Original Research

Gendered images of God in the Belhar Confession (1986)

Christina Landman

Received: 28 Jan. 2026; Accepted: 01 Apr. 2026; Published: 31 Aug. 2026

Copyright: © 2026. The Author Licensee: AOSIS.
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

Abstract

The Confession of Belhar was accepted as a formal confession of faith by the 1986 General Synod of the Dutch Reformed Mission Church at its meeting in Belhar, a then ‘Coloured township’ near the Cape Town International Airport in the deep southwest of South Africa. In 2026, the Belhar Confession celebrates 40 years of formal recognition. This article explores the images of God in the Confession of Belhar that have gender references. Introducing the topic, literature addressing these gendered images of God in the Belhar Confession will be discussed. This will be followed by the main part of the article, which analyses the relationship between God and gender in the Confession and will try to answer the question whether sexist references to God constitute reality for the confessor.

Contribution: Finally, the gendered references of God in Belhar will be compared to images of God in the following four documents: (1) the 1994/2005 Uniting Reformed Church in Southern Africa’s (URCSA’s) Policy on Gender Equity; (2) the Open Letter from the men of the URCSA to the Women of the URCSA in 2005; (3) the Constitution of the Christian Women’s Ministries of the URCSA; and (4) the Acts of the 2022 General Synod of URCSA, the latest Acts of an URCSA General Synod available at the time of writing. This will be performed to determine whether a sensitivity towards gendered images of God has been established in URCSA documents during the 40 years since 1986, with special reference to the Confession of Belhar.

Keywords: Confession of Belhar; Dutch Reformed Mission Church; Uniting Reformed Church in Southern Africa; URCSA’s Policy on Gender Equity; Mary-Anne Plaatjies-van Huffel and gender insensitivity.

Introduction

Background

The 1986 General Synod (GS) of the Dutch Reformed Mission Church accepted the Confession of Belhar formally as its fourth confession of faith. It was called the Confession of Belhar because the Synod was held in the then ‘Coloured township’ of Belhar in the southwest of South Africa, now a peri-urban suburb of Cape Town. In 2026, the Confession of Belhar celebrates its 40th year of formal existence.

In 1994, the first democratic elections in South Africa took place on 27 and 28 April. This brought an end to the apartheid regime, which classified people and forced them to live and work according to their racial designation. Two weeks before the national elections, on 14 April 1994, the Dutch Reformed Mission Church, which was reserved for Coloureds during apartheid, and the Dutch Reformed Church in Africa, reserved for black people, united to form the Uniting Reformed Church in Southern Africa (URCSA) as a non-racial church.

The Confession of Belhar was accepted as the fourth confession of faith of the unified church. It was actually the motivating power behind the unification. The language of the 1986 version of the Belhar Confession did not use inclusive language regarding gender, and neither did the version accepted in 1994. Both versions were in Afrikaans. The 2005 General Synod of the URCSA referred an English translation of the Confession by Dr Douglas Bax of the Uniting Presbyterian Church to the Temporary Judicial Commission for finalisation (Decision 65). It was the 2008 General Synod of the URCSA that accepted an English text of the Belhar Confession as an official version. While the Bax translation remained gender-exclusive, the 2008 text was partially inclusive. References to believers were inclusive of both men and women, and the pronoun ‘his’ or ‘him’ was never used for God. Instead, ‘God’ is repeated to exclude male references to God, as in the first sentence of Article 4: ‘… God has revealed Godself …’. However, the Confession still refers to God as ‘Father’, which is very male, and Jesus Christ is still God’s ‘Son’.

The designation ‘God’ occurs 24 times in the Belhar Confession, while Jesus (Christ) is referred to 11 times, and the (Holy) Spirit four times. The reason for more references to God than to Jesus or the Spirit may be because of the repetition of God instead of a male pronoun. However, it may also be that the Belhar Confession focuses on God as the One acting in the present, while Jesus is a more static symbol of reconciliation. Most of the references to God in the Confession are to God acting in the present, that is, God bringing justice, God supporting the downtrodden, etcetera.

In analysing these (de-)gendered references to the Divine in the Belhar Confession, the 2008 English text will be used, as it appears as an addendum in Plaatjies-van Huffel and Modise (Belhar Confession 2017:491–494).

