IDENTIFICATIONAL REPENTANCE - THEOLOGY OF APOLOGY
This paper was delivered at the special Evangelical Alliance conference ‘Repenting for Others?’ at Sutton Coldfield Baptist Church in June 2001.
This offering is little more than an account of where my own thinking has got to on the theology of apology, but designed to help others with theirs. The stage has not yet been reached where it is possible to write definitively on the matter. Clarification and discussion of the issues, rather, are what is needed.
My personal conviction, based on observation and involvement, is that Identificational Repentance (IR) is powerful and effective in achieving healing and reconciliation. More fundamentally, I believe the theology underlying IR to be true – if, as yet, insufficiently clearly articulated.
It is not proposed here to discuss the practical aspects of the ministry of IR. That is being tackled elsewhere (for instance, by John Dawson in ‘Healing America’s Wounds’, Brian Mills and Roger Mitchell in ‘Sins of the Fathers’, and Chris Seaton in his Peaceworks paper ‘Identificational Repentance – towards a definition of IR’). This paper concerns itself mainly with the theory behind IR.
THE ORIGINS OF IR
A registered member of the Confessing Church, Dr Klara Schlink (later Mother Basilea), became, in 1934, National President of the Women’s Division of the German Student Christian Movement. After Hitler’s rise to power, pressure was exerted on her to accept
‘the Aryan paragraph’, which would bar Jewish Christians from the movement. She refused to comply, persuading the group also to reject the demand. Throughout World War 2, although informers were present at many of the lectures given by her across Germany, she ‘felt constrained to speak of the election of the Jews and their leading position and commission to all nations in the millennium kingdom.’ (Basilea Schlink, ‘Israel, My Chosen People’. Interrogated extensively by the Gestapo, her being questioned, amazingly, only ever related to her challenge to her hearers to follow Jesus – with the implication that he was the true Leader).