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5. Truth-Telling, Political Forgiveness, and Free Speech
- University of Notre Dame Press
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Chapter Five Truth -Telling, Political Forgiveness, and Free speech The previous chapters explored the implications of the principle of divine-human communion for Christian thinking on both the form of political community and the performance of Christian politics. Though still anchored in the principle of divine-human communion, this chapter will deal less with the form of political community and more with an issue that has received much attention of late: the role of forgiveness in politics. The debate about forgiveness in politics has something to do with democracy in the sense that its purpose is to effect a reconciliation among diverse peoples for the sake of these peoples occupying the same political space as equals. My concern is not with how forgiveness in politics facilitates democracy but on how the principle of divine-human communion can illuminate the attempts at political forgiveness. The primary catalyst for this surge of interest in political forgiveness is, no doubt, the leading role Archbishop Desmond Tutu played in establishing the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) in post-apartheid South Africa. Tutu forcefully and persistently proclaimed that the only way to envision a virtually unthinkable future 163 164 The Mystical as Political for a united South Africa that included both the oppressed and the oppressors, the majority black South Africans and the minority white Afrikaners, was through forgiveness.1 The TRC was the institutional mechanism designed to mediate national forgiveness and reconciliation toward a democratic South Africa. Despite this surge of interest, there has been relatively little theological reflection on forgiveness in politics in the past two decades.2 Of the theological works that have been written on forgiveness, little, if any, attention has been given to the sacrament of confession that is practiced within the Roman Catholic and Orthodox traditions. Such lack of attention to this particular Christian practice is somewhat surprising, especially since it is ultimately tied to forgiveness. If, as I have been arguing in the previous chapters, an ascetics of divinehuman communion is a politics, then the ascetical/sacramental practice of confession cannot be irrelevant to the debate about politics and forgiveness. My own angle, then, will be to illustrate what difference understanding forgiveness as an event of divine-human communion makes for thinking about political forgiveness. Before doing this, however, I must offer an interpretation of the Christian practice of confession that is less juridical and centered more on the act of truth-telling. What will initially seem like a digression is the necessary interpretive foundation for seeing what relevance the Christian ascetical/sacramental practice of confession has for current discussions on political forgiveness. I will end this chapter with some reflections on how the particular understanding of truth-telling I am offering in this chapter could inform a theological account of democratic free speech, one that focuses less on conscience and more on the capacity of truth-telling to form particular kinds of relationships. Confession as Contractual Although testimony to the confession of sins is present in the scriptures (for example, Ps 50/51 and James 5:16), the confession of sins as a liturgical practice and its identification as a s acrament devel- [3.88.16.192] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 02:52 GMT) Truth-Telling, Political Forgiveness, and Free speech 165 oped over time within Christian history.3 From a p ublic act performed in the midst of the community, confession eventually became a face-to-face encounter between the confessant and the spiritual father, spiritual director, or priest. Over the course of time in t he Christian tradition a particular interpretation of the sacrament of confession began to dominate—one that continues to hold our imagination today when we think about confession. This interpretation often is referred to as the juridical and penitential understanding of confession. This forensic understanding of confession reaches its peak in the proliferation of the Penitentials in the Christian medieval West.4 This juridical, forensic understanding of confession also appears in the Christian East.5 The focus of such a legalistic understanding of confession is on individual sins that preclude one’s entrance into heaven. Sins were catalogued according to type—venial and mortal—and penances were constructed to correspond with the type and degree of severity of the sin. Although pastoral in intent, confession within the framework of the Penitentials resembled a sort of bargaining for what one could give in exchange for erasing a particular debt, leading to the abuses often associated with casuistry and the indulgences. The...