The power of saying sorry

Richard Flanagan is an esteemed Australian writer. My son recently gave our family a copy of Flanagan's recent book, Question 7. It is a personal memoir that masterfully weaves together a wide array of topics, from nuclear physics to the Tasmanian wilderness. The most striking part of the book was the following beautiful passage (page 140).

"Three Japanese women to see my father many years later. They came with gifts. They asked him to tell his story and they listened they said they were sorry.

There was a sense of strange ceremony, the awkwardness of ensuring something exquisitely fragile was not dropped before being given and received. There was a reserve on the part of both my father and the women, perhaps explicable as a nervousness about giving offence when none was intended.

They were part of a group of Japanese women committed to exposing Japanese war crimes. Two were middle-aged. One was elderly. They were brave and dignified. The eldest was their leader. She had survived the the Tokyo fire bombing. My father expressed his sorrow.

His children and his grandchildren were all there. We watched this with its strange weight of human dignity and goodness. I could not ever have believed that saying sorry might mean so much. None was the government. None bore responsibility. No one spoke for anyone other than themselves. Nothing said had had any national consequence. Yet in that strange communion lay liberation. What other answer can any of us make to the terrible question of history?"

Behold! Life!

Is life a miracle to behold or a problem to be solved and something to be explained?

I have enjoyed reading Wendell Berry's book, Life is a Miracle: An Essay Against Modern Superstition. It is a passionate critique and response to E.O. Wilson's book Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge.

[A brief and helpful summary is in Kirkus Reviews].

Berry is a poet, farmer, and former professor. He takes umbrage at Wilson's scientism and reductionism, which Berry considers to present an impoverished view of life, nature, and the university.

Berry has lived and worked on a farm for decades while writing. I cannot imagine doing this, as I am impractical. The passages below [page 45] gave me insight into what he is trying to achieve.

"In all of the thirty-seven years I have worked here, I have been trying to learn a language particular enough to speak of this place as it is and of my being as I am. My success, as I well know, has been poor enough, and yet I am glad of the effort, for it has helped me to make, and to remember always, the distinction between reduction and the thing reduced..."

“But, when I try to make my language more particular, I see that the life of this place is always emerging beyond expectation or prediction or typicality, that it is unique, given to the world minute by minute, only once, never to be repeated. And this is when I see that this life is a miracle, absolutely worth having, absolutely worth saving. We are alive within mystery, by miracle.”

Berry taught at a university for many years but eventually became disillusioned for reasons discussed in his essay, The Loss of the University.

Did Jesus believe in miracles?

A legacy of the Enlightenment was the notion of a divide between the natural and supernatural. Miracles can only happen if God intervenes in the natural world.

There was a nice discussion of these issues in a podcast episode, The Intelligible Universe, where John Dickson has a discussion with Peter Harrison and two astrophysicists, Sarah Sweet and Luke Barnes. 

[Aside: It was a treat for my wife and I to be in the audience where this episode was recorded live in Brisbane earlier this year.]

Peter Harrison recently published Some New World: Myths of Supernatural Belief in a Secular Age

Here is a summary of one of the relevant chapters

This chapter gives an account of the origins of our present understanding of the natural/supernatural divide, showing how the terminology of the ‘supernatural’ first emerged in the Middle Ages and gradually assumed its modern form between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. The attendant ‘isms’—naturalism and supernaturalism—arrive at the end of this period, during the 1800s. The original context for the naturalism/supernaturalism distinction was neither science nor philosophy, but the sphere of biblical criticism. From there it was imported into a scientific context. The nineteenth century also witnessed attempts to reconstruct the history of science with a view to arguing for a long-standing alliance between naturalism and science. A more accurate portrayal of the relevant history shows, to the contrary, that ‘science’ had been consistently aligned with theistic assumptions about the regularities of nature. These regularities were formalised as laws of nature in the seventeenth century, at which time they were understood as divinely authored imperatives to which nature necessarily conformed. In the nineteenth century, what had originally been understood as expressions of the divine will were simply redescribed in purely naturalistic terms by advocates of naturalism. Ironically, they were now claimed to represent evidence against theistic readings of nature.

In the episode, John Dickson makes the following provocative argument.

Jesus probably didn't believe in miracles. Jesus probably didn't believe in the supernatural. If what we mean by supernatural and miracle is the invasion of an outside alien force into nature, that definition of course comes from the enlightenment.

