home | board | compass | prayer | eCard

[Main Index]

04/24/2002 Entry: "Politics and forgiving"

I attended a lecture today given by Prof Haddon Wilmer under the title Politics & Forgiving. Prof Wilmer is a British Baptist theologian who has been exploring the relationship between politics and forgiveness for thirty years. The continuing struggles in Israel/Palestine illustrate the vital need to make this exploration concrete.He suggests that the primary task of politics is not the survival of governments, the success of the elite or efficiency of management. For him, politics is first about the creation and sustaining of inclusive communities which regard all people with respect and attention. It is inclusion which provides the link between politics and forgiveness, because the decision to include implies forgiving. This is not a simple task. The process is vulnerable both to a failure to include people as they are and to a failure to accept inclusion as a goal and value.Prof Wilmer argues that forgiveness is central to the political process because failure is inevitable (that's what human beings do) and it is forgiveness which makes dealing with failure possible. Forgiveness refuses to define a person by their misdeeds, however wicked, but instead opens up possiblities of new life for the one who accepts forgiveness. Forgiveness does not mean merely 'letting go' - it is a creative act which treats wrong with the utmost seriousness.He suggests that the function of the church is not to be the 'spiritual home' of forgiveness, but to be a witness to the source and wellspring of forgiving, the Living God.