Endless Guilt-Edged Circuits of the Apology Loop

Much of the present debate about the Voice can be traced to John Howard who, while expressing personal sorrow for what had happened to indigenous Australians, declined to offer an official apology on behalf of his government and the Commonwealth. Howard’s reason for doing, he said, was because “I do not believe, as a matter of principle,that one generation can accept responsibility for the acts of an earlier generation. I don’t accept that as a matter of principle”.

Significantly, Howard’s position brought him into direct conflict with Peter Jensen, then the newly elected Anglican Archbishop of Sydney, who was widely reported in the media as accusing Howard of “being out of step with God”. While technically the Archbishop posed his comment more as a question, he did say:

I think he is wrong … I think [Howard] has a view which, unfortunately, is not communal enough. I think his view is too individualistic and he should recognise the Christian understanding, which is that we belong together and we do things together and we have a joint responsibility for things.[1]

This comment, offered in the highly charged atmosphere of the momentr, appears to have overlooked the reason Howard felt unable to give the kind of apology being demanded of him. Howard wasn’t arguing against the idea of corporate responsibility per se but whether or not individuals of the present generation should be held responsible for the actions of individuals in a previous generations

The question of intergenerational guilt really goes to the heart of the current debate involving reconciliation. As Jacinta Nampijinpa Price has argued recently and once again recently argued, the current Prime Minister’s strategy has been “banking on gaslighting Australians” to vote ‘Yes’. But what has the perpetual sorry cycle we have entered into as a nation achieved? Sadly, it has only produced an ever increasing hostility and simmering resentment. As Douglas Murray pointed out in The Australian:

It is now 15 years since Kevin Rudd as prime minister made his apology to the Indigenous peoples of Australia. Has any of the guilt been alleviated since then? Have the “sorrys” washed away any blame? It seems not. But then, how could they? After all, something that the Australian debate seems to have almost completely ignored is something I have tried to bring out a number of times. And it is this.

As a number of the most serious and profound ethicists of the last century have agreed, an apology can work only when it comes from someone who has done a wrong and is accepted by someone who has been wronged. If it comes from someone who has themselves done no wrong and goes to someone who has not actually been wronged, then the deal is a fraud. If such an apology is offered and accepted it is a fraud on both sides. Someone who has done no wrong is pretending to be speaking for the dead. And people who have suffered no direct wrong are pretending to be able to accept an apology on behalf of people they did not know.

As an Englishman—and descendant of those dreaded ‘colonisers’—Murray has the benefit of the outsider’s perspective as well as the ability and courage to speak truth to power, especially when he observes that the emperor has no clothes. And as such, his insight into our cultural malaise really does bell the cat. As Murray writes:

Australia feels like it is stuck in an apology loop because it is. And the reason that it doesn’t seem to be getting the country anywhere is because it never could – however many cycles of this you want to go around for.

One thing that it does do is subdue the majority of Australians. As I have found when travelling the country, the typical Australian no longer seems to me to be that striding, sensible, happy-go-lucky figure of old. They seem—in my experience—to be guilt-ridden people, forever caveating their thoughts and self-consciousness to an often excruciating degree. 

Why? Because if you browbeat any group of people for long enough you will get that result. A cringing, creeping-through life person, who subdues their thoughts and distrusts their own speech and actions.

What ever happened to us as a nation? We used to be known for a bold and questioning spirit which delighted to call out authoritarianism and its associated pomposity. But as the extended lockdowns of COVID panicdemic demonstrated, it’s like we now want Big-Brother to tell us what to do. We’re okay with  the government taking away our freedoms; indeed, as a certain sort of Victorian demonstrated when Daniel Andrews’ police were peppering their fellow citizens with rubber bullets and arresting social media users in their kitchens, quite a sizeable slice of the population heartily endorsed the jackboot and the knock on the door. Now, once again, we’re being gaslighted into saying ‘Sorry’ to people we haven’t personally offended. We’re now a nation of hand-wringing wimps.

The Uluru Statement from the Heart and The Voice though, are founded upon a highly questionable theological and ethical premise. And that is the notion of intergenerational guilt. Sadly, even some Christian theologians have argued that current generations are morally culpable for the actions of the previous. For example, Rev. Dr. Michael Jensen has written in The Gospel Coalition:

Deep wrongs have been done to Indigenous peoples, from which they still suffer and from which most other Australians benefit. The Bible says ‘you shall not steal’, and we (as a nation) have stolen. The Bible says ‘you shall not kill’, and we (as a nation) have killed. That is not in question: it is a matter of historical record. Lest we say ‘we’ have not done anything of the kind, it is good to remember that Scripture acknowledges the reality of intergenerational responsibility for sin — Exodus 34:6-7.

However, the argument that Dr. Jensen is advancing is not well-grounded in Scripture. Scripture does acknowledge the reality of intergenerational responsibility for sin, but only if the present generation continues in the same acts of rebellion as the previous.[2] However, this does not mean that the present generation, which has repented of those actions, is somehow or other morally culpable now.[3]

A careful reading of the Second Commandment though, demonstrates Jensen’s interpretation is incorrect. For the text actually clarifies what it means when God says, “I the LORD your God, am a jealous God, punishing the children for the sin of the fathers to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me.” (Exod. 20:5)[4] Thus, as the respected Old Testament scholar Douglas K. Stuart writes:

