Raymond G. Helmick, SJ, taught conflict resolution in the Department of Theology at Boston College. He has mediated in a number of conflicts in Northern Ireland, various Middle Eastern conflicts, and the Balkan countries, among many others. He is on the executive board of the U.S. Interreligious Committee for Peace in the Middle East and served as senior associate of the Center for Strategic and International Studies from 2000–2004. He is the author of numerous monographs and articles.

Rodney L. Petersen is an American scholar in the area of history, ethics, and religious conflict. He is the author or editor of numerous articles and books, including Consumption, Population, and Sustainability and Earth at Risk.

CHAPTER 1

A Theology of Forgiveness

Terminology, Rhetoric,& the Dialectic of Interfaith Relationships

Rodney L. Petersen

Across all of the grand wisdom traditions run termsthat reflect a desire to heal broken relationships and to findways of acceptance that enable us to live together. In Islam we find greatemphasis on the quality of mercy, reflective of the merciful nature of God.Buddhism stresses the importance of compassion. And Judaism, according toRabbi Harold Kushner, finds that the key to breaking the spell that locks usup in patterns of resentment is forgiveness. The "discoverer" of the role of forgivenessin the realm of human affairs, according to political theorist HannahArendt, was Jesus of Nazareth. Whether this is quite true, or true in only aparticular way given the attention all religions pay to forgiveness at somelevel, does not detract from the insight it raises as we look back on the mostconsciously violent of centuries since the "discoverer" alluded to by Arendt.

Many in the public policy community in North America now believethat the term forgiveness will be central to working with the political orderof the twenty-first century. Joseph Montville and others have made thepractice of forgiveness central to what they define as "track two" diplomacy.Its efficacy, however, as a tool for diplomatic practice, or for a deepeningof our understanding of human health, will depend in large measureon how we conceive of the topic in its ontological foundation and the waysin which the possibility of forgiveness can cross confessional, or religious,and conceptual boundaries. Therefore, while the purpose of this chapter isto note the ontological foundation for forgiveness in Christian theologyand to understand its terminology and rhetoric within a community of commonnarrative, that is, the church, the chapter will also sketch the ways bywhich a dialectic of forgiveness can cross confessional boundaries.

In the history of the church the practice of forgiveness has been clearlytied to penitence, most often privatized as a part of individual religiouspractice since the early medieval period. Throughout what became recognizedas "Christendom," the public significance of forgiveness often languishedas more retributive conceptions of justice dominated social theory,power politics, and practice. Forgiveness was often "spiritualized" andremoved from the practice of everyday life. While forgiveness might happenbetween God and an individual penitent, among persons and groups insociety only some lesser form of condoning, dismissal, or forgettingappeared possible. The recovery of particular patterns of religious behaviorand theology in the Protestant reforms caused Christians to rethink thetopic. While it has often been said that all of Luther's thoughts "radiatelike the rays of the sun from one glowing core, namely the gospel of the forgivenessof sins," a juridical and sacrificial view of the atonement continuedinto the early modern period, as seen in the classic liturgies andtheologies of the newly established national churches in the West. Nevertheless,the Protestant Reformation and Roman counter-reforms stimulatedsimultaneously in the church a recovery of the term forgiveness andthoughts about its practice, although this often occurred in more pietistic-orientedcircles, apart from the...