“Apartheid” (separation) is a worldwide phenomenon. In fact, we learn from the Bible that God Himself determined the boundaries or borders of nations. The reason for their allotted boundaries is to present every nation an equal opportunity to seek Him for salvation.
Act 17:26, 27 And He made from one [common origin, one source, one blood] all nations of men to settle on the face of the earth, having definitely determined [their] allotted periods of time and the fixed boundaries of their habitation (their settlements, lands, and abodes), So that they should seek God, in the hope that they might feel after Him and find Him, although He is not far from each one of us.
Think of it: God separated nations so that their separation from Him (by virtue of their sin and lost status) may be eradicated. Why? . . . . because any attempt other that God’s own way of uniting people in Christ Jesus His Son, is futile. Nimrod’s Tower of Babel is a good example of man’s puny little endeavours to unite mankind in a loving and caring brotherhood and a similar futile venture under Antichrist is closing in on the world very fast. The argument is this: “God has given to each nation its proper opportunity to learn his character. Idolatry, therefore, is folly and wickedness, since it is possible to find out the existence of the one God from his works.”
There is a growing tendency amongst post-modern South African clergy to vilify “Apartheid,” not only with an intent to expose its dark and ugly history, but to project its atrocities onto biblical Christianity and to discredit it as false by trying to prove that it too separates people. Sakkie Spangenberg of the Nuwe Hervormers (New Reformers) ventured to do just that in a debate between himself and Dr William Lane-Craig at the Musaion in Pretoria on 12 May. Some of their adherents have written several articles on this subject (here, here and here). The result is that the majority of the post modern preachers are compromising the Gospel of Jesus Christ and are even prepared to blend it with other religions in order to remove the stigma of Apartheid. How else are you going to advance the abysmal marriage between the New Science (Quantum Physics, fractal theory and chaos theory) and the new quantum spirituality which claims that God is not only separate from his creation but that He is simultaneously immanent (in everyone and everything). Warren Smith in his book “A Wonderful Deception” wrote:
The New Age/New Spirituality is already heralding quantum physics as a “scientific” basis for their contention that God is not only transcendent but also immanent—”in” everyone and everything. Physicist Fritjof Capra’s 1975 best-selling book on quantum physics—The Tao of Physics: An Exploration of the Parallels between Modern Physics and Eastern Mysticism–was the first to present this proposed scientific/spiritual model to a mass audience. In it, Capra explains that he gained new spiritual insights through a mystical experience he had sitting on a beach in Santa Cruz, California in 1969:
Five years ago, I had a beautiful experience which set me on a road that has led to the writing of this book. I was sitting by the ocean one late summer afternoon, watching the waves rolling in and feeling the rhythm of my breathing, when I suddenly became aware of my whole environment as being engaged in a gigantic cosmic dance. . . . As I sat on that beach my former experiences [research in high-energy physics] came to life; I ‘saw’ cascades of energy coming down from outer space, in which particles were created and destroyed in rhythmic pulses; I ‘saw’ the atoms of the elements and those of my body participating in this cosmic dance of energy; I felt its rhythm and I ‘heard’ its sound, and at that moment I knew that this was the Dance of Shiva, the Lord of Dancers worshipped by the Hindus. (1) (Emphasis added)
As a matter of interest, Cobus van Wyngaard as most of the other post modern clergy in South Africa, is an ardent admirer of Fritjof Capra. Nevertheless, let us continue.
Apartheid (separation) in the sense of looking down with disdain on peoples of other races and confining them to social positions down the ladder, separate from your own, is wrong — totally wrong.
James 2:1-10 MY BRETHREN, pay no servile regard to people [show no prejudice, no partiality]. Do not [attempt to] hold and practice the faith of our Lord Jesus Christ [the Lord] of glory [together with snobbery]! For if a person comes into your congregation whose hands are adorned with gold rings and who is wearing splendid apparel, and also a poor [man] in shabby clothes comes in, And you pay special attention to the one who wears the splendid clothes and say to him, Sit here in this preferable seat! while you tell the poor [man], Stand there! or, Sit there on the floor at my feet! Are you not discriminating among your own and becoming critics and judges with wrong motives? Listen, my beloved brethren: Has not God chosen those who are poor in the eyes of the world to be rich in faith and in their position as believers and to inherit the kingdom which He has promised to those who love Him? But you [in contrast] have insulted (humiliated, dishonored, and shown your contempt for) the poor. Is it not the rich who domineer over you? Is it not they who drag you into the law courts? Is it not they who slander and blaspheme that precious name by which you are distinguished and called [the name of Christ invoked in baptism]? If indeed you [really] fulfill the royal Law in accordance with the Scripture, You shall love your neighbor as [you love] yourself, you do well. But if you show servile regard (prejudice, favoritism) for people, you commit sin and are rebuked and convicted by the Law as violators and offenders. For whosoever keeps the Law [as a] whole but stumbles and offends in one [single instance] has become guilty of [breaking] all of it. (Emphasis added).
