Wednesday, February 18, 2015

Apology, Confession, Remorse and Reparation in Peace Reconciliation of the Reformed, the Lutherans and Mennonites

Jacob Keim Dawty, 1753

Reparation

I gave $33,000 in perhaps facetious reparation to the Reformed Church for claimed and perceived injustices my ancestor Jacob the Elder is said to have committed in his alms gathering in Holland c. 1730, and in his  demo of that first Reformed church building on his land.  No set figure was in mind but  when that total accured, to put away your numerologies, it just happened. 

We had already given several times that to the less noble purposes of the charismatic octopus. Latterly the Mennonites themselves got in on it too and I have made the Christmas list as a perferred donor.

 My mother always insisted I didn't know the value of money. I would win big at poker in those days of family gathering, take double handfuls of change out side and throw them up in the air to scatter the grass. Kids in the morning thought it had rained. I started throwing money on the ground at the feet of fellow tourists in Britain among the standing stones because they seemed to disrespect them. Later on I just wrote stories about such people, some in The JFK Order. The claims and the counter claims with their suits and counter suits concerning Jacob are available  in these blogs, but when I donated the Reformed funds in 10K installments it was  under my breath that they would  serve to alleviate this debt. So the Christian Reformed Church school stands in beneficiary for the Reformed Churches of Skippack and Philadelphia. Apologies also to The Elder for this act since he never allowed any of the kierkendief alleged. But you will see below how Jacob Reiff did his own reparation by being made to offer a bridge between opposing parties.

Confession

When  Lutherans, the politicians anyway, Do Lutherans Really "Condemn the Anabaptists"?, decided to heal "the breaches of Christian unity that occurred in the sixteenth century... the breach Lutherans have suffered with--and to some extent inflicted upon--the Anabaptists and their heirs [that] was in fact already a reality before the Reformers lived through the breakdown of conversations with the Roman Catholic Church in the middle of the sixteenth century." This breakdown of conversations means water tortures, the breach was routing to prison in the dead of night whole families, which rhetorical duplicity in attempting to exculpate themselves and scapegoat Catholics is as reformed as all failures to communicate. This notable euphemism of itself, that Lutherans have suffered,
conjures neatly as well as the reverse case, that it was already a reality before the Reformers, excuses their culpability. Adherents of the Augsburg Confession were at the center of these interrogations and tortures of women and children.

The Lutheran World Federation along with the Vatican's PCPCU
Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity: said in October 1999, "with one mind we declare that, according to our insight into the life and teaching of the Mennonite congregations, the condemnations of the CA no longer apply. 

Mennonite "renunciation of force" rejected these secular churches and their use of  government enforcement.

 If Mennonites along with making peace with the Adversary make peace with that world such a pact spells their dissolution after 500 years, which is what the 16th century Lutherans wanted.  Even at the reconciliation party Larry Miller, secretary general of the Mennonite World Conference said, "We still remember being a prosecuted minority,"  a huge understatement given that the Mennonist Bloody Book says that without persecution their faith would wane, “if you then find, that the time of freedom has given liberty and room to your lusts, persecute yourself, crucify and put yourself to death, and offer up soul and body to God.” (Bloody Book 361, "Persecute Yourself").  

 Mennonites taught their young to  read the Bloody Book of Martyrs "to remind them of the faith and steadfastness of their fathers (Strassburger Genealogy 408f).

Mennonites and Lutherans in the 21st Century: A Journey in Reconciliation is an ongoing process as of November 2018.

A  Response to Will - The Difference Between an Apology and a Confession #MWCMM


Jacob Reiff the Elder  gets to play a part in this "reconcilation" thats to Harvard's John Ruth who makes him a Lutheran for his own purposes. But The Elder was  explicitly Reformed with much documentation (Harry Reiff thinks him a Mennonite in the end). The First Reformed Church in Philadelphia met in his home,  but as  a pawn in the reconciliation of modern Lutheran and Mennonite, he is not explicitly named. This makes it easier to fool, after all, didn't the lion get substituted with the wolf. The pride of the Harvard Mennonite PhD being the ultimate authority of current Mennonity, except if we examine his sources, he was drafted to give a reply to the Lutherans.
 
