The Christian Nationalist Repentance Action’s work among the Afrikaner-Boer People
2 September 2024
An organization called the Christian Nationalist Repentance Action (CNRA) held an Afrikaner-Boer worship and prayer service at the historic Paardekraal Monument yesterday. The service was led by Rev. Gideon Grobler, pastor of an independent Reformed Church in Vereeniging, South Africa. Grobler, who preached from Jeremiah 7, used the occasion to emphasise the need for collective, covenantal and national repentance before God. He highlighted how the judgment the Boer people currently suffers is a result of systematic apostasy and disobedience to God’s Law. Grobler, in line with the Reformers, amplified how God covenantally deals with nations under the new covenant in the same way he did with Judah and Israel under the Old. He highlighted how nations apostatize when sin and godlessness become normalized and accepted in society. He referred to the example of the third commandment where taking the Lord’s Name in vain is accompanied by an inescapable curse (Exodus 20:7), noting that when it becomes acceptable in a culture to do so, this alone is sufficient grounds in terms of God’s righteousness to judge a people collectively.
The CNRA has highlighted several national sins prevalent in Boer culture, and calls upon Boers to collectively commit to rooting out these sins in their cultural life. National sins are defined as “violations of the commandments of God that have become socially acceptable in our national life.” Their list of national, covenantal sins include 12 sins identified as particularly prevalent among Boers:
1. Mammonism, i.e., an unbiblical love of money,
2. Sabbath violations,
3. Trusting in and glorifying men in the place of God,
4. Drunkenness,
5. Addiction to cellphones and television at the cost of maintaining a healthy family life and conducting daily family worship,
6. Pornography and Fornication,
7. Neglecting parental/covenantal duties to children,
8. Laziness,
9. A lack of respect to those in society to whom it is due,
10. The failure to stand up for the crown rights of Jesus,
11. Cowardice, and
12. Pacifism.
The sins highlighted in list amplifies the need for national-covenantal repentance as a means of collective covenantal sanctification. The diversity of God’s creation necessitates that peoples repent in ways specific to those sins prevalent among that particular people. The apostle Paul also recognized lying, brutality and gluttony as sins besetting the Cretan people (Titus 1:12). Yet none of these sins are particularly characteristic of the Boers, for example. On the other hand, Boers may, for example, be more prone to addiction to cellphones or television than Germans, whereas Germans tend to be more accepting of LGBTI degeneracy than Boers. Boers also tend to be more guilty of pacifism or more specifically passivity in the public and political domain than Americans, for example, whereas Americans are more prone to be accepting of third-commandment violations.
God covenantally deals with nations in accordance with the national diversity of his creation. Each nation has a duty before God to repent and sanctify their national life. In this regard civil magistrates and those in ecclesiastical offices have an important role to play, and to this end both the church and the state must be national in character. The promise of II Chronicles 7:13—14 of deliverance for repentance is then also specifically directed to ethno-nations. Propositional nations can simply not lay claim to this covenantal promise.
This reality is brilliantly explained by Geerhardus Vos’ exegesis of Romans 11. He writes:
The “branches broken off” metaphor has frequently been viewed as proof of the relativity and changeability of election, and it is pointed out that at the end of Rom 11 vs. 23, the Gentile Christians are threatened with being cut off in case they do not continue in the kindness of God. But wrongly. Already this image of engrafting should have restrained such an explanation. This image is nowhere and never used of the implanting of an individual Christian, into the mystical body of Christ by regeneration. Rather, it signifies the reception of a racial line or national line into the dispensation of the covenant or their exclusion from it. This reception, of course, occurs by faith in the preached word, and to that extent, with this engrafting of a race or a nation, there is also connected the implanting of individuals into the body of Christ. The cutting off, of course, occurs by unbelief; not, however, by the unbelief of person who first believed, but solely by the remaining in unbelief of those who, by virtue of their belonging to the racial line, should have believed and were reckoned as believers. So, a rejection ( = multiple rejections) of an elect race is possible, without it being connected to a reprobation of elect believers. Certainly, however, the rejection of a race or nation involves at the same time the personal reprobation of a sequence of people. Nearly all the Israelites who are born and die between the rejection of Israel as a nation and the reception of Israel at the end times appear to belong to those reprobated. And the threat of Romans 11:22 (of being broken off) is not directed to the Gentile Christians as individual believers but to them considered racially.1
God deals with nations covenantally. Recognizing this means that in order to live in a God-glorifying manner, we must align every aspect of our socio-religious and socio-political engagement with this reality. National repentance is inescapable to engendering the day when “all kings shall fall down before Him, and all nations shall serve Him” (Psalm 72:11).
1. Geerhardus Vos, Reformed Dogmatics, vol. 1, p. 118.