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161 chapter six Reconciliation in God and Christian Life There has been a lot of talk about sin in this book—certainly more than one is likely to find in much of contemporary Christian ethics. There are risks associated with this insofar as talk of sin is regarded as coming at the expense of our appreciation of grace or an affirmation of creation’s goodness. Rather than signal misanthropy or a moribund worldview, due recognition of sin’s pervasive disruption follows from the grace-occasioned, worship-inducing, astonished awareness of creation’s beauty and God’s loving intention to reconcile all things, including each of us. We become aware of sin in the knowledge of grace, so that talk of sin can be one key in which grace plays. If a fall from grace can be a fall into grace, we can speak of the gravity of sin and gratuity of grace together. Talk of sin can function as a crucial resource in the personal and communal processes of healing ruptured relationships and righting our involvements with creaturely goods. It can also, of course, contribute to those very ruptures, wounds, and wrongs. The church is that faith-formed community where we learn to speak and to hear words of sin and grace together. As a pilgrim community that enjoys a taste of God’s reconciling grace but is not yet fully reconciled, it can be a source of harm and scandal as well as healing and edification. These facts provide all the more reason why our understanding and practices of forgiveness and reconciliation need to be mindful of but not limited to determinations of moral culpability. The reasons why and the way to speak of sin and grace together become clearer when we reflect on forgiveness and reconciliation. This chapter begins with two stories of reconciliation, one about a clearly, terribly wrong act and the other about a case that does not involve wrongdoing. We then turn to some recent scholarship on forgiveness in light of which these two stories appear both vexing and instructive. The chapter will argue that God’s forgiveness permits and prods us to reinterpret moral wrongdoing in a way that creates new possibilities for moral agents. Forgiveness, however, is not yet reconciliation. Reconciliation encompasses forgiveness but also exceeds it. It does not require determinations of culpability or depend upon the satisfaction or removal of some perceived claim upon the chapter six 162 offender, though it could include these. Reconciliation entails a communion that corrects and overcomes the disruption of proper relationship between persons. The chapter then considers the importance of ecclesial contexts and practices for Christian life.A theology of reconciliation, enlivened and embodied in ecclesial life, provides crucial insights into the integrity and limits of Christian moral life as well as the discipline of Christian ethics. A theology of reconciliation relativizes Christian ethical distinctions and judgments while simultaneously securing them in an affirmation of God’s reality as the author and end of creation and the source of freedom and value. This theology of reconciliation thereby makes our endeavors truthfully to understand our moral acting a penitent, shared practice in which we come to realize our involvements with sin as we grow in awareness that we are graciously drawn into mutual abiding in God and one another. Two Stories of Reconciliation On October 2, 2006, in Nickel Mines, Pennsylvania, a gunman named Charles Roberts walked into a one-room Amish school intent on sexually assaulting and killing the female students. The teacher and one girl escaped early on. The gunman released the male students along with three adult women who were visiting and their small children. He bound the remaining ten girls. He phoned his wife and told her he would not be coming home. He said he could not forgive God for allowing their newborn daughter to die hours after her premature birth some nine years ago. He claimed that he had sexually molested two female relatives as an adolescent, though they denied it ever happened, and that he was tormented by the urge to molest young girls again.1 Roberts said he hated himself and hated God. When police arrived he called 911 and ordered everyone off the property. He warned that he would begin shooting. Seconds later, he fired at all ten girls and once at the policemen storming the building, and then he shot and killed himself. Five girls died. The other five were seriously injured...

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