God Has a Dream by Douglas Abrams

First published: New York: Doubleday, 2004

Genre(s): Nonfiction

Subgenre(s): Africa; history; spiritual treatise

Core issue(s):Agape; connectedness; forgiveness; freedom and free will; God; hope; nonviolent resistance; peace; social action

Overview

Beginning each chapter with “Dear Child of God,” Desmond Mpilo Tutu, the first black Archbishop of Cape Town (1986-1996), presents in God Has a Dream a pastoral type of intellectual and spiritual memoir that he sees as a “cumulative expression” of his life’s work. Based largely on earlier writings, speeches, and sermons, it provides an invaluable summary of Tutu’s philosophy, with highlights of the South African struggle against apartheid (racial segregation). Written with his friend Douglas Abrams, God Has a Dream describes in detail the events and emotions that surrounded South Africa’s first democratic general election in April, 1994, which is celebrated there each year on April 27 as Liberty Day. Tutu never loses sight of the broader context of global human freedom and dignity. God’s “dream,” on which the book is premised, is described in sweeping terms reminiscent of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., during the March on Washington in 1963. This dream, however, is distinctively Tutu’s and South Africa’s.

Archbishop Tutu was deeply involved in the South African struggle long before 1994, working incessantly to try to free long-imprisoned African National Congress (ANC) activist Nelson Mandela and encouraging international sanctions against South Africa and corporate divestment from it. In 1984 he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his nonviolent efforts against racial injustice in South Africa and beyond. When Tutu retired as Archbishop of Cape Town in 1996, Mandela—by then released from his twenty-seven-year incarceration and elected president of South Africa—appointed him chairman of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which was created to bring to light the atrocities of apartheid and to promote reconciliation between former oppressed people and those who had oppressed them.

God Has a Dream is replete with humor, inclusiveness, and deceptively simple challenges based on the notion that all people have a role to play in the realization of God’s “dream.” No one is beyond redemption, and no one is unable to contribute to God’s plan for humankind, Tutu argues; everyone is a part of that plan. People are made for interconnectedness, which is not limited to personal relationships. Interconnectedness also encompasses humankind’s stewardship over physical creation. Nature, to Tutu, is entrusted to humankind for safekeeping and maintenance.

The eight chapters of God Has a Dream span a broad but coherent range of spiritual principles set in the context of South Africa’s liberation and its universal implications. Tutu points out in chapter 1 that God believes in us and is working endlessly to transfigure us into what we ought to be. In his second chapter, Tutu defines God’s dream in terms similar to those of the late Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., when he delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech in Washington, D.C., in August, 1963. Above all, God’s dream, says Tutu, is that all human beings will become one family in relationship to one another under God’s fatherhood.

Chapters 3, 4, and 5 are based on the important truth that God loves us all, including even the worst of sinners. He calls on us to love our enemies and to become instruments of transfiguration of the world. The last three chapters urge us to learn to see “with the eyes of the heart” and thus listen quietly for God’s instructions and trust that God’s dream will eventually triumph.

Two seminal concepts guide Tutu’s analysis: transfiguration and ubuntu. The first is borrowed from the story of Jesus’ transfiguration in Matthew 17, Mark 9, and Luke 9. Tutu uses it in God Has a Dream to mean transformation and sees it as universally applicable. The principle of transfiguration, he insists, suggests that no person or situation is “untransfigurable.” All of creation will eventually be liberated and perfected. This Pauline concept, drawn from Romans 8:19-23, takes on a vivid contemporary meaning as Tutu links it specifically to seemingly hopeless human situations like the long-term effects of apartheid and conditions of hunger, loneliness, fear, and injury around the world.

The Nguni term ubuntu cannot be precisely translated into English. It is a distinctively African concept that refers to the bonds that link all human beings. Roughly translated, ubuntu means that everyone’s humanity is caught up in, and inextricably bound up with, everyone else’s. What we do affects others, and vice versa. This applies at every level of human relations, including international.

