Kairos Document - Reactions

Reactions

Although the Apartheid State was not directly addressed in the KD, the government reacted strongly against it. A government spokesperson rejected it in a speech in Parliament, denouncing it as a call for violence, and calling for its prohibition ('banning') by the government. An Inkatha political magazine, the Clarion Call, similarly attacked it as a theological document that supported the 'violence of the ANC' (African National Congress). However, to the surprise of many observers at the time, the KD was never banned by the Apartheid government.

Within the churches in South Africa, and indeed worldwide, the KD led to intense and often heated debates. The unpolished nature of this radical document allowed many critics to disengage from real debate. For example, Markus Barth and Helmut Blanke make a rather brief, disparaging remark, which seems to be based on a reading of the KD that is significantly at variance with its substance. In the KD, Barth and Blanke claim, "it is the starved, exploited, oppressed people whose cause, as it were, by definition is righteous, while all political, economical, and ecclesiastical wielders of institutionalized power are depicted as instruments of the devil."

A crucial part of the debate was the distinction made between state, church, and prophetic theology. The distinction between 'church' and 'prophetic' theology, where the former was explicitly rejected by the KD, caused furious debates. Many argued the KD's qualified criticism of central theological concepts like reconciliation.

Another aspect of this debate, especially in South Africa, was the question of violence: not the violence of the state, but the supposed use of violence to resist and indeed overthrow the state. As the summary above shows, this was not a central part of the KD, but it nevertheless became a focus for the debate. This focus on violence soon came to eclipse much of the rest of the KD. The publication of the book Theology & Violence is testimony to that debate; it attempted both to ground it in biblical, historical, ethical and theological reflections, and to 'move on', as Frank Chikane in his contribution to that book called it.

The influence and effect of the KD was such that attempts were made in a number of contexts to create similarly 'revolutionary' documents to challenge the churches' attitude to particular issues. None of these were remotely as successful as the KD. For example, in South Africa again, a group in the ICT attempted to address the sharply rising and complex violence in 1990 with a 'new Kairos document'. Several years later, some theologians in Europe tried to address global economics as 'the new Kairos'. Perhaps the most successful attempt to follow in the footsteps of the KD was the 'Latin American KD', called The Road to Damascus, written by Central American theologians and published in April 1988. However, the KD was successful in influencing black evangelicals and Pentecostals to come up with their own declarations in the context of Apartheid.