Forgiveness Considered

By Henry J. Charles

Book Explains the Concept of Forgiveness

Henry J. Charles brings forgiveness into modernity as an integral moral imperative PORT-OF-SPAIN, Trinidad and Tobago (Release Date TBD) When the concept of forgiveness takes the center stage, most Christian and Western culture-oriented people usually relate it to its religious connotation, in every likelihood drawing on the ultimate expression of forgiveness in the death of Jesus Christ on the cross. Author Henry J. Charles, though affirming the roots of forgiveness in the Biblical heritage, considers the notion in its broader dimensions as an ethical imperative, one also capable of geo-political application.

FORGIVENESS CONSIDERED first explores the word in its biblical and non-biblical meanings. It also clarifi es the several misrepresentations and misconceptions of forgiveness in ordinary understanding. In other portions of the book, the author deals with forgiveness as a special process akin to a fundamental change in character. He also deals with implications of forgiving and forgetting, and the idea that certain acts can be considered unforgiveable.

The book finally looks to special geopolitical contexts, where nations attempt to come to term with histories of brutality and oppression, as a way to envisage and realize a more liberating future. He examines the realities of amnesty, forgiveness, and reconciliation in South Africa, in the light of the latters history of apartheid, in the hope that forgiveness and reconciliation may be accorded a much wider application in human affairs than repairing the serious breaches that occur in interpersonal relations.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Dec 20, 2011
• ISBN: 9781465309365

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Copyright © 2011 by Henry J. Charles.

Library of Congress Control Number:       2011961273

ISBN:         Hardcover                               978-1-4653-0935-8

                   Softcover                                 978-1-4653-0934-1

                   Ebook                                      978-1-4653-0936-5

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CONTENTS

Prologue

1 Biblical Meanings

2 Extrabiblical Perspectives

3 Conditions and Misconceptions

4 Stages and Phases

5 Issues in Remembering and Forgetting

6 Forgiving the Unforgivable

7 Forgiveness and Reconciliation in South Africa

PROLOGUE

IN HIS BOOK The Examined Life: Philosophical Essays, Robert Nozick explored the special character of the Holocaust in the history of human atrocities and its radical implications for Christian theology. Christian theology, he wrote, has held that there were two momentous transformations in the situation of humanity, first the Fall and then the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ, which redeemed humanity and provided it with a route out of its fallen state. Whatever changed situation or possibility the crucifixion and resurrection were supposed to bring about has now ended; the Holocaust has shut the door that Christ opened. (1)

Nozick went further, [W]hatever the current situation of individuals one by one, the Holocaust created a radically new situation and stats for humanity as a whole, one the sacrifice of Jesus could not and was not meant to heal. (2)

In Nozick’s view, the Holocaust, thus, lies completely beyond the reach of forgiveness. It represents the signal instance of the impossible to which forgiveness in Christ does not and cannot apply. Nozick’s sentiments are not unique, of course – and I return to the issue in chapter 6. Many others have seen other crimes, atrocities against children, for example, as similarly invalidating any possibility of forgiveness. One may take Ivan Karamazov’s famous discourse on theodicy and scandalous sins against children in The Brothers Karamazov as allocution for all such thinkers.

Forgiveness has never been a subject absent from religious writing. In recent years, however, it has become an area of growing academic interest. (3) How can this development be accounted for? One must note, I think, the current proliferation of writings in the related field of memory, a development attributed to postwar personal and historical reflection on the Holocaust. The Holocaust, Tony Judt writes, has become the focal point for the current discussion of memory; how the past should be remembered, how the past should be commemorated, and what should be the relation between memory and history. (4) Such discussions touch directly on forgiveness since they significantly include treatment of traumatic memory. The questions raised thereby for forgiveness relate critically to the function of memory (remembering or forgetting past injury) for the sake of the future individual and social health.

