Professor JNJ ‘Klippies’ Kritzinger
The Afrikaner anti-apartheid dominee and academic Gerrie Lubbe passed away on Saturday, January 2, at the age of 74 after a battle with cancer.
He was a retired minister of the Via Christi congregation of the Uniting Reformed Church in Southern Africa (URCSA) in Lenasia, south of Johannesburg, where he had worked since 1970.
He grew up in Zeerust, North West , and trained as a minister of the Dutch Reformed Church at the University of Pretoria in the 1960s. He became known in Lenasia for his community activism and his public witness against the injustices of apartheid.
The Via Christi Community, under his leadership, developed close partnerships with other organisations in Lenasia, like Time to Learn, JISWA and others. Two events, in particular, caught the attention of the broader Lenasia community (and of the security police): In August 1987, during the three-week long national mineworkers strike, Via Christi at great discomfort accommodated about 150 dismissed mineworkers in their church hall; and in December 1989, when Prakash Napier, an MK cadre from Lenasia, died in an abortive guerrilla attack, Via Christi agreed that he could be buried from their building.
From 1970 to 1980 Gerrie worked as a full-time minister in Lenasia, with the financial support of the white Dutch Reformed Church, but as his opposition to apartheid deepened, it became impossible for him (and Via Christi) to retain that financial link. Via Christi was part of the Reformed Church in Africa (RCA), the Indian “wing” of the DRC “family” of churches and when the RCA Synod approved the “tent-making” (self-supporting) ministry in 1980, Gerrie moved quickly to find other employment in order to become a part-time minister. He worked in the security department of Munich Reinsurance Company in Johannesburg for two years, until his appointment at Unisa.
When the Ottawa Assembly of the World Alliance of Reformed Churches (WARC) declared theological support for apartheid to be a heresy in August 1982, Gerrie and two white colleagues in the RCA decided to hand back their licensing documents to the Dutch Reformed Church in order to identify clearly with the RCA. In a bizarre twist, the RCA leadership responded to that act of identification by declaring that the three ministers had thereby lost their ministerial status in the RCA as well.
This caused a personal crisis for Gerrie, but the Via Christi Community rallied around him and his family, embracing him as their minister. That eventually led to Via Christi severing its ties with the RCA and becoming part of the URCSA.
Gerrie became known nationally and internationally for his role in the South African Council of Churches and for partnering with his friend, Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu, to set up a formal interfaith movement in South Africa.
Gerrie chaired the South African Chapter of the World Conference on Religion and Peace (WCRP-SA) from 1984 to 1994.
In that time leaders of different religious communities raised their voices jointly against the tricameral parliament.
They also developed close personal friendships and an interfaith consensus on the kind of state that South Africa should be after apartheid: a non-partisan (“secular”) state, which is not antagonistic to religion but appreciates the constructive role of religious communities and engages actively with them.
The Declaration on Religious Rights and Responsibilities, produced by WCRP-SA in 1992, contributed to the formulation of religious freedom in the present constitution.
During the transition to democracy, Gerrie was also involved in the National Peace Initiatives and served on the sub-commission for religious matters of the committee that arranged the inauguration of President Mandela in May 1994.
In addition to being a church minister and a community activist, Gerrie was an intellectual and an academic. He obtained a Master’s degree in Semitic languages from the (then) Rand Afrikaans University in 1978 on the image portrayed of the Jews in the Qur’an. In 1989, he completed a doctoral thesis in religious studies at Unisa on The Muslim Judicial Council – a descriptive and analytical investigation, exploring how the MJC applied Islamic law in the South African context.
He taught religious studies at Unisa from 1983 until his retirement in 2006, writing numerous study guides and supervising 16 Master’s and 19 doctoral students. His academic publications focused mainly on religious pluralism and the constructive role of religious communities to transform society.
Gerrie was an influential public intellectual who helped lay the foundations of a just and inclusive democracy in South Africa, characterised by mature and respectful inter-religious relationships.
In his 2014 autobiography, Embraced by Grace: The Story of a White Ant, he tells how he was warmly embraced by black fellow Christians and people of other faiths – and how that transformed his life, drawing him into the shared human struggle to undermine the apartheid system and create a just, pluralistic society. He saw himself as a termite (“white ant”) which – as small as it was – helped others to gnaw at the ”system” until it collapsed.
Gerrie Lubbe was a loyal friend to many, a committed community activist, an innovative scholar, a deeply devoted Christian believer and a caring church minister.
He will be missed for his sense of humour and his warm hospitality. He is survived by his wife Jeanetta, three children and four grandchildren.
His funeral will take place at 10am tomorrow in the Via Christi Community building at 163 Flamingo Street in Lenasia.
l Kritzinger is an Emeritus Professor of Missiology at Unisa