While it is yet day

Haddon Willmer

Politics and forgiveness

  • 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…

  • Forgiving Constitutes the Person

    This paper is a meandering comment on a part of James E. Loder’s The Logic of the Spirit, which caught my fancy. I have thought much about human development, having lived through a lot of it myself, seen and messed about with it in other people, but I have no competence in the science of…

  • Jesus Christ the Forgiven: Christology, Atonement and Forgiveness

    Paper given at at SST, April 2000. Published in Forgiveness and Truth ed Alistair McFadyen and Marcel Saroty T & T Clark, 2001, pp 15-29. You can also download the paper as a pdf at the link here. All three at once Not all christologies are shaped by concern for atonement, and not all ideas…

  • ‘Vertical’ and ‘Horizontal’ in Paul’s Theology of Reconciliation in the Letter to the Romans

    This paper was written to honour Vinay Samuel, the first director of the Oxford Centre for Mission Studies. I worked there for a dozen years after I retired from Leeds. I liked its vision and the students it brought me.  Corneliu Constantineanu was the first person I supervised at OCMS and he became a dear friend. He…

  • Politics and forgiveness

    POLITICS AND FORGIVENESS is an unlikely combination. One senior Baptist world leader said to me, “There isn’t much forgiveness in politics”. That gives us no excuse for rejecting it as our task and responsibility as Christian human beings. After all, the combination of God and Humanity is unlikely, and seems implausible in the world as…

  • With my missing hands

    Note:  This essay is a revision of a chapter originally published in 2008 in Remembering to Forgive: A Tribute to Una O’Higgins O’Malley ed Enda McDonagh, pp141-148.  Una O’Higgins O’Malley was a remarkable Irish woman, who worked for peace and reconciliation in Ireland. She founded the Glencree Reconciliation Centre, where I met her in 1978…