Forgiveness And Abuse: Jewish And Christian Reflections

Marie Fortune, Joretta Marshall

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136417436
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Explore what forgiveness means in the context of sexual and domestic abuse! Using research, studies, stories, and prayer, Forgiveness and Abuse: Jewish and Christian Reflections focuses on the views and opinions of these two prominent religions as well as shares the wisdom of their traditional teachings. Forgiveness is an essential concept for many survivors of abuse as well as the perpetrators. Some believe that urging victims to simply forgive and forget in the face of such harsh realities may not be practical and could actually endanger the healing process. Forgiveness and Abuse studies several aspects of the spiritual influence in forgiving and vindicating abusive crimes, including:

• traditional views of forgiveness and repentance using excerpts from Jewish law
• a clinical study examining the relationship between forgiveness and mental health as well as comparing Christian and Jewish responses to a questionnaire regarding forgiveness
• abuse of children and adults by members of the clergy: the roles of the victims, the abuser, and the church
• the differences between forgiveness and reconciliation and whether they are both necessary
• so much more!

Several of the historical practices of Christianity and Judaism regarding abuse, its public acknowledgment, and its forgiveness have been harshly criticized. Forgiveness and Abuse offers you new insight on the spiritual connections between religion, abuse, and forgiveness, and brings you hope as religious leaders unite to better themselves and others. With the events of recent years weighing on society's shoulders, this collection is profoundly significant for clergy, counselors, therapists, and survivors, as well as the perpetrators themselves.

When Forgiveness Is Not the Issue in Forgiveness: Religious Complicity in Abuse and Privatized Forgiveness

Margaret F. Arms

SUMMARY. This article examines public and private (individual) aspects of forgiveness relating to abuse and the complicity of religious institutions in abuse by some theological formulations and doctrines. It argues that the real issue is not whether to forgive but how much the process involves individual and religious institutional truth telling. Drawing from the work of Desmond Tutu and Carter Heyward, the author suggests that public and private dimensions of truth telling are critical components of forgiveness. Without the public participation of religious institutions in truth telling about their own complicity, privatized forgiveness is diminished but may stand as an act of resistance. [Article copies available for a fee from The Haworth Document Delivery Service: 1-800-HAWORTH. E-mail address: <[email protected]> Website: <http://www.HaworthPress.com>©2002 by The Haworth Press, Inc. All rights reserved.]

KEYWORDS. Abuse, public/privatized forgiveness, religious complicity, truthtelling, Tutu, Heyward, resistance

For abuse survivors, considerations of forgiveness occur in the context of the concrete and harsh reality of their experiences. The questions I have heard from survivors, in the over fifteen year’s psychotherapeutic work with them, come with a compelling intensity reflective of the physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual assault on their integrity that their abuse has brought. Their questions assume the form and tone of a litany. Not infrequently, clients respond to their own questions to me with a variation on Jesus’ request to God as he hung on the cross, “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.”¹ In the survivor’s responses, however, Jesus’ words become not a request for forgiveness but an angry, ironic, sometimes bitter, question more in the spirit of protest found in the lamentation psalms.

How, some asked, do you forgive your grandfather who used you as the conduit to friends whom he sexually molested, and who swore he had not thereby harmed you?² Another wondered whether she could or should forgive the man who date raped her after being told no, and then remarked that her “no” was really a joke. Survivors of clergy sexual abuse questioned whether they could forgive their pastors who used the power of their office and position to molest survivors who came to help. These survivors had profound reservations about forgiving the institutional church that had known about the abusive clergy, and had done nothing except effect a geographical cure. They challenged the appropriateness of forgiving a church that insists forgiveness is the duty of every Christian but will not examine its own complicity in a culture of violence and abuse. How, even, they asked, do you forgive a God who seems to insist that the church is right and who likewise expects forgiveness? So go the questions for those who have experienced abuse. In the face of such experiences, perhaps the more meaningful question is yet another question: “Should we forgive?”

Forgiveness is a multilayered subject, with profound ethical issues surrounding decisions about the ability or advisability of abuse survivors to engage in the process of forgiveness. This article argues that dimensions of public and private participation embedded in the process of forgiveness place constraints on the relevance or wisdom of forgiving. For example, issues of truthtelling, power, and the privatization of the forgiveness process (by which I mean pressures on individuals to forgive) in the face of public (in the case of this article, religious institutions) absence from the process all contribute to concerns surrounding the process of forgiveness.³ This article maintains that the discourse and process around decisions relating to forgiveness are more important considerations than issues about whether or not an abuse survivor should or should not forgive.

