The World Has Forgotten How to Forgive with Amy Orr-Ewing

I also actually got interested in the topic through apologetics initially when, you know, for the last sort of six or seven years, just really experiencing the increased levels of rage on campus, but also in political settings.

And I had the opportunity to talk.

speak here in the uk parliament for the national prayer breakfast this is for us when rishi sunak was prime minister so this is like 2023 um and i spoke on um forgiveness in a very kind of divided culture as a way of addressing council culture as well which i came to sort of think of as like council culture is like a sort of non-christian form of death for transgression it's like if you cross a line if you you know do something say something believe something that for me crosses a line You have to die.

You just have to die a sort of social or professional death.

You have to lose your job.

You have to lose your community.

You have to lose your good name.

And I realized that sort of bubbling under that was this deep sense in a generation that harm and moral wrongdoing matter so much

that

people have to die when they commit those things.

And it was like they were saying to the church, you don't care about sin or egregious harm as much as we do.

Yeah, that's really interesting.

That was like the starting point.

Because I was seeing that, you know, if you think about all the big justice movements on campus, and now, of course, it's Gaza.

But before that, it was, you know, decolonization, anti-colonization, or

some of the

race conversations, Me Too, exactly.

At its root, all of those movements are saying, harm to a person or you know categories of people it it has to matter

yes and so i feel like

there's a gospel connection there that we can say um actually yes harm and moral wrongdoing do matter and a christ the christian faith has a reason for that being true if you're a materialist and you just think a actually that worldview doesn't account for your rage or why you feel harm matters.

But none of us actually want to live in a world where there is no grace, where like the end of the road is harm matters and you have to die if you cross the line, because we're all going to cross the line in the end, you know, we're all going to fail in some way.

So And actually, no one wants to live in a world or in a culture that is only predicated on that.

And then I began to ask the question, could there be such a thing? Because I realized in apologetic terms, what? So this is really identity politics and the left.

What they were saying was harm matters to us more than it does to you.

Justice matters to us more than it does to you.