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Studying Theology and falling in love

Anyone who thinks or acts, prays or worships, as if there is some ultimate mystery known by many names but often as “God”, is a theologian, however rudimentary or sophisticated. But not everyone who does such things or believes in God discovers that doing theology can become a personal odyssey driven by a passion that can become all-consuming.

(From A Theological Odyssey)6

I matriculated in 1955 at the age of sixteen, a year below average and with average grades, and registered at the University of Cape Town (UCT) for a BA with English and History majors. I was the first in my extended family to go to university. Nobody, except my mother, thought I would succeed – not with my matric results. I must confess that I did not think so either. As there was a possibility that I might go into the ministry, I added Greek to my list of courses, along with Philosophy. My Philosophy professor, Martin Versfeld, was an Afrikaner convert to the Catholic Church and an authority on Plato and Augustine. To the surprise of everyone, including myself, I received high marks in the subject at the end of the first semester.

I joined the university’s Student Christian Association (SCA), which, at that time, was becoming more politically liberal, though it remained conservative evangelical in ethos. On some Sunday afternoons, I would go with other students to District Six, a predominantly “coloured” area not far from the city centre, to teach Sunday school. I recall the trek up Harrington Street to the small semi-detached house in Ayre Street where the class was held.

Little did I know that District Six would soon be flattened by bulldozers and its inhabitants dumped on the Cape Flats – one of the many apartheid crimes that destroyed the lives of communities and families around the Peninsula. Long before that, Africans had been excluded from living within the “white” areas of Cape Town, so there already existed poor black townships on the city’s perimeter, which served white interests. Not everyone who lived in Cape Town was a privileged Capetonian enjoying the mountain, the sea and its many other attractions.

At this stage, there were handfuls of “coloured” students on the UCT campus who challenged our prejudices. There was also a lively political debate among sections of the university community. Anti-apartheid student protest action was beginning, and would gather momentum over the next few years.

After teaching Sunday school in District Six on Sunday afternoons, I would sometimes stand on the Grand Parade and listen to anti-apartheid speeches by leaders of the African National Congress (ANC) and the South West Africa People’s Organisation (SWAPO). Within a few years, these gatherings became illegal, but I have often wondered whether I heard some of the great liberation leaders speak. So my political education began at the same time as I was being introduced to Aristotle, Kant and the existentialists, and while I taught Sunday school.

My father was not keen that I should go into the ministry, but my mother thought it a good idea. In the end, they left it up to me to decide. And so, during that first year at UCT, when Basil Brown, pleased by my examination results, asked me if I was serious about the ministry, I confidently answered in the affirmative and was invited to preach at our church one Sunday morning. My sermon, the first of many to come, was on the healing of Naaman the Aramean (2 Kings 5). It is a wonderful story of prophetic insight and the humbling of power, but I doubt whether I understood that at the age of eighteen.

I was subsequently interviewed by another senior minister, Noel Tarrant, a wise and venerable man, who probed my intention with searching questions. I was adamant (perhaps even too self-assured) that this was my calling, and my application was approved by the Congregational Union of South Africa (CUSA). Today that would be impossible: There is now a minimum age requirement and a lengthy process for testing vocations.

By this time, I was aware that CUSA was a predominantly coloured denomination – at least in the Western Cape – even though the majority of congregations that I knew well were all-white. From time to time, ministers from other racial groups preached at our home church, and I would attend meetings or services at theirs, but it was all rather paternalistic. Being a majority black denomination did not mean that the majority was in control. I also discovered that most of the white ministers were expatriate Englishmen who had little knowledge of the church on the other side of the tracks, and no knowledge of Afrikaans and Xhosa – the main languages spoken there. They could just as well have been ministering in Manchester, Birmingham or London. I was, in fact, one of a small handful of South African-born white candidates for the ministry in CUSA.

The ministerial committee decided that I should go the next year to Rhodes University in Grahamstown, about a nine-hundred kilometres to the east of Cape Town, where an ecumenical Faculty of Theology had been established in 1947. This would enable me to finish my BA begun at UCT, and to take some pre-theological subjects before proceeding to the Bachelor of Divinity (BD) – the equivalent of today’s Master of Divinity. I was excited by the prospect.

My sister, Rozelle, married Ramon Dempers from Windhoek in January 1957. I was one of the best men at the wedding, and was fitted out for the occasion in a tailor-made suit. At the wedding, I met a young woman who had recently moved from Johannesburg to Windhoek. She told me to look out for her close school friend Isobel Dunstan, who was now studying at Rhodes. The consequences of this conversation would be life changing, but I had little premonition that this was so at the time.

