This from some of my reading this morning, stuck out as a significant reflection for me:

Forgiveness is an embodiment of God’s judgment of sin, however, as a judgment of grace. God does indeed judge sin, but not according to the traditional canons of justice. Such justice, as we have seen, does not accomplish reconciliation; rather it leaves us locked in struggle. For this reason, as the liberationists acknowledge, justice so conceived cannot be the final word about God. God judges sin not in order to uphold the canons of “what is due,” but in order to heal all desire (of both victim and perpetrator) that it might participate in the joyous sociality of love. Forgiveness is a judgment that abandons none and seeks to reconcile all. As such it is a judgment of grace

Daniel Bell, Liberation Theology at the End of History p. 172

it is as a whole that we begin to perceive how the assemblage of knowledges, instruments, persons, systems of judgment, spaces and buildings that constitutes forgiveness as a therapy of desire avoids degenerating into a pious veneer spread over the impunity of the powerful. Taken together they reveal forgiveness to be a form of judgment. Confession, repentance, and penance are the path that the divine gift of forgiveness clears beyond sin.

Bell p.171

The highlighted phrase also addresses the issue of how the typical conception of forgiveness for all is in constant misuse as ” pious veneer”; it is not meant to be “absolution” without “healing”. The oppressor has just as much at stake as the oppressor, for they too must accept and participate in the healing. I recall a little debate between Steve Bush and Jamie Smith on this one. Steve seemed to be missing this aspect; this warning of Bell’s about the “pious veneer” that seems implied if the many facets of “the refusal to cease suffering” are not taken together.

It seems to me that the problem that churches have in America (and elsewhere, too) is that an acceptance of the premise of justice as “what is due” visa vi the typical progressive Christian advocacy, is so often also missing the “technology” ingredients (ie. ” the assemblage of knowledges, instruments, persons, systems of judgment, spaces and buildings” of which Bell speaks). The “funds” are insufficient to mount resistance. It looks like Gordon Cosby’s vision of “Being Authentic Church” is even more of a requirement; the idea that we must have inclusion of these folks who are the poor for whom we advocate; that the “programs” for which Progressives rally and advocate are not “given over” to government (and this is not to exclude neccessarily the good that can come from “getting a story told” that seeks to hold government accountable to “practice what they preach”; and to show where this is not being lived out in actual practice and being stifled by political “expediency”). The Church of the Saviour has initiated a host of programs that have existed for years that simply set up the networks and staff the programs that actually do the work, unattached to the success of whatever “supplemental” political efforts may be ongoing to bring these needs to the attention and priority of government programs.

Absent also is the process of determining mission, via the evoking and discovery of gifts within the body of Christ. Without these “birthing structures”; “formation” technologies and a society that lives in and around these, the way is opened to letting desire be corrupted. The way is opened to build “buffers” between us and the least of these.