Preface

Summary

This book is about forgiveness.

The subject is no longer the preserve of only those within the Christian tradition. People within the disciplines of psychology, philosophy, law and politics, for example, are also talking and writing about forgiveness.

Most weeks there is something in the popular press that is germane to the topic of this book. It is rare that an academic book can engage with popular culture in this way without becoming journalistic.

The Christian tradition has a significant, coherent and sometimes critical contribution to make to academic and popular discourse on forgiveness. As this book will show, modern discussion about and reflection on forgiveness are impoverished without the contribution of Christian thinking. The fact that society may be ‘post-modern’ and ‘post-Christian’ does not mean that the Christian tradition has nothing to say about forgiveness. There remains a distinctive and important place for the Christian voice on the subject.

Modern discourse also has a contribution to make to Christian thinking. It forces theologians to rethink the content and forms of their categories of thought and to restate them for a modern audience that asks modern questions. It is urgent that theologians do that, if they are to engage coherently with the sorts of wrongdoing that have taken place in the last hundred years – wrongdoing that is probably unparalleled as to both its extent and its depravity.