Stephen Crittenden: Welcome everyone, to The Religion Report.

Today we’re picking up on the theme of individual conscience and the role of the churches in politics that we began exploring last week.

In a moment we’ll be speaking to Labor’s Foreign Affairs spokesman, Kevin Rudd. He’s just written a 5,000-word piece for The Monthly magazine marking the centenary of the birth of the German Protestant pastor, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was part of the resistance movement against the Nazis. Born on February 4th, 1906, Bonhoeffer was one of the founders of the breakaway Confessing Church, which opposed the treatment of the Jews, and he was hanged in the final weeks of World War II for his part in the failed July 20 plot to assassinate Hitler.

Kevin Rudd says, ‘He is without doubt the man I admire most in the history of the 20th century’.

As it happens, a leading Bonhoeffer scholar, South African Protestant theologian and church historian, John W. de Gruchy was in Australia last week on a speaking tour to mark the Bonhoeffer anniversary. Professor de Gruchy taught at the University of Capetown for 30 years, and was a prominent opponent of the apartheid regime in South Africa. He’s the editor of The Cambridge Guide to Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and another very fine book, Christianity and Democracy, in which among other things, he explores the relationship between Church and State that developed in Christian lands, and how western parliamentary democracy developed, at least in part, out of the very democratic internal structures and processes of mediaeval religious orders like the Dominicans.

Professor de Gruchy, welcome to the program. In your book you say ‘western democracy developed within the matrix of Christendom and the Enlightenment, and that it can only be deciphered in relationship to both, that democracy took over from Christianity its sense of the sacred and some of its major values.’ These seem to be important things to be reminding people about in 2006, would you agree?

John W. de Gruchy: Well I think so. We get the idea that democracy of course developed out of Ancient Greece and then through the Enlightenment, as you mentioned, and finally the French Revolution and the American Revolution. But some of the seeds were sown by the Hebrew prophets, and picked up by various trajectories in Christianity in the Middle Ages for example, and then later. So I think Christianity has played a very important role in shaping modern democracy, at least in the West; it might not be true elsewhere, but certainly in terms of the West.

Stephen Crittenden: Would you agree that many people in the secular West at the moment are bewildered by the return of religion, and they feel that part of what secularism is all about is that we beat the churches back at the French Revolution, and suddenly we’re still sort of finding religion playing a big role in our parliaments, and influencing our politicians, and people can’t quite work out why.

John W. de Gruchy: Well I don’t think theologians can quite work out why either. But it is a phenomenon and it’s not unprecedented, it’s happened several times in the course of history that religion has bounced back in one way or another. A great deal depends upon historical context. You get the very interesting situation in North America where secularism and religion have always coexisted and fed off each other, so one cannot say that what has happened there is the same as what has happened in Europe since the French Revolution. It’s a different experience, and certainly since the Communist revolution and what happened after the Second World War in Eastern Europe. So secularisation in Europe means something a little different to the North American experience, and in Africa where I come from, Southern Africa, it’s almost impossible to think about democracy, or society, purely in secular terms.

Stephen Crittenden: Because religion plays so much role in all sorts of civic institutions?

John W. de Gruchy: Well that’s right, and it’s deeply embedded in the culture, and that’s quite different to the Australian experience. So I don’t think one can generalise. So that the bouncing back of religion depends where you’re standing and where you’re located, as to how you’re experiencing it.

Stephen Crittenden: Yes indeed. I’m also I guess making another point, and this is a point that you make in a very interesting way in your book, and that is, I think it’s an unfamiliar idea for many people, the idea that our democratic procedures may have their origin not just in Athenian democracy in Ancient Greece, but in the remarkably democratic ethos of the mediaeval friars, the orders like the Dominican order, which ironically gave us the Inquisition, but also gave us democracy. And I guess gave us our ideas of individual conscience and natural law too.

John W. de Gruchy: Well that’s right, and the whole notion of conciliarity and things of that sort. It’s in people like Thomas Aquinas and so forth, you get a lot of the theory being developed on how society should function, and one cannot call it democracy in the modern sense, but at least one sees the seeds being sown, and the way in which some of the orders were structured spills over from that into later periods. And many of the key thinkers in European history were influenced by that whole tradition, whether by education or having been within it. So I wouldn’t say Christianity is the dominant or only, but it certainly is a major factor in all of this.

Stephen Crittenden: I’d like to take you back even further to the 4th century. You say that St Ambrose in Milan, he was the Archbishop of Milan, who developed a doctrine of the church having the right to intervene in political affairs. You say it basically led to 1700 years of ambiguity about the separation of Church and State.

