The Case of South African Apartheid: A Failure of Christian Ethics

Weekend Edition June 5-7, 2015

The Case of South African Apartheid

A Failure of Christian Ethics

by MICHAEL WELTON


At the heart of the crisis of the public presence of Christians in our tormented world has been their inability to offer any consistent and penetrating ethical critique of political subjugation, economic exploitation and racial (or sexual) oppression. In fact, Christian churches have often been in the forefront of championing and legitimating these explicit forms of human immiseration.

Those on the secular left are seldom aware of the role that exegetical interpretation of the Bible plays in shaping Christian responses to phenomena such as the state of Israel’s dispossession and brutal treatment of Palestinians or apartheid in South Africa (two of endless examples).

The question of “what kind of exegesis” is appropriate for Christians in the public square will be examined by analyzing how Christian thinkers and actors have read the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament to legitimate apartheid in South Africa (Richard Burridge, “Apartheid: an ethical and generic challenge to reading the New Testament”, in Imitating Jesus: an inclusive approach to Christian ethics [2007]).

Burridge, a well-known scholar of the New Testament gospels, has written a perceptively disturbing and unsettling commentary that reveals that Christian ethical thought offers different ways of understanding how to read texts into the world, each of which legitimized the South African apartheid regime.

More:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/06/05/a-failure-of-christian-ethics/