronicle not only of writings on subjects embracing reconciliation, a theology of ministry, Calvin, a Reformed theology of liberation, restorative justice, as well as more Bonhoeffer, but also of the seemingly endless travels and visits to lecture on every continent and in just about every major university in the world. But de Gruchy is more than a global conference-trotter. As his account makes clear, so many of his travels and meetings have given him new experiences and perspectives that he has absorbed into his fertile mind, and out of which he has forged new insights and themes of his own. Thus in his later years he has ventured into a theology of aesthetics and an exploration of Christian humanism. On this way he has been accompanied by his wife Isobel, whose own theology has found expression in poetry and painting, with a lot of inspiration from Julian of Norwich. The latter stage of the journey however has been meant an encounter with tragedy in the loss of their son Steve, himself a notable theologian, in a drowning accident in 2010. Even that unspeakably dark experience has been taken up into a new theological exploration in de Gruchy's moving book Led into Mystery (2013). As Archbishop Desmond Tutu says in his foreword, “Many of us … give thanks for John's intellectual brilliance and outstanding scholarship. But most of all I give thanks for the humility of revealing his vulnerability.” As a theologian, he is rooted in his own Reformed tradition yet open to the whole reach of Christianity – in his placing of himself in the struggle for justice, in his deep empathy with the worlds of other religions, and in his quest for the wholly human and all that makes human life enriching. If “ecumenical” refers to the whole inhabited earth, then John de Gruchy is a truly ecumenical theologian. He has indeed come a long way, and his journey is not finished yet. Keith Clements, retired general secretary of the Conference of European Churches, is the author of Dietrich Bonhoeffer's Ecumenical Quest.