Desmond Tutu - God Is Not a Christian: Speaking Truth in Times of Crisis

God Is Not a Christian

And Other Provocations

Desmond Mpilo Tutu
Edited by John Allen

God bless our world

Guard our children

Guide our leaders

And give us peace

For Jesus Christs sake.

Amen

Adapted by D ESMOND T UTU from a prayer by T REVOR H UDDLESTON

Contents

S ome of my friends are skeptical when they hear me say this, but I am by nature a person who dislikes confrontation. I have consciously sought during my life to emulate my mother, whom our family knew as a gentle comforter of the afflicted. However, when I see innocent people suffering, pushed around by the rich and the powerful, then, as the prophet Jeremiah says, if I try to keep quiet it is as if the word of God burned like a fire in my breast. I feel compelled to speak out, sometimes even to argue with God over how a loving creator can allow this to happen.

When I recently announced my retirement from public life, I said I wanted to slow down and spend more time reading and writing, praying and thinking, and being with my family. I also said that, apart from continuing some of my activities as a Nobel Peace laureate, I would adopt a lower public profile and no longer give interviews to journalists.

Reflecting on this collection of what I have said and written over the past forty years has shown me how difficult it is going to be for me to shut up (and reminded me how sexist my language was when I was young!). For as I see and read about the suffering, the pain, and the conflict that Gods people still undergo, their experiences cry out for the passionate involvement of people of faith in advocating for the values of Gods kingdom.

Yet no one is indispensable, least of all me, and what gives me hope and reassurance as I approach my eightieth birthday is the remarkable passion for justice and peace that I have experienced when meeting and speaking to thousands of young people around the world in these first years of the twenty-first century. When I see their level of commitment, I know that the world is in safe hands.

In the Church of SantEgidio in Rome, home of an extraordinary community of laypeople devoted to working for the poor, there is an old crucifix that portrays Christ without arms. When I asked about its importance to the community, I was told that it shows how God relies on us to do Gods work in the world.

Without us, God has no eyes; without us, God has no ears; without us, God has no arms or hands. God relies on us. Wont you join other people of faith in becoming Gods partners in the world?

D ESMOND T UTU , A PRIL 2011

I f the reasons for Desmond Tutu becoming one of the worlds most prominent advocates of faith-based social justice and religious tolerance could be reduced to a single, succinct statement, it would be this: his fierce and uncompromising determination to tell the truth as he sees it.

In the early years of his public life, his courage in speaking out, angrily and fearlessly, against apartheid at a time when most of South Africas political leaders were in jail, exiled or banished, or facing torture and assassination made him a hero in the eyes of most black South Africans. But, as Nelson Mandela would later write, it also made him public enemy number one to most whitesthe reviled subject of death threats and even, it became clear later, serious attempts on his life.

That changed after the release of Mandela and the transition to democracy, when Tutu became as watchful a critic of his friends and erstwhile allies in the struggle against apartheid as he had been of their predecessors in government. At the same time, he used his anti-apartheid credentials to broaden his campaign for justice and human rights to Africa and the world, in situations of political injustice and oppression ranging from Marxist Ethiopia and Western-aligned Zaire to the Middle East and Panama under military rule.

He did not stop there: the values underlying his advocacydrawn from his faith and the vision of a shared humanity held out by the African spirit of ubuntu (a person is a person only through other persons)led him to become a campaigner against intolerance in general, speaking out for interfaith understanding and cooperation, and against religious fundamentalism and the persecution of minorities such as gays and lesbians. His outspokenness and his readiness to voice what appeared on the surface to be heresy have made him both an admired icon and a lightning rod for controversya man who could be acclaimed the hero of a crowd on one day and be forced to remonstrate with a murderous mob on another.

Watching him exercise his ministry over the course of thirty-five years, whether in the streets and stadiums of South Africarallying peoples morale with stirring rhetoric, channeling anger in creative directions, and defusing violenceor in closed meetings with dictators, Western leaders, or Zionists angry at his identification with the Palestinians, I came to see that it is when he is faced with the toughest, most challenging situations that he is at his best. It is when he is called upon to deliver his most unpopular messagessometimes to his opponents, at other times to his supportersthat he articulates his values, his ideals, and his faith most powerfully and persuasively.

I hope that this collection will reflect this face of Desmond Tutu. As a series of texts reflecting a life in action rather than the ruminations of a scholar, it comprises a disparate range of material: off-the-cuff interventions, answers to journalists questions, letters, and both abbreviated and lengthy excerpts from speeches, sermons, and other writings, condensed and edited for clarity where necessary.

J OHN A LLEN

C HAPTER 1
God Is Clearly Not a Christian
Pleas for Interfaith Tolerance

Nothing epitomizes Desmond Tutus radicalism (using the word radical , as he likes to say, in the original sense of getting to the root of an issue) more than his views on the relationship of his faith to the faiths of others. This chapter combines remarks he made over four occasions, revealing a refreshing, inspiring, and, yes, radical perspective that has become particularly pertinent to the post-9/11 world.

This is an excerpt from a sermon preached at St. Martin in the Fields Church on Trafalgar Square, London, during a meeting of leaders of the worlds Anglican churches after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War, drawing on the Christian scriptures as the basis of his approach.

I snt it noteworthy in the parable of the Good Samaritan that Jesus does not give a straightforward answer to the question Who is my neighbor? (Luke 10:29). Surely he could have provided a catalogue of those whom the scribe could love as himself as the law required. He does not. Instead, he tells a story. It is as if Jesus wanted among other things to point out that life is a bit more complex; it has too many ambivalences and ambiguities to allow always for a straightforward and simplistic answer.

This is a great mercy, because in times such as our owntimes of change when many familiar landmarks have shifted or disappearedpeople are bewildered; they hanker after unambiguous, straightforward answers. We appear to be scared of diversity in ethnicities, in religious faiths, in political and ideological points of view. We have an impatience with anything and anyone that suggests there might just be another perspective, another way of looking at the same thing, another answer worth exploring. There is a nostalgia for the security in the womb of a safe sameness, and so we shut out the stranger and the alien; we look for security in those who can provide answers that must be unassailable because no one is permitted to dissent, to question. There is a longing for the homogeneous and an allergy against the different, the other.