Aim

This article aims to analyse the images of God in the Confession of Belhar for their gendered references, or lack thereof. A comparison will then be made to the gendered images of God in four other key church documents: (1) the 1994/2005 URCSA’s Policy on Gender Equity; (2) the Open Letter from the men of the URCSA to the Women of the URCSA in 2005; (3) the Constitution of the Christian Women’s Ministries of the URCSA; and (4) the Acts of the 2022 General Synod of URCSA to establish a growth of gender sensitivity in the URCSA, if at all.

The reason for choosing the first two documents is apparent, since they deal with gendered issues in the URCSA; the third is the Constitution of the Christian Women’s Ministries (CWM) and is important here since questions have been asked and published by women in the URCSA whether the CWM reflects the values of the URCSA’s Policy on Gender Equity in its images of God; the final document is the Acts of the 2022 General Synod (GS) of the URCSA and the latest formal document available to the author at the time of writing, and is used to ask the question: Has God become ungendered in the URCSA’s documentation?

Literature review and unique contribution

Very little has been written – academically and popularly – about gendered references in the Belhar Confession. One reason for this is that criticism of the Belhar Confession from within the URCSA itself was, and still is, seen as almost sacrilegious. Another reason is that gender issues were not really on the table in the 1980s when the Belhar Confession came into being; locally, gender was overshadowed by race, although theological gender talk was already rife worldwide.

In 2004, Prof. Piet Naudé, then from the Department of Christian Studies and Ethics at the University of Port Elizabeth, published a very sensitively balanced article on ‘gendered truth’ in the Belhar Confession. It was published in Scriptura (2004:201–209), an academic journal not affiliated to any church, and subtly entitled Can our creeds speak a gendered truth? A feminist reading of the Nicene Creed and the Belhar Confession. Naudé (2004:201) argues that although the Confession uses the ‘androcentric metaphors of the canon and tradition (it is) at the same time open to surprisingly inclusivist meaning’. Naudé (2004:203) acknowledges that language constitutes reality and that there is a ‘powerful relation between religious language (metaphors) and ecclesial-societal realities’; that is, that references to God as male create the reality of a male God in religious societies. However, Naudé (2004:2007) finds that the Belhar Confession, although it names God via sexist metaphors, redeems itself by describing God as the One who orders unity amongst all people, and who wishes to bring about justice and true peace for all. This means that God is acknowledged by the Belhar Confession as struggling and empowering confessors against gender injustice as well.

Writing in 2006, Prof. Christina Landman, like Prof. Piet Naudé in 2004, also did not have access to the partially inclusive language of the English version of the Belhar Confession, which was officially accepted by the URCSA only later, that is, in 2008. However, she takes an opposite position to that of Naudé. Landman (2006:283) argues that, if justice is embodied in sexist language, the door is closed not only on justice but on God’s acts of justice as well. She agrees that language creates people and mourns the fact that the Dutch Reformed Mission Church, which was the first of the Dutch Reformed family in South Africa to restore women to the office of minister of the Word in 1982, accepted the Confession of Belhar with its sexist, women-exclusive language in 1986. Consequently, Landman (2006:288) makes three recommendations to make the Confession of Belhar an inclusive confession of faith that encourages and recognises the interconnectedness between men and women. Firstly, references to confessors should be inclusive. This was indeed recommended in the 2008 English version of the Belhar Confession. Secondly, references to the maleness of God should be excluded by repeating ‘God’ instead of male pronouns. This, too, was recommended in the 2008 version. However, Landman’s third recommendation that God should be confessed not as ‘Father’ and ‘Son’ but as ‘Caretaker’ and ‘Saviour’ – as Article 1 of the Belhar Confession itself describes God – was never applied in later versions of the Belhar Confession.

Research methods and design

A content analysis will be made of the Confession of Belhar according to the following research questions:

• Are the images of God in the Confession of Belhar traditionally male, such as ‘Father’ and ‘Son’, or are other images of God used that are not gendered?
• Is the image of God in the Confession of Belhar that of God active in the present, or that of God passive as already revealed in the past? And are God’s actions, as God Godself, described as stereotypically male?
• Is the God of Belhar transcendental or immanent? Is the transcendental God more male than the immanent God?
• Is the God of Belhar Reformed, the God of missionary piety, or Liberationist?

Gendered images of God in the Belhar Confession

Article 1

The first article of the Confession of Belhar confesses belief in the triune God:

‘We believe in the triune God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, who through Word and Spirit gathers, protects and cares for the church from the beginning of the world and will do so to the end.’ (Belhar Confession 2017: n.p.)