Late that January, along with James Elias – a Presbyterian friend who was also going to Rhodes – I left home and caught the Union Castle mail ship to Port Elizabeth. Rozelle and Ramon happened to be on honeymoon on the same boat. I didn’t see anything of them during the trip, but then I was only on board for one day and night. It must have been very sad for my parents to say farewell to both of us at the same time, but my sights were set on what lay ahead. Arriving in Port Elizabeth, we took an overnight train that stopped at virtually every siding along the way for the last hundred kilometres to Grahamstown.

Situated in a hollow in the hills, Grahamstown had something of the charm of an English country town. After all, it began as a British and largely Methodist and Anglican settler village in the early nineteenth century, soon after the arrival of the 1820 Settlers. These unsuspecting arrivals were sent to the Cape at the end of the Napoleonic Wars to become a buffer between the expanding colony to the south and the Xhosa-speaking peoples to the north-east.

When I arrived, the legacy of that conflict was still apparent in the architecture and social stratification of the city, with the majority of blacks living in poor townships, struggling to find employment in town and at the university. The “coloured” population fared better, but not by a great deal. In contrast, the “white” Settler city boasted many churches, fine boarding schools, an Anglican theological seminary, as well as the university and the regional law courts. Settler Grahamstown was conservative and racist, with pockets of liberalism an exception to the rule.

There were two Congregational Churches in town, both situated on its outskirts as a result of segregation. I preached at one of them several times, but it was a long walk to attend regularly, so I worshipped at the “white” Methodist and Presbyterian Churches, along with my fellow theological students, or “toks” as we were known. In those days, going to church on Sundays was the norm for most people, even students, though that was changing by the time I left. During vacations, it was not always possible to go home, so some of us went to run evangelistic missions at churches in nearby towns, under the banner of the Varsity Trekkers.

In 1957, Rhodes was a small English-speaking university of eight hundred students. Largely segregated like all South African universities, it was twinned with the University of Fort Hare in Alice, where Nelson Mandela had once studied, some 160 kilometres away. Given its modest size and geographical isolation, Rhodes had some remarkably able and progressive professors, whose work was internationally acknowledged.

The theological students’ residence was named Livingstone House after the LMS missionary explorer David Livingstone. Although it was reserved for senior students, I was placed there from the outset to make up the Congregational quota and, as always, was the youngest in the residence to begin with. The majority of the seventy or so students in the Faculty of Theology were studying for the Methodist or Presbyterian Churches. There were a few Anglicans (they had their own St. Paul’s College across the valley) and only a handful of Congregational students, as the majority were at Fort Hare.

Apart from a few rather pious fellows, the “toks” were a boisterous bunch of men (there were no women in the ministry then), most of them older than the average student. Some had a fair amount of life experience behind them. I recall one had been a London policeman, and another a champion wrestler. Both of them were part of a group of English Methodists sent to South Africa for training before serving in local churches. I will remain silent about the pineapple punch we brewed and sold to other students, but I will say that I learnt to play squash and became reasonably good at it.

I soon settled into the routine of Livingstone House. Our regime was by no means as strict as St. Paul’s Anglican College across the valley. But it was obligatory to attend evening prayers each day in the chapel, wearing our black academic gowns, which we were also required to wear in the dining hall. Lectures were given every morning, so most afternoons we were free to study or play sport. On the weekends, there was not much to do in Grahamstown apart from going to church, except going to the two small bioscopes to see outdated movies (but never on a Sunday), playing sport, or courting female students – a major pastime for most of us. Only one student in Livingstone House had a car during the four years I was there, and as there was no public transport in the town, we walked everywhere.

I remember my first week of lectures well, because Isobel Dunstan, about whom I had heard at my sister’s wedding, was sitting right behind me in one of my classes. She was in her second year and, out of interest, was doing a course in New Testament while studying for a Science degree in Mathematics and Botany. We soon went on several dates, but she was not particularly interested in me. She did, however, invite me to meet her family during my first Christmas vacation when she heard that I planned to spend six weeks in Johannesburg’s northern suburbs, working in a new church extension project. Isobel, who was of Cornish and Methodist stock, had meanwhile started going out with John Borman, a Methodist theological student. I myself had several girlfriends, though none of those relationships lasted very long.