Lutheran ecumenists tired of their bloody past apologized to the  nearest Mennonite.  Chief politician John Ruth drafted the Mennonite  response (Lutherans and Mennonites move toward right relationships). He found Jacob Reiff's grave, dug it up  and reburied him as a symbol of unity. amity. Jacob Reiff, neither Lutheran nor Anabaptist finally did some good for the Reformed. That the symbol of amity was  false in its particulrs
characterizes the new accord.

They like to call it subconscious when the deep structure betrays the surface. Calling Jacob a Lutheran anonymously and putting him under the authority of Muhlenberg but suppressing his name so no one would catch him in the act, can be said to be well meaning even if forged. Who doesn't want to unite with their executioner?  If moving the boundary stones in the 21st century is fair play everything of the past can be denied, included what people believe about themselves.  If one proposition of Counterfeit civilization immediately replaces another, equally false, and contradicting it, that is to gloss over by the prejudiced selection and randomize by abstraction and anonymity.

There is no contrition in the Lutheran apologies, rather there are rationalizations. The equivocating language makes the apology suspicious of itself. That they "suffered" a breach instead of a ravage, is as bad as that only "to some extent" were their water tortures inflicted on people they drowned in a bag. Over and over again there had been a "breakdown of conversations" with the Catholics. This language of a failure to communicate from Paul Newman in Cool Hand Luke is beyond precious. But to invoke in this false healing and reconciliation the name of someone who heaped contempt on them all, but kept it largely to himself, and to cite him anonymously, which must be the case lest the duplicity be exposed, fits the apology case. So Jacob Reiff, neither Lutheran nor Mennonite, but Reformed, is chosen by Mennonite John Ruth to bridge the reconcilation of Lutherans and Mennonites in false apology, but his exact identity is held back, if it wasn't the spurious would be obvious. Ruth's closing is mostly fictional.

 
 "In closing, let me recall from those unusual years an inspiring incident linking our two fellowships. Even after Muhlenberg had a beautiful new church built at Trappe, he allowed one of his members, who had been living among the Mennonites of Skippack, [you should say the reverse, Jacob Reiff's  father's land, Hans George, was the early boundary reference for original deed  of  Michael Ziegler's land “beginning at a corner of Hans George Reiff’s land” (Strassburger, 419) who came to Germantown in 1709 (Alderfer, Several Documents, 28). So who lived among who?] to bury his aged mother’s body in the graveyard of the Mennonite congregation. Of course the service [see Two Documentary Sources for the Funeral of Anna Reiff, 1753] would be conducted by the Lutheran pastor, who was surely the best preacher of the gospel in the region:
 
 [Caution. There is no know doc for any of what follows]
 
The day being very hot, Muhlenberg proposed to preach under a large tree. He was surprised [? fictional drama.] that the Mennonite leaders present urged him instead to come into what he called their “roomy” meetinghouse for the service. Hesitantly but respectfully accepting this invitation, Muhlenberg found himself nevertheless cautioned at the meetinghouse door by an elderly Mennonite minister, who hoped that the Lutheran pastor would include in his service “no strange ceremonies.” How typically and cautiously Mennonite! Yet, after the service came another surprise, when the same old man thanked Muhlenberg with tears for “sounding the Gospel” in their meetinghouse. This morning, in a gesture unimaginable for my Mennonite ancestors, you, our Lutheran friends, are once again holding a service in one of our roomiest houses of worship."

Jacob Reiff

 Ruth does not credit Reiff probably because of his own animus for Reiffs, who were never manageable at all. Jacob Reiff, who took two voyages back to Holland and Germany around the 1727-30, and who spoke English and represented the colonial government even as a young man was also both a founder and destroyer of the first Reformed Church, which reasons need not delay us here. This resulted in his being sued in a case of kierkenthief that lasted more than a decade. He was called a kierkenthief, and was continually castigated by the principal Reformed minister Boehme, along with his entire family. The Reiff family enters the picture because they were all highly defined individuals, what the religious seem to call "lawless," but the tongue tells the tale of its own self.
 