Analysed in terms of the four research questions above, the following is found:

• God is male. God is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. However, God also has non-gendered names. God is the gatherer, protector and caretaker of the church.
• Through these non-gendered names, God reveals Godself as active in that God gathers, protects and cares for God’s church. God is not only revealed, remaining passive and captured in the Bible; God is an actor in the present according to God’s revelation in the Bible.
• God is transcendental as Father and Son, and as gatherer and protector; however, as caretaker, God moves towards being immanent in the church.
• God is Reformed in that other Reformed confessions of faith accepted by the URCSA confess God as triune, as Father, Son and Holy Spirit. However, unlike these Reformed traditions that confess God as creator, the Confession of Belhar confesses God as gatherer, protector and caretaker.

Article 2 (Unity)

The second article of the Confession of Belhar deals with unity. It is the longest of the articles, and too long to quote here. In terms of the research questions, the following is found:

• ‘God’ is mentioned seven times, ‘(Jesus) Christ’ eight times, and ‘(God’s) Spirit’ twice. God is male and is again called ‘Father’.
• God is rather passive in this article. The church, as the ‘people of God’, is encouraged to be active in finding unity with one another. Christ is at least active as a symbol in working reconciliation. However, in this article on church unity, God is not attached to any verb or to the present.
• God and the church, the ‘people of God’, are close. God’s people are reminded that they are filled with one Spirit, that is God’s Spirit, who remains transcendental.
• God in this article is Reformed as the triune God, with equal references to God, Christ and the Spirit. The article contains 18 references to Biblical texts in which the triune Godhead is acknowledged.

Article 3 (Reconciliation)

The third article of the Belhar Confession deals with reconciliation. In terms of the four research questions, the following is found:

• ‘God’s life-giving Word and Spirit’ appears twice in this rather short article, every time with a verb, that is, ‘God’s life-giving Word and Spirit has conquered the powers of sin and death, and therefore also of irreconciliation and hatred …’ as well as ‘God’s life-giving Word and Spirit will enable the church to live in a new obedience’, connecting God to the present (Belhar Confession 2017: n.p.).
• God conquers irreconciliation and enables the church to live towards reconciliation. God is a powerful actor, both spiritually and in practice, and in the present.
• God is transcendental in enabling the church from within, that is, through its members.
• God is a Liberator through the reconciliatory work of Christ, who is mentioned once in this article. The 11 Biblical references in this article refer mainly to the enabling work of (God’s) Spirit.

Article 4 (Justice)

This article on justice needs to be quoted almost in full:

• We believe that God has revealed Godself as the One who wishes to bring about justice and true peace on earth; that in a world full of injustice and enmity God is in a special way the God of the destitute, the poor and the wronged and that God calls the church to follow in this; that God brings justice to the oppressed and gives bread to the hungry; that God frees the prisoner and restores sight to the blind; that God supports the downtrodden, protects the strangers, helps orphans and widows and blocks the path of the ungodly; that for God pure and undefiled religion is to visit the orphans and the widows in their suffering; that God wishes to teach the people of God to do what is good and to seek the right;

That the church belonging to God should stand where God stands, namely, against injustice and with the wronged (Belhar Confession 2017: n.p.).

In terms of the four research questions, the following is found:

• God is portrayed in Article 4 as more active than in any other article.
• Reference to God is always attached to a verb (and to the present): ‘God has revealed Godself as the One who wishes to bring about justice’; ‘God calls the church to follow in this’; ‘God brings justice’; ‘God frees the prisoner’; ‘God supports the downtrodden, protects the strangers, helps orphans and widows and blocks the path of the ungodly’; ‘God wishes to teach the people of God to do what is good and to seek the right’. However, God seeks justice, but God also seeks peace. In the 15 Biblical references in this article, only four are from the Old Testament. And not one of them refers to God as war-like, only as the One who seeks justice and protects the oppressed.
• God is transcendental. God calls the church, which belongs to God, to stand where God stands.
• This is the God of liberation theology. God does not cause suffering. Evil systems and people cause suffering. God calls God’s church to, like God, engage in resisting injustice to establish peace.

Article 5 (Obedience)

The final and short article of the Belhar Confession declares its belief in Jesus Christ as Lord and as the Head of the Church. It concludes with a glorification of the triune God, who is Father, Son and Holy Spirit:

‘… To the one and only God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, be the honour and the glory forever and ever.’ (Belhar Confession 2017: n.p.)