John W. de Gruchy: Yes. Well I think he stands early in the whole development of what we now call Christendom, or the Constantinian period, setting the parameters for Church-State relations in terms of the church having a responsibility to keep the State along a particular moral line, and of course that is what is broken really with the French Revolution, and the development of secular democracy, and that’s when people begin to say in Europe that the church should keep out of this whole area.

Stephen Crittenden: But the churches haven’t dropped that idea completely, have they? The churches keep coming back, especially on issues like I guess social justice, but also private morality; they keep coming back to say ‘No, no, we have a right to speak here’.

John W. de Gruchy: Well there’s ambiguity there because for example in Germany during the Nazi period, the majority within the churches believed quite strongly that the church should not interfere in politics or say anything about politics, and that has been a very strong tradition in certain sectors of the church, whereas others have always felt strongly that they should speak out on justice issues of that kind, so there’s not one model of Church-State relations, there are various models. The trick today of course is how within a secular society the church participates, and you’ve got this ironical situation in the United States, such a strong separation of Church and State, and yet religion plays a dominating factor in political life and political decisions.

Stephen Crittenden: Your comments about the Nazi period remind me that you’re here in Australia for a conference, or several conferences in fact, celebrating the centenary of the birth of one of the greatest of all of the 20th century Christian saints, Deitrich Bonhoeffer, who of course was executed by the Nazis for his role on the edge of the plot to kill Adolf Hitler. What is the importance of Bonhoeffer for us today? I suspect he has a lot to make us think about on this issue of individual conscience and the role of Church and State.

John W. de Gruchy: Well I think he does. Of course it’s difficult to reduce it into a couple of pithy sentences, but I think that one of the things that he does teach us is that the silencing of the prophetic voice of the church is to the detriment of the state. It’s not just something that affects the church let’s say, but he had a wonderful lecture that he gave just before Hitler came to power in which he said that the church has the responsibility to remind the state of its responsibility and of its boundaries. In other words, Don’t play God. And it had the responsibility of binding up the victims within society, whether they were state victims or victims from other causes. And then he made the third observation that if the state fails in its responsibility to be state, in other words if it transgresses its own boundaries, then the church has a responsibility to put a spoke in the wheels. Now that’s a pretty radical statement and of course that’s where he ended up.

Stephen Crittenden: I guess for me too, the other issue with Bonhoeffer is he isn’t someone who sort of pussyfoots around on the sidelines. At a moment of crisis he understands or he believes that you have to act, and act decisively, and in this case, take part in a plot to kill the leader.

John W. de Gruchy: Yes. Well of course he didn’t see this as akin to murder or to assassination. For him, it was part of a long-standing Christian tradition that went back many centuries of tyrannicide. In other words, there come those moments, sometimes very rare, in which it becomes morally justified to do this, but it doesn’t justify the use of violence more generally or it doesn’t justify war, it doesn’t justify violent revolution. This is a very specific act out of necessity, out of conscience, dependent really on God’s mercy in doing it, because it’s a guilty action but it’s a necessary one.

Stephen Crittenden: As a South African, who comes out of a reformed tradition, of course we all remember the role of the Dutch Reformed Church in being a supporter of apartheid; I guess that goes back to the very same kind of acquiescing in the role of the state that Bonhoeffer was complaining about, or breaking away from.

John W. de Gruchy: Yes it certainly does. The Dutch Reformed Church in South Africa came to South Africa in the middle of the 17th century, and the controlling influence there was the Dutch East India Company, not the government. It was the same in New Amsterdam, which became New York. It’s a very early example of global economic power controlling the church, but it led to the church being confined to the so-called religious sphere of life and really not being allowed to speak beyond in terms of the social questions of the day, and that became part of the ethos of the Dutch Reformed Church.

Stephen Crittenden: How has the Dutch Reformed Church continued on in the post-apartheid era?

John W. de Gruchy: Well I think the Dutch Reformed Church today is struggling to reinvent itself, its identity, and is doing so I think very well in the main. The white Dutch Reformed Church was and remains the sort of cultural centre for the Afrikaaner people. It’s like an immigrant church if you like, that might exist in Australia from let’s say Norway, and the Norwegians find some sort of cultural security in their church. So the Dutch Reformed Church is closely aligned to that. But it’s coming to grips with the multicultural realities of South Africa and the very far-reaching political changes and it’s certainly a very different church today than it was under apartheid.

Stephen Crittenden: Thank you very much for being on the program.

John W. de Gruchy: Thank you. Good to be with you.

Stephen Crittenden: Professor John W. de Gruchy.

Guests Professor John W. de Gruchy University of Cape Town, South Africa

Publications Title: Christianity and Democracy Author : John W. de Gruchy Publisher: Cambridge University Press, 1995

http://www.abc.net.au/rn/religionreport/stories/2006/1754592.htm#transcript