 Conrad Reiff has received his due, Peter Reiff less so but the only regular among them was their brother George who died prematurely and childless. Jacob lived long enough and well enough to be an obvious friend of Muhlenberg who he must have known after Muhlenberg's arrival in 1742, when he was twelve years old than Muhlenberg, but the Reiffs had been farmers and blacksmiths established before 1717. The father Hans George might make pretext for making Jacob a Mennonite, for the Hans George Reiffs lived next to their cousin Hans Reiff, a Mennonite. Neighbors on the boundary of Reiff's property in Salford relied on each other to the point that Hans George Reiff was asked to sign as a witness to the Mennonite trust. His wife, the widow whose burial is in question, gave such an early donation to the Skippack Alms Book that it is on the first page. That she was buried in the Mennonite graveyard after a large gift to build the Mennonite meetinghouse, does not obviate that she was herself evidently the daughter of a Reformed church minion in Holland. 
 
When Muhlenberg spoke at her funeral at the behest of her son Jacob it was the greatest gathering the area had seen, so much so that Gottlieb Mittelberger used it as an example of a funeral in his Journey to Pennsylvania, though, also in the anonymous fashion. Muhlenberg's affirmation of Jacob's character in his Journals is a political statement as well as sincere, for Jacob Reiff the Elder was a man of distinction and character who appealed to Muhlenberg who was one himself. There is never however one reference that Jacob was his parishioner and a Lutheran.

Sweeping under the rug all difference and variety to make unity and reconciliation where there is none prepares, rhetorically at least, for the loss of gender, the loss of history, language, everything that makes us interesting, which is then substituted for life extension, super powers, acceptance by the collective.


 We are so rich in the language of apology to suggest that if it is in language it is false, which becomes more and more true since the fallen angels also wanted Enoch to apologize to the Eternal Father for them. Such conveyances come up in Charlie Rose apologizing for imposing himself naked upon his female assistants, he thought he was too beautiful to resist, like Lucifer, or George Bush senior patting little tushes from his wheel chair as if he thought he was the Pope of Uncleanness, as if his beauty was irresistible. They apologize in the hope that they can stay in power. The whole apology scam began decades ago when renegade daughters wanted their fathers and mothers to apologize for giving them birth, for blessing their childhoods with light. Dustin Hoffman's apology was it was "the things we do between takes." Kevin Spacey was, "I'm sorry, so so sorry" like a line out of  Portrait of the Artist, "apologize, apologize or the eagle will come and pull out your eyes." 

Bad as apology is, no apology is worse? No admission of wrong, no acknowledgment of the victim? Our need to show how labored we are with the product of our conditioning. In the work of Hegel you can literally apologize for anything, mining corps for yellow cake pollution of the badlands, oppressing native peoples everywhere, Canada selling their children in the sex trade, to avoid the consequence of their actions. They apologize with the hope they can do it again. Hey, don't they believe Charlie Manson will get another chance? Reincarnation is the biggest fraud of all in the apology scheme, that if we torture you you will change your ways or at least pay back every drop of blood you spilled, every word you spoke. And the thoughts, what about the thoughts? Nobody knows. All this comes just in time for the denouement.  The higher they reach they more they let go their lusts. You'd think leaders, politicians, movie stars, pastors, teachers would know that. 

The inherent contradiction in the Lutheran/Mennonite  Fraud Reconciliation is a chapter in  the Fall of Evangelicalism, a social political act that deems "apology" complicit with the Vatican politics of religion and state. But falsely skewing the facts to bridge Lutherans and Mennonites of 18th century Skippack with someone who was neither Lutheran nor Mennonite is a close second. Third,  the continuing fabrication of documents and relationships regarding Jacob Reiff and that patrilineage in general continue the coverup.

This is the background that occurs in the latest foray of the Elder Jacob who has been hoisted to justify the rapprochement of Lutherans and Mennonites at the 450th anniversary of their discord.  