This explanatory section of the second commandment, with its assertion that God is “jealous…punishing the children for the sins of the fathers,” has been widely misunderstood. It does not represent an assertion that God actually punishes an innocent generation for sins of a predecessor generation, contrary to Deut 24:16 (“Fathers shall not be put to death for their children, nor children put to death for their fathers; each is to die for his own sin”; 2 Kgs 14:6). Rather, this oft-repeated[5] theme speaks of God’s determination to punish successive generations for committing the same sins they learned from their parents. In other words, God will not say, “I won’t punish this generation for what they are doing to break my covenant because, after all, they merely learned it from their parents who did it too.” Instead, God will indeed punish generation after generation (“to the third and fourth generation”) if they keep doing the same sorts of sins that prior generations did. If the children continue to do the sins their parents did, they will receive the same punishments as their parents.[6]

What has been routinely overlooked in this debate so far, especially from a religious perspective, is not only the large amount of good the church has done for indigenous people over many generations,[7] but any discussion of passages of Scripture which teach that only the soul who is guilty of sin should be punished. Take, for instance, the passage found in Ezekiel 18:

But suppose this son has a son who sees all the sins his father commits, and though he sees them, he does not do such things: “He does not eat at the mountain shrines or look to the idols of Israel. He does not defile his neighbour’s wife. He does not oppress anyone or require a pledge for a loan. He does not commit robbery but gives his food to the hungry and provides clothing for the naked. He withholds his hand from mistreating the poor and takes no interest or profit from them. He keeps my laws and follows my decrees. He will not die for his father’s sin; he will surely live. But his father will die for his own sin, because he practiced extortion, robbed his brother and did what was wrong among his people. “Yet you ask, ‘Why does the son not share the guilt of his father?’ Since the son has done what is just and right and has been careful to keep all my decrees, he will surely live. The one who sins is the one who will die. The child will not share the guilt of the parent, nor will the parent share the guilt of the child. The righteousness of the righteous will be credited to them, and the wickedness of the wicked will be charged against them.[8]

Significantly, Anglican theologians such as Michael Jensen and Peter Adam promote the legitimacy of intergenerational guilt. This leads them to conclude that non-indigenous Australians today, even recently arrived migrants, are morally culpable. The link Jensen and Adam make holds that they benefit from the practice and legacy of colonialism and, therefore, share the same spiritual guilt. Adam even argues that we should “ask the indigenous people if they wanted those of us who have arrived since 1788 to leave”![9] Earlier in his paper, Adam acknowledges the far-reaching implications of this stating,

It would in fact be possible, even if very difficult and complicated for Europeans and others to leave Australia. I am not sure where we would go, but that would be our problem.[10]

The theological and moral problem with this position is that both Adam and Jensen fail to engage with the teaching of passages such as Ezekiel 18 — as well as Jeremiah 31:29-30 — even though they are aware of its truth.[11]

All of which is to say, John Howard was right not to issue an apology to the current generation of Aborigines for injustices of the past. From a Christian point of view, it is unethical and immoral to punish future generations for the perceived crimes of previous ones. As such, while the Jensen and Adam perspectives may well have anticipated the ascendancy of identity politics, Howard’s philosophical position was more prescient than that of his naysayers.[12]

Mark Powell is Pastor and Teaching Elder at the Cornerstone Presbyterian Church in Hobart

[1] Andrew West, “Enough already!” The Monthly, December 2005-January 2006.

[2] Douglas K. Stuart, Exodus (Nashville: B&H, 2006), “In connection with the wording “he punishes the children and their children for the sin of the fathers to the third and fourth generations,”…this wording means something quite different from what it might seem to mean to the casual reader. It does not mean that God would punish children and grandchildren for something their ancestors did but that they themselves did not do. Rather, it describes God’s just punishment of a given type of sin in each new generation as that sin continues to be repeated down through the generations.” 717.

[3] Significantly, in a previous iteration of his paper Jensen wrote: “And lest we say ‘we’ have not done anything of the kind, we should as readers of Scripture acknowledge the reality of intergenerational culpability; or if not; the responsibility we have as fellow citizens to reckon with the injustices of the past which have not as yet been resolved (and, to repeat, from which we benefit).” Michael Jensen, The Voice: A Christian Consideration (Unpublished Paper), Page 5. Emphasis mine.

[4] For a fuller treatment see: https://clearlyreformed.org/how-the-bible-talks-about-corporate-responsibility-and-repentance/?fbclid=IwAR3VQIWH8-YK3QfHxQI0OH4MO2H0odCfV-2nv2fvIQblfE-Kr7_d0Cw5BXI_aem_AZ0sh4ygqAfUK85tR4xmVFt_EV8nruX1lf9DUL1vszJZ1PoLMaL7x1KKf87G7erwu_Y&mibextid=Zxz2cZ

[5] Exod. 34:7; Num. 14:18; Deut. 5:9; Jer. 32:18.

[6] Stuart, Exodus, 454.

[7] See Regina Ganter, The Contest for Aboriginal Souls: European Missionary Agendas in Australia (ANU Press, 2018). The book can been freely downloaded here: https://press.anu.edu.au/publications/series/aboriginal-history/contest-aboriginal-souls

[8] Ezekiel 18:14-20.

[9] Adams, “Australia – whose land?” Adams goes on to say, “If we do not leave, then we would need to ask each of the indigenous peoples of this land what kind of recompense would be appropriate for them. This would be an extremely complicated and extensive task, but must be done.” Page 8. See https://stjudes.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/Australia-whose-land-Peter-Adam.pdf

[10] Adams, “Australia – whose land?” Page 3. See https://stjudes.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/Australia-whose-land-Peter-Adam.pdf

[11] Adams, “Australia – whose land?” Adams refers to the book of Ezekiel on page 5, footnote 23 but significantly, fails to give a reference to the relevant chapter and verse. See https://stjudes.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/Australia-whose-land-Peter-Adam.pdf

[12] For a fuller treatment of the religious problems surrounding The Voice see The Spirit Behind The Voice (Connor Court, 2023).