Visiting the Dunstan home was an enjoyable diversion from walking in the summer heat to innumerable houses guarded by large dogs and separated by extensive gardens, to invite largely uninterested people to come to church. Another welcome distraction during that long, hot summer was watching South Africa play Australia at cricket at the Wanderers. In addition, I began Hebrew lessons with a sage-like Jewish scholar and, for the first time, experienced the awe with which Orthodox Jews regard the name of God given to Moses at the burning bush. Soon, however, it was time to return to Rhodes for my second year.

Our professors and lecturers were mainly expatriates, and the curriculum was based on the traditional Scottish model: Systematic Theology, Church History and Biblical Studies, each divided into various sub-disciplines. In addition Biblical Studies required Hebrew and Greek. I came to understand the Bible with fresh eyes, relishing the prophets and wisdom literature. It was an eye-opener to learn, for example, how the Synoptic Gospels came to be written, and how such knowledge helped one to comprehend them.

There were some attempts to give us training in pastoral care, but as this was not part of the university curriculum, it did not amount to much.

Looking back, I now know that our courses could just as well have been taught in Edinburgh, Zurich or New York, for there was little attempt to relate them to South Africa; although I did learn much about our social and missionary history, as well as the wrongs of apartheid, from Leslie Hewson, a South African Methodist.

Despite the curriculum’s shortcomings, I received a reasonable theological grounding and was introduced to some of the major themes and challenges facing Christian faith in the twentieth century, such as the relationship between faith and science. I was also encouraged to read widely and well. I enjoyed the work of the Scottish Congregationalist theologian P.T. Forsyth and that of another Scot, John Baillie, who, I later learnt, had been one of Bonhoeffer’s teachers at Union Seminary in New York. The major European theologian I studied was the Swiss Emil Brunner, whose controversial disagreement with his compatriot Karl Barth over the problem of natural theology exercised our minds. I also read Brunner’s massive book on ethics, The Divine Imperative, which was on our reading list. Barth himself, the most significant Protestant theologian of the twentieth century, was not a big part of the curriculum, and Bonhoeffer was an unknown name. It was only during my final BD year that I read the latter’s The Cost of Discipleship as part of a student reading group convened by Peter Storey, who went on to became a Methodist bishop and president of the SACC.

During my final two years, despite being part of a denominational minority, I was elected chair of Livingstone Fellowship, which comprised all theological students and represented them more widely. Livingstone Fellowship did much to foster a sense of ecumenical belonging, even though denominational identities were strong. It also brought me personally into contact with theological students at Fort Hare who would later become church and political leaders. I travelled there on several occasions – a two-hour journey by car – in order to discuss issues that threatened to destroy the already tenuous relationship between us at Rhodes and those studying Theology at Fort Hare. Although I always felt welcome, anger at both the injustices of apartheid and our liberal white paternalism was palpable.

Another task allotted to me as fellowship chair was attending the centenary of the Faculty of Theology (or Kweekskool) at Stellenbosch University in 1959 at the invitation of the Students’ Council. This turned out to be the beginning of a long relationship, which was uncomfortable at first, but enriching eventually. I went to the celebrations with James Elias, my Presbyterian friend from Cape Town. We were, I think, the only English-speaking guests among the students who joined the procession from the stately Kweekskool to the nearby and beautiful Moederkerk (Mother Church). There I listened to Professor B.B. Keet, doyen of the theological professors, who gave an overview of Reformed theology during the past century. Keet was one of the few Dutch Reformed theologians who had openly criticised apartheid, notably in his book Suid-Afrika – Waarheen? (Whither South Africa?), which I had read the year I was at UCT.

I made many friends in Livingstone House and by my third year, Isobel Dunstan and I had also become good friends. By this time she had broken off with her Methodist suitor, John Borman, and it was he who suggested that I should court her again. It was 1959 and Isobel was now in her final honours year. We began going out again, grew closer, felt attracted to each other, and discovered that we shared a similar spiritual journey and sense of humour. We were, in short, falling in love.

One weekend, I had to go to preach in Port Elizabeth, so we went together. We borrowed the minister’s small car on the Saturday evening, and went out to have supper on the Humewood Beach front. All we could afford were hamburgers and chips. It was then, in that “romantic” setting, that I proposed. Isobel later told me that she had anticipated my doing so. That evening we were young and I impetuous, the moon was full, and the future stretched invitingly before us.

