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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
EMBODYING FORGIVENESS
Embodying Forgiveness is a project by the Centre for Contemporary Christianity
in Ireland that will run until around May 2003. The backdrop to this project
is fitting for such a topic. Community tensions and struggles are as fierce
as ever. Victims of violence are created on a daily basis and criminal
activity is ongoing. Furthermore our political future is quite uncertain
and relationships in the political arena are as sour as they ever have
been. In response to this the Christian message of forgiveness is extremely
important but at great risk of being ignored. The Christian church must
be able to bring its message to bear on many issues and situations. Experiencing
a sense of forgiveness is core to the encounter with God’s grace
and the joy of new life in Christ. However, forgiveness is often one of
the greatest sources of pain and struggle in our lives as we endeavour
to follow Christ’s example of forgiving others.
This project will hopefully provide a challenge to us to reflect on the understanding of forgiveness in our spiritual life and help us face up to the challenge of living toward forgiveness in our daily life. We hope people can be led to go beyond enjoying the blessing of being forgiven by God and feel torn by the pain of struggling to forgive others. We hope they will be empowered to reflect and grow in the journey toward embodying forgiveness in their spiritual life, relations, church and community.
Why Forgiveness?
Forgiveness is central to the Christian faith. There are many important
issues surrounding the concept of forgiveness. It touches on many important
areas of life and raises many questions.
Psychology
A lot of recent research has been done by academics on the idea of
forgiveness and the results have filtered down to a more popular level,
as has been shown by the coverage in both Christian and secular magazines
- Christianity Today and Time have carried major articles
in relation to it. This work has focused on showing how the act of forgiving
can actually help to bring psychological and emotional healing for people
who forgive those who have wronged them. Some academics have even suggested
that it could help bring physical healing.
Repentance
The relationship between repentance and forgiveness has been extremely
important for Christians. The big question is which should come first.
Should we be willing to extend forgiveness or should we always refuse
to do so until there is genuine repentance? A classic text used in this
discussion is Luke 17:3-4 … ‘If your brother sins. . . if
he repents, forgive him…’. Strictly speaking if we use this
text to say we cannot forgive those who do not repent, we commit a logical
fallacy.1 However, the main question then becomes:
how far is it clear that the text implies this?
Justice
In relation to justice we must ask whether or not forgiveness must
override the concerns of justice. This was a big issue in the South African
situation and had to be addressed. Can forgiveness be held together with
a commitment to justice? A big question that could be asked here is, “Is
it possible for the relatives of victims of the Oklahoma bomber to both
demand justice in the way it was finally done (i.e. the death penalty)
while at the same time forgiving him for his crimes?” Various definitions
of justice such as restorative justice and retributive justice would need
to be explored in order to hold a commitment to both.
Truth
The relationship between truth and forgiveness has proved to be vital.
In many cases undertaken by South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation
Commission, victims and relatives of victims found it easier to forgive
the perpetrators once they knew the truth – or once the truth they
already knew was acknowledged publicly by the perpetrators.
Memory and Forgetting
Is it a reasonable request to ask people to forgive and forget? On
this issue it is important to see a difference between the act of forgiving
and the act of forgetting. Crimes committed can be forgotten yet never
have been forgiven. Likewise, forgiveness can be offered and yet the crime
never forgotten. A mother who has lost a child through violence can surely
never forget - it would be unreasonable to expect her to - although she
can forgive and find the healing that this brings. It is important to
note the words of George Santayana, ‘Those who cannot remember
the past are condemned to repeat it.’ Another issue rises out
of this in relation to the past. Is it possible to ask forgiveness for
something that happened centuries ago? What would it mean for me to ask
a family for forgiveness for trouble my great-great grandfather brought
over a century ago?
Criminals &
Victims
Sometimes Christian voices imply that the victim should always forgive,
in other words that there is some sort of moral obligation. This has caused
stress to many victims and yet can be seen to have some biblical foundation,
for example in the Lord’s Prayer ‘as we forgive those who
trespass/sin against us’. Christians need to be empowered to
play a very pragmatic role in helping victims achieve this while at the
same time not forcing it on the victim and causing more hurt along the
way – a delicate and difficult task.
Community
We have seen many cases where one person has given a public apology
and made a request for forgiveness on behalf of an entire community. The
question needs to be asked whether or not this is even valid. It involves
the idea of communal sin and the idea of one person representing all when
all might not be in agreement with the actions and words of the spokesperson.
Despite these difficult questions it still needs to be addressed as to
whether or not such an action has any sort of healing virtue in terms
of community relations. If it does, then we must ask whether we should
live with the problems for the sake of communal relations.
