While it is yet day

Haddon Willmer

Politics and forgiveness

  • Don’t let the sun go down on your anger

    Riot on the streets answered by stern prosecutions and prisons over-full – will that ensure order, bring peace?  We have often been here before. Read, for example, Austin Lovegrove’s informative and entertaining book, Images of an Australian Enlightenment: The Story of Lachlan and Elizabeth Macquarie’s Treatment of the Convicts as a History Tale for Today…

  • Prayer and politics

    Praying is no substitute for politics. When we abandon living in the world, when we no longer love the earth, when we ignore the neighbour on the road, prayer is left empty, make-believe piety. We no longer walk with Jesus, Word made flesh, whatever our orthodox profession. Politics, even when it has not collapsed into…

  • Does Jesus call us to political discipleship?

    With a group from our church I listened to Edward Norman giving the Reith Lectures, and was increasingly disturbed. It was a time when many of us had been stirred by books like John V. Taylor’s Enough is enough, by Martin Luther King, and whispers of Liberation Theology, and we were children of the post-1945…

  • Love Your Enemies

    “You have heard, you shall love your neighbour and hate your enemy. But I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you”.    (Matt 5:43) These words sound like a call, even a command. But we fear the risk. So the miserable-go-round of the world continues – we have enemies, and we hate them,…

  • Forgiveness as Permission to Live

    Originally published in Wounds that Heal: Theology, Imagination and Health, ed Jonathan Baxter, SPCK, 2007, pp79-98. The Framework  Words in the forgiveness family are used in many different ways. That needs sorting out. One reason why it does not get sorted out is that many assume they know instinctively what forgiveness is. So our talk…

  • Transforming society – or merely making it

    a theological discussion with the Bible in one hand and a very particular newspaper in the other Society for the Study of Theology 1995 What is this paper about? I have been asked to write a paper about theology and the transformation of society or transformation in society. I can only make this a manageable…

  • The Politics of Forgiveness

    Published in The Third Way, c.1979 There is, at present, a great and growing interest amongst Christians in this country in political matters. They feel responsible and concerned. This is a good development – a waking up to reality. But all that we do is not well: the man struggling out of deep sleep goes…

  • Sin drops us in it at the threshold of forgiveness

    1 Introduction:  This sketch is significant for me, since it is the first time I have got near to defining sin as what brings us to the threshold of forgiveness. That may not be a new idea altogether, but I can’t remember finding it plainly anywhere. Luther and Barth give me some encouragement in that direction, but…