While it is yet day

Haddon Willmer

Politics and forgiveness

  • 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…