One of the significant thinkers about forgiveness and reconciliation is Miroslav Volf, whose book Exclusion and Embrace was written out of the tragedy of the Balkan war in the 1990's. His home village was attacked by Serbian Cetniks, and subjected to atrocities such as rape, summary execution and arson. In the Preface Volf remembers being asked a question following a paper he had delivered at a theological conference about forgiveness and reconciliation. The influential theologian Jurgen Moltmann asked if, for all the fine theology and theory, he could now emabrace a Cetnik. Volf's answer was searingly honest, and radically charged. He said no he could not - but as a follower of Jesus he must.
And there it is. The dilemma of the enemy, whether perpetrator or victim. How to do the morally impossible even when it is a moral imperative; how to be obedient to God when the whole being revolts at what is demanded. To witness atrocity against our neighbours, our family, to bear the consequences and memory of cruelty, intentional affliction and hate articulated in word, action and cultural violence; how to even think in terms of forgiveness without satisfaction, redress, indeed justice?
Volf's book Exclusion and Embrace was a watershed treatment of how humans respond to inflicted violence, enacted enmity and deliberate relational rejection. Either the heart builds walls that exclude and reject, or it finds a way to embrace, dismantle walls and pursue friendship as the ultimate security of justice. It's a hard book to read, not only because of the subject matter. It is at times technical, socially analytic, psychologically exploratory, and all this in pursuit of a theological foundation for seeing the other, however hated and hating, as one we will seek to embrace rather than exclude.
One of Volf's more accessible treatments of this whole nexus of ethical and theological problems is Free of Charge. Giving and Forgiving in a Culture Stripped of Grace. Even the title is a reset button for many of our assumptions about the drivers and motives of a consumerist and competitive society. Near the start of the book he writes a paragraph that will be unfolded throughout:
God generously gives, so God is not a negotiator of absolute dimensions. God demands, so God is not an infinite Santa Claus. So what is the relation between God's giving and God's demanding? In other words, what is the difference between a Santa Claus God and a gift giving God? The bare-bones answer is this; a Santa Claus God gives simply so we can have and enjoy things; the true God gives so we can become joyful givers and not just self-absorbed receivers. God the giver has made us to be givers and obliges us therefore to give. page 28
And out of that generosity of giving and receiving is born the disposition to forgive. Later Volf speak out of his own experience of the courage and moral faith that enables forgiveness:
We give when we delight in others or others are in need; by giving we enhance their joy or make up for their lack. We forgive when others have wronged us; by forgiving we release them from the burden of their wrongdoing. The difference lies in the violation suffered, in the burden of wrongdoing, offence, transgression, debt. And that's what makes it more difficult to forgive than to give. page 130
The cost of forgiveness, and the connection between Christian forgiveness and the Christian experience and understanding of God are major strands in all of Volf's writing. The giving God is a forgiving God - but forgiveness is not indulgence of evil, which would neither be justice nor mercy. The dynamics of forgiveness, the anatomy of justice in relation to both mercy and punishment, the moral imperative not to hate and the equal demand to protect the vulnerable and bring justice to the victim, mean that forgiveness is no simple wiping of a slate, no ignoring of offence, no obscuring of the consequences of evil. The Christian faith instinctively turns to ponder the cross and its meaning in the heart of God and for the life of the world. While the ideas of a giving and forgiving God can be spoken as a sound byte, in reality they are truths rooted in the eternal love of God and the tragedy of a broken creation. Hence the focus of the first post in this series.
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