It assumes a dualism, a spiritual ethereal world and the physical one. And every now and then the spiritual injects itself into the material. The gospel writers didn't share this outlook from their viewpoint, which was really the Jewish viewpoint. There aren't two worlds. There's just one world. There is just the creation that comes from the creator.

Everything that happens in the universe from the regular rising of the sun to the very surprising sight given to the blind person. It's all the powerful Work of the one creator working in and through nature. What we call miracles are not invasions from a parallel world. They are just powers, God's powers in and through creation.

And this is why the gospels describe Jesus baffling deeds, not as supernatural events, not even as miracles. They see them as special examples of power. And as signs of the future. The Greek terms in the Gospels are Dunamis, which means strength or power, and Semea, which means sign. Powers, that's easy enough to comprehend.

But what about signs? What are they signs of? It'd be tempting to think that what Jesus means when he describes his powers, his healings, his signs, that what he means is these are signs of the spiritual world. If only you could pull the veil, you would see a spiritual world invading the natural. But actually that's not what Jesus says. 

He says they are signs from the future. They are little displays in the present of God's intentions with all of creation...

Don't portray a supernatural world as distinct from a natural one. There is just one world, God's world, where the creator acts powerfully in every moment, and wherein the moments of Jesus healings, the creator gave a preview that one day he will mend all things. 

Beyond dualistic theology in Asian contexts

 For the global church, three questions that have attracted significant debate and division are the following.

1. What is the relative priority and relationship between evangelism, social action, and political involvement?

2. Do miracles of physical healing and exorcism of evil spirits happen today?

3. How unique is the Christian message and the salvation that Jesus offers in light of a pluralism of religions?

Over the past century, the global church has become divided over these issues. These fractures are not always just along liberal and conservative lines but between Pentecostals and others, and the Western and the Majority World.

These issues are explored in depth in Mangoes or Bananas? The Quest for an Authentic Asian Christian Theology, by Hwa Yung. This is the book for this month's theology reading group.

Most advocates of a particular answer to these questions may claim that their position is supported by the Bible or at least by their theological tradition. Hwa's important contribution is to argue that there is more to the story. Two influences drive different answers, and these are interrelated and in tension. The first influence is the culture and context of the theologian. Culture affects the way people think and reason; it gives them a worldview, a set of presuppositions that are usually implicit and rarely questioned. The second influence is related to the first, but more specifically, the overpowering intellectual legacy of the Enlightenment. 

Although Hwa focuses on his own Asian context, the book is relevant to a broader audience, including Westerners, such as myself, as it may stimulate a greater self-awareness of the influences shaping one's own theology.

Hwa follows David Bosch to identify seven contours of the Enlightenment worldview. In his classic book, Transforming Mission: Paradigm Shifts in Theology of Mission, Bosch has a chapter that is 90 pages long, Mission in the Wake of the Enlightenment. The seven contours are the following.

1. The supremacy of reason

2. Subject-object dichotomy

3. Elimination of the idea of purpose

4. Optimism in Progress.

5. Distinction between facts and values

6. All problems are solvable in principle

7. Humans are emancipated and autonomous individuals

Hwa explains how much of this is alien, both intellectually and emotionally, to Asian thought and culture. In a moving and personal chapter (added to the second edition) he says (p. 199-200).

"With these three issues troubling me (their resolution came only later) I almost lost confidence in my theological pilgrimage. Some of my good western friends urged me to go back to work on a PhD in the west. But I told them that I could not bring myself to go back to do a doctorate in systematics, even to the most illustrious of institutions, because I would die emotionally. For then I would have to spend the bulk of my energy and time justifying my presuppositions to Western teachers and examiners, whose Enlightenment mind-set would probably mean that they and I live in different thought-worlds."

The key issue for Hwa is the dualism of Western thought, in contrast to the holism of Eastern thought. He argues that this dualism underlies Western answers to the three questions, and even how the questions are framed or the importance that is placed on them. This dualism is nicely summarised by a footnote on page 53.

 "In commenting on the differences between the positions of Melbourne 1980 and Pattaya 1980 [a meeting of the World Council of Churches and Lausanne, respectively], David Bosch (1985:85) writes: ‘My contention has been, and still is, that both positions are indefensible, as both have succumbed to a perhaps, not easily detectable but nevertheless insidious dualism in which, ultimately, grace remains opposed to nature, justification to justice, the soul to the body, the individual to society, redemption to creation, heaven to earth, the word to the deed, and evangelism to social responsibility.’"

Balance is the necessary but impossible task of theology.  We need to be aware of and avoid false dichotomies and be open to dialectic and integrative thinking.