All the facts however are in doubt in John L. Ruth's 'linking our two fellowships." symbol of  reconciliation of Lutheran and Mennonite. As a Harvard PhD and professor of English among Mennonites Mr. Ruth's historical works are encyclopedic.  Of course, reconciliation is as major a Mennonite belief as one could wish, so in this plethora of apology for Lutheran participation in that past bloodthirsty time, Mr. Ruth was invited to represent the Mennonites before the Lutherans and to receive, as it were, The Apology. In this context he delivered up our grandfather Jacob Reiff the Elder much as Mittelberger delivered up Jacob's brother but however by name, because the Reiffs are a little outre among Mennonists. Jacob's anonymity therefore was able to hold the graft of Ruth's revisions to the account of events in Skippack following Muhlenberg's arrival. This fictionalization is entertaining. Compare the statement that Anna Reiff wrote in English from Dotterer, via...Mary Jane Hershey.

 For Jacob the Elder to play a part in this fractious contention after 500 years is beyond all expectation even if his citation is anonymous in the resolution of Lutherans and Mennonites. Embroiled as he was in controversy in his own Reformed denomination it only adds to the flavor of his life and its meaning. He draw animosity from religious authorities much as did his brother Conrad with the New Born cult in Oley in 1730. That their father was a notable man of peace held in respect with many in 1725 partly enabled the extensive contacts  his sons had with other cults and religions. These matters serve as a background to their lives which we know because of the controversy it stirred. Harry Reiff thinks him a Mennonite. John Ruth thinks him a Lutheran for his own purposes. He was explicitly Reformed. But we have to face up to counterfeit civilization and its aims to legitimatize any figure being taken for any purpose to form a derivative of any reason. One false proposition therein is immediately replaced by another equally false, and contradicting it, which is glossed over by the selected details and then randomized to abstraction and anonymity, sold like any mortgage fund, hence even though Jacob the Elder becomes a pawn in the reconciliation of Luther and Mennonite, he is not named as such, the unkindest cut of all, to leave him there without clothes or even a stone to identify him. So here we come with our barrow again to dig up the appurtenances.


This impacts the integrity of John Ruth, pride of the Mennonite and Harvard PhD, really the ultimate authority and head of much current Mennonity. His books are well known and indispensable. His life within the community where he was born and grew up to serve is without question whereas my own Mennonity has nothing but question. We are poles apart on a continuum that recognizes some affinity too. I never got to be a Mennonite for reasons stated elsewhere. In any case when the Lutheran ecumenists tired of their bloody past to the point of rejecting it they approached the whole Mennonite establishment. John Ruth's statement and his implication of Jacob Reiff as a symbol of unity and amity between Lutheran and Mennonity is Ruth's own but stands for the greater communities. That the symbol is completely false, an entire fiction, thus stands as Ruth's own judgment of the case. They like to call it subconscious betrayal when the deep structure betrays the surface. In this case calling Jacob a Lutheran, putting him under the authority of Muhlenberg and then suppressing his name to make him a general representative of a fabricated point of view, a unity, when he spectacularly is not, few will recognize and be able to find out the forgery. Or you can say Ruth is well meaning in his insight, and that the particulars if not true in this case are true in some other, moving all the boundary stones of reason in one fell swoop. For the sake of turnabout is fair play I want to make John Ruth's fabrication a symbol of the moving of stones that  brings the 21st century to deny absolutely everything people ever believed about themselves and justifying it on the base of the same skewed facts contradiction and mis-selections.

Ruth may not credit Reiff because of his own animus of these intractable folk of the 18th century. One later malfactor Reiff in Lancaster of  1842 he does identify either, for the lengthy consideration is entirely omitted in the index, even if a little poking around reveals Abraham Reiff a minister in Groffdale about 1780 (1161). Ruth uses these Reiffs to urge his cases of Mennonite discipline, congregation vs. Bishop, requirements of fellowship. Under the heading Child Abuse at Groffdale he cites a "wealthy Earl Township couple by the name of Reiff" (512), "the affluent Reiffs" to rhetorically further the lack of sympathy, guilt by Protestant ethic, for "the Reiffs were mistreating" their servant girl. He offers this following a parenthesis where another orphan boy's mother made pregnant by U. S. Senator James Buchanan died after "slitting her throat in a cornfield" (512). Guilt by parenthetical association? These Reiffs' spiritual status was subjected to written investigation by Jacob Stauffer that remains in the Geschicht-Buchlein translated as A Chronicle or History Booklet about the So-called Mennonite Church  (Ruth 1279). Does one take the counsel of the congregation or shall we take it on ourselves and do as the Word says?" (The Earth is the Lord's, 514)