God had to teach the apostle Peter a good lesson to free him from his deeply imbedded belief that a Jew should not sit down to eat with Gentiles because they are allegedly polluted (Remember the vision of the sheet Peter saw let down from heaven? – Acts 10:11-16). Although Peter eventually obeyed the leading of the Spirit and accompanied the men Cornelius sent to summon him to his home, he later fell into the very same “Apartheid-ditch” when Paul had to resist him to his face because — now listen very carefully — because he “walked not uprightly according to the truth of the gospel.” (Galatians 2:14). Any kind of separation other than the separation God ordained by virtue of the boundaries he set for nations, is wrong — totally wrong. It is not only anti-Gospel but hampers the preaching and the spreading of the Gospel. Calvinism per se pretty much had a lot to do with the institutionalization of Apartheid in South Africa. John Calvin wrote in his Institutes of the Christian Religion:
All are not created on equal terms, but some are preordained to eternal life, others to eternal damnation; and, accordingly, as each has been created for one or other of these ends, we say that he has been predestined to life or to death. (2)
Can Calvinists honestly say that this statement is biblical, especially in the light of James 2:9 quoted above? Or would they rather argue that Paul was completely wrong when he wrote: “there is no respect of persons with God” (Romans 2:11). He shows absolutely no partiality and anyone who is racially prejudiced is not in tune with God or his Gospel. I recently heard someone say: “You shouldn’t touch him with the longest available pole because he is beyond any hope of redemption and has no hope of ever going to heaven.” Guess who said it and why? Well, of course it was a Calvinist (one of the privileged elect) who referred to a reprobate (one of the underprivileged non-elect who was chosen to be cast into hell before the foundation of the earth).
When the reformed churches in South Africa began to plead for forgiveness for their part in the justification of Apartheid from Scripture, they did not do so from a biblical or Gospel perspective but from a Calvinist one. In fact, they could not have argued in favour of Apartheid from a biblical or Gospel perspective, simply because the Gospel has and never will tolerate it. Had they obeyed the Gospel, they would never have had any proof in defence of Apartheid. But then again, how could they have justified Apartheid from a biblical or Gospel perspective when their own “Gospel” is based on election, the very building block for Apartheid? Their approval of Apartheid was based mainly on scripture from the Old Testament which, in reference to Israel’s unique position as God’s chosen people, is replete with the phenomenon of separateness (Apartheid).
Lev 20:24 But I have said unto you, Ye shall inherit their land, and I will give it unto you to possess it, a land that floweth with milk and honey: I am the LORD your God, which have separated you from other people. (Emphasis added). (Please bear in mind that God’s decision to separate Israel as a holy nation unto Himself, had nothing to do with racial discrimination. He kept them apart for a single purpose in mind and that was to protect them from the dangerous idolatrous practices of the heathen nations surrounding them and especially to work out his plan of salvation through a chosen Messianic line within the confines of the nation of Israel).
In his article Dutch Calvinism and the Development of Afrikaner Nationalism Irving Hexham (3) writes:
Most books dealing with South African issues mention at some point that the Calvinist religion of the Afrikaner people have played an important role in the development of Afrikaner Nationalism. Writing on “Afrikaner Nationalism” in the Oxford History of South Africa Rene de Villiers says:
There was another factor which, from the outset, played a continuing role in holding the Afrikaner people together and shaping their political philosophy, namely, the Calvinism preached and practiced by the Dutch Reformed Churches of which 90 percent of Afrikaners are adherent. (4)
In The Last Trek Sheila Patterson illustrates this influence by saying:
To the Boers the Old Testament was a mirror of their own lives. In it they found the deserts and fountains, the drought and plagues, the captivity and the exodus. Above all they found Chosen People guided by a stern but partial Deity through the midst of the heathen to the promised land. And it was Old Testament and the doctrines of Calvin that moulded the Boer into the Afrikaner of today . . . The doctrines which the Boers took with them on their Trek through the veld and the centuries were those of sixteenth century Calvinism. (5)
Their insistence, prior to 1994, on Old Testament passages as sufficient proof for the phenomenon of Apartheid stems from the Calvinist’s view that the Church (and in particular the elect) have replaced Israel as a nation. The next inevitable step was Apartheid because, according to their thinking, God Himself has separated the new Israel (the elect) from the non-elect. Do you see the connection? In the more extreme factions of Calvinism, i.e. the so-called “Boerevolk” (“Israel vision”) who, as they believe, are the ten lost tribes of Israel, the phenomenon of Apartheid has taken on a spiritual dimension because they actually believe that black people do not have a soul and therefore are irredeemable. This, of course, is completely anti-biblical and utter nonsense.
