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

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.

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War & peace

23 March 2023

6 min read

On war fighting

Why do soldiers go to war? There are a thousand different answers writes Owen, a serving soldier.

Owen

Owen is an officer in the British Army.

Soldiers silhouetted by dust and sunshine work at a fence with tools.

British soldiers dismantle a fence line in Afghanistan.

Jamie Peters RLC/MOD via Wikimedia Commons.

The car bomb went off at 0630, rudely awakening me from a deep sleep. The noise, big and bassy, was followed by silence, followed by the wailing of the camp attack alarm. I felt a range of emotions in those moments, but definitely present was a sense of relief. “So that’s what it sounds like…”. I had been in Kabul for two or three months by that point, and had always been slightly on edge whenever I walked between buildings, knowing that an explosion was inevitable at some point, but not knowing how loud it would really be. Afghanistan was my first operational tour – it was 2014 and the British presence in country was shrinking rapidly, and my reward for a good performance on my intelligence officer’s course was assignment to a unit deploying to the Afghan capital. It might seem a strange reward, but it was sincerely meant, and gratefully received.

A security camera high angle over an Afghan townscape showing an explosion on a street.

“So that’s what it sounds like…”. Security video captured the car bomb that exploded near the author's military base.

Why does a soldier go to war? You could ask a thousand men and women in the armed forces and get a thousand different answers. The most straightforward (and superficial) answer is “Because I was ordered to”, but delve below the surface and you find all manner of motivations and justifications. All I can offer you is why I think I wanted to join the British Army and fight (there are reasons that are probably hidden even to me) and how as Christian I make sense of war.

I joined the Army at a time when what were known as Blair's Wars were stuttering to an unsatisfactory conclusion. We had withdrawn from Iraq, leaving behind a broken country and unwittingly paving the way for Islamic State, and soldiers were still fighting and dying in Helmand Province, Afghanistan. While I was going through the selection process for the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst there were a plethora of war documentaries on television that had been filmed using helmet cameras, giving an unprecedented first-person view of conflict. A normal person might have watched those programmes and thought they wanted no part on it whatsoever. I saw them and wanted in. Why?

What appealed to me most was the responsibility; of deploying to a dangerous place with your fellow soldiers and doing everything in your power to keep them alive.

I look back and think there were all sorts of reasons floating round my head. There was undoubtedly a slightly boyish sense of adventure – it seemed like most of my peers at university were off to be bankers, lawyers or management consultants, and I wanted to do something a bit less grey. There was a desire to challenge myself too – a worthier reason, but still not the full story. What appealed to me most was the responsibility; of deploying to a dangerous place with your fellow soldiers and doing everything in your power to keep them alive and to complete your mission. I saw soldiering as less a job than a calling.

Throughout my career much has changed but that sense of responsibility is still there. It is at the heart of how I understand being a Christian in conflict zones, my personal ‘theology of war’, if you like. When I came home from Afghanistan, I was asked by a friend whether I had killed anyone. I said I hadn’t. He then asked if I thought I could bring myself to do so should the situation arise. I said that I hoped so, because I had been on armed sentry duty multiple times and so was the only person standing between my colleagues and the enemy. If I had identified a suicide bomber but decided not to shoot in that moment, then I would have been betraying the responsibility I had to my friends. Indeed, I doubt that any suicide bomber would have thought worse of me had I shot him – he would have recognised that I had my job to do, just as he had his.

Who is anyone to judge between us, and who am I to claim the morality of what I do for a living?

Of course, this line of thinking is problematic. If I am just doing my job and the suicide bomber is doing his, then in moral terms we are surely are only as good, or as bad, as each other. His God calls him to do his duty and look after his brothers and sisters, and so does mine, and we are therefore equally right or equally wrong. Who is anyone to judge between us, and who am I to claim the morality of what I do for a living?

And yet sincerely holding a belief does not make you right. The failings of moral relativism are well-documented, yet too often we act as the sort of people who treat Pilate’s question “What is truth?” as a viable philosophical position rather than as the moral evasion that it is. We in the West are jaded by complex and bloody counterinsurgencies with no clear end state, affirming Bart Simpson’s dictum that “There are no good wars, with the following exceptions: the American Revolution, World War II, and the Star Wars Trilogy”. But the conflict in Ukraine has shown that binary wars between an obvious aggressor and a nation defending their homeland are not merely history, and that today people can still take up arms for justifiable reason.

I'm a Christian so I am a pacifist in the sense that peace is vastly preferable to war, and I have seen first-hand the suffering and misery it causes. Yet as a Christian too I cannot affirm peace at all costs when it means that rights and lives of innocent people can be callously disregarded by an oppressor who can only be resisted by force. I look at pictures of bombed-out apartment blocks in Ukraine, of kidnapped schoolgirls in Nigeria, of civilians murdered in Afghanistan and cannot affirm anything less than this, that there are things in this world worth fighting for.

I would reflect too that both my calling as a soldier and my faith have given me a sense of the value of life not as something not to be clung too at all costs, but as a gift to be made the most of. One of the things we did in our first week of Sandhurst was to make a will. There I was, fresh out of university, deciding who should inherit my meagre possessions (I didn’t even have a car), and asking the bloke next to me, who I’d only met 24 hours ago, to witness my signature. To be honest, it didn’t really feel real. What felt much more real was posing for a photo in the unit sports hall two years later, arms crossed, Union Jack and regimental flag behind me, knowing that it was the photo that would be used in the newspapers if I was blown up in Afghanistan.

You see that mutual love in tight-knit units where one soldier is prepared to die for another.

When you’re forced to confront the fact that you might die, you start to realise what it is that you are living for. I believe in the sacredness of life as a God-given gift, which makes the idea of sacrifice which lies at the heart of the Christian faith all the more powerful. “Greater love has no one than this” Jesus says in John’s Gospel, "to lay down one’s life for one’s friends”, and you see that mutual love in tight-knit units where one soldier is prepared to die for another. I think it’s that idea of living and possibly dying for something or someone more than just me is what keeps in the Army, when many of those who made their wills in that room at Sandhurst have left for civilian jobs.

Which brings me back to my initial reflection, that there are myriad different reasons why people join the armed forces and go to war. My Christian faith is at the heart of my reason(s), but I'm realistic to know that many of my colleagues do not share that faith and so would have a different motivation (though perhaps not quite as different as one might think). We all have stories to tell about why things matter to us, and matter to us so much that we think they are worth fighting for, in whatever guise 'fighting' takes. You have heard my story. What’s yours?