Can you just take somebody and make him a parishioner of the Lutherans and bury him in the Mennonite cemetery as a Mennonite to make him a symbol of reconstructed amity between L and M justifying their refellowshipping each other, even if it is all based on a lie?-- The whole intent is the removal of boundary stones, don't say man, don't say B.C.  Don't say victim, oppressor, resolve contradiction into unity, bring order out of chaos.

They were never manageable at all. Jacob, who took two voyages back to Holland and Germany around 1727-30, and who spoke English and represented the colonial government even as a young man, was also a founder and destroyer of the first Reformed Church, of which the reasons need not delay us here. This resulted in his being defamed and sued in a case that lasted more than a decade 1732-1749, where he was called a kierkenthief, church robber, Complaint 1732 and Answer,
 and was continually castigated by the principal Reformed minister Boehme, along with his entire family. His family seems to enter the picture because they were all individuals and radicals, Conrad Reiff has received his due notice. Peter Reiff less so but perhaps all them were radicals. The only regular was Hans but he died prematurely and childless. Jacob lived long enough and well enough to be an obvious friend of Muhlenberg who he must have known after Muhlenberg's arrival in 1742, but the Reiffs had been farmers and blacksmiths well established in 1717. The father, Hans George, draws the Mennonite purpose about the family for living next to his cousin Hans Reiff a  Mennonity and Michael Ziegler, a Mennonite minister.  These neighbors on the boundary of his property in Salford relied on each other to the point that Hans George was asked to sign as witnesses of the Mennonite Trust of 1725, "Hans George Reiff, a member of the German Reformed Church, who wrote a neat signature, and Antonius Heilman, a Lutheran living at the Trappe."
His wife Anna gave early donations to the Alms Book and was buried in the Mennonite graveyard, but she was speculatively the daughter of a Reformed church minion in Holland. When Muhlenberg spoke at her funeral, the greatest gathering the area had seen, so much so that Gottlieb Mittelberger used it as an example in his Journey to Pennsylvania, though, also fashionably, anonymously, Muhlenberg's affirmation of Jacob's character was also a political statement as well as sincere, for Jacob Reiff was a man of distinction and character that appealed to Muhlenberg who was one himself. There is never however one reference that Jacob was his parishioner

So what's the problem? The sweeping under the rug of all difference and variety to make unity and reconciliation where there is none. What's the ultimate result, The preparation of the loss of gender, the loss of history, language, everything that makes us interesting for the substitute of life extension, super powers, acceptance by the collective.

The brand of the Bernese Bear on the back of Henry Funck's grandfather of 1671 is not absorbed into the skin. The scar remains. 

