DESMOND TUTU: THE FULL FLOWERING OF THE ANGLICAN SOCIAL GOSPEL
The Most Reverends George Carey, 103rd Archbishop of Canterbury; Trevor Huddleston, 2nd Archbishop of the Indian Ocean; and Desmond Tutu, 10th Archbishop of Cape Town and Primate of the Anglican Church of Southern Africa.
The Baptist minister Walter Rauschenbusch, in his 1907 book Christianity and the Social Crisis, pointed out that “the Church … has a stake in the social movement. The Church owns property, needs income, employs men, works on human material, and banks on its moral prestige. Its present efficiency and future standing are bound up for weal or woe with the social welfare of the people and with the outcome of the present struggle.” (1) Rauschenbusch served for eleven years as pastor of the Second German Baptist Church in Manhattan’s Hell’s Kitchen Neighborhood, which was, at the time, dominated by working-class immigrant families primarily of Irish descent. This book, written “to discharge a debt” to the working people of New York he pastored, (2) became one of the foundational texts of the Social Gospel movement in mainline Protestantism. Three years after his book came out, the United Presbyterian Church of North America adopted their “great ends of the Church,” inspired by Rauschenbush and his contemporaries, that remain in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.)’s Book of Order today: “the proclamation of the gospel for the salvation of humankind; the shelter, nurture, and spiritual fellowship of the children of God; the maintenance of divine worship; the preservation of the truth; the promotion of social righteousness; and the exhibition of the Kingdom of Heaven to the world.” (3)
This tradition flourished in the Anglican Communion as well, with supporters in the Episcopal Church who “sought to build up national churches that would minister to the social and spiritual needs of the local people while maintaining communion in a universal (catholic) church.” (4) Anglican and Episcopal writers and theologians tackling this subject included Frederick Denison (F. D.) Maurice, a mid-19th century priest in the Church of England. For Maurice, the Incarnation of Jesus Christ on this planet “revealed the Truth, that is, the presence in our midst of Christ as Head and Center of the human race, and the foundation of our existence. The Kingdom of God had been already established on earth, and it was here that God’s purpose was to be fulfilled -- that divine justice required earthly justice.” (5) Maurice’s beliefs in the Social Gospel and in Christian socialism became widespread, and his ideas were shared across the Anglican Communion, in particular, the thought that “the Kingdom of God [is] not confined to the limits of the Church; it embraces the whole of human life.” (6)
While the Social Gospel tradition was not exclusive to the Anglo-Catholic strain of Anglicanism, many of those who brought it to Africa in the 20th centuries were in that strain. The early 20th century Bishop of Zanzibar, Frank Weston SSC, (7) famously said in his concluding address to the 1923 Anglo-Catholic Congress that “you cannot claim to worship Jesus in the Tabernacle, if you do not pity Jesus in the slum.” (8) It was Weston’s call to social service that animated and excited a young Trevor Huddleston, (9) who, instead of living a charmed life as a countryside vicar, joined the monastic Community of the Resurrection, who eventually sent him to Sophiatown, a well-known black suburb of Johannesburg. It was there that he would eventually meet a young Desmond Tutu.
In his foreword to Piers McGrandle’s biography of Huddleston, Trevor Huddleston: Turbulent Priest, Archbishop Tutu remembers his first meeting with Huddleston, who doffed his cap to Tutu’s mother when they passed in the hallways. Huddleston, who became known in South Africa as an anti-apartheid activist and was a beloved friend to many members of the African National Congress (ANC), including the late Nelson Mandela, is summarized as such by his friend and mentee: “people like Trevor … made us realize that we too count, we too matter in the sight of God, we too even when we are black are people to whom hats ought to be doffed.” (10) To both Huddleston and Mandela, the innate goodness of each human person was evident and, by 1940s social standards, deserved to have hats doffed for them by all, not just one unique priest.