I approach the subject of forgiveness from the perspective of one who has spent over 15 years working with abuse survivors, most of whom were victims of sexual abuse, first in my psychotherapy practice and now at The Shalom Center where we work with their spiritual issues and questions. The lens filtering my thoughts on forgiveness are the stories of those who have come to my office seeking healing from deep wounds associated with abuse. Sometimes these clients have sought to find ways to forgive; sometimes they have sought to find strength not to forgive in the face of pressures to forgive. In either case, they have sought a path that has integrity both to the deep wounds caused by the people who harmed them and to their need to release the hold the abuse continued to have on their lives.

Axiomatic to the ensuing discussion of forgiveness is the clear claim that abuse is never, in any circumstance, justified. Abuse calls for a religious institutional response of challenge and confrontation of the acts and of the assumptions of power inherent in those acts. In short, abuse calls for firm resistance, or “no,” from both a religio-cultural and an individual level. This article further assumes that if truthtelling is not possible, because it is dangerous for the abuse survivor, or because the abuse survivor is not ready to tell the truth about what happened, or because the offender (institutional or individual) declines to tell the truth, forgiveness cannot have integrity.

With the above in mind, this exploration of forgiveness vis à vis abuse approaches the subject from several angles. First, it begins by mapping the terrain and providing some of the various ways some scholars use the term “forgiveness.” Second, it looks at the dimensions and process of truthtelling as the sine qua non of forgiveness. To make such a claim is not to suggest that truthtelling is the only aspect of forgiveness, it is, however, to claim that forgiveness cannot proceed without it. Without truthtelling, forgiveness becomes another way to maintain the “shameful secret,” and a quick, superficial, albeit meaningless “fix.” Furthermore, truthtelling requires the support of public, such as religious, institutions through their participation in the truthtelling process itself. Without such support, the danger of the process is too great for the abuse survivor.

Third, I examine the limitations placed on the private dimensions of forgiveness, by the religious institution’s disengagement from the process. This article argues that religious institutions (the “public” aspect) often are complicit in individual acts of violence. At times, religious institutions are themselves primary offenders, such as explicit abuse by church professionals like those that have come to public awareness with the recent exposé of child molestation by Roman Catholic priests. Although clergy sexual abuse is devastating to those who are its victims and represents a flagrant and reprehensible act of abusive power, it is not the focus of this article.

A more subtle and common form of complicity in a violent and abusive culture exists in some religious doctrines and practices. For example, the public discussions about how many offenses (“strikes”) will be tolerated before offending Roman Catholic clergy are removed from the priesthood strongly suggests that the Roman Catholic institution has some ambivalence about the nature of the offense.⁴ Certainly, this ambivalence and reluctance to embrace a zero tolerance policy gives subtle, although presumably unintentional, room for abuse–at least once This more subtle variety of collusion with individual acts of abuse is the focus of the discussion below about the public religious institutional complicity in our culture of violence and abuse.

Another example of religious complicity in a culture of abuse takes the form of pressures on individuals to forgive abusive acts. Religious leaders and institutions pressure individuals (the “private” dimension) to forgive without engaging in institutional truthtelling about their own collusion with violence. In other words, the religious pressure is on the individual to forgive; but the religious institution absents itself from the process of truthtelling about its own contributions to abuse.⁵ The process of forgiveness thus becomes privatized, and secret. These public and private dimensions of forgiveness draw the discussion towards consideration of the power dynamics inherent in acts of forgiveness.

Finally, this article claims that the real issue surrounding forgiveness in the face of abuse is less whether or not one forgives, but whether one engages the questions of forgiveness through truthtelling, an engagement that becomes an act of prophetic resistance. Preoccupation with forgiveness may detract from larger questions of religious complicity in perpetuating an abusive and violent climate that fosters individual acts of abuse. The conclusion is that forgiving or refusing to forgive both may be acts of resistance to abuse, depending upon the degree of truthtelling in the process. Engaging the questions and process surrounding issues of forgiveness with a stance of prophetic truthtelling then become the point of resistance to that abuse.

