Questioning God

Three: Returning/Forgiving: Ethics and Theology

73 three Returning/Forgiving Ethics and Theology Robert Gibbs ‘‘Return, Israel, to the Lord, your God.’’ My first word, ‘‘Return,’’ is a citation of a biblical command, and it is a citation of the first word in the first word-pair of my title: returning/forgiving. I cite the command, the exhortation in Hosea (14:2) addressed to the community, to re-cite and so to alert us to the other side paired with forgiveness. Hosea’s text is the earliest Hebrew text about returning. The Hebrew word for repentance, Teshuvah, means returning and is from the root that means to turn. It is clearly a relational term: We return to God and to other people. In the Jewish tradition, the problems, even the aporias, focus more on the task and the impossible possibility to return. Forgiveness , although less the focus, is also a relational term. Indeed, both terms are not primarily self-relations, but relations with others, with others as agents who are able to act. Of our social relations, these two relations (returning/ forgiving) are the most other-centered, depending most on another person. To return is to re-approach, to come near again, placing me back in relations with someone I harmed. To forgive, on the other hand, is to accept someone back, to overlook the harm or better still to remedy what went wrong. To accept apologies. These two performances are different, however, and not only is my Robert Gibbs 74 responsibility as returner different from my responsibility as forgiver, but also what I must risk in returning to another is distinct from my risk in waiting for another to ask for my forgiveness. The two performances make different demands of me, different risks in relation to the other depending on which side of the relation with another I am located. These relations enact a complexity of asymmetry. The other relation I will explore, ethics and theology, is construed on a different plane. The double contingency of forgiveness and return structures the performances in the social realm; the possible relations of ethics and theology occur in the realm of discourse about responsibilities. My point of departure would be that ethics concerns our relations with each other, our responsibilities for other people, and so in the specific context of this paper, our responsibilities to return to and to seek reconciliation with those we have harmed—and the other responsibility to welcome the other back and accept the offering of appeasement. Theology, on the other hand, concerns not simply the nature of God, but more important, our relations with God, particularly when we have damaged that relationship through sin. Here, too, there is a responsibility to return to the one I have harmed, but here the task in forgiveness is to accept God’s forgiveness—a task whose complexity we could learn from Kierkegaard. To what extent is our return to God like our return to another person? To what extent is the expectation of forgiveness parallel? Must we understand our responsibility to forgive others to be like God’s, or is it somehow different? Those direct questions point to the deeper issue: How must the discourse about our responsibilities for each other be linked or unlinked from a discourse about our responsibilities to God? For myself, I would not choose to identify myself as a theologian, but that is not due to any commitment to exclude God or even theological matters from philosophy, but rather due to a commitment to translate and so run risks of misapprehension in the effort to re-invigorate and redevelop each discourse. I wish to strain these discourses and their disciplines in order to think what philosophy needs most today: a thinking and, even more so, a performance of repentance. Let me conclude my preamble with one almost-slogan: The task of theology for our moment is to translate the teaching of Teshuvah, of return, into a philosophical teaching. Teshuvah is not a private act of contrition but is a social performance and is the key to understanding a task of reconciliation fundamentally different from Hegel’s. Its vulnerability and one-sidedness is vital to the ethics of reconciliation, where the goodwill of the survivors must not be coerced, demanded, or even presumed. Both within philosophy’s own domain and in our world, the work of reconciliation requires insight into both returning and forgiving—an insight that when introduced from theology can also give us hope to take responsibility for our...