Interestingly, the Amish apply the same humility to their own eternal destiny that they applied to Roberts’s eternal fate. They are loathe to speculate on both salvation and damnation, and unwilling to insist either that they are saved or that Charles Roberts went to hell. Amish people speak of having a “living hope” of salvation. Unlike many evangelical Christians who openly pronounce assurance of salvation, the Amish resist declaring that they are saved. Such proclamations of human certainty are, in the Amish mind, an offense to God, for only God knows the mysteries of salvation. Our task, they would say, is to follow faithfully the way of Jesus in daily life and not to presume to know the mind of God. Nevertheless, they have hope and confidence that God will be a just and merciful judge.
This understanding of salvation reflects the Amish focus on practice rather than doctrine, on acting rather than speaking. One young Amish father made a direct connection between forgiveness and the Amish view of salvation, pointing to Jesus’ words that God will forgive us by the same measure we forgive others. “That means that if in the future you don’t forgive, you will lose your salvation. You can’t say ‘once saved, always saved.’” An Amish deacon also linked forgiveness and salvation together. The two, in his words, “are one and the same; they’re pretty close together. Every sin can be forgiven, but to be saved, you need to forgive. To enter into a holy place [Heaven] your sins must be forgiven, but if you don’t forgive, your sins can’t be forgiven. . . . If we do not forgive, there will be dire consequences.”
This view of salvation elevates the importance of forgiveness in the Amish faith, making forgiveness essential for eternal salvation. Some Christians may find such understandings of eternity disturbing. While many would agree that God is the final judge, Amish humility about eternal security and their fusion of behavior and salvation counter the ideas of many Christians. Indeed, these convictions about salvation represent the most striking application of
Gelassenheit:
the willingness to yield certainty about eternal outcomes to the providence of God.
Earthly Justice
Beyond the questions of long-term justice and divine providence lies the issue of earthly justice here and now. For the Amish, forgiveness does not mean condoning bad behavior or erasing its consequences. “If Roberts had lived, we would have forgiven him, but there would have been consequences,” explained a minister. Yet the Amish do not believe that worldly justice rests in the hands of the church.
As mentioned in Chapter Eleven, the Amish subscribe to a two-kingdom theology, shaped by their history of religious persecution in Europe. The churchly kingdom of God operates with a pacifist ethic that avoids force to achieve results. The ethics that Jesus taught—love for enemy, nonretaliation, and forgiveness—guide this spiritual kingdom.
In contrast, the worldly kingdoms—the governments of this world—rely on force, or at least the threat of force, to achieve their goals. The Amish accept the state’s authority to use force, and the Dordrecht Confession of Faith instructs obedience to the state as long as its demands do not conflict with God’s. For example, the Amish flatly refuse to participate in the armed forces, press charges in court, or sue those who wrong them. They do pay all taxes except Social Security, which they consider a form of insurance that undermines the church’s responsibility to care for the needs of its members.
Nonetheless, because they believe that the state is ordained by God to maintain order in the larger world, they expect that the state will organize a police force, imprison lawbreakers, and conduct war. “We fully expect a killer to go to jail,” said an Amish elder. “We’re not naïve. We would never want a killer turned loose,” added a deacon. “It’s the government’s job to punish evildoers.” As the tragedy unfolded in Nickel Mines, the Amish readily accepted the intervention of the state police and thanked them profusely for their help. They saw the events of that October morning as an intrusion of worldly violence into their community, and they expected worldly authority to counteract it.
The boundaries between church and world are not always that tidy, of course, and the Amish have occasionally faced perplexing questions of justice when worldly and churchly authorities overlap. In 1994, for example, a Pennsylvania jury found a twenty-eight-year-old Amish man, Ed Gingerich, guilty of involuntary manslaughter but mentally ill after he brutally killed his wife in front of two of the couple’s young children. Testimony revealed that he had been diagnosed with schizophrenia and had occasionally been hospitalized in the past, but that his family and church neighbors had helped him substitute homeopathic alternatives for his prescribed medication.
The case exposed conflicting views of justice, responsibility, and punishment. Jurors later said they blamed the church for creating conditions that made the murder likely, while a criminal justice professor charged that prosecutors had not done enough to secure a first-degree murder conviction. Meanwhile, the Amish bishop, who was also an uncle of the victim, was quoted as saying that he was dismayed that the court handed down only a five-year sentence: “We thought he would be put away for a long time, maybe ten or fifteen years.” Indeed, when Gingerich was released from prison, having paid his debt in the eyes of secular society, his church in northwestern Pennsylvania would not allow him to return, continuing to shun him and separate him from his children and most other relatives. Gingerich instead found a home in two midwestern Amish settlements whose members considered his punishment sufficient and supported his return to psychological care. Gingerich’s case demonstrates the sometimes complicated and overlapping boundaries of the worldly and churchly kingdoms in Amish life.
This World Is Not Our Home
The Amish belief in miracles is part of their understanding of God’s providence, and it is woven into their affirmation that God is closely and directly involved in the world. Many Amish people spoke of miracles in the wake of the shooting. Some believed angels were hovering above the roof of the school that day. As we noted earlier, the girl who escaped the building before the shooting said she heard a voice tell her to run—a voice that many ascribe to an angel. In addition, Amish people often described the healing of the injured girls as miraculous. The poem written by a sister of one of the boys in the Nickel Mines school included these lines:
Some days we think we can’t go on
When so many of our friends are gone.