A second tributary – as Archbishop Desmond Tutu, chairperson of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (1995-1998), pointed out – has been the progressive increase in the number of such commissions as part of the movement of formerly repressive societies from barbarism to decency, to quote Rajeev Bhargava regarding South Africa itself. (5) Reconciliation is often part of the broader mandate of such commissions. Forgiveness has therefore become part of their landscape even if, as was the case in South Africa, not a specific feature of the commission’s mandate. (6)

In the United States also, the International Forgiveness Institute was established in 1994 by Robert Enright, a psychologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, as an outgrowth of previous social-scientific research done at the university. Enright, jointly with Joanna North, has edited the volume Exploring Forgiveness, the result of the national conference on forgiveness, which is one of the flagship contributions to writings on the subject today. I deal with some of the issues raised in this volume in chapter 3. (7) Thirdly, obvious connections exist between forgiveness research and an increasing prominence of the idea (and spread of the values) of restorative justice. Archbishop Tutu (and others), for instance, saw the agenda of the TRC as a process in this form of justice; and the connections and resonances between the latter and forgiveness are obvious. They share the same fundamental features of acknowledgment, accountability, amends, and restitution. (8)

Finally, in 1998, the John Templeton Foundation, with others, inaugurated A Campaign for Forgiveness Research to increase public understanding of the power of forgiveness. (9) Forgiveness research is thus ongoing in several professional and academic quarters. Many dimensions of the subject, however, remain open to further exploration. If, for example, forgetting is impossible for victims of serious hurt and injury, how should they remember in a liberating way? And when they remember, how do they successfully negotiate the moral ambiguities of memory? Writers on forgiveness also speak of stages. Is forgiveness totally susceptible to stage description and analysis in the manner of the grief cycle or moral and cognitive development? Again, if forgiveness is no longer just a religious imperative, what form does it take regarding the nonreligious or the secular? Are there also categories of the impossible, as Nozick and others have held, to which forgiveness cannot apply? What of forgiveness in the political realm? Can groups or nations forgive? What form can such forgiveness take, and what merit does it have?

Political forgiveness – to focus a little on this last mentioned area – has in fact been much in the public domain within recent years, largely because of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (hereafter the TRC or the Commission). The TRC remains a compelling instance of how forgiveness fares when confronted, among other things, with the moral claims of criminal justice and with communal pain spread over decades. Some of the more agonizing dilemmas revealed by the work of the Commission centered around these issues.

The Commission came into being through an Act of Parliament, reflecting a negotiated settlement between the National Party government and the African National Congress. Many had expected quite a different outcome – either liberation struggle ending in a seizure of power or open civil war and eventual partition. The commission emphasized different purposes during its years of sitting; but its primary mandate was to promote national unity and reconciliation, which included the promotion of democracy, restoring the dignity of victims, and encouraging perpetrators… to come to terms with their own past. (10)

Disclosures made through face-to-face encounters at the amnesty committee hearings also shed light not only on accessible features of forgiveness but also on more hidden aspects of the reality. Much of the pain and burden of serious injury, for instance, remains by definition private. An important implication of this, to paraphrase the words of Jesus, is that offenders never really know what they do. Some of the more harrowing features of reconciliation became clear only from the testimonies of survivors and members of victims’ families. (11)

In the chapters that follow, I begin with the biblical witness and context. The Bible remains perhaps the most important contributor to what we think and practice regarding forgiveness in the West. It is the place from which our sense of the obligation to forgive primarily derives. In my years as a pastor and a teacher, I have found this obligation to be the singular command of Jesus that ordinary Christians find most difficult to obey.

Writing on forgiveness today, however, demonstrates that forgiveness need no longer be linked solely to Christian or religious contexts. For many, it can just as easily be viewed as a moral value with inherent validity and justification. In chapter 3, I explore other motivations for forgiveness apart from those familiar to religious traditions.

Forgiveness, however, remains an area in which confusion persists. Many think that it requires them to blot out the harm or evil suffered – that forgiving means forgetting, even when forgetting is virtually impossible. Many also think that forgiveness always entails being reconciled to wrongdoers and readmitting them to their former status. Many also refuse to forgive because they think that to forgive is to excuse. In chapter 3, I review some of these prevailing misconceptions.

In chapter 4, I explore the notion of stages in forgiveness and ask finally whether the reality is entirely captured by stage description and analysis.

Stage theory became popular through Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s grief cycle, outlined in her book On Death and Dying (1969). Kübler-Ross was of course not the first to employ stages to chart significant steps in human transitional processes. The stage theory had long been prominent in developmental psychology. Jean Piaget, Erik Erikson, Lawrence Kohlberg, James Fowler, and Carol Gilligan all utilized stages to elucidate movement in cognitive, moral, and faith development. (12)

The form and pattern of the process varies in these different approaches. For Kübler-Ross, the grief cycle should be seen more in terms of a framework