Editorial

Michael Battle, Desmond Tutu: A Spiritual Biography of South Africa’s Confessor (Louisville KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2021); 368 pp.: 9780664231583, $50 (hbk)

This deeply affectionate book is written by the African-American theologian Professor Michael Battle, Director of the Desmond Tutu Center at General Theological Seminary, New York. He has already written several books on Archbishop Tutu’s theology, focusing on the Bantu concept of ubuntu (mutual togetherness), and now offers a ‘spiritual biography’ that presents Tutu as a ‘mystic saint’.

Those who have been fortunate to meet Desmond Tutu will know just how effervescent he is. I was a fresher when I first encountered him, then a mature student, at King’s College London. He was also serving as a curate in the North London church where I had been a chorister. It was obvious that the academic staff at King’s (at that time largely Anglican) admired him hugely. I met him again in the early 1980s when staying at the South African Council of Churches in Johannesburg, where he was General Secretary and – as we know from John Allen’s widely acclaimed Rabble-rouser for Peace: the authorized biography of Desmond Tutu (Rider Books, 2006) – in serious danger of assassination. A decade later I stayed with him, by now Archbishop and Nobel Peace laureate, at Bishopscourt in Cape Town. It was difficult not to be in awe of his sheer courage and moral passion – challenging the murderous apartheid regime and speaking the truth, then and later, to those in power. Many of us do indeed see him as a prophetic saint. But is he really a mystic saint?

Battle argues at length that he is and divides this book into three parts, typical of the three stages of classical mysticism: purgation, illumination and union. Apartheid was the context of purgation, especially with its pretension to be theologically based. For Battle, Tutu becomes ‘an alternative kind of saint’ who ‘turns apartheid’s hagiography on its head and requires a spiritual and theological perspective … he leads us to see how we are all saints – not just the set apart’ (p. xii). For Tutu, he argues, it is ubuntu that ‘provides an African worldview in which human and divine identity may find mutuality in the concept of community. In this way ultimate community with God follows through the mystical procession of purgation, illumination and union’ (p. 47). He sees Tutu’s magnificent work – opposing apartheid despite political denunciations and death threats (as well as critics within his own church), his post-apartheid leadership of the internationally influential Truth and Reconciliation Commission and, finally, ‘his elder years as sage’ (p. 289) – as all sustained by a disciplined mystical spirituality.

Michael Battle has devoted much of his life to Tutu – writing his PhD on him, being ordained by him, serving as his chaplain for two years and taking successive cohorts of students to visit him in South Africa. Ignoring 1 Corinthians 1.12–17, he even depicts himself as a ‘disciple’ (p. 239), wincing only at Tutu’s non-pacifism (the pacifist Stanley Hauerwas supervised Battle’s PhD). Yet perhaps – compared with Allen’s chronological biography – this spiritual biography is less critical of some of Tutu’s foibles: economic extravagance; acting without consulting senior colleagues (despite his attachment to ubuntu); and nonetheless insisting on obedience from strong-minded younger colleagues. In my view, prophetic saints can indeed have foibles and yet be regarded as saints.

And – again, in my view – it would be hugely retrograde to follow Battle’s final suggestion that Anglicans should actually canonize him when he dies. Instead, we must surely honour his astonishing legacy in our lectionary. Desmond Tutu’s passionate, heroic and biblical challenge to apartheid in South Africa stands alongside Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s equally passionate, heroic and biblical challenge to Nazism in Germany. They have few theological equals.

The following book shows one important new way of honouring his legacy:

Ernst M. Conradie, Secular Discourse on Sin in the Anthropocene: What’s Wrong with the World? (Lanham MD and London: Lexington Books, 2020); 255 pp.: 9781793635075, $105/£81 (hbk)

Written by a theologian at the University of the Western Cape, this book explores ways in which theological challenges to apartheid can now be applied to the current environmental debate. Conradie argues that ‘systems do not change by themselves … Structural change is not induced merely by policy making, by cultural trends, or by awareness raising through media campaigns’ (p. 96). The radical challenges of Tutu and others in South Africa to the distortions of apartheid demonstrated that much more is needed. In the context of human-induced climate change, radical human action (ironically, anthropocentric action) is required in order to challenge the ‘idolatry’ and ‘heresy’ (both terms used to challenge apartheid) of consumerism and materialism. As with apartheid (supported shamefully by many leaders in the Dutch Reformed Church), certain brands of theology, notably the so-called prosperity gospel, have become complicit in this idolatry/heresy:

From a Christian theological perspective, heresy entails a distortion of the truth revealed in Jesus Christ, and something that leads not only to division within the church but also to false witness in the world. This indicates that a point has been reached where a disagreement is no longer a matter of opinion, that is, where debate is no longer possible. In a particular context things have become so crucial and divisive that to leave the matter aside would simply not do. (p. 193)