Summary of the gendered images of God in the Belhar Confession

In terms of the four research questions outlined above, the image of God in the Belhar Confession is as follows:

• God is referred to in gendered terms. Although God is not referred to in the male pronouns of him and his, God is the Father and the Son in three of the articles of the Belhar Confession. In Article 1 (only), God also receives non-gendered names such as protector and caretaker, but not that of the creator, as confessed in other Reformed confessions accepted by the URCSA.
• God is active; God is not the revealed God of the Bible only, but the God who acts in the present against injustice and enables God’s church to do the same.
• God remains transcendental, not immanent, but on the side of the sufferer.
• God is the triune God of the Reformed confession, but is also expressed in the Belhar Confession as the actor God of Liberation Theologies who does not cause suffering but acts on the side of those who suffer because of evil systems.

Comparative images of God in key gendered documents of the Uniting Reformed Church in Southern Africa

In the next section of this article, the images of God in four key documents of the URCSA vis-à-vis gender will be explored in light of the four research questions posed above. The documents are: (1) the 1994/2005 URCSA’s Policy on Gender Equity; (2) the Open Letter from the Men of the URCSA to the Women of the URCSA in 2005; (3) the Constitution of the Christian Women’s Ministries of the URCSA; and (4) the Acts of the 2022 General Synod of URCSA. The reason for their selection is explained above under ‘Aim’.

URCSA’s Policy on Gender Equity (1994/2005)

Mary-Anne Plaatjies-van Huffel describes the history and the present of URCSA’s Policy on Gender Equity in an article, ‘A history of gender insensitivity in URCSA’. She calls URCSA’s Gender Policy ‘a milestone never embraced 1994– 2005’:

URCSA has a gender policy, but the church at large is in total oblivion that such a policy exists. Already at the conception of URCSA in 1994, a gender policy was adopted. This policy was the result of deep reflection during the 1980s in the DRMC (Dutch Reformed Mission Church) on the World Alliance of Reformed Churches’ (WARC) programme regarding the partnership between men and women. The DRMC gave prominence to this programme. (Plaatjies-van Huffel 2019:11)

The General Synod of URCSA in 2005 remembered and revived this, its Policy on Gender Equity (from here on referred to as Gender Policy), which had already been accepted at the unification Synod of 1994. Decision 71 (Acts of Synod 2005a:125–126) contains the 1994 Gender Policy as well as the 2005 General Synod’s expansion of the Policy into three more sections, namely, a Mission statement, Objectives, and a Plan of Action. The 1994 Gender Policy reads as follows (the parts in italics are particularly relevant to this article on the images of God):

The Synod decided to test her total theology, practice and all the other facets of the church, honestly and critically to identify every possible form of sexism. The Synod points to the following guidelines:

• The dismantling of all partitions that still separate women and men within church communities;
• To listen afresh to the Biblical evidence regarding the status and association of men and women;
• The recognition of women’s talents for the broader service, and the consequent involvement of women in leadership positions and positions of authority on all levels;
• The testing of the current oral and written use of language in the church’s liturgy, confessing and official documents, and the truthful striving to use language that:
  • Confirms the underlying community of women and men;
  • Reflects the experiences of both men and women;
  • Describes God by using a variety of Biblical images in both male and female metaphors;
• To give men and women equal access to job opportunities, and to ensure that women receive equal salaries and benefits (URCSA 1994).

It is especially the fourth point that bears relevance for this article since it deals with religious language and metaphors. Indeed, already in 1994 the URCSA formulated a Gender Policy not only to use inclusive language in all its documents, including its confessions (‘confessing … documents’) but also to describe God ‘by using a variety of Biblical images in both male and female metaphors’. (Belhar Confession 2017: n.p.)

As said, the 2005 General Synod expanded the 1994 Gender Policy with a Mission statement, Objectives and Plan of Action, as reflected in Decision 71. The Mission, inter alia, acknowledges ‘the basic biblical affirmation that God created people in God’s image, male and female God created them’ (Gn 1:27). In this, we find God the Creator in preference to God the Protector and Caretaker as in the first article of the Confession of Belhar.

