Article
Comment
Race
5 min read

How reconciliation underpins acts of reparation

The case for reparations is criticised for looking too much to the past. Anthony Reddie argues that the ancient roots of reconciliation are vital for today’s debate.

Anthony Reddie is Professor of Black Theology at the University of Oxford, and Director of the Oxford Centre for Religion and Culture.

A diagram plan of a slave ship showing hundreds of body outlines.
Diagram of the ship ‘Brookes’ from Regulated slave trade: reprinted from the evidence of Robert Stokes. (London, 1849)
Lambeth Palace Library.

Reconciliation is the key theological motif that runs through the scriptures and across Christian Tradition - Reconciliation between God and humankind, reconciliation between human beings across the cultural, social, political, ethnic and economic divide, reconciliation between our warring selves within us. 

Paul’s writings form the earliest documented texts in the New Testament canon. His writings are full of references to God’s reconciling work in Christ on the cross. This theme, however, needs to be read in terms of Jewish thought. This will correct the over-spiritualising of this in Christian practice. 

To make sense of the notion of reconciliation one also must understand the Jewish antecedents that inform Paul’s writing, given Paul himself was a Jewish man. In the Hebrew scriptures and in Jewish thought, atonement and salvation are collective and corporate concepts. This is very different to much of what constitutes post-Reformation Evangelical Protestantism where the emphasis is on individual salvation in Christ, by grace, through faith. 

The Hebrew Bible traditions of the Sabbath and Jubilee were moments for system re-set and dismantling inequalities which had accrued. 

Essentially, being in right-standing with God necessitated that one should be in right relationships with others. In fact, one could argue that it appears to be the case that one cannot be in a right relationship with God unless you were doing right by the other. The above can be seen in the Old Testament book of Leviticus. The early verses of its sixth chapter clearly state the notion of restorative justice for that which was wrongly taken and used, which is described as a “sin against God”. 

One can also see this concept or formula evident within the book of Deuteronomy 15:12–18. The key is verse 12 which states:  

“If any of you buy Israelites as slaves, you must set free after six years. And don’t just tell them they are free to leave – give them sheep and goats and a supply of grain and wine.”  

As Peter Cruchley’s work on the Zacchaeus Tax campaign has shown, the Hebrew Bible traditions of the Sabbath and Jubilee were moments for system re-set and dismantling inequalities which had accrued. They were moments of breaking the cycling, ongoing basis of debt and economic enslavement. It’s worth reminding ourselves that not one penny has been given to any of the descendants of enslaved Africans for the wrong done to them and yet Christian communities in the West still want to talk about redemption that is affirmed by their Judeo-Christian roots! 

Understanding the scriptures in their historical context enables Christians to discern a theological pattern for using money and other resources for enacting restorative justice. Modern interpretive theories on how we read biblical texts take full account of the fact that the New Testament was written within the context of the Roman Empire, where the Emperor claimed divine honours which faithful Jews could not affirm. Today’s reader must recognise that the context in which ALL of the New Testament canon was composed was one that echoed to the restrictive strains of colonialism and cries for justice against oppression. Judea, in which Jesus’ ministry was largely located, was an occupied colony of the Roman Empire. 

Contemporary scholars have shown that in the Jewish tradition, issues of reconciliation, redemption and salvation have a corporate ad a collective dimension to them as well as an individualistic one. 

Scholars such William R. Hertzog II have shown the extent to which wealth in the Roman Province of Palestine was always connected with economic exploitation. So, when Jesus challenges the ‘Rich Young Ruler’ to follow him, he says this in knowledge that the young man’s accumulation of wealth was not amassed in a neutral context. The reason why this encounter is so compact is because both the Rich Young Ruler and those first hearers knew the expectation of how he should behave. 

The Three Cs (commerce, civilisation and Christianity) were the underlying rationale on which the British Empire was based. The Three Cs were coined by David Livingstone (a London Missionary Society ‘Old Boy’) in Oxford in 1857. The exporting of Christianity via the European missionary agencies in the eighteen and nineteenth centuries was largely undertaken under the aegis of empire and colonialism. Christian mission, therefore, has had a difficult relationship with non-White bodies or the ‘subaltern’ for centuries as they are the ‘other’ and have been exploited for economic gain. There was no ethic of equality between missionaries and the ‘natives’. 

