Ecclesial Apology as Prophetic Representation: Speaking for a Nation Without a Mandate

Philosophical accounts of political apology make official representation a condition of a collective apology's meaning: only an authorised speaker can say ‘we’ for a people and bind it to change. By that measure an ecclesial apology for a nation's sins, offered where the state has not apologised, looks ineffective at best. I argue that such an apology is a prophetic act resting on a different kind of representation. Drawing on Walter Moberly and Walter Brueggemann, I read Jeremiah 14 as a paradigm of prophetic confession, in which the prophet confesses his people's sin in the first person plural, without official warrant. Dietrich Bonhoeffer's account of the church as vicarious representative ( Stellvertretung ) then supplies the ecclesial warrant for such an act, provided the church confesses a guilt it shares. The 1965 apology of Ōmura Isamu to the Korean church, and the Kyōdan confession that followed, illustrate the argument.