Tutu was named as Dean of the racially-mixed St. Mary’s Cathedral in Johannesburg in 1975, only 14 years after his ordination, Tutu preached the Gospel truths in the pulpit, shared a stage with Winnie Mandela, and became well-known as the leading black man in South Africa’s Anglican hierarchy. Two years later, after he had become Bishop of Lesotho, he returned to South Africa to preach at the funeral of the activist Steve Biko, leader of the Black Consciousness Movement, who was beaten to death at the age of 30 by security services. Before Tutu was the celebrity he became, before the primateship, before the Peace Prize, before the TRC, the themes he carried throughout his life remained evident. 29 years after Biko’s death, Tutu was invited to give the Steve Bantu Biko Memorial Lecture at the University of Cape Town. As he succinctly said in that lecture, “what Steve … meant to exorcise [was] this demon, to make us realise that as he said, we were human and not inferior as the white person was human and not superior. I internalised what others had decided was to be my identity, not my Godgiven utterly precious and unique me.” (11)
That unique him propelled him to a life of public and religious service par excellence that no one could ever hope to replicate. But his name certainly helped. The late Archbishop’s middle name Mpilo is a Xhosa word that means life. Given to him by his paternal grandmother, the name soon became meaningful, as a young Desmond faced significant health issues during his younger years, including polio and tuberculosis, the latter of which brought him closer to Huddleston as the priest visited him frequently in the hospital during his 18 month stay. It was that same life that he then sought to give to others, a perfect encapsulation of his fulfillment of the Social Gospel work that started before he was even born. As Tutu once wrote,
I want to say that there is nothing the government can do to me that will stop me from being involved in what I believe is what God wants me to do. I do not do it because I like doing it. I do it because I am under what I believe to be the influence of God’s hand. I cannot help it when I see injustice. I cannot keep quiet. I will not keep quiet, for as Jeremiah says, when I try to keep quiet, God’s word burns like a fire in my breast. (12)
It is not enough to solely make the Arch a symbol of how far we have come in the last century. The man who famously said “I wish I could shut up, but I can’t, and I won’t” would not want us to. In one of his last public writings, released this summer for the NGO that his friend Nelson Mandela started, Tutu wrote: “Climate injustice is deeply connected to other forms of injustice that undermine our intrinsic value as human beings.” (13) Desmond Tutu was the Anglican tradition at its best - a man of God who loved his church, loved his world, and strove for us to be better. But nothing sums him up better than what the British priest Jarel Robinson-Brown tweeted shortly after hearing the news: “Many will sanitise Archbishop Tutu - but in reality he was so many things particularly: deeply radical, fearlessly prophetic, unashamedly catholic, openly progressive, truly courageous, frighteningly honest, and…woke af.” (14) May we all strive to follow in the path he trod.
A Collect honoring the life and work of Desmond Tutu
O God, who became incarnate in Jesus Christ so that all might have life and have it abundantly, grant us the strength to follow in the path of Desmond Mpilo Tutu in fighting oppression and seeking to rediscover the humanity in each person; through the same Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
Walter Rauschenbusch, Christianity and the Social Crisis, xiv.
Ibid, xv.
Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), Book of Order 2019-2023 Part II, 5.
Ian Douglas, Fling out the Banner!: The National Church Ideal and the Foreign Mission of the Episcopal Church, 13.
Diane M. Pella, As We Are United in One: Frederick Denison Maurice and Christian Socialism, unpublished dissertation, 264.
Ibid, 266.
SSC is the post nominal for the Society of the Holy Cross, a society of male priests in the Anglo-Catholic strain inspired by the Vincentians.
Frank Weston, Our Present Duty, http://anglicanhistory.org/weston/weston2.html.
Julian Scharf, Review of Trevor Huddleston: Turbulent Priest, in The Journal of Theological Studies 2006, 393. Fr. Scharf was the first white priest ordained by Bishop Huddleston and later served as his part-time chaplain.
Desmond Tutu, Foreword to Trevor Huddleston: Turbulent Priest, vii.
Desmond Tutu, 2006 Steve Bantu Biko Memorial Lecture, https://www.uct.ac.za/downloads/news.uct.ac.za/lectures/stevebiko/sb_desmondtutu.pdf.
Desmond Tutu, quoted in “Society and Sacrament: The Anglican Left and Sacramental Socialism, Ritual as Ethics” by Nicholas Groves, in Buddhist-Christian Studies 2000, 72.
Desmond Tutu, Introduction to “What does it take to reach out full potential as climate activists?,” https://theelders.org/news/what-does-it-take-reach-our-full-potential-climate-
https://twitter.com/FrJarelRB/status/1475046885245304836
