Introduction:Forgiveness
Derek Poole

Let the church be church
Brian Moore

From the Director - Statement in response to IRA and IICD Announcements
David Porter

Decommissioning - How do I feel?
David Clements

Embodying Forgiveness
Patrick Mitchel

Forgiveness in the New Testament
Bill Addley

Better than Bitterness
David Clements

Necessary Miracles - Thoughts on Forgiveness and Politics
Duncan Morrow

Faith and Practice - Moyna Bill
Ruth Hutchinson

Embodying Forgiveness Project
Stephen Graham

Tutu Book Review
Stephen Graham

Jones Book Review
Alice Swann

Transformation 2002

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NECESSARY MIRACLES: THOUGHTS ON FORGIVENESS AND POLITICS
Max Weber famously defined the state as that body which holds the monopoly of all legitimate violence in a given territory. The usual English translation is more euphemistic than the original German, speaking of ‘force’ rather than ‘legitimate violence’. But Weber was deliberately trying to unveil something important in politics: the state is founded in violence. As both Hobbes and Locke knew, the control and use of violence is what makes a state necessary in the first place. Only anarchists have believed that human beings can live together in large numbers without a larger authority with the ability to arbitrate disputes, enforce decisions and control those who continue to prosecute their own interests with violence. And all of them confirm what Paul already knew in the first century: that conformity to the law is both our only way to live together AND it is death.

Politics is about using power to win and exercise power. Even at its best, it has never been about the abolition of violence, but about its reduction by control. Of course this carries with it enormous dangers. If the power of the state falls into the hands of unrestrained violence, then the state itself becomes the embodiment of terror. While we are traumatised by the terrorism of small groups over whole nations, we must not forget that ‘the reign of terror’ was perpetrated by a state in crisis – the French Revolution. Furthermore by far the larger part of the deliberate deaths attributable to terror in more recent history was committed by states: Nazi Germany, Stalin’s Russia, Mao’s China and Pol Pot’s Cambodia.

Politics is ultimately not about best and worst but about worst and better. Utopias, which hold out the possibility of escaping this terrible double bind through politics, are ultimately confronted with a terrible dilemma: if people will not do what is good for them, will we force them, or lose our dream? But it is also not to say that all systems are equally tyrannical or unchangeable. Churchill was certainly right: ‘Democracy is a bloody awful system of government, but it is the best bloody awful system of government we have.’

In the New Testament, the theme of earthly power is the core of the third temptation: if you bow down and worship me, the principle of violence and death in the world, you can be master of everything. And Jesus refuses - refuses to the point of death. Another aspect is graphically conveyed in John’s account of the passion. “It is expedient,” says Caiaphas, “that one should die for the people.”

As a result of this moment of frankness, Caiaphas has been vilified by much Christian writing and in one sense, rightly so. But in another sense, his only sin was candour, articulating the principle on which the rest of us, Christian or otherwise, continue to live. Many political leaders have been prepared to kill more than one to ensure the survival of their political project. It was no less true of World War Two than it was of Stalin’s terrors, so we have probably all understood the impulse. And the same underlying choice has been made in Afghanistan. It is uncomfortable to have to acknowledge that a decision not to go to war is ultimately also to take risks with other lives. To govern is to choose.
Jesus always speaks of and from a reality beyond politics and violence, within which the apparently impregnable order of power is rendered meaningless by grace and love. Entrance to this reality is founded on forgiveness, because only through being forgiven could we possibly enter. Only injustices can be forgiven. Forgiveness, the limitless decision to count as nothing the injury and guilt that lies between us and God, is the possibility which speaks of a wider reality to which human life must return. It is the antithesis of law and enforcement, having always to do with granting more than can be asked for and given without asking for payment. As Dostoevsky and one of the thieves crucified alongside Jesus knew, forgiveness in relationships can also go along with a capacity to accept punishment.

So what has forgiveness to do with politics? For as long as we think of it as a tool, as a trick of power or as a strategy we remain firmly rooted within the language and possibilities of power relations. The strategies and tools may be useful political or personal possibilities but they are not the same as the genuine decision to embrace an enemy or a decision to ask to be returned to full humanity following real violations. Legislating forgiveness always remains impossible. Asking forgiveness on behalf of others in an age when nobody grants that kind of authority to anyone else is probably a lost possibility. Grand statements without real personal penance, always seem vacuous and politically motivated. Underlying all the rationalisations, this alone explains the well-founded resistance of secular politicians to even countenancing forgiveness as a political category.
Like little else, forgiveness and the cry for healing underlines the limit to politics faced with broken relationships. But to say, as many do, that politics has nothing to do with forgiveness is, for me, too simple and too cheap. Our possibilities lie not in the capacity of politics to enlist forgiveness as a strategy, but in the opportunities which political leadership and power find to speak from the truth of their human weakness, bowing before the deep human truth which violence teaches us: that without forgiveness all human life is impossible. But it is only those politicians who recognise the limits of their power and return to the reality of their human weakness who can bridge the gap. They do so, not in formulas or in speeches, but in simple acts and words that say little but convey everything. And when we meet to talk about forgiveness and its meaning, we need to witness to it by telling stories rather than seek for foolproof formulas. So when we meet, let us tell our stories of those who shine as lights from the hilltops. In one quick glance I see Anwar Sadat in the Knesset, Willi Brandt at Auschwitz, Vaclav Havel and the Sudeten Germans and Martin Luther King and the whites of Alabama.

Duncan Morrow lectures at the University of Ulster’s School of History, Philosophy and Politics in Jordanstown.