Before you castigate me, I must once again explain that God’s separation of his chosen people from all the other nations was not because he favoured them above the others. He had to choose someone through whom He could bring his Messiah into the world as a man to pay the penalty for all of mankind’s sins. Jesus could only be fully man (while He remained fully God) in the context of legitimate ancestors and a nation of his own and God in his sovereignty chose Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and their decendants to be his ancestors and Israel to be that nation. This is precisely why God declared a blessing on those who blessed Abraham and his physical descendants (the Jews) and a curse on those who cursed them, for to curse them is to curse the very blessing of God through Abraham’s son, Isaac.
The stigma of the Auschwitz-Birkenau complex, comprising 48 Nazi death camps which Hitler and his cronies built in occupied Poland to exterminate the Jews during World War II and in which at least 960,000 Jews, 75,000 Poles, and some 19,000 Roma (Gypsies) were mercilessly butchered, has become a useful rod in the hands of anti-Semitic activists in America and elsewhere in the world. It is no surprise because America and England are only continuing what they had begun during Word War II. In his book “Judgement Islam, Israel and the Nations” Dave Hunt exposes America’s and England’s reluctance to at least obstruct Nazi Germany in her heinous murder of Jews at Auschwitz.
It was not until January 16, 1944, at the urging of a minor official who presented to him once more the staggering information already known, that Morganthau persuaded Roosevelt to take action. The motive, however, was not to rescue Jews from Hitler’s ovens, but to defer political criticism that could hurt him in the upcoming elections and his bid for an unprecedented fourth term. The War Refugee Board was formed, but its efforts were too little and too late. To the very end of the war, U.S. and British military leaders turned a deaf ear to Jewish pleas to bomb the railroad lines leading in and out of Auschwitz and other death camps.
American journalist Dorothy Thompson wrote in Hitler’s day, “It is fantastic commentary on the inhumanity of our times that for thousands and thousands of people a piece of paper with a stamp on it is the difference between life and death.” And even the proper piece of paper proved worthless as the bloodlust reached new heights worldwide. (6) (Emphasis added).
The abominable word “Auschwitz” is no longer used only to remind us of the atrocities of Nazi Germany against the Jewish nation but has become a rallying cry against the Jews who are supposedly committing genocide against the Palestinians, and to make it worse they inappropriately and absurdly link Auschwitz to the Apartheid system in South Africa. The YouTube site is stacked with home-made clips that pin the Apartheid stigma on the Jews: Titles such as the following are numerous:
- Racism in Israel
- Apartheid Paradigm: Palestine-Israel Noam
- UN Official calls Israel “Apartheid”
- Stop US aid to Apartheid Israel
Here in my own country, South Africa, things aren’t any better. Our young post-modern clergy in particular have no clue whatsoever what the difference is between the Nazi atrocities at Auschwitz-Birkenau and Apartheid. To them it is one and the same thing, conveniently forgetting that in the years prior to 1994 black on black violence was often more hideous than Apartheid itself. Apartheid is GONE but not the VIOLENCE amongst blacks. Take a look at the latter link to a CNN video clip and please tell me whether this is not Apartheid? (Xenophobia).
Cobus van Wyngaard, pastor of the Kameeldrif DRC and a staff member of the Centre for Public Theology at the University of Pretoria, recently wrote two comments on the Apartheid system in South Africa. On 3 May 2010 in his comment “Auschwitz and Apartheid: which do we know better?” he very cleverly links Apartheid to the Nazi atrocities at Auschwitz. On page 32 of his book, Judgment Day, Dave Hunt quotes John Loftus and Mark Aarons:
For more than twenty centuries, the Jewish people, more than any other segment of humanity, have been persecuted, uprooted, and annihilated. It is true that many ethnic and religious groups have suffered grievously at the hands of tyrants, but there is a crucial difference. More Africans were killed in the era of slavery, but there was no determined intent to eradicate the entire Negro race. A higher percentage of Armenians perished in the Turkish genocide before World War I, but the main intent was to deport them, not extinguish their genetic pool. Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, and Suharto murdered millions of their own citizens, but the motive for those crimes was political power, not racial animus. In each of these cases, the genocide was intended to serve a deeper purpose—the conquest of territory, the acquisition of wealth, the enlargement of political power…. In contrast, the genocide of the Jewish people was not intended to be a means to an end. It was not attempted in order to achieve a more fundamental purpose. It was the fundamental purpose. This is what makes the Nazi Holocaust unique in human history. (7)
There is a vast difference between the Hitlerian and Islamic jihad to entirely annihilate the Jews (and by the way they have expressed their gratitude for Hitler on several occasions) (8) and separate development (Apartheid). The UN, America, England and the other nations have tried for decades to vie for an independent Palestinian state in the Middle East, separate from the Jews. Isn’t that Apartheid?