The Objectives set by the 2005 Synod for executing the Gender Policy of 1994 have as their first objective:

[t]o change unjust structure and distorted symbol systems reflected in gender relations … [and] [t]o uproot all instruments, e.g., Sexist Language … within the church that perpetuate inequalities between men and women. (Belhar Confession 2017: n.p.)

The Plan of Action, sadly, does not include any plan to change sexist language or symbols.

In terms of the four research questions posed above, the 1994/2005 URCSA’s Policy on Gender Equity (Decision 71) offers the following images of God:

• God is never referred to as male.
• Inclusive language is used to refer to God. God is active as the biblically revealed God, that is, as Creator, creating men and women equally.
• The Gender Policy demands that God be described in both male and female biblical metaphors.
• There are 14 references to ‘God’ in the Gender Policy of 2005, 3 to (Jesus) Christ and 2 to the (Holy) Spirit. The triune God is acknowledged in a Reformed way, but the overwhelming reference to God more than Christ and the Spirit points to a tendency in Liberation Theology (See Landman 2025:8–9).

The Open Letter from the Men of the URCSA to the Women of the URCSA (2005)

The 2005 General Synod of the URCSA, apart from the Gender Policy, also entertained an Open Letter from the Men of the URCSA to the women of the URCSA (GS Acta 2005b:159–160). It was read by Dr Allan Boesak and acknowledged on behalf of the women by Prop. Alet Pretorius. The Letter is placed here in full, and references to the three persons of the triune God in this Letter are placed in italics below:

Dear sisters in the Lord Jesus Christ

It is with humility that we write this letter to you.

Together with you we have heard the gospel of Jesus Christ and are trying to follow that gracious call to enter the kingdom of God. Together with you we have discovered that pearl of great price and have sold everything to buy it.

It is as joint heirs of eternal life -- together with you – that we confess that we have taken over power in the Body of Jesus Christ. This is the way we received the structures of the church from our fathers and grandfathers, but we have realised that this is not the way that our Lord would want us to lead and guide the church.

We confess that, instead of treating you as equal image bearers of the living God, we often pushed you into second-class citizenship in the household of God;

We confess that, instead of treating you as equal fellow-disciples of our Lord Jesus Christ, for a long time we went alone to study theology and to appoint church leaders;

We confess that, instead of treating you as equal fellow-witnesses to Jesus Christ, empowered by the Holy Spirit, we silenced you in church and resisted the work of the Holy Spirit who has given you so many gifts for ministry to build up the temple of the Holy Spirit.

Most of us realised many years ago that the systematic exclusion of – and discrimination against – any group or category of people does not reflect the will of God our Creator, as revealed in the life of Jesus Christ our Lord. When the former NGSK drafted the Belhar Confession in 1982, it clearly expressed the biblical view on the unity of the church, reconciliation between people, and justice in church and society. The Confession has been a bright light on our painful journey as Reformed churches in Southern Africa to dismantle the racist structures and attitudes of apartheid. However, we confess that we have applied the liberating guidance of Belhar primarily to the problems of overcoming barriers of ‘race’, culture and ethnicity. So today, as URCSA, we stand judged by the Belhar Confession:

For having discriminated against women in church and society;

For having worked against reconciliation by alienating women from significant participation in leadership positions and ministerial formation;

For having practised injustice against women in church and society.

In the light of the above, we as male members of the URCSA, wish to say to our sisters in the church:

We confess that our discrimination against you has hurt and alienated you in many ways;

We admit that these actions have been a lack of respect and a failure of love;

We humbly apologise to you for all the actions, attitudes and structures for which we have been responsible;

We commit ourselves to make restitution for this wrong and to build a new church with you – in which you are free to exercise all your gifts and ministries and in which we develop an equal partnership to the glory of God (GS Acta 2005b:159–160).

This much-neglected letter of 528 words, written by ‘the men of URCSA’, reflects the four research questions as follows:

• Biblical images of the Divine are used without using exclusive male metaphors. In the above, these images have been marked in bold. They encompass the gospel of Jesus Christ, the kingdom of God, the body of Jesus Christ, the household of God, the will of God our Creator, and many more. References to God, Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit are more or less equal in numbers, and the idea is not created that God is a male God who rules the Trinity and the world.
• God is the active God of the Belhar Confession, the Confession being the foundation of the Open Letter. God acts against disunity and injustice in the present.
• God remains transcendental, our Creator.
• The authors of the Open Letter identify with the Reformed Church in South Africa. It displays a humble piety that has not been expressed before by men towards women in the local missionary pietist tradition. Moreover, the men expect to be judged by the Belhar Confession itself for their previous neglect of and discrimination towards women.