The Story So Far
As part of the project there is a series of papers on forgiveness being
produced. Drawing on a broad range of contributors, the papers aim to
explore the meaning of forgiveness in the Bible and in different Christian
traditions, and to ask about the implications of the practice of forgiveness
for our society. Our hope is that through this series of papers we will
come to a fuller and more authentic understanding of forgiveness which
may alternatively challenge and affirm our existing convictions. The papers
that have already been produced are as follows:
Paper 1 Forgiveness and Psychology, written by Alwyn Thomson (ECONI Research Officer) and Gill McChesney (psychology student at UU), looks at the appropriation of the idea of forgiveness within psychology and offers a Christian critique of this development.
Paper 2 Forgiveness in the Old Testament, written by David Montgomery (associate minister at Knock Presbyterian), looks at the theme of forgiveness in the Old Testament and asks what relation such a theme has to the New Testament and Christian view of forgiveness.
Paper 5 Forgiveness in the Catholic Tradition, written by Eoin De Bhaldraithe (Roman Catholic priest and Cistercian working in Bolton Abbey), is an original look at forgiveness in the catholic tradition, analysing past and present acts of repentance and forgiveness on the part of the Roman Catholic Church.
Paper 6 Forgiveness in the Anabaptist Tradition, written by Megan Haltemann (Philosophy PhD candidate at Notre Dame University), looks firstly at forgiveness in the context of church relations and discipline and then has a brief look at how such ideas relate to relationships outside of the community of believers.
Two papers are ready to go to print.
Paper 3 Forgiveness in the New Testament, written by Janet Unsworth (Superintendent Minister of the Newry Circuit of the Methodist Church). This paper is extremely important in terms of Christian understanding of forgiveness and we hope it serves to complete the picture that was started with Paper 2.
Paper 7 Forgiveness in the Orthodox Tradition, written by Geoffrey Ready (A Reverend Deacon of the Greek Orthodox Church based in Bangor). The paper looks at forgiveness under the concept of love and especially of love being an attribute and property of God alone from which we as humans receive a vocation to love others. Such a calling is not without difficulties and the paper goes on to discuss the struggle to love and forgive.
Conference
The venue for this year’s conference, which took place on 20th
October, was Grosvenor House Conference and Training Centre where the
120 people who attended wrestled with issues surrounding the concept of
forgiveness in a divided society and of what it means to speak of and
enact forgiveness in our relationships at all levels.
The Keynote Speaker was Professor L. Gregory Jones, Professor of Theology at Duke Divinity School in Durham, North Carolina and author of the book Embodying Forgiveness. His keynote address topics were Practising Forgiveness and Can the Past be Forgiven? A number of other speakers supplemented the keynote addresses by leading seminars to explore the outworking of forgiveness in different contexts and on a range of themes: politics, justice, truth, victims and repentance.
Still To Come
A number of papers will be produced over the next one and a half years.
Paper 4 Forgiveness in the Protestant Tradition Looking at how forgiveness has been conceived in the thinking of a number of influential Protestant thinkers.
Paper 8 Forgiveness, Truth and Memory Looking at the role of remembering and truth telling in relation to forgiveness. Is forgiveness more or less likely in the light of truthfulness and remembering? Is the phrase ‘forgive and forget’ defensible or not?
Paper 9 Forgiveness, Reconciliation and Justice Looks at the difference between and the relationship between forgiveness and reconciliation and asks how we hold together a commitment to both with a commitment to justice.
Paper 10 Forgiveness, Guilt and Repentance Looks at the debate within the conservative Protestant tradition over the relationship between the granting of forgiveness, the acknowledgement of guilt and the act of repentance.
Paper 11 Forgiveness and the Individual will address the possibilities and limits of forgiveness that can happen between individuals.
Paper 12 Forgiveness and the Church is a look at the church’s practice of forgiveness in its own life and in its relationship with society.
Paper 13 Forgiveness and Social Groups will look at the nature and possibility of forgiveness among social groups
Paper 14 Forgiveness and Politics takes a look at the possibility of forgiveness in a political context (e.g. forgiveness between political enemies or political manifestations of forgiveness in law or ceremony)
Paper 15 Forgiveness in Literature and Popular Culture is an analysis of how forgiveness is presented and dealt with in popular culture by looking at literature, films, etc.
Paper 16 Concluding reflections will draw together some of the issues raised and some of the conclusions drawn from the series of papers. It will also point to areas where further work would be profitable.
If you have any questions regarding the Embodying Forgiveness project, or the work of CCCI in general, or want to receive the series of papers on forgiveness, then you can contact me at stephen@econi.org
1 The logical fallacy
in this instance is called the Fallacy of Denying the Antecedent. Its
formal structure is as follows:
(1) If P (Repent) — Q (forgive)
(2) Not P (not repent)
(3) Therefore not Q (not forgive)
Stephen Graham is Research Assistant with ECONI’s Centre for Contemporary Christianity in Ireland.
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