ABSTRACT
A few years ago I spent an entire day in the Aboriginal Tent Embassy, opposite
Old Parliament House in Canberra, talking about reconciliation in Australia. The
discussion was rather chaotic and arguments flew around in the thick air. I remember
a very serious statement by one of the elders who told me, ‘I am sick of this talk about
reconciliation; we can talk about it when hostilities have stopped’. Strongly stated,
and an interesting and important observation, it did not itself give me too much
insight to the nature of reconciliation. Since that day, although I remained without
knowledge of what reconciliation was, I have returned to the beginning, to the book
of Genesis and subsequent books of the Bible because I knew that reconciliation
was a theological concept and that helped me. Reconciliation is an old concept, one
that has occupied theologians from the Eastern and Western Fathers of the Church
to contemporary Christian theologians such as Karl Barth (see, for example, Barth,
2004). In the nineteenth century Hegel was preoccupied with a more secular project
of how to reconcile man with himself and with history, and the idea is also present in
Marx and his followers. And it is still present, in its secular forms, somewhere in the
background of much contemporary political and legal philosophies.