The Constitution of the Christian Women’s Ministries of the URCSA

Mary-Anne Plaatjies-van Huffel already in (2011:105–119) published an article on ‘The institutionalisation of Christian Women’s Organisations: from docile recipients to agents of change’. In this article, she traces the history of how, since 1890, the Vrouezendingbond [Women’s Mission Society] of the (white) Dutch Reformed Church constituted Christian women’s organisations in the (coloured) Dutch Reformed Mission Church and the (black) Dutch Reformed Church in Africa along racial lines. More important is that the Vrouezendingbond, especially since the 1920s, flooded coloured and black women’s organisations with religious literature that emphasised patriarchal values, stressed women’s submissive role, silenced them in the public sphere, and presented all this as divinely ordained. However, since 1994, the Christian Women’s Ministries (CWM) of the URCSA transformed into agents of social transformation and addressed social issues at their conferences. This is because women from the CWM started to attend ecumenical meetings where they were empowered.

It was, however, Mary-Anne Plaatjies-van Huffel (2019:17–18) herself who stated in her auto-ethnographical essay ‘A history of gender insensitivity in URCSA’ that the still patriarchal management structures of the URCSA kept on ‘cherry-picking’ women from the CWM to attend ecumenical meetings, leaving ordained women like herself (and the author) behind.

Nel (2019:1–15) also published an article on the URCSA’s CWM, ‘To build a new church together? Exploring interdisciplinary dialogue with a Christian Women’s Ministry: Addressing patriarchy in URCSA’. In this article, she argued that the CWM had not been able to fully empower black women to address gender justice. Much work has still to be done ‘to build a church where … the church should prophetically address injustice and seek witness to the partnership between women and men’ (Nel 2019:1).

Within those rather ambivalent views on the CWM, the time has come to consider the images of God in the Constitution of the CWM itself. The first six articles of the Constitution are included here because God is mentioned only in the first 5 of the 12 articles, and article 6 says nothing about God. Apart from the headings and references to God, the Belhar Confession and the empowerment of women are in bold (Box 1).

The following remarks can be made about this (first part of the) CWM Constitution in terms of its images of God:

• The images of God are male; the Motto (Article 2) states that CWM are Women in Service of Christ and His Church; and one of the Values of the CWM (Article 3) is Faith in the Divine God (Father, Son and the Holy Spirit)
• The Vision of the CWM (Article 4) is formulated in terms of the four-pillar values of the Belhar Confession: to strive to be dynamic in unity, reconciliation, justice and obedience;
• The Mission of the CWM (Article 5) is to demolish the walls of gender, race, language and culture, and to acknowledge equality; and yet, in the Objectives of the CWM (Article 6), there is no mention of the empowerment of women in terms of gender, language and equality.

The Acts of the 2022 General Synod of the URCSA

The Acts of the Eighth General Synod of the URCSA held in 2022 are the latest official document of the URCSA available to the author. It is difficult to answer from this document the question whether URCSA has grown in its images of God. ‘God’ is used only once in the Decision Register. Decision 19 is the 1st Report of the Order Commission: Personal Commitment and Spirituality. It reads: ‘GS2022 employs on all delegates to attend Synod with an open mind, love for one another and for the world and passion to see the glory of God’. Certainly, no gendered image of God there. However, there is a reference to ‘fraternal greetings’ in Decision 19 for which the church can look for a replacement in future.

Notable is Decision 416 regarding the inclusion of a woman in the General Synod (GS) Executive. It reads:

GS approves a move to expand the GS Executive with the aim of practicalising the notion of inclusivity. We believe that the church must have a ‘will’ to include women in all the leadership positions of our church. We therefore move that the synod approves the move to include a woman in the executive for the church to be representative of the demographics of our church. (Belhar Confession 2017: n.p.)

This conforms to the objectives of the URCSA’s Policy on Gender Equity, but seems to be second best and in the field of damage control since no women were elected to the GS Executive itself, and a woman now needs to be brought in through the back door, but she does not, according to the URCSA Church Order, have voting rights within the Executive. The example at hand is that of Rev Angelique Ghall, who was appointed, not elected, as assistant Scribe in the Northern Synod. This is not a position acknowledged in the Northern Synod Church Order, and therefore she has no rights as a member of the Moderamen.

