Kairos Time

There are at least two kinds of time: Chronos time and Kairos time.  Chronos time is every day time, the passing of the minutes, hours, days, weeks, and months.  Kairos time is time that is special, when there may be a particular movement of the Spirit of God.  The church calendar can lead us into Kairos time, with colors of purple leading us into the waiting of Advent and Lent, and with golds and whites celebrating at Christmas and Easter. 

Part of my trip to South Africa included an opportunity to reflect on and to learn from a Kairos moment in South Africa forty years ago, when I a mere preschooler.  In 1985, Christians in South Africa (mostly Black and Colored--two of their racial categories), discerned that they were in a Kairos moment.  They had been facing oppression and segregation for years, based on a belief in white supremacy and a desire for a captive work force for the mines and other big business.  And since 1948, they had been living under an apartheid regime, which formalized and extended the argument that white people were superior by, among other things, removing Black and colored people from their homes if they were in living on desirable land.  When the people rose up, the ruling party struck them down violently.  And the people often responded with violence--the fruit of those hounds of hell chasing the dispossessed: desperation, hatred, and bitterness.

Into this horror--horror still peppered with the beauty of new births, marriages, friendship, and laughter--spoke theologians and lay leaders. They were trying to read the times well and to see what the Gospel demanded of them. This was a Kairos moment, they said, not only for South Africa, but for the church.  It was "the moment of grace and opportunity, the favorable time in which God issues a challenge to decisive action."  But it was also a "dangerous time because, if this opportunity is missed, and allowed to pass by, the loss for the Church, for the Gospel, and for all the people in South Africa will be immeasurable."

Crises, they said, revealed the truth of who a people really were.  And the crises in South Africa was showing that the church was deeply divided.  "Both the oppressor and the oppressed claim the same loyalty to the same Church.  They are both baptized in the same baptism and participate together in the breaking of the same bread, the same body and blood of Christ.  There we sit in the same Church while outside Christian policemen and soldiers are beating up and killing Christian children or torturing Christian prisoners to death while yet other Christians stand by and weakly plead for peace."

What had led to this moment of truth?  They concluded they were facing three types of theology.  The first, state theology, supported the regime--the hierarchy, the forced removals, the beatings, the devaluing of human life.  It misused theological constructs and the Bible for its own purposes, claiming that Romans 13.1-7 gave divine authority to the state and demanded blind obedience.  They called the god that the state appealed to an idol, a god "of the casspirs and hippos [military vehicles], the god of teargas, rubber bullets, sjamboks, prison cells and death sentences. Here is a god who exalts the proud and humbles the poor–the very opposite of the God of the Bible who “scatters the proud of heart, pulls down the mighty from their thrones and exalts the humble” (Lk 1:51-52)." This god, they said, is the devil and to follow this god is to be heretical.

Church theology, coming from many church leaders (though not believed by the majority of Black and colored Christians), cautiously criticized apartheid.  It called for reconciliation, without repentance or justice, both which are necessary for true reconciliation.  When Church theology called for change, it addressed the white oppressors and asked them to reform the system.  It's assumption was that if individuals changed, they might offer small reforms.  But what was needed, these authors of the Kairos document determined, was immediate change that addressed the injustice embedded in the systems.  Further, by calling for only nonviolent change, Church theology was ignoring the violence of the state (I met people and heard stories of those who had been imprisoned and beaten for trying to resist the regime).  While the framers of the Kairos document admitted that people resisting apartheid were at times violent in their resistance, the blanket condemnation did not acknowledge the imbalance of power.  And Church leaders were not resisting the increasing militarization of the state.

Church theology's fundamental problem, they concluded, was that it lacked social analysis.  It had an inadequate understanding politics and political strategy.  "There will be a Christian way of approaching the political solutions, a Christian spirit, motivation and attitude.  But there is no way of bypassing politics and political strategies."  The reason Church theology lacked social analysis is that it was focused primarily on saving people out of the world and for heaven, which was not a biblical spirituality, they said.  "

A truly biblical spirituality would penetrate into every ‘aspect of human existence and would exclude nothing from God’s redemptive will. Biblical faith is prophetically relevant to everything that happens in the world."

The theological response these framers supported was what they called prophetic theology, a theology that took a stand and spoke to the particularities of their situation.  Prophetic theology needed to analyze the social situation accurately and determine how to respond in light of Scripture.  They determined apartheid was not a race war, but oppression, and that when God's people are oppressed in the Bible, God liberates them (i.e. Exodus 3.7-9 and Luke 4.18-19).  The apartheid regime, they said, could not be reformed, to be made incrementally .  It had to be removed.

Prophetic theology would call people to hope.  The oppressed, they said, had hope--they were fighting for their freedom and believed that God would enable them to carry on.  But the oppressed, the white people in South Africa, faced fear, not hope.  And so they doubled down in violence and silence.  But Christians, they said, needed to act and join the struggle.  "We must all accept responsibility for acting and living out our Christian faith in these circumstances. We pray that God will help all of us to translate the challenge of our times into action."

This was the moment that a gathering of mostly Christians--many trained theologians-- had come together to discuss, and to read their own contexts in light of its wisdom.  I don't often sit among professional theologians, listening to their academic discourse.  Of course, I did not agree with all the discussion raised, but I was not there to further reinforce my own siloed perspectives.  I was there to learn and to listen.  And I got to hear not only professional theologians, but also regular people, leaders from around the world, even, who have and are reading the signs of their times and applying Scripture to their situation.  People told stories, laughed, and ate.  And they wondered how to live faithfully today, talking often of creating pockets of faithfulness.  The discussion reminded me of Clarence Jordan, who I write about in Ordinary Heroes of Racial Justice.  While Clarence may not have followed Kairos document's prophetic call to civil disobedience, he insisted that Christians needed to form a new community, characterized by a shared life that honored each person's imago dei.

Reading this document, reflecting on it, and meeting people who had signed it and/or worked to end apartheid was humbling.  I wondered, and I would ask you, in what ways am I walking in state theology, church theology, or prophetic theology?  How can I better discern contemporary times, especially given that I study the past?  I wrote Ordinary Heroes of Racial Justice in part because I thought we were at a Kairos moment of sorts.  In the opening paragraph, I said, that "today no Christian in America, no matter their racial background, can ignore race.  This is a gift from God, a moment when we, the church in all its diversity, can seek justice and righteousness in all their fullness.  We must not let this moment pass."  For me, part of discerning the present--and moving past my own blind spots preventing me from reading Scripture well--requires learning from others who lived in different times and places than our own.