91Èȱ¬

Good morning.

Lloyd's Register - not to be confused with Lloyds of London - has issued an apology for its role in the trafficking of enslaved Africans. Both businesses emerged from the very same coffee house in Lombard Street in the City of London. Lloyds of London dealt with insurance. Lloyds Register, on the other hand, provided information about the condition of seagoing vessels, on which merchants and underwriters relied. Both businesses thereby facilitated the transatlantic slave trade and both businesses have now apologised for the roles they played and committed funds for a variety of projects of reparation.

Lloyds Register is one of many institutions - including my College and University - which have been trying to come to terms with their entanglements with enslavement. So I know very well that whenever the issue of making an apology comes up, objectors will say that the notion that we today can make an apology for something they did 200 years ago is illogical. You can't fall in love on someone else's behalf, you can't go on a diet for someone else, and you can't apologise for them either.

I suppose the right person to answer this point is a vicar since vicars are, as the name suggests, in the business of being vicarious. A vicar is someone who acts in place of another - and from an administrative point of view, a vicar was once the person who did the work on behalf of the rector who took the money. But more importantly, the parish priest was, like the Pope, the vicar of Christ, and Christ himself was the representative of God. And if this is not enough, Christ was also, mysteriously, the representative of humanity before God - as Paul puts it in a very dense piece of prose in his 2 Letter to the Corinthians, 'God hath made him, who knew no sin, to be sin for us, that in him we might be made the righteousness of God.'

Theologians have spilt much ink - and unfortunately have been the cause of others spilling blood - in disputes about how precisely Christ's work for human kind is to be understood. What is clear however, is that Christ's act of moral repair is conceived as vicarious.

The real problem with apologies for historic wrongs is not, I think, a problem about apologising on behalf of others. Our moral imaginations are accustomed to the idea, and - to take an example - parents apologise on behalf of children (and more frequently children on behalf of embarrassing parents) all the time. The real issue with any of our apologies is ensuring that they are not mere words trying to brush the past under the carpet, but instead express commitments to doing right in the present so as to heal the wrongs of the past.

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