One can see that Jesus’ teachings around wealth and its relationship to discipleship and living the “Jesus way” has political and economic implications. Scholars such as Musa W. Dube, Catherine Keller, Michael Nausner and Mayra Rivera, have all shown the similarities between first-century Palestine, the slave epoch of the sixteenth to eighteenthcenturies, the eras of colonialism and our present globalized, postcolonial context. Each context is based upon imperialistic/colonial expansion, capital accumulation, forced labour and exploitation of the poor by the rich. 

Pharaohs on Both Sides of the Blood-Red Waters is the title of a 2017 book by the famed anti-apartheid activist and scholar Allan Boesak, who reflects on the contemporary ‘Black Lives Matter Movement’ largely in the US and post-Apartheid South Africa. In this context he speaks of the corporate reality of ‘Cheap Grace’ as outlined by the famous German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer. The West has attempted transformation WITHOUT sacrifice or restorative justice. Bonhoeffer chided Western Christians for wanting to have discipleship without radical commitment to God’s word, and forgiveness and redemption without struggle and sacrifice. Boesak reminds us that there is no redemption without the cross. Reconciliation must cost us something! 

Due to the influence of post-Reformation Evangelicalism, we have largely interpreted Jesus’ words in a purely individualistic way. Contemporary scholars have shown that in the Jewish tradition, issues of reconciliation, redemption and salvation have a corporate and a collective dimension to them as well as an individualistic one. 

I believe that institutions like the Church of England can set a prophetic lead to other Christian institutions, and beyond it, to other civic bodies and indeed governments.  ‘Cheap Grace’ NEVER leads to redemption and reconciliation. Without restorative justice there is no reconciliation, and the mission of Christ is diminished.

Article
Books
Comment
Film & TV
Morality
6 min read

Murder we wrote: how cosy crime and psycho-thrillers carve our minds

Our reactions have changed from heart-wringing cries to merely puzzle-solving

Theodore is author of the historical fiction series The Wanderer Chronicles.

Elderly amateur sleuth stand by their pinboard.
The Thursday Murder Club convenes.
Netflix.

We love murder. 

That seems to be the only reasonable conclusion when you look at the sales figures of Richard Osman’s record-busting murder mystery series, which opened with The Thursday Murder Club back in 2020. In UK sales alone, it sold over a million copies within the same year as its release, something no other book has ever done.  

This was more than a bestselling debut novel, this was a cultural event in UK publishing. And no doubt Netflix are hoping for something equally seismic when their film adaptation of The Thursday Murder Club goes live. 

The combination of light humour, a clutch of charismatic octogenarians, tea and cake, and the odd violent death or two to keep them entertained, seems to have struck the motherlode of British cultural appeal. I can only imagine the stellar cast they have assembled for the film adaptation, led by Helen Mirren and Pierce Brosnan, will take the series’ success to new heights. 

As an author currently puzzling my way through my own contemporary murder mystery, I can only look on at the phenomenon in wonder and sigh for what may yet be.  

But murder has always been a tricky one for me as a) an author, and b) a Christian. Do those two facts mean I have to be a “Christian author”? And if so, what kind of limits does that put around what I should be writing about? It may not sound like much of a conundrum to you, but honestly I have wrestled with this question for a long time. There is darkness in the world: how much darkness should I explore in my books? (So far, if you ever read any of my historical novels, you’ll see the answer is: quite a lot.) 

Maybe I’m taking it all too seriously and murder is mere light entertainment now. Death is to be enjoyed with a nice cup of tea; evil, with slice of Victoria sponge cake. 

But somehow, I don’t think so. 

Recently, I was helped in my moral quandary by another crime author, Andrew Klavan. In his book, The Kingdom of Cain, published last month, Klavan explores the question of evil and specifically murder in what he terms a ‘literature of darkness’. It is a fascinating, if unusual, book. His approach is to take three murders that actually happened, and demonstrate how each has influenced a long succession of murder novels (and movies) up to the present day.  

