Personal Blogs

Much of the peer-reviewed literature I’ve read up on since my final year happens to be focused on the topics of Christian thought according to André du Toit and Irving Hexham. This blog was originally written in 2009 as a research proposal for one of my lecturers, H. M. Hopfl (Essex), and a potential supervisor, Dr. Ruth Watson (Cambridge). In the following blog, I engage briefly with the theme of polity from the perspective of Hexham and Du Toit in preparation for B813, which commences on 04 May 2024.

Did the Socio-Politics of Reformed Thinking Influence Social Outcomes in South Africa?

Many an author on Afrikaner Calvinism has gone to great lengths to structure books on aspects of Calvinism in the sixteenth century. Irving Hexham is an interesting contributor to Calvin’s biographical oeuvre and an inspiration when writing about the history of the Dutch Reformed Church (henceforth "DRC") and when attempting to interpret the complex ambiguities that exist in The Cape. I plan to use the debate between Hexham and Andre de Toit as the groundwork for a central discussion (which is arguably unresolved). From there it should prove possible to lay hold of some more concrete lines of discussion such as the question of worker ethic, racial discrimination, and religious separatism in the seventeenth-century age of enlightenment^[1].

The groundwork of Hexham (1975) cites many authors in its critique of the Afrikaners, among them Susan Ritner (1967) who explains categorically that a decision by the 1857 Synod of the DRC to condone separate worship in the Dutch Reformed Church of South Africa shows “evidence of racial discrimination”. Hexham makes such claims as “to this day Calvinists are a small group in the DRC and their real power Is probably far less than many commentators would like to believe (1975:202). The impression given by Hexham here is one of unsavory disillusionment in the epistemology of the DRC and its relationship with Calvin’s original sixteenth-century philosophy and that of his followers in Europe.

Hexham leads us to a very interesting place in the literature, stating:

“du Toit (1847-1911) did not pretend to be an author or a television celebrity. All he claimed to do was to uphold the ideas of Dutch Calvinism in South Africa, or rather, as he would have put it, to propagate “true” Calvinism in South Africa. He admitted freely that Calvinism which he advocated originated in the Netherlands and he made no pretence about the fact that his political philosophy was based upon the views of Abraham Kuyper in the Netherlands”

Hexham writes, “It may be possible to trace back to Calvin’s theology some of the terms used by Afrikaner Nationalists as part of their political vocabulary, but most important ‘Calvinist’ theories and attitudes are ones connected with Christian-Nationialism. Yet these cannot be traced back to Calvin.”

André De Toit has published literature in direct response to the issues raised by Hexham (de Toit, 1983^[2]), where he refers to “the cluster of construct that has been used to justify racial inequality and repression in latter-day Afrikaner societies” as a “historical myth” referred to as the “Calvinist paradigm of Afrikaner history”. In a latter text, de Toit (1985^[3]) supports this view concerning what apartheid meant through the lens of Calvinist history by stating that “very little of this purported historical explanation will stand up to scrutiny”. Here, de Toit is referring to the central thesis of the “Calvinist paradigm of Afrikaner history; the ideology of a Chosen People functioned to legitimate racial inequality and oppression”.

To interpret fully the role of Dutch Calvinism, one must spend time researching the origins of its reform (that of the Netherlands), unlike towns in France and Scotland, Calvinism did not settle in the same manner during the fifteenth century. Also, the major work of Cornelius Van Til as well as other leading Dutch neo-Calvinists (such as Meow, Waltershtorf, and Plantinga) require one to appreciate the history of ‘presuppositional’ apologetics and its conflict with ‘classical’ apologetics within the Afrikaner tradition.

There exists a self-evidential concern relating to the principle of ‘common grace’ and the ‘covenant common grace’ which maintains controversy due to its revered conflict with both ‘prevenient’ and ‘special’ grace for its self-justification of divine potestas within Presbyterian establishments which in itself would cause a series of social phenomenon to perpetuate themselves, such as discipline and order. Furthermore, the more intellectually stimulating area of research will undoubtedly also constitute an interesting theoretical aspect; i.e. an inquisition that shall involve analyzing the doctrines that underpin Lapsariaism and Antelapsarianism concerning the Supralapsarianism advocated by Kuyper. We know the historical context of this debate goes as far back as the 1618 Synod of Dordrecht, where the confessional unity of the Reformed churches in the Netherlands^[4] and South Africa can be traced to and where the departure from traditional Calvinism was arguably initially conceived. It is therefore important to distinguish the “elements of disparity” and help continue and contribute to this outstanding literature.

1.     Meara, D. O. (1978) “Analysing Afrikaner Nationalism: The ‘Christian-National’ Assault on White Trade Unionism in South Africa”, 1934–1948. African Affairs (London). [Online] 77(306), pp. 45–72 – Available at https://www.jstor.org/stable/721347 (Accessed on 02 May 2024)