International Grace

A few days ago I got a letter from a Croatian man who introduced himself as the translator of my book What’s So Amazing About Grace? into Croatian.  He asked if I would write a preface for the book specifically for Croatia. 

“You have referred to the Croatian/Bosnian/Serbian experience during the recent war,” he said.  “Although the war ended over 15 years ago, the wounds are still here and we are very very far from true reconciliation.”  He went on to say that Christians in the Balkans are still struggling with truth and justice, and wonder whether grace can apply without the prior steps of truth and justice.

The Balkan countries still celebrate war criminals as heroes of the nation, often with the church’s approval.  Rapes, tortures, concentration camps, ethnic cleansing—these memories of war still haunt the landscape.  The translator asked, How can we “do grace” in such a setting?  More, how can we keep another Balkan war from breaking out again in several decades?

I did write the preface, beginning with these paragraphs:

If I had originally envisioned this book for a Croatian audience, it would be a different book.  How so?  I cannot say for sure.  The Balkans do not need an American writer to barge in with a limited understanding of your history and culture and offer advice.

For this reason I present this book as a kind of dialogue with you the reader.  I depend on you, indeed I urge you, to take what I set forth in these pages and apply them to your own country.  At times, as you read, you may find yourself shaking your head and saying, “He doesn’t understand Croatia!”  You are right—I don’t.  But you do, and it is up to Croatians to come to terms with your recent past as well as your distant past.

I went on to say that as an American I can offer some hope.  After all, I grew up in the southern state of Georgia, which endured a brutal campaign by General William Tecumseh Sherman, whom some historians credit as introducing the modern “scorched earth” tactics of total war.  His troops burned my home city of Atlanta to the ground, and all over Georgia you can find bronze markers recalling the destruction his armies inflicted during their March to the Sea.

My Philadelphia uncles used to taunt me by asking me to book them a room in Atlanta’s “General Sherman Hotel,” which of course did not exist.  We viewed Generals Sherman and Grant as war criminals, and in school we were even taught to scorn President Abraham Lincoln, who had forcibly reunited a divided country.  The Georgia state flag incorporated the design of the Confederate flag, and I went to a high school named for a Confederate general.  A popular bumper sticker in my childhood featured a cartoon figure of a Confederate soldier with the words, “Hell, no, we ain’t forgettin’!”

Before the Civil Rights Act forced change, we southerners also trampled on the rights of citizens from a different race.  In a genteel version of ethnic cleansing, we fought in the courts and sometimes on the streets to keep them out of “our” restaurants, churches, neighborhoods, and schools.  One race used to own the other, and I can hardly imagine a starker example of “Ungrace” than the slave trade that brought millions across an ocean to serve wealthy plantation owners.  Visit the modern city of Atlanta today, however, and you will find few vestiges of that kind of racial division and regional patriotism.  It takes time but wounds heal, justice triumphs, change happens.

Historian Shelby Foote points out that only after the Civil War did Americans start saying “The United States is…” rather than “The United States are….”  Our identity as one nation came out of our bloodiest war.  Indeed, I recently learned that the burning of Atlanta played a crucial role in that re-union.  Exhausted by war, the Democratic Party of 1864 adopted a platform calling for peace negotiations based on recognizing Confederate independence and nominated General George McClellan to oppose the beleaguered President Lincoln in that year’s election.  News of Sherman’s September triumph in Atlanta helped swing popular support back to the Republican incumbent Lincoln, who pursued the war to its conclusion.

More recent times show that the same pattern of healed wounds can apply internationally as well.  Two of America’s closest allies are Germany and Japan, the two nations who opposed us in the most destructive war in history.  U. S. ties are strengthening with Vietnam, another nation who fought us in a bitter and bloody campaign.  I have witnessed similar scenes of reconciliation in places like Germany, where East and West reunited, and in South Africa, where under the leadership of Nelson Mandela a majority race chose the way of truth but not revenge and in the process forfeited justice for the sake of reconciliation.

For these reasons, I have hope for Croatia and its neighbors.  Fortunately, Croatia has outstanding scholars and pastors who are seeking how best to apply theology to their nation’s history.  Among the most insightful is Miroslav Volf, who emigrated from Croatia to teach at Fuller Seminary in California and then at the Yale Divinity School.  The End of Memory, a magnificent book, includes his comments about memories of the traumatic past: “They need not colonize the present nor invade the future by defining what we can do and become.  Past wrongdoing suffered can be localized on the timeline of our life-story and stopped from spilling forward into the present and future to flood the whole of our life.”

Grace is the only force I know of that can block the toxic influence of a painful past on the present and the future.  As Volf says, “For in the light of Christ’s self-sacrifice and resurrection, the future belongs to those who give themselves in love, not to those who nail others to a cross.”

For years the Balkans have been a laboratory of what I call “Ungrace,” the law in relationships that echoes one in physics: Every action causes an equal and opposite reaction.  You have lived with the deadly consequences of that law for centuries.  Can the modern Balkans become instead a laboratory of grace?  And what would that look like?