Over the years of our now long marriage, Isobel and I have often commented that both our upbringings mitigated against expressing romantic feelings in overt ways. We had difficulty baring our souls or hugging and kissing exuberantly in public, simply because that was not done in our families. But reserve did not mean that love was absent or intimacy avoided. Years later, Isobel expressed this in a poem:

Mine was a loving, caring home

but not of demonstrative love …7

It is true that on the night I proposed to her I did not have a love poem to recite or a bunch of roses to give, nor did I fall on my knees; nor was her response a spontaneous hug and sensuous kiss, such as we had already shared aplenty while we walked and talked and lay on the grass on the hills above Grahamstown. Instead her response was a thoughtful pause and a request for time to think. She kept me hanging on a thread for two days. Then she accepted with hugs and kisses. Many years later, while looking back, she captured our relationship in another poem:

My love for you never was

an exotic brilliant-hued bloom,

or a heady-scented rose,

never a story

to catch the imagination

of the whole world.

Not Iseult loving Tristan,

nor Juliet with Romeo.

More like an acorn,

or the fleshy, round seed

of a yellow-wood,

small and insignificant,

but falling on dark, rich soil

and growing to a mighty tree –

deep-rooted and firm,

stretching arms to pluck

the rainbow from the sky.

Isobel’s love for me was immediately tested. Her parents were visiting Grahamstown with her younger sister, Elsie, soon after our decision to get married. I approached Mr Dunstan while he was alone and asked him if I could marry his daughter, and he agreed right away without more ado. But Isobel’s mother, Lilian, upon hearing the news later that day, was appalled. She flatly refused to give her support. My Congregational affiliation was unacceptable (surely there were enough eligible Methodists!) and I was far too young, which was true. Isobel dug in her heels. We were in love and she was going to marry me. That was that. In December 1959, we got engaged in Cape Town. Our photograph was taken by Happy Snaps while we walked arm in arm down St. George’s Street, with Isobel sporting her modest diamond engagement ring, paid for with money I borrowed from my father. I must remember someday to repay him.

After completing her Honours degree in Mathematics, Isobel went home and taught at a high school in Johannesburg. Unfortunately, her mother died suddenly on 16 March 1960, in the same week that I turned twenty-one. Preparations were hurriedly cancelled for celebrating this traditional rite of passage in Grahamstown, and I hitched a long overnight ride to Johannesburg to be at the funeral. Not only did Isobel now have to mourn the sudden loss of her mother, but she also had to take over the responsibilities of running the family home. This meant caring for her much younger sister, and managing a household for a busy father and two very active brothers, who were just a year or two behind her. Thus she was plunged into shopping and cooking, for which she had very little preparation, while I, 1 500 kilometres away, completed my BD.

The week of Isobel’s mother’s funeral and my aborted twenty-first birthday was made far more ominous by the Sharpeville massacre on 21 March 1960. The terrible events that occurred that day rudely awakened many to the inherent violence of apartheid and the challenges facing the country. It happened just as I was finishing my studies and about to begin my ministry. I was one of a handful of theological students who signed a protest letter to the prime minister, Hendrik Verwoerd.

During that final year at university, I learnt much from Professor W.D. Maxwell, an authority on Calvin and Liturgy; studied Paul Tillich’s Systematic Theology in detail; and wrote a dissertation on Congregational Ecclesiology, tracing its roots in both the Calvinist and Anabaptist traditions, and showing how it had developed since then. I completed my BD with a first class honours at the end of 1960. I had now satisfactorily concluded my training for the ordained ministry – at least, that’s what I thought. I was soon to be proved wrong, but for now my thoughts were fixed on my impending marriage.

Isobel and I were married in Johannesburg on 7 January 1961 in her home Methodist Church in Parktown North. Ian MacDonald, later professor of Philosophy at Rhodes, was my best man, and Jean Pyle, a close friend of Isobel’s, was her bridesmaid. After a fun-filled and adventurous honeymoon that took us 6 000 kilometres around South Africa in a second-hand Fiat 600 that regularly broke down, we arrived in Cape Town where I was ordained to the ministry in my home congregation in Cape Town. There was a power failure that evening at the beginning of the service, so all the ministers processed into the church by candlelight. I don’t recall much else, except that Basil Brown preached, and at one point, as I removed my handkerchief from my suit pocket, I dislodged a wad of confetti that had become embedded there at our wedding. Not a very auspicious incident on that otherwise solemn, important and joyful occasion, which concluded with a party back at my parents’ house.