MAPPING THE TERRAIN

Defining forgiveness is a difficult task. The subject is complex, as numerous pastoral theologians who have attempted definitions can attest. For example, pastoral theologian David Augsburger in his book Helping People Forgive required 27 propositions to explain what he means by forgiveness.⁶ Some argue that forgiveness is the giving up of hate and fantasies of revenge.⁷ Others suggest forgiveness is a process tied to reconciliation and the “restoration of communion with God, with one another, and with the whole Creation.”⁸ Theologian Martin Marty suggests that forgiveness be understood “not so much as a doctrine … but as an ethos” emerging from the character of God, which we as God’s creation are to emulate.⁹ Others, such as pastoral theologian Joretta Marshall, emphasize the importance of extending the process of forgiveness to include attention to aspects of communal complicity and participation in the wrongdoing.¹⁰ All argue that forgiveness is hard work; none argues that forgiveness involves condoning harmful acts or forgetting.

Carter Heyward, in her book Saving Jesus From Those Who Are Right, offers a workable definition of forgiveness that includes many of the foregoing components of forgiveness, and allows for a focus on public and private truthtelling, the process central to the claims about forgiveness in this article. For that reason, her thinking about forgiveness is helpful. She writes, “Forgiveness is a social, political, and psychospiritual leap out of the past toward the future. It is a passage through obsessions with wrongs done. Even in small ways, it is a radical political act because it is the work of justice-love.”¹¹ It is a definition suited to the purposes of this article because it focuses on forgiveness as a process intricately bound up with systems as well as individuals.

TRUTHTELLING:THE VITAL INGREDIENT

The work of Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu is helpful in exploring the import of truthtelling vis à vis forgiveness.¹² His experience with the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which was commissioned by the Mandela South African government in 1995 to bring healing and reconciliation to a nation decimated by the atrocities of apartheid, provides fertile ground for an examination of forgiveness in the ways outlined above.¹³ The Truth and Reconciliation Commission was charged “to establish as complete a picture as possible” of what happened in the crime of apartheid.¹⁴ The process went beyond a casual “This is what I did and I’m sorry.” It examined both contextual factors as well as the individual crimes associated with apartheid. It involved exquisite attention and respect to the victims and their stories. The goal of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission was restorative rather than retributive justice.

As a secular structure and process, the South African parliament opted to use the language of “amnesty” rather than “forgiveness”; however, Tutu frequently uses the two terms interchangeably.¹⁵ His work provides profound and relevant insights, especially in his insistence on the centrality of truthtelling as a prerequisite for forgiveness. Unlike the South African experience, the religious climate in the United States does not foster truthtelling on a religio-cultural level. This failure of religious and cultural truthtelling, especially on a religious level, undermines and limits the process of forgiveness.

The Christian tradition has insisted that Christians take seriously the charge to forgive. Several Scriptural citations come to mind: Jesus’ requesting forgiveness for those who crucified him from the cross (Lk 23:34), Jesus’ instructions to his disciples to forgive 70 times 70 (Mt 18:21), Jesus’ sermon on the plain in which he argues against judgment and condemnation and concludes with the words “Forgive, and you will be forgiven (Lk 6:37).” Certainly the doctrine of the atonement can be understood to be at least in part about forgiveness, as well as about sacrifice and salvation.

Concerns, however, arise. For example, in the absence of larger religio-cultural truthtelling, the privatization of forgiveness discourages, albeit perhaps unintentionally, the very wrongs one seeks to forgive. To promote forgiveness in the face of its privatization may be to engage in religious abuse. These issues point to serious difficulties with the appropriateness of encouraging private acts of forgiveness between individuals when public discourse from cultural, including religious, institutions lacks truthtelling about those institution’s complicity with abuse. In other words, at times to forgive is to heal the wounds of God’s abused people lightly. Certainly, Marie Fortune, whose work has done much to raise the consciousness and conscience of the church in the area of abuse, argues that the church frequently engages in “healing the wound lightly.”¹⁶

SAFETY CONSIDERATIONS

It would be foolhardy and dangerous to encourage truthtelling, especially from victims of abuse, without considering issues of safety. Again, the South African experience has much to teach our own society about the hard work of truthtelling in forgive...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• Forgiving the Unforgivable? Jewish Insights into Repentance and Forgiveness
• Forgiveness and the Jewish High Holy Days
• Forgiveness and Mental Health: An Exploration of Jewish and Christian Approaches
• Forgiving Abuse–An Ethical Critique
• Sexual Abuse, Forgiveness and Justice: A Journey in Faith
• Three Spirits: One Parish A Short Story in Four Parts
• Forgiveness, Reconciliation, and Healing
• When Forgiveness Is Not the Issue in Forgiveness: Religious Complicity in Abuse and Privatized Forgiveness
• When Sisters Dream
• The Practice of Forgiveness in Sue Miller’s Novel The World Below
• Index