Truth and Reconciliation: Beyond Victims and Perpetrators
Submitted by David Ian Giffen for consideration by the Anglican Journal board or any other relevant publication.
Truth and reconciliation are phrases heavy with hope—but also burdened by the limits of how we understand human suffering, justice, and healing. In the Church, we often frame these journeys through a narrow lens: victims who must be protected and perpetrators who must be punished. But this binary, while intuitively satisfying, ultimately obscures the complexity of trauma, sin, and redemption.
As a former Anglican priest and frontline mental health worker, I have witnessed firsthand the tangled realities of brokenness—where survivors, offenders, and communities all carry wounds. To reduce these realities to simple categories risks perpetuating the very harm we seek to heal.
Theologian Miroslav Volf invites us to embrace a “wounded healer” model of reconciliation, one that acknowledges how we are all wounded and in need of healing (Exclusion and Embrace, 1996). This approach insists reconciliation is not about neat moral accounting but about entering a liminal space where vulnerability and accountability coexist.
Psychological research confirms this complexity. Trauma expert Bessel van der Kolk notes that trauma is not a singular event but a relational and systemic disruption that fractures trust, identity, and community (The Body Keeps the Score, 2014). Survivors and perpetrators alike are caught in cycles of harm shaped by history, context, and often unrecognized pain.
Within the Anglican Church, we must reckon with this layered reality. Our history is marked by systemic failures—colonial violence, clerical abuse, institutional silence. These are not isolated sins but social sins, as Gregory Baum describes: “an illness that destroys us while we cannot recognize its features or escape its power” (Theology and Society, 1974).
To move beyond victims and perpetrators is to confront these social sins honestly, refusing to hide behind legal shields or institutional comfort. It requires cultivating spaces of truth-telling that neither retraumatize survivors nor excuse wrongdoing but invite accountability infused with grace.
This is not facile forgiveness. It is a demanding process rooted in Jesus’ own ministry of liberation and restoration (Luke 4:18–19). It calls us to “bind up the brokenhearted,” but also to challenge systems that perpetuate harm. As theologian Walter Brueggemann writes, the prophetic task is to “name the sin of the community” while envisioning its transformation (The Prophetic Imagination, 1978).
The Church’s complicity in silencing survivors through secrecy and legal mechanisms—whether NDAs or otherwise—betrays this prophetic calling. Silence is a social sin that fractures community and deepens trauma. True reconciliation demands dismantling these barriers and creating sacred spaces where all voices are heard.
Practical models such as the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada provide important lessons. Their work emphasized survivor-centered processes, acknowledgment of systemic harm, and community engagement (Honouring the Truth, Reconciling for the Future, 2015). Yet even there, the challenge remains: how to hold perpetrators accountable without losing sight of their humanity and capacity for transformation.
This tension is the crucible of reconciliation. It asks us to hold paradox: justice and mercy, judgment and compassion, truth and healing. To embrace this is to live into the gospel’s radical call—not to judge simplistically, but to seek the flourishing of all God’s creation.
The Church’s future depends on its willingness to enter this liminal space with honesty and courage. We must move beyond binaries and foster a holistic reconciliation that honors the complexity of human brokenness and the power of divine grace.
I have witnessed the cost of silence, the burden of unspoken wounds. I have seen how the Body of Christ can fracture under the weight of secrecy and shame. But I have also seen hope—a hope grounded in resurrection and the unyielding love of God.
Truth and reconciliation, properly understood, are not just goals—they are sacred practices that demand we embrace the full, painful, redemptive story of our shared humanity.
References
Baum, Gregory. Theology and Society. New York: Seabury Press, 1974.
Brueggemann, Walter. The Prophetic Imagination. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1978.
Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada. Honouring the Truth, Reconciling for the Future: Summary of the Final Report. 2015.
van der Kolk, Bessel. The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. New York: Viking, 2014.
Volf, Miroslav. Exclusion and Embrace: A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness, and Reconciliation. Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1996.