(continued from previous article)
But what about God’s memory? Will not God remember? Is not God’s memory, as Rowan Williams puts it in Resurrection, the long memory of the victim, even if it is a memory of “the victim who will not condemn”? 9 Commenting on the encounter between the resurrected Lord and Peter, Williams argues beautifully that God, resisting the endemic forgetfulness of the offenders, restores to them their guilty past, though not so as to condemn them but as to make the restored past “the foundation for a new and extended identity. 10 What will happen, however, after God has narrated the history of the offender’s sin in the context of grace 11 and has given the offender a new identity? The answer is so simple, and we are so used to hearing it, that we miss its profundity: God, to whom all things are present, will forget the forgiven sin. The God of Israel, who is about “to do a new thing” and who calls people “not to remember the former things,” promises to blot their transgression out of God’s own memory (Isa. 43:18-19, 25; cf. 65:17). “I will forgive their iniquity, and remember their sin no more” (Jer. 31:34).
What are the implications of God’s “forgetting” of sins for the human forgetting of evil and wrongdoing? In seeking an answer to the meaning of God’s forgetting, we must pay attention to the complex and multilayered dynamic of divine remembering and nonremembering. God remembers iniquities, remembers them well (Rev. 18:5). Yet God also forgets them. God remembers the iniquities just to forget them after they have been named as iniquities and forgiven. Why both remembering and forgetting? Because of another divine memory, much more important and powerful than the memory of the offense, a memory that defines the very identity of the God of Israel. Just as a woman cannot forget her nursing child, so God cannot forget Israel. Inscribed on the palms of God’s hands, Israel is unforgettable even when she has offended and forgotten God (Isa. 49:15-16). The memory of sin must be kept alive for a while, as long as it is needed for the repentance and transformation to occur. But then it must be allowed to die, so that the fractured relationship of the divine mother and her all-too-human child may be fully healed. The memory of offense, sustained beyond repentance, clouds both the memory of past love and the vision of future reconciliation. The loss of this memory-the memory of iniquities-brings back the child into the mother’s arms, already outstretched toward it because she would not lose the memory of their embrace.
But, we may protest, how dare God forget! Let God “forgive and forget” the insults God has suffered, but what “right” does God have to forget all the brutalities done to so many human victims? Would not a loss of this memory amount to an embrace between the perpetrator and God-a collusion of the perpetrator’s short memory and God’s quick forgetting-that would blur over suffering and death and leave the victims forgotten? Indeed, if God is the God of the victims (which is what the Cross tells us God is), God cannot forget as long as the victims remember. With a loud voice the souls of those who have been slaughtered keep reminding God: “Sovereign Lord, holy and true, how long . . . ?” (Rev. 6:10).
But how long should victims remember? Must the victims remain eternally enslaved by what Nietzsche called “the spirit of revenge”? Should not they too forget in the end, so that they themselves can be redeemed, the former (repentant) perpetrators dressed in white robes, and both reconciled to each other?
What speaks so loudly against the victim’s forgetting is, of course, the thought -an abysmal thought-of “dressing the former perpetrator in a white robe.” I wrote these words down drawn by the Pauline vision of justified sinners-and immediately erased them. The images of burned villages, destroyed cities, raped women from the recent history of Croatia, my native country, flooded my mind. It seems impossible for me to embrace a tchetnik with bloody hands just as it seems impossible for a Jew to embrace a Nazi or for a mother to embrace the tormentor who let his dogs tear her son to pieces! No redeemed future is imaginable in which the perpetrators-even judged and transformed perpetrators!-are dressed in white robes. Everything in us rebels against the image. Yet everything we know about the God of the Cross demands that we seriously entertain it. If we do, the question will no longer be how dare God forget, but how can God, without forgetting the victims, help heal their memories?
Consider, first, the eschatological side of the answer. In what strikes one as an “antitheodicy” of sorts-an abandonment of all speculative solutions to the problem of suffering-the apostle Paul writes: “I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory about to be revealed to us” (Rom. 8:18). The logic is as simple as it is profound. If something is not worth comparing, then it will not be compared, and if it will not be compared, then it will not have been remembered. For how would one fail to compare suffering with glory if one remembered the suffering while experiencing the glory? 12 When we reach the other side, and the bridge connecting the new to the old is destroyed so as to prevent the old from ever invading the new, the last part of the bridge to disappear will be the memory of the old. Enveloped in God’s glory we will redeem ourselves and our enemies by one final act of the most difficult grace made easy by the experience of salvation that cannot be undone-the grace of nonremembering. When not born out of resentment, the memory of inhumanity is a shield against inhumanity. But where there are no swords, no shields will be necessary. Freed by the loss of memory of all unredeemed past that unredeems every present and separated only by the boundaries of their identities, the former enemies will embrace each other within the embrace of the Triune God. “That alone do I call redemption,” we might say, echoing Nietzsche but referring to a quite different redemption.
