Indemnity

Indemnity is one of many legal and economic terms that find secondary employment in religious usage. The wages of sin is death; forgive us our debts (or trespasses), Satan as "the accuser," God as a judge, selling one's soul are everyday examples. Indemnity has various meanings in legal parlance and a similar variety in theological usage.

The Oxford Universal Dictionary (3rd edition, 1955) defines indemnity as "security or protection against contingent hurt, damage, or loss; safety." It adds as a second definition, "a legal exemption from the penalties or liabilities incurred by any course of action." It is also seen as "compensation for loss, a sum paid by way of compensation." The Encarta® World English Dictionary [© 1999 Microsoft Corporation] offers the same meanings: "1. protection or insurance against possible loss or damage, 2. legal exemption from penalties or liabilities, 3. a compensation paid for loss or damage." Similarly, the verb form "indemnify" means to keep free from, secure against (any hurt, harm, or loss); or to compensate for loss suffered, expenses incurred.

In the Hebrew Bible

In pre-biblical times, most societies allowed for non-equal indemnity; a person who was only injured was often allowed to kill the person responsible in revenge. This was true of many near-eastern and middle-eastern societies. In some cultures, the standard has been like-for-like recompense, as in "an eye for an eye".

An innovation occurred with the development of the Hebrew Bible ("Old Testament"), which put limits on indemnities; in the Biblical view, a maximum limit was applied with the phrase "an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth." In later centuries this was anachronistically read by non-Jews as a promotion of equal physical indemnity, while many Jews and Bible scholars hold that in its original context its function was to limit such actions.

Legal and Insurance Usage

An insurance payout is often called an indemnity. Insurance against the expenses incurred in a lawsuit is also called an indemnity.

