Abstract
‘Forgetfulness leads to exile, while remembrance is the secret of redemption,’ it says at Yad Vashem. Both Israel and Church stand under the command to ‘remember’. At the Passover, Israel must remember the exodus, the journey from bondage to liberation. At every Eucharist the Church remembers the events of the Last Supper and the significance of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. But is remembering the secret of redemption? Bitter memories can also lead to hatred and death, as we see in Northern Ireland and the Balkans, and as the divorce courts know. And how trustworthy is memory? Quite apart from ‘false memory syndrome’, we all tend to re-narrate our past so that, rather than being a microscope examining the facts, memory is more like a kaleidoscope, constantly throwing up new patterns. Not only individuals but whole cultures do this, as George Steiner noted about post-war Germany.
From the Balkans himself, and with his own bitter memories, Miroslav Volf patiently teases out the many strands in memory. On the one hand, no memory, no identity; on the other hand, traumatic memories can imprison and dehumanize us. Memories of abuse can make us abusers. ‘Forgive and forget’ may pass for trifling hurts but Dostoevsky’s Ivan Karamazov famously claimed that some crimes went beyond eternal reconciliation, and Elie Wiesel, the apostle of memory, says this about the Holocaust. Volf refuses all easy solutions, but he meets the anger of protest atheism partly by insisting that we are all wrongdoers – no one is in the position to throw the first stone – but secondly by asking what we learn about the possibility of the redemption of bitter memory in the gospel. This is the heart of the book. He distinguishes between forgetting and ‘not-coming-to-mind’. Bitter memories will not be erased but it could be that they will not come to mind. Learning from Kierkegaard, he understands this possibility as a result of the gift of love. We cannot say to the abused: ‘Get over it! Forget it!’ It is possible, however, for those hurt no longer to hold offences against the offender. If this were not possible, could there be redemption? We would have Dante’s world, where the redeemed enjoy the eternal torments of the damned, which is not redemption at all but an eternal celebration of vengeance. Instead, wrongdoings have to be named and acknowledged, we must forgive and receive forgiveness. The presence of the God who forgives in Christ makes this possible: ‘Our minds will be rapt in the goodness of God and in the goodness of God’s new world, and the memories of wrongs will wither away like plants without water.’ Redemption is a social reality: as David Jenkins used to say, the Trinity is a vision of a world where all are fully human because all are fully human, and the humanity of God is what makes this possible.
A profound and really necessary book addressing many of our most difficult conundrums, going beyond the banalities of many accounts of redemption, and helping us to understand how, given the terrors of history, we might be able to speak of redemption at all.