23 ZADOK 138 AUTUMN 2018 Glenn Loughrey A major question for the church in Australia today is: how does it respond to its history with the Aboriginal People of this land? The church was and remains complicit in the genocidal colonial treatment of Aborigines as a result of massacres, destruction of language and culture, and the removal of children. Missions played a signifcant role in the ‘civilising of the savages’ and the dislocation of people from all that gave them meaning. Today, churches exist on land stolen from the Aboriginal People without treaty or reparation. Clergy continue to work on country that does not belong to them. Parishioners worship in spaces gained through the blood of those who fought to save a way of life and culture that those colonising this country sought to destroy. As Peter Carey says, 'You wake up in the morning and you are the benefciary of a genocide' (Stephanie Convery, ‘Peter Carey’, The Guardian, 18/11/17). The property you own, the businesses you work in, the government and councils who service you and the churches you worship in are all built on stolen land. You are complicit. William Cox is alleged to have said in 1824 that the only ‘solution’ was ‘the eradication of this vermin … And that includes women and children’ (Bruce Elder, Blood on the wattle, Frenchs Forest, NSW: New Holland, 2003). The result? By 1872 no tribal person existed in the area around Mudgee in NSW. Dynasties were built, land bequeathed to churches and infrastructure developed as a direct result of the destruction of local people. How do today’s church and individual Christians respond to this situation? It is perhaps too obvious to say that what’s been done has been done and cannot be reversed. And it is all too obvious that today’s Australian Christians had little or no part in the past acts of individuals or the church. Yet we beneft daily from what could be described as the foundational sin. Is our response one of paralysed guilt or is there another response that is more in tune with the death and resurrection of Jesus? I hope to map such a process, providing a way forward that wrestles with the sin of the past and takes responsibility for it. From inherited guilt to shared responsibility Inherited guilt is destructive for a number of reasons, the primary one being that there is no forward motion. It is backward-looking and leads to excuses and defensiveness: ‘It wasn’t me, I wasn’t there. I did not commit those sins so don’t lay the guilt trip on me’. It results in people acting out from that defensive position and blaming the victims for their situation: ‘If this situation continues to cause you harm it is not because of me, but because you have not moved on, gotten over it, left it behind. It’s not my fault’. We perhaps have an example of inherited guilt in the story of Moses. Having led the Israelites out of captivity and wandered for forty years in the desert, he was not allowed to cross over into the Promised Land. The reason was not his own personal and particular sin, but the sin of the community, of those he was leading, who complained against God and sought their own way. The Israelites remained in the desert until that wayward generation, including Moses, was gone, before moving into the Promised Land. Moses and the people he led were judged according to the sins of the whole community. This shared guilt did not give new life but perpetuated the sin of the past and kept people from enjoying the possibilities awaiting them across the river. For the Israelites, the sins of the past were only dealt with when those who remained discovered a shared or inherited responsibility for those sins and resolved to move forward into the Promised Land. Joshua and those he led fully understood and acknowledged the sins of the past, which had kept their ancestors out of the Promised Land, but didn’t remain caught up in the guilt attached to those acts. Instead, they took responsibility for them, seeking to put things right. As a result, they laid the foundation for their ofspring to fourish, despite the many twists and turns that continued to occur in their story. The situation in contemporary Australia is analogous: neither Aboriginal nor non-aboriginal Australians can move forward so long as we are collectively paralysed by an inherited guilt. Churches, particularly the English State Church, not only benefted directly from, but also played a signifcant role in, the destruction of Aboriginal culture, language and spirituality. Churches continue to seek to convert Aboriginal People from their spirituality to ...we benefit daily from what could be described as the foundational sin. Is our response one of paralysed guilt or is there another response that is more in tune with the death and resurrection of Jesus? THE FIRST SIN AND INHERITED RESPONSIBILITY