But we just hold on to the good things,
We’re surrounded by miracles.
Certainly, as we have seen, the Amish conviction that God intervenes in miraculous ways does not mean the Amish have solved age-old questions about God’s providence. It doesn’t mean they never wrestle with questions of how a loving God is involved not only in “the good things” mentioned in the poem but also in the terrifying and tragic things in life. Nor does it mean they skirt questions of justice.
But accepting miracles, like accepting mystery, goes hand-in-hand with Amish humility, submission, and patience with life. This combination of values provides them with an enormous capacity to absorb adversity, forgo revenge, and carry on—gracefully.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Amish Grace and the Rest of Us
True forgiveness deals with the past, all of the past, to make the future possible.
—DESMOND TUTU, SOUTH AFRICAN ARCHBISHOP
A
s we began writing this book, we soon faced a challenge: what should we title it? We settled on the main title,
Amish Grace,
quickly, but the subtitle,
How Forgiveness Transcended Tragedy,
took much longer. The problem was the verb between
forgiveness
and
tragedy
. To put it simply, we couldn’t quite decide what the act of forgiveness had done to the tragic events of October 2, 2006.
We discussed the word
redeemed
. Had Amish forgiveness redeemed the tragedy that befell their community? For a book about the Amish, the word
redeemed
had the advantage of carrying Christian connotations. It also suggested, as many Amish people told us, that good is more powerful than evil. Still, the more we thought about it, the less comfortable we became with the notion that forgiveness had redeemed the tragedy at Nickel Mines. The tragedy remains. Five girls died, others carry scars, and one remains semicomatose. Amish families continue to grieve, Amish children still have nightmares, and Amish parents pray for their children’s safety with an urgency they didn’t know before. The expressions of forgiveness that flowed in the aftermath of Roberts’s rampage brought healing, but they didn’t bind up all the wounds of the shooting. The word
redeemed
claimed too much.
We settled on
transcended,
for two reasons. First,
transcended
conveys very well how the Amish of Nickel Mines rose above—far above—the evil that visited their schoolhouse. Whether good is more powerful than evil may be a matter of philosophical debate, but who can dispute the fact that the Amish responded to absolute horror with an amazing generosity of spirit? Second, the story of Amish forgiveness quickly eclipsed the story of the shooting itself. Devastating violence visits our world every day, but rarely is violence greeted with forgiveness. In Nickel Mines it was, and that response became the big story to emerge from a small village in Lancaster County.
But what should we make of that story? Like some of the Amish people we interviewed, we are glad that the story of Amish forgiveness received wide play after the shooting. At the same time, we have reservations about the way the story was used and celebrated. As much as we were impressed, even inspired, by the Amish response in Nickel Mines, we wondered: Is there anything here for the rest of us? The longer we worked on this book, the more vexing that question became.
The Amish Are Not Us
If there’s one thing we learned from this story, it’s this: the Amish commitment to forgive is not a small patch tacked onto their fabric of faithfulness. Rather, their commitment to forgive is intricately woven into their lives and their communities—so intricately that it’s hard to talk about Amish forgiveness without talking about dozens of other things.
When we first broached the subject of forgiveness with Amish people, we were struck by their reluctance to speak of forgiveness in abstract ways. We did hear forgiveness defined as “letting go of grudges.” More frequently, however, we heard responses and stories with
forgiveness
interspersed with other terms such as
love, humility, compassion, submission,
and
acceptance
. The web of words that emerged in these conversations pointed to the holistic, integrated nature of Amish life. Unlike many of their consumer-oriented neighbors, the Amish do not assemble their spirituality piecemeal by personal preference. Rather, Amish spirituality is a precious heirloom, woven together over the centuries and passed down with care.
To hear the Amish explain it, the New Testament provides the pattern for their unique form of spirituality. In a certain sense they are right. The Amish take the words of Jesus with utmost seriousness, and members frequently explain their faith by citing Jesus or other New Testament texts. But the Amish way of life cannot be reduced simply to taking the Bible—or even Jesus—seriously. Rather, Amish spirituality emerges from their particular way of understanding the biblical text, a lens that’s been shaped by their nonviolent martyr tradition. With the martyrs hovering nearby, offering admonition and encouragement, the Amish have esteemed suffering over vengeance,
Uffgevva
over striving, and forgiveness over resentment. All Christians can read Jesus’ words in Matthew’s Gospel—“forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors”—but Amish people truly believe that their own forgiveness is bound up in their willingness to forgive others. For them, forgiveness is more than a
good
thing to do. It is absolutely central to the Christian faith.
All of this helps us understand how the Nickel Mines Amish could do the unimaginable: extend forgiveness to their children’s killer within hours of their deaths. The decision to forgive came quickly, almost instinctively. Moreover, it came in deeds as well as words, with concrete expressions of care for the gunman’s family. For the Amish, the test of faith is action. Beliefs are important, and words are too, but actions reveal the true character of one’s faith. Therefore to
really
forgive means to act in forgiving ways—in this case, by expressing care for the family of the killer.
In a world where the default response is more often revenge than forgiveness, all of this is inspiring. At the same time, the fact that forgiveness is so deeply woven into the fabric of Amish life should alert us that their example, inspiring as it is, is not easily transferable to other people in other situations. Imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery, but how does one imitate a habit that’s embedded in a way of life anchored in a five-hundred-year history?