Ethical considerations

Ethical clearance for this study was obtained from the University of South Africa College of Human Sciences_CREC (Ref no. 8362), where the author is affiliated as a Professor Extra-Ordinarius. The Ethical Clearance Certificate is registered under NHREC Registration (No. Rec-240816-052).

Results

Finding 1: God as male or female

The Belhar Confession refers to God three times in the gendered images of Father and Son, but avoids exclusive pronouns like ‘him’ or ‘his’ to refer to God. However, URCSA’s Policy on Gender Equity (1994/2005) and the Open Letter of the men to the women in 2005 nowhere use gendered images of God. The Gender Policy also aims at changing official documentation of the URCSA to refer to God in biblical images that are inclusive of male and female. But then, the Constitution of the CWM refers to God as male. Again, the Acta of the 2022 General Synod of URCSA seldom refers to God, and since women are equally seldomly elected to the General Synod Executive, makes a concession in Decision 416 to co-opt a woman in the Executive, albeit without voting powers.

Finding 2: God as active or passive

The God of the Belhar Confession is an actor, that is, God is active in the present as God has been revealed in the Bible. God has acted against disunity, injustice and irreconciliation in the Bible, and God is doing so in the present, calling God’s church to action. In more than half of its references to God, God is combined with a (present tense) verb. In both the Gender Policy and the Open Letter, God is the active God of the Belhar Confession. The Constitution of the CWM formulates the Vision for their members (mothers) in terms of dynamically executing the four actions of the Belhar Confession, which are unity, reconciliation, justice and obedience.

Finding 3: God as transcendental or immanent

The God of the Belhar Confession is transcendental, who encourages and equips the church through God’s Spirit. The Open Letter describes God as Creator, who is ultimately transcendental, while the Belhar Confession confesses God as Caregiver and Protector, and not as Creator per se. The emphasis on the Belhar Confession of God as being on the side of the poor and downtrodden, and identifying with the sufferer, may display some features of immanency.

Finding 4: God as the God of theologies

The God of the Belhar Confession is the active and liberating God of the moment, as God has revealed Godself in the Bible. This is the God of the Liberation Theologies of the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s. These Liberation Theologies, however, also display characteristics of (missionary) piety in their references to sin and salvation, right and wrong. Sin lies in evil systems and their leaders, and not necessarily in the sinful heart of the individual, as missionary piety claims. The revealed God is the God of Reformed Theology; the acting, intervening God of the present is the God of Liberation Theologies, which locally displayed many Reformed and pietistic characteristics.

Conclusion

Mary-Anne Plaatjies-van Huffel was the first (and to date only) woman Moderator of the URCSA (2012-1016) and also the most outspoken critic of the gender insensitivity in the URCSA. Yet she never criticised the gendered language of the Belhar Confession in any of her numerous publications on the Confession. Even Plaatjies-van Huffel regarded the Belhar Confession as untouchable after having been accepted by the Synod (the English version in 2008). Changing it now may be as unthinkable as altering the Apostolic Creed.

This article, too, does not aim at undermining the Confession of Belhar. On the contrary, it applauds the influence of the Belhar Confession on the URCSA’s Policy on Gender Equity, the Open Letter from the men of URCSA to the women of URCSA, and the Constitution of the Christian Women’s Ministries. All of these are gender-focused documents that overtly or covertly acknowledge the influence of the Confession of Belhar on their vision and mission.

However, this article laments the fact that the Confession of Belhar houses gendered images of God, in contradiction to the URCSA’s Policy of Gender Equity, which had already in 1994 set the goal of ‘describ(ing) God by using a variety of Biblical images in both male and female metaphors’.

Acknowledgements

The author declares that they have no financial or personal relationships that may have inappropriately influenced them in writing this article.

Christina Landman: Conceptualisation, Data curation, Formal analysis, Funding acquisition, Investigation, Methodology, Resources, Visualisation, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing. The author confirms that this work is entirely their own, has reviewed the article, approved the final version for submission and publication, and takes full responsibility for the integrity of its findings

The author declares that there are no financial or personal relationships that may have inappropriately influenced her in writing this article.

The author declares that all data that support this research article and findings are available in the article and its references.

The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and are the product of professional research. They do not necessarily reflect the official policy, or position of any affiliated institution, funder, agency, or that of the publisher. The author is responsible for this article’s results, findings, and content.

References