Does this vision of the final redemption whose last act is “nonremembering”-a redemption that has nothing to do with reconciliation through “systematic totalization”-have any bearing on our life in a world where swords abound and shields must be used? It does-provided we do not forget that, as long as the Messiah has not come in glory, for the sake of the victims, we must keep alive the memory of their suffering; we must know it, we must remember it, and we must say it out loud for all to hear. This indispensable remembering should be guided, however, by the vision of that same redemption that will one day make us lose memory of the hurts suffered and the offenses committed against us. For ultimately, forgetting the suffering is better than remembering it, because wholeness is better than brokenness, communion of love better than distance of suspicion, harmony better than disharmony. We remember now in order that we may forget then; and we will forget then in order that we may love without reservation. Though we would be unwise to drop the shield of memory from our hands before the dawn of the new age, we may be able to move it cautiously to the side by opening our arms to embrace the other, even the former enemy.
In the well-known story in the Book of Genesis, Joseph was ready to undertake the difficult journey of reconciliation with his brothers, who sold him into slavery because, as he put it, “God has made me forget all my hardship and all my father’s house” (41:51). Before coming to an end, the journey of reconciliation entailed a good deal of remembering, however. Joseph himself was reminded of the suffering his brothers had caused, and subtly but powerfully he made them remember it, too (42:21-23; 44:27ff.). Yet, like the distant light of a place called home, the divine gift of forgetting what he still remembered-“backgrounding” the memory might be the right term-guided the whole journey of return. Wanting to insure that the precious gift be lost neither on him nor on his posterity, Joseph inscribed it into the name of his son, Manasseh-“one who causes to be forgotten.” A paradoxical memorial to forgetting (how can one be reminded to forget without being reminded of what one should forget?), Manasseh’s presence recalled the suffering in order to draw attention to the loss of its memory. It is this strange forgetting, still interspersed with indispensable remembering, that made Joseph, the victim, able to embrace his brothers, the perpetrators (45:14-15)-and become their and his own savior (46:1ff.).
In conclusion, let me return briefly to divine “forgetting” and its relation to human forgetting. How can God forget the wrongdoings of human beings? Because at the center of God’s all-embracing memory there is a paradoxical monument to forgetting. It is the Cross of Christ. God forgets humanity’s sins in the same way God forgives humanity’s sins: by taking sins away from humanity and placing them upon Godself. How will human beings be able to forget the horrors of history? Because at the center of the new world that will emerge after “the first things have passed away” there will stand a throne, and on the throne there will sit the Lamb who has taken away the sins of the world and erased their memory (Rev. 22:1; John 1:29).
Adapted from the forthcoming book Exclusion and Embrace, by Miroslav Volf. Copyright (c) 1996 by Abingdon Press. Excerpted by permission. For information on ordering a copy of this book, call 1-800-672-1789.
Endnotes
1. Tzvetan Todorov, “The Abuses of Memory,” Common Knowledge, Vol. 5, No. 1 (1996), pp. 6-26.
2. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for Everyone and No One, translated by R. J. Hollingdale (Penguin Books, 1969), p. 161ff.
3. Paul Ricoeur, “The Hermeneutics of Symbols and Philosophical Reflection: I,” in The Conflict of Interpretations, edited by Don Ihde (Northwestern University Press, 1974), p. 312.
4. Juergen Moltmann, The Trinity and the Kingdom of God: The Doctrine of God, translated by Margaret Kohl (HarperCollins, 1981), p. 49.
5. Paul Ricoeur, “Evil, a Challenge to Philosophy and Theology,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Vol. 53, No. 3 (1985), pp. 635-48.
6. Even if suffering inflicted is forgiven and the kind of “higher harmony” that Dostoevsky’s Ivan Karamazov “absolutely renounces” is established, the “non-sense” of past suffering and therefore a “dis-harmony” in the present would still remain. This dis-harmony cannot be resolved through thought, through action, or through forgiveness, because none of these can make the deed undone.
7. Even the impossible act of undoing what was done would not suffice to achieve the final redemption, because the memory of what was done, unless erased, would still remain to afflict the person. Only a much more radical act of “making what happened not to have happened” would do, because if what happened was made not to have happened, then what was remembered would have been made not to have been remembered too. Which is to say, to have final redemption, one may want more than “the transformation of the world plus the loss of the memory of suffering,” but one cannot want less.
8. It could be objected that without the memory of the evil or wrongdoing suffered, a person would not be herself. But this would be an odd argument, the fact that our history forms part of our identity notwithstanding. For clearly we remember now neither everything that has happened to us nor everything we once remembered as having happened to us, and yet we are, arguably, ourselves. Indeed, we are now who we are precisely because we do not remember everything, but remember this or that and remember it in this or that way. Why, then, would we not be able to be ourselves if the memory of wrongdoing and evil we suffered receded into oblivion? True, our identity would have been reconstituted through such nonremembrance, but it is our identity that would be thus reconstituted, much as it is being reconstituted daily. Would it not be strange to assert, for instance, that my mother would not be who she is without a memory of my little brother Daniel’s fatal accident, when now as she remembers the accident she wishes with all of her being that it had not happened?
9. Rowan Williams, Resurrection: Interpreting the Easter Gospel (London: Darnton, Longman, and Todd, 1982), p. 23.
10. Williams, Resurrection, p. 35.
11. Gregory L. Jones, Embodying Forgiveness: A Theological Analysis (Eerdmans, 1995), p. 147.
12. I do not read Paul’s claim that “We know that all things work together for good for those who love God” (Rom. 8:28) as an attempt to justify God by justifying “all things” but to describe a function of “unjustifiable” things in the lives of “those who love God.”
Copyright (c) 1996 Christianity Today, Inc./Books & Culture Magazine
September/October 1996, Page 12
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