Through this exposition, we witness the changing attitudes to murder over the last century and a half and in particular how those changes seem strongly linked to the ebbing tide of Christian faith in the West. 

For example, Dostoyevsky’s great novel, Crime and Punishment, was published in 1866. The double-murder, central to the plot, is carried out by a young student named Raskolnikov. He is an intellectual who is seeking to prove that the moral boundary beyond which murder lies is nothing more than a mere concoction, a social construct (or worse, a religious one) which he, being of superior intelligence, can transcend and therefore ignore. The entire novel is the story of how his conscience will not allow him to get away with this. Near the end, he confesses his crime to the young prostitute, Sonya, who responds to his confession in fearful horror: 

“What have you done? What have you done to yourself?” 

The second question is key. 

Dostoyevsky based the plot of his novel on a real axe-murderer, a Frenchman called Pierre François Lacenaire, who went to the guillotine in 1836. Lacenaire became an international sensation when, in court, he aired many of his own pseudo-intellectual justifications for his actions – that the murders he committed were a strike against the injustice of the elites and the iniquitous power structures of the day. Rather than what they appeared to be: a grubby little double murder for the sake of a few francs. Lacenaire set the tune which many still whistle today, I’m sorry to say. 

But Dostoyevsky was prophetic. He foresaw long before Nietzsche and others who would follow, that the tide of Christian faith was going out in Western civilization. And so it continued to do through the back end of the twentieth century and into this one. 

Before that, the notion that murder is wrong because every human being is made in the image of God was a long-held axiom, going back arguably to the first chapters of Genesis. And in killing the image of God, any image of God, this may therefore be the closest we can come to killing God himself. Seen in that light, murder is sacrilege on an appalling scale.  

But there’s the rub. That light has dimmed. The secular philosophies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have turned down the dimmer-switch, so that it is no longer axiomatic that humans possess an inherent sacred value. Instead, in varying guises and to varying degrees, the conclusion has been that humans are nothing but self-conscious lumps of meat. We (the state, the law) may ascribe them some value. “We are all equal,” yes - but as George Orwell anticipated, “some are more equal than others.” (Is intersectionality, for example, anything but the manifestation of that prediction?) 

Maybe this explains how the horror of murder has diminished from Sonya’s heart-wringing cry, into something more akin to a crossword puzzle. Don’t get me wrong, I love a good Agatha Christie. But her murder mysteries don’t waste much time on the philosophical implications of, say, the local doctor bumping off the parish priest. 

And from there, the genre of the murder mystery has split into two strains. On the one hand, we get the psycho-thriller, in which the horror of the act of murder is of less interest than the dark psychological state of mind of the killer themselves. But if that’s too dark, don’t worry. We can do light, too! And so on to cosy crime blockbusters, in which, if a murder was committed, it was because the victim had it coming – so let’s all calm down and have another slice of cake. 

There is no space here in which to explore how, as a culture, our collective historical experience may have helped to steer us in this direction, as well as our changing philosophy. But there is no doubt where we have ended up. We see death cults all around us. We see legislation being passed in our Parliament which would have been unthinkable until very recently. We see social justice where before we saw crimes.  

Think about how often the arch-crimes of history have been perpetrated on the ground of viewing the “other” as less than human, and certainly less than sacred. Then ask yourself, why should we see any human as more than a lump of meat? At what point does the rubber hit the road? - as surely it will. 

What have we done? What have we done to ourselves? 

I do wonder where all this goes. And yet, if the spiritual bellwethers are to be believed, perhaps we have reached low tide at long last – certainly it has revealed some pretty ugly creatures lurking at the bottom of the rock pool. Many, myself included, must hope that the tide of faith is truly on the turn. Let’s see. Certainly, if this proves to be the case, it seems to follow that our attitude to murder will change with that on-rushing tide. And so with it, the literature of darkness. 

Beyond The Thursday Murder Club, there may yet be other great stories told of murder; they, like Crime & Punishment, will be far truer, and in a paradoxical sense, far more beautiful. After all, at the heart of the gospel, there lies a murder. If God himself can take such a dark event and turn it into light, then, at a far inferior level perhaps, as His image-bearers, so might we. 

Which reminds me… back to my draft.

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