Liberating the Will of Australia. Geoffrey Burn

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СКАЧАТЬ phases: the history before the arrival of the First Fleet, and the history afterwards. The reason for this is that the arrival of the First Fleet saw the beginnings of Australian law, and all those who acknowledge this law, whether they were been born in the country or have arrived since, are essentially the same in that they live in a system founded on the Root Sin. No one who is born into the country, or who comes to the country from elsewhere, can say that they are not part of the problem, for, in accepting the notion of the nation of Australia and its legal system, they are part of continuing the problem. Further, it simply is not true when the report from the Referendum Council states that “there is no doubt our constitutional system, our system of government, the rule of law, and our public institutions inherited from Britain are the heritage of the Australian people and enure for the benefit of all of us, including the First Peoples”:13 it is exactly these institutions which continue to have a detrimental effect on the First Peoples in Australia because they are founded on the nonexistence of these peoples.

      The culture in Australia is changing, with a greater willingness to acknowledge the past and a greater commitment to agreement-making and seeking to put things right. This is hard work and its value is not to be underestimated. Nevertheless, the Root Sin has not been addressed. If all the harm done to the First Peoples in Australia is like a tree that has grown from the Root Sin, then what has been happening is that some of the branches of have been lopped off, but the Root Sin is still firmly in the ground and continues to put forth more branches, whilst providing life to those branches which have not yet been removed, consequently continuing to damage the First Peoples in Australia. That is, what is happening is not enough and the roots need to be dug out. This issue is the primary focus of this book.

      It will be argued that Christian theology has the power to both give a deep enough explanation of the problem as well as help us to know what must be done to resolve it. I am aware that the church and its theology have often been part of the problem for the First Peoples in Australia. The church has participated in programs that have led to people being alienated from their land and losing some or all of those systems which supported their existence in The Land, indeed their very existence; theology became a weapon. This is something that I deeply regret. Nonetheless, it is in returning to find deeper meanings of various theological concepts that hope for the future can be found—a real hope, not a just pious desire. Theology is needed because the problem is a spiritual one. It is hoped that the theology that is developed here is restorative, that it can be a healing lens through which to see what has been happening and what needs to happen in order to put it right.

      The outline of the book is as follows.

      The First Movement, Binding, lays out the theological foundations for understanding how the Root Sin continues to work its way out today. It begins by introducing the concept of bound willing. I will be drawing heavily on the work of Alistair McFadyen in order to explain the dynamics of bound willing.14 In his book, he uses two case studies—child sexual abuse and the Nazi holocaust—to explain, develop, and test the doctrine of bound willing and the nature of salvation, the liberating work of God to release people from all that binds them. These case studies of traumatic and incomprehensible events show how theology gives both a deeper understanding of the dynamics of complex problems and also how release from these problems can come about. It is important to understand that I am not suggesting that the situation in Australia is like either of these case studies. Rather, understanding the underlying dynamics of these examples gives a new way of looking at what has happened in Australia since the coming of the first Europeans, which is key to understanding why harm continues to be done to the First Peoples in Australia, even when good is intended, as well as showing the way out of this continuing problem. The second case study is important because it helps to shift the perspective from individualism to see the dynamics of how whole nations can become gripped and driven by forces of which they are not fully aware, and where the individual is caught up in systems from which there seems to be no escape. These theological concepts are then used to interpret the biblical book of Ezekiel in a way that may be unfamiliar to many readers, but a way which is truer to the theological worldview of its writer. It will be seen that the original people addressed by Ezekiel believed that they were being adversely affected by the sins of their forebears, things for which they themselves were not responsible. They wanted to draw a line under the past and say that they were not the same as their ancestors. Ezekiel, however, says that the actions of his hearers are in continuity with those of their forebears and that they are responsible for the outworking of the past in the present. He calls on the present generation to repent, to turn away from these actions, to turn to God. The message of Ezekiel to his nation, that it continues to sin in the ways of its ancestors, is applicable to Australia today; it is not possible to draw a line under the past because Australia is bound up in continuing to damage the First Peoples in ways that are firmly rooted in its past. Both the theological foundational material and the study of Ezekiel raise the possibility of change through repentance. A final section in the First Movement begins to show how bound willing helps us to understand what has been happening in Australia, especially where policies that were meant to be good have caused harm.

      I have chosen the term “movement” rather than the more common “part” because it captures the idea that the situation is not static. The First Movement is entitled “Binding” because the direction of travel is towards being more deeply trapped in the results of the Root Sin, whilst the Second Movement is called “Loosing” because it is about what must be done in order to free all the peoples in Australia from the effect of the binding.

      Having started with a musical metaphor, the part of the book that follows the First Movement has been called the Intermezzo, for it rehearses some of the themes of the First and Second Movements. It is a study of the history of land through the courts and legislature over a period of half a century. This is a critical topic because Aboriginal identity is bound up in The Land and so it is a good barometer of how Australia treats its relationships with its First Peoples. More than that, it provides an extended example of whether the theological idea of bound willing gives us any insights into the dynamics of the situation. It will be concluded that there were some significant acts of repentance, namely various Lands Acts, but even these introduced new ways of damaging the First Peoples because of the ways that they were set up and in the way that claims had to be made. Other actions, such as Native Title Acts, have proved much less stable and are the ones which most obviously show both unintentional and intentional destructive behavior by politicians and judges in managing them, behavior which is in continuity with the Root Sin. Most of all, all of this work was inherently limited, for it was only asking whether the claims in the laws of the First Peoples could also be recognized in Australian law and only for land for which there was no stronger title claim. This is logical, of course, for Australian law could not step outside itself to renegotiate its foundation in negotiation with the laws of the First Peoples. But this is just another way of saying that the process was not strong enough to address the Root Sin in the foundation of Australia.

      The Second Movement, Loosing, is about what needs to be done in order to liberate Australia from the Root Sin. The first section introduces the theological concepts of repentance and forgiveness. Critically, it will be seen that repentance is more than a confession or an apology, but also involves putting right the harm that was done. Apologizing accepts the instability of an unknown future, where things must change. Repentance creates a space for the victims to be able to express everything (absolutely everything, not just what they think is politically possible) that they need (not just desires, but what is really needed) in order to regain their life. Likewise, forgiveness does not overlook what has been done and can only be given when there has been true repentance. Neither forgiveness nor repentance can stand alone, but they are intertwined in a process, the result of which is the establishment of justice. The second section is a case study of the church in Corinth in the middle of the first century CE. The reason for making this study is to show that repentance for the church in Corinth had to involve the total reordering of all of their social and economic relationships; nothing short of a complete change in the foundations of their life would be a repentance of the problems in their community. A byproduct of this study is that the word “reconciliation” is given a fuller and deeper meaning. People have rightly become very wary СКАЧАТЬ