CHAPTER 2 WORKS OF FAITH, FAITH OF WORKS A REFLECTION ON THE TRUTH AND JUSTIFICATION OF FORGIVENESS

ABSTRACT. This essay is a reflection on how South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) has articulated and defended the proposition that reconciliation affords victims of human rights abuses the opportunity to forgive their tormentors. While certainly not the only proposed benefit of reconciliation, the author believes that the controversy surrounding the TRC’s call for forgiveness sheds light on the “problem of persuasion ” that appears when institutional and quasi-institutional bodies attempt to generate public support for reconciliation. Truth and Reconciliation. In the motion and instant of transition, this phrase issues a challenge to our understanding, politics, and faith. The meanings of its constituent terms are ambiguous, their relationship contested. How should we read the “and ” that sits between “Truth and Reconciliation? ” At times, these concepts and practices appear coupled; truth motivates reconciliation while reconciliation lends form to truth-seeking, helping to gather what Antjie Krog rightly sees as the dizzying and sometimes paralytic array of truth theory – correspondence, coherence, deflationary, pragmatic, redundancy, semantic, double, logical, subjective, and so on (Krog 1998