 The oppressor who turned the bear into its slave and branded the dissident with its logo, one enslaved upon another, the same burgers who beat the tortures of the Bloody Book into the blood that ran with their horrors into the bear pit of Bern is our historical case of the discord between the Lutheran and Mennonite. It was open warfare against the Mennonite. These days the Bärengraben is a surveillance graben nicely predicting zoos of new age underground and camps served by boxcars that governments will some day apologize for. When, after four centuries Lutherans reconcile with Mennonites 500 years after bloody persecution and the oppressor and chief accuser want to be forgiven, forgiveness is a sort of timing to serve the greater purpose of dissolving all boundaries. Canada asked forgiveness from its natives (2008), South Africa did of its. The Amish asked the Conestoga people and to Israel for the holocaust. We have entered the era of the History of Apologies. Spain, Netherlands, the Pope join in. When they're not apologizing they're still accusing. The Pope will put you jail for doubting global warming, but not for killing the Pacific with Fukushima, for building a wall to preserve the integrity of a nation, but not for the one around Vatican City hiding pedophiles. Apologies are a technique of the left so prevalent not a day goes by that Caucasoids must apologize for being white, men for being of a particular gender, the Indians had 5!, parents must apologize to their children, presidents to everyone who is offended by law.  Apologizers for past murders reveal some scheme in the present, some misdirection to divert attention from even worse, like the doctrine of Wm. Burrough's Nova, that each 'Anthropocene' epoch engineers one crisis after another TO SUBVERT ATTENTION AWAY FROM THE FACT, always seeking to create as many insoluble conflicts as possible and to always aggravate the existing ones  (53). Imagine if Angela Merkel apologizes for the destruction of Germany when replacement immigrants outnumber German men 20-45 by 2026. Imagine the apologies of  government science after half the English have cancer, as predicted, and 1 of 3 children is autistic, caused by the fluoride added to water, aluminum added to air, radiation added to sea. Supposing the receivers of these apologies are incredulous, if they survive, but what can't be set right? The apologies for 6000 years of tyranny? Answer, everything. Nothing. Satan apologizes for deviousness to deceive the more. If you feel the tension between the two, the accuser repenting and the victim disbelieving, that is because in the age of patch up, as if the many generations before those rabid words and heinous acts never happened, a psychic verbal propranalol defamiliarizes reality. The whole intent of the removal of boundary stones, don't say man, don't say B.C.  don't say victim, oppressor, is to resolve contradiction into unity, bring order out of chaos.

"It is the doctrinal content of the Confession that is binding for Lutherans today, and that historical judgments contained in the Confession are relative and fallible, the essay suggests the possibility that the condemnations of Anabaptists in the Augsburg Confession do not apply to Mennonites participating in these dialogues. "  DAVID G. TRUEMPER

  undoing of the breaches of Christian unity that occurred in the sixteenth century--any undoing of the breeches will reveal the whole hidey mess, keep it covered
we who were at the center of the western church's sixteenth-century fractures bear central responsibility for seeking healing and reconciliation
courage and evangelical commitment demonstrated by the Mennonite dialogue
In 1980 "Mennonites in Germany had been invited to join a 450th anniversary remembrance of the great Lutheran Augsburg Confession of faith...Mennonites replied that our spiritual forebears, the Anabaptists, had been scathingly denounced Confession.Why would we be asked to participate in celebrating our own condemnation?"
Lutherans are generally afflicted with a loss of their zeal, seek ot reconcile with  conversations as we have been in carrying on the now forty-six year old conversations with the Roman Catholic Church.
A loss of all cesrtitude, mark of  the beast requires all submission
How comfortable can you feel that that the reigning Pontiff in the Vatican is to be labeled "Antichrist is not inerrant or a binding symbol as the Confession says? so they reduced their heinous acts to  symbols
"authority of the Lutheran symbolical writings" -
"What did it mean to say that then?" all nonsense, it's what they did, that never ceases to exist. "
    There are in fact relatively few condemnations of Anabaptists in the Augsburg Confession. Such condemnations appear explicitly in articles V, IX, XII, XVI, XVII; and implicitly in articles X and XXIV. Only seven! reading of the condemnations
Luther: 
In 1528 he wrote, "I think it is not right, and I am genuinely sorry that such people are so gruesomely murdered, burned, and cruelly assassinated.
 In his May 6, 2011 Address at the Lutheran Synod at Franconia Mennonite Church Mr. Ruth reviews the Mennonites killed for their faith, "some days there were two, four or ten executions" (4).

"The Augsburg Confession whose effect we may recall this morning. The man
who wrote it, in defense of the Lutheran Princes before the Emperor, called the Anabaptists “a fiendish” and “horrible devilish sect,” teaching “only revolt, theft and murder, besides immorality and adultery.” They were to be wiped out, and executed according to Leviticus 24, which commanded Israel to stone blasphemers to death."
 