Tutu’s deeply personal work is a remarkable reflection on the modern human condition that exudes both humor and pathos, sober realism and vibrant hopefulness. Tutu rejects the notion that he is optimistic in any conventional sense. He prefers to be called “realistic” because the vision of hope he shares is grounded in viewing life as it actually is. The fact that there is hope for human beings and nature is a result of God’s power and love. Moreover, Tutu’s and his fellow countrymen’s struggles in South Africa have equipped them for greater service to all humankind.

Christian Themes

Drawing extensively from both the Old and the New Testaments, as well as his experience in battling apartheid, Tutu engages some of the most challenging issues of Christian thought and praxis in this short but very substantive book. His distinctive blend of Judeo-Christian theology in the Anglican tradition with African thought shapes his treatment of all of the major issues.

From the outset, Tutu insists that, despite appearances to the contrary, there is hope for the world that originates in God’s active involvement with humankind and nature. He wrote God Has a Dream, he points out, because of two counterposed realities: First, all of us experience sadness and at times despair, and we even “lose hope that the suffering in our lives and in the world will ever end”; opposing this is Tutu’s “faith and my understanding that this suffering can be transformed and redeemed.” Tutu argues that no one and no situation is beyond repair. All can be “transfigured.” The ultimate cause and manifestation of transfiguration, says Tutu, is the cross of Jesus Christ. Its power and the love that it displayed transformed the lives of Saint Paul, Saint Peter, and many millions of other men, women, and children. In turn, they became God’s “agents of transformation.”

Tutu’s apparent optimism is actually far more than sanguine positive thinking. It is God, after all, who has the dream, and it is thus more than mere wishful human thinking. Although many people find it more difficult to believe that God loves them and is working in a redemptive way in their own lives than to believe in divine providence more generally, God loves everyone equally. In the context of South Africa’s long and difficult journey to freedom, as well as the gargantuan scope of man’s historical inhumanity to man, this unconditional love demands that people who would become disciples of God’s truth, and thus fully join God’s human family, must forgive and indeed love their enemies.

Tutu departs in this book from some prevailing post-Enlightenment trends in theology, notably in his emphasis upon suffering in the cause of freedom. Ubuntu demands this, as do the early Church’s many examples of sharing and bearing each other’s burdens. Tutu’s model throughout is the family. Families share. Families love and sacrifice, and from the perspective of God’s dream, all races, all cultures, all nations are meant to be complementary members of the eternal family. Racism, sexism, environmental and other artificial barriers must yield to God’s redemptive fellowship. Appealing to the spirit of Galatians 3:28, Tutu vigorously opposes such obstacles. Paul there proclaims, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” Ubuntu theology, always important to Tutu, affirms, “I am human because I belong.”

Sources for Further Study

Allen, John. Rabble-Rouser for Peace: The Authorized Biography of Desmond Tutu. New York: Free Press, 2006. This award-winning South African journalist’s account underscores Tutu’s commitment to the idea that the only authentic basis for peace is high regard for human rights. Illustrated.

Clark, Nancy L., and William H. Worger. The Rise and Fall of Apartheid. New York: Pearson/Longman, 2004. With its main focus on defining apartheid and explaining why it ended, this four-part history includes strategies for reform, legislation, and reprinted primary sources.

Du Boulay, Shirley. Tutu: Voice of the Voiceless. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1988. This masterful analysis traces Archbishop Tutu’s life from his birth in Klerksdorp, Transvaal, in 1931, through the many stages that made him an internationally respected advocate of oppressed people.

Gish, Steven D. Desmond Tutu: A Biography. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2004. Presents Tutu as South Africa’s counterpart to Martin Luther King, Jr., and covers his childhood, education, mentors, and spiritual and intellectual journey to becoming South Africa’s first black archbishop.

Hulley, Leonard, Louise Kretzschmar, and Luke Lungile Pato, eds. Archbishop Tutu: Prophetic Witness in South Africa. Cape Town, South Africa: Human and Rousseau, 1996. An inspiring and informative account of Tutu’s philosophy, especially his ubuntu theology, which underscores human interdependence and divine origins.