In an attempt to broaden Cobus van Wyngaard’s narrow scope on Apartheid and its atrocities, I wrote a comment on his blog to remind him of the atrocities being perpetuated under the ANC Government.
I’m not saying that Apartheid was the best thing that ever happened in South Africa. However, there is more Apartheid in our country now than before. Four million people (a great deal of them whites) are jobless. Why? Because their skins are white. I’m merely asking you to make a fair assessment between Apartheid and the other atrocities against mankind. Auschwitz in your estimate is a good yardstick to measure Apartheid but please be fair and mention the other atrocities as well, like for instance the ongoing murder on white South African farmers. Did you speak out against Malema’s love song “Kill the Boer, kill the farmer”?
Guess what? Our very reverend Cobus van Wyngaard refused to place my comment on his blog, simply because he and his buddies walk around South Africa and in their pulpits with blinkers over their eyes. They only see what they want to see and damn the rest. In another comment here he wrote “I want to talk about Apartheid.” How on earth can you talk about Apartheid when you do not know what the difference is between the Nazi’s atrocities and Apartheid? As I have already pointed out, the worldwide plea for a separate Palestinian state in the Middle East is nothing else but pure Apartheid.
Because of man’s innate wickedness these atrocities will continue until the Lord Jesus Christ returns to set up his Kingdom of peace on earth. In fact, things are going to become much worse prior to Christ’s return when a man who is going to make Hitler and his Nazi atrocities look like a Sunday School picnic will appear on the world scene in the very near future, and like Hitler try to exterminate the Jewish nation. His most dangerous ploy will be to present himself as Israel’s long awaited Messiah which, in the long run will end in disaster for Israel and the rest of the world. The prophet Daniel says that he will destroy many by peace (Daniel 8:25) when Israel signs a peace treaty with him at the beginning of the seven year tribulation. The post-modern churches and in particular the Emerging Church are paving the way for the Antichrist to deceive the entire world which, in closure, brings me to the most dangerous form of Apartheid – another gospel, another, Jesus and another spirit. The false doctrines of false teachers are the worst kind of Apartheid; it is a spiritual Apartheid that alienates and separates people from God. It draws you away and separates you from Jesus Christ and drives you into the arms of the Antichrist. It may indeed be called the Apartheid-ization of nations from God.
(1) Fritjof Capra, The Tao of Physics: An Exploration of the Parallels between Modern Physics and Eastern Mysticism (Boston, MA: Shambhala Publications, Inc., 1999), p. 11.
(2) Institutes of the Christian Religion, Book III, Section 21, 5
(3) Irving Hexham is currently Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Calgary, Alberta, Canada. He wrote the article The Irony of Apartheid: The Struggle for National Independence of Afrikaner Calvinism against British Imperialism.
(4) M Wilson and L Thompson eds. The Oxford History of South Africa, Vol. 2 (London 1971), p. 370
(5) S Patterson, The Last Trek (London 1957), p. 177
(6) Dave Hunt, Judgement Day: Islam, Israel and the Nations, The Berean Call, p. 36
(7) John Loftus and Mark Aarons, The Secret War Against the Jews: How Western Espionage Betrayed the Jewish People (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994), 18.
(8) Hitler declared that the “final objective [of] rational anti-Semitism…must be the removal of Jews altogether.” (Michael Berenbaum, The World Must Know: The History of the Holocaust as told in the United States Holocaust Museum (New York, Little, Brown and Company, 1933), 105.)
It is no surprise, then, that to most Muslims, especially those living in Muslim nations, Hitler is one of their greatest heroes. Mein Kampf in Arabic remains a perpetual bestseller in Muslim countries, especially among “Palestinians.” Hitler was, in fact, a partner with Haj Amin Mohammed Effendi al-Husseini (great uncle and mentor of Yasser Arafat and still a hero to Muslims), a murderous terrorist, appointed Grand Mufti of Jerusalem by Britain, and personally responsible for the concentration camp slaughter of hundreds of thousands of Jews. (From the Mufti’s private diary, cited in Arab Higher Committee: Its Origins, Personnel and Purposes, citing captured Nazi records submitted as documentary evidence to the United Nations, May 1947, 6.)
On November 21, 1941, Hitler promised the mufti “a solution to the Jewish problem” in exchange for al-Husseini’s recruitment of thousands of Arabs to fight with Hitler. (Ibid). (Taken from Dave Hunt’s book Judgement Day: Islam, Israel and the Nations, The Berean Call, p. 33