The Lutheran-Mennonite International Study Commission said that Lutherans had invited the Mennonites to celebrate their own condemnation, arguing with them especially about adult and infant baptism, which was the crux of centuries long ago, as if they were feeling defensive:

" it seemed strange that the Mennonites wanted to maintain the name “Anabaptist,” especially since, in their view, it is not “re-baptizing” (“ana” means “again” in Greek) but baptizing in the first place"


"It appears that Lutherans were directly or indirectly responsible for the deaths of at least one hundred Anabaptists. (Although figures are hard to establish with absolute certainty, it seems that around 2,500 Anabaptists were executed for religious “crimes.”) And this injustice was preserved in Mennonite memory—especially in a big book called Martyrs Mirror, which details the stories of Anabaptists who suffered and died for their faith, though it rarely specifies whether the persecutor was Lutheran, Reformed, Catholic, or something else—while most Lutherans forgot all about it.

"In the end, a sizable number of Anabaptists was put to death in Lutheran territories and with the endorsement of Lutheran theologians."


  Is the past like a broken chair to be repaired and reused? Not at all. First because the skills to fix the chair only exist in the hands of specialists which do an ordinary broken chair and its owner no good, but second because nobody wants the old chair anyway when they can get a new one from IKEA. So we have a new past which has nothing in it because we didn't want the old one anyway and if we did it would only be owned by specialists.

The apologies are a sham.

The apologies are a sham.

Where is the oppressor to gain expiation? Happily a mechanism already in place, made by the same oppressor only needs to go visit the owl of Bohemian Grove owl to assuage their marred past and its guilt, not seek forgiveness. Sanding the top of the old desk up to remove the confessor "error" generations later to assuage their guilt, seeking to apologize they continue to defame those they in their ancestors killed. It's unforgivable and they have to live with it throughout all time. There is no forgiveness of  political acts, subversion, gulags, desaparecidos, tortures, murders. There is self sacrifice for a life time. Torture is a political act inflicted on nations for their own benefit. Unless you stand up and repudiate these acts, as Trump did the invasion of Iraq, you are implicated in the guilt and apology. The best lack all conviction however they apologize. Joyce's Stephen Dedalus is prophetic, apologize, apologize. You're made to apologize because it makes you one of the weak, the will-less mind-dulled manacles. You 're then made to forgive on the other side of the forced conclusion of Hegel.

There are literally 360 points of view of a thing in two dimensions, more in 3D and in 4, the revelation of time. Ask the civilizations and conquerors of Jerusalem whose similarities and differences are tempted with the notion that one of them is right, so history devolves into a collective state, called the truth, the fact with differences removed. These points of view are true only for the speaker of the moment. Each documentation of fact, all 360 degrees of reality and every sheet of ininterpretation in the ream of 500 in a pack for argument's sake and for scale might be reduced to quadrants. Merely identifying four quadrants is a great achievement in interpreting reality, including as it does opposites and complements. We are tempted to substitute an onion and its many skins for this paper, but in order to be true to the mind of the historical character, we must assume he is like ourselves, vexed and suited with packaging which does not reveal the real thoughts even to himself, or if he does it is in the night thought not remembered in the day, even while the fact circles in the heavens of his own mind. That the mind is a heaven self contained and populated with thoughts as if they were angels is surely the working assumption of every intellect. So the dawn or the night is given, but not the hidden reaches below. We know this as we know ourselves. Amazed, dismayed at the mixture in any character, we are all (un)comfortable in these contradictions of ourselves and our subjects as we design them, but it is amusing, if not good, to read the opposites and tangents.

Cited
John L. Ruth. The Earth Is the Lord's: A narrative History of the Lancaster Mennonite Conference. 2001.
Truemper, David G. The Role and Authority of the Lutheran Confessional Writings: Do Lutherans Really "Condemn the Anabaptists"?
 
"esteemed first of all Jacob Reiff was not a Lutheran or a Mennonite. Second the relation he had with Muhlenberg was as a neighbor and of mutual respect among leaders of the community, as his father had with Hans Reiff

Can you just take somebody and make him a parishioner of the Lutherans and bury him in the Mennonite cemetery as a Mennonite  justifying their refellowshipping each other, even if it is all based on a lie?

seeTHE SCRIBBLER: Amish ask for forgiveness from Native Americans

The high cost of forgiveness that even in the apology and its acceptance you will be used. Politics as usual full of  titles of respect, esteemed