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Forgiveness: a Political Necessity

01 April 1992

Brian Frost's ambitious purpose is to pick out the `threads of forgiveness' embedded in twentieth century politics - or at least in the international politics of the last 50 years.

The politics of peace by Brian Frost
Darton, Longman and Todd, London

Brian Frost's ambitious purpose is to pick out the `threads of forgiveness' embedded in twentieth century politics - or at least in the international politics of the last 50 years.

Although there is some sense of travel, even emotional, fatigue as the reader is hustled from country to country on a tour of the century's worst wounds, injustices and divisions, there is no shortage of healing acts of repentance and forgiveness. `What is surprising,' says Frost, `is not that some initiatives failed, but that there have been these attempts to link forgiveness with the process of politics, and that they can, at least inpart, be documented'.

They certainly can. The author, described as `both an Anglican and a Methodist' working with the British Council of Churches, had assembled a wealth of examples, intending to make an anthology. But his publisher wanted them put in the context of 'the history of this century'. While this naturally benefits the material, the book often lapses into potted history.

Nevertheless the accounts, whether of individual or collective forgiveness, are impressive and often extremely moving. From those who survived the holocaust, suffered imprisonment and torture under various oppressive regimes or bereavement in situations like Lebanon or Northern Ireland, comes testimony to an amazing capacity to forgive.

The examples come from non-politicians like Lau-rens van der Post in Japan, Corrie ten Boom of the Netherlands and Alec Smith and Arthur Kanodereka of Zimbabwe - as well as from those who have taken repentance and forgiveness onto the stage of international politics, such as Anwar Sadat of Egypt, President von Weizsacker of Germany and Japanese Prime Ministers Kishi and Nakasone.

Not all those who have shown this capacity for forgiveness have been of religious faith. Speaking to a Commission of the Chinese Communist Party shortly after he had been rehabilitated in 1977, Deng Xiaoping is reported as saying, `We should not bear grudges against people who were once out to get us. Instead of harbouring resentment against comrades, we should forgive old wrongs.'

This seems to reinforce one of the book's conclusions that repentance and forgiveness are not just a rich experience for those with faith, but also a political necessity for binding up human societies in the wake of trauma and tragedy. It is the essential letting go of the past so that, as Archbishop Desmond Tutu writes in his foreword to the book, `new beginnings are possible'.

Here is a valuable source book for all those convinced of the continuing importance of the politics of forgiveness.

Paul Williams

A CHALLENGE TO THE ENLIGHTENMENT
The Gospel and contemporary culture
Edited by Hugh Montefiore - Mowbray, London

Until two centuries ago people in Europe interpreted the world through the teachings of the Church. The Enlightenment, the movement of thought to which Kant gave the clearest expression, replaced this with the `scientific view' that man and his world were machines independent of values. The Church was relegated to a club, one among many to join. This coherent collection of essays is written in the belief that the reign of Enlightenment Man is coming to an end. Its publication is part of a process, involving conferences and consultations with all the main churches in Britain, that has been going on since the publication of Lesslie Newbigin's prophetic work, The other side of 1984.

The Gospel and contemporary cullure dares to examine and question the unspoken assumptions by which we live in the late 20th century, assumptions which are so much part of us that we are unaware of them yet which shape the way we think.

In many fields we are obsessed by `the moderns' and have little time for direct contact with the great minds of former ages who might bring us corrective. As Hugh Montefiore says in his introduction, our prevailing `assumptions, presuppositions and values' are leading us to a dead
end. We have seen colossal progress in every branch of science. Yet how to make human nature less destructive and divisive, more creative and peacemaking, baffles us.

Eric Ives, Professor of English History at Birmingham University, traces how historians have seen their role since Ranke, the father of scientific history, wrote of his work in 1824: `it wants only to show what actually happened'.

Ives comments: `if all historians do is list the details of chaos, there are better things to do with life.... Only if they imitate the ostrich can historians escape the need to think about the meaning of history.'

The philosopher, Professor Colin Gunton of Kings College, London, starts by noting: `The pluralism of modern culture, of which so much is made in so many places, is a myth. On the surface there is diversity and variety in modern life, but beneath the surface there is a pressure for homogeneity which in fact nullifies them.' He quotes Alasdair MacIntyre: `The contemporary debates within modern political systems are almost exclusively between conservative liberals, liberal liberals and radical liberals.' And so debate is superficial, avoiding fundamental questions.

The key unspoken assumptions, Gunton goes on to say, are about how we know and what we know. This may sound remote to the lay person, but it profoundly affects our lives. Whether we know it or not, we are children of the Enlightenment. Philosophers had striven to be objective, to see things as they are from the outside. This approach let loose the astounding advances of science. Kant held, however, that we have no actual knowledge of reality; all we can say is that our concepts describe the world as it appears to the mind. His successors modified or extended this view until, writes Gunton, `finally we are all enclosed in a kind of self-centred isolation... in which there can be no real communication between people and their world because each individual is finally unrelated to anything else. It is a nightmare vision.'
From this standpoint we cannot know God, and any reference to God must be left out of philosophy, science, the arts and politics. We are left with the worship of the human mind as the highest value, and yet with a frustrating sense of its limitations.

Artistic inspiration
However, Gunton points out, there is another way of knowing. Drawing on Michael Polanyi he writes: `Our relationship to a person or thing is primarily to our knowing them.... We do not contemplate reality from the outside, from a godlike distance - "objectivism" but we indwell the world as part of it. All knowledge arises out of and is a function of relation.'

This is how we know God, who is not only `out there' but, according to St Augustine `more deeply inside you than your own heart'.

What does all this mean for our living and acting? There is a clue in the words of Jeremy Begbie, tutor at Ridley Hall, Cambridge, and a musician. He is writing about artistic inspiration, a concept which is `hardly a popular one today in aesthetic theory'. What he writes of the artist applies to everybody, for we are all called in some way to be artists: `It is the task of the Spirit to make possible that free, purposeful, interaction with one another, the physical world and the Creator.... To be inspired is first and foremost to be responsive. As John Taylor points out in his celebrated book The go-between God, we commonly speak about the Spirit as the source of power. "But in fact he enables us not by making us supernaturally strong but by opening our eyes. The Holy Spirit is that power which opens eyes that are closed, hearts that are unaware and minds that shrink from too much reality." '

We cannot hoist ourselves out of defensive, inward-looking attitudes unworthy of the people of God so as to be confident, outgoing, articulate. But the Spirit, as far as we allow, will work in us that `renewing of our mind' which St Paul called for nearly two thousand years ago.

Michael Hutchinson