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Christian theology does not attribute any ultimate
significance to this understanding of history as conflict and
contestation. It signifies the “not
yet” of Christian eschatology. Adopting a harmonious view of history is
a hasty jump into the eschaton. The use of violence and the committing
of cruelties are greatly facilitated as people in conflict develop
justifications for their neighbor’s pain. Such justifications provide
them with moral insensitivity that justifies the use of brutality.
Violence ruptures personal and communal webs of meaning. The
perpetrators of violence impose upon their victims a narrative of
domination that favors the perpetrators interests and structure of
reality. This is the key to maintain violent control. The narrative of
domination is violently imposed as the truth if the original narrative
of life is successfully suppressed or at least co-opted. Violence
inflicts physical pain upon its victims and suffering as it destroys
their system of meaning. Their resistance against the violent narratives
of domination occurs when they link their suppressed narrative of life
to a much larger narrative that does not ignore the effects of violence
upon their lives. Reconciliation and forgiveness occurs whenever the
victims of violence discover and embrace a redeeming narrative that
liberates them from the seductive and cunning power of domination.
Reconciliation
Christian churches provide an expansive narrative of life that liberates
people from the oppressive structures of domination that perpetrators of
violence have imposed upon them. This is encoded in the principle of
reconciliation and forgiveness. These principles are grounded in the
life, teachings, death, and resurrection of Jesus and embodied in the
lives of the saints. The applications of these principles to the public
life requires the acknowledgment that reconciliation and forgiveness may
be high jacked by the perpetrators of violence, and requires the
recognition of the deep wounds of those victims of violence. There are
at least three understandings of reconciliation that come close to the
genuine meaning of reconciliation but distort and even falsify its true
meaning. These are: reconciliation as a hasty peace; reconciliation
instead of liberation; and reconciliation as a managed process.
Reconciliation as a process takes time – time that can make the
participants feel insecure, but time that is necessary nonetheless for
beginning a new life. Reconciliation is a process and a way of life with
an eschatological horizon that cannot be foreshortened by circumventing
history. It requires respecting - and often restoring – the human
dignity of the victims of violence. Furthermore, reconciliation cannot
occur without recognizing the sources of conflict and initiating a
process that liberates the victims of violence from the structures of
domination. The struggle against injustice is part of the genuine
pursuit of reconciliation. Finally, reconciliation cannot be confused
with conflict mediation, a process whose goal is to lessen conflict or
to get the parties to accept and live with situations of conflict.
Reconciliation in Christian theology is the enduring gift of God to
believers and the Church’s enduring mission to the world. It refers to a
healing of division and the beginning of a process towards genuine
communion of the whole creation with God, which finds expression in the
communion of people with nature and each other. It addresses both
personal and communal needs for healing, the restoration of broken
social relationships and the relearning of how to live together in peace
and mutual trust. In whatever ways the Church acts to bring about
reconciliation, it enacts its deepest truth as the sacrament of Jesus
Christ and fulfills its Christ-given mission to all people, believers
and
unbelievers alike.
Reconciliation is the master narrative that inspires, guides, and shapes
the involvement of the churches in societies ravaged by serious
violation of human rights, divided by inter-ethnic conflicts, or broken
apart by between countries. It translates into the shaping of cultural
sensibilities that help people live in a humane way in this world of
strife – a world of conflict over scarce goods between actors who hold
varying degrees of power.
Embracing the Other
Reconciliation plants in people’s hearts and in the public life the will
to embrace the others unconditionally in their irreducible difference.
As Miroslav Volf points: “the will to give ourselves to others and
welcome them, to readjust our identities, to make space for them is
prior to any judgment about other. It is absolutely indiscriminate and
strictly immutable; it transcends the moral mapping of the social world
into ‘good’ and ‘evil’. There is no possibility to heal divisions, to
overcome violence and contribute towards the creation of a culture of
peace if we allow the demonization of the others which results in the
suppression of their irreducible differences through ethnic cleansings,
genocides, religious persecutions, imprisonments, and acts of terror.
In an inescapably unjust and discordant world, the only hope that we
have to attain a potential, tenuous convergence on what is just must be
grounded on the will to embrace the other. If such a will does not
exist, then each conflicting party will insist on the justness of its
cause and will continue indeterminably in its violent conflict until the
death or suppression of the other, thus perpetuating violence and
fragmentation in the name of justice, since there is too much injustice
in a uncompromising struggle for justice. The will to embrace and affirm
the humanity of the others despite their apparent irreducible
differences provides the basis for discerning in the others whatever is
right or just in their causes and actions. Conversely, if exclusion
becomes the basis for being in contact with the other, then primacy is
given to whatever rightly or wrongly is named as unjust in the others
that does permit any positive relation with them.
The indiscriminate love for all does not, under any circumstances, imply
that justice must be sacrificed or overlooked for the sake of peace.
Quite the contrary, it demands that one be attentive to issues of
justice, seeking to transform oppressive relationships into just
relationships by contributing towards the creation of a genuine human
community in an imperfect world of inescapable injustice. This cannot be
done without hearing the cries of those whose humanity and dignity have
been violently taken away by the destructive and violent forces of
oppression. The process of reconciliation never comes to a closure,
since all responses to collective atrocities and violence are incomplete
and inescapably inadequate. The churches in their solidarity with the
victims of history infuses upon those victims, as wells as upon the
perpetrators of violence, a new outlook of life grounded in God’s love
that liberates them from their alienated state of being. It shapes the
broader cultural habits and expectations that make peaceful solutions to
situations of conflict possible.
Source: This paper was presented at The Second International Forum on
Universality and Culture in the Globalization Era, held in Nicosia,
Cyprus, May 2-5, 2003
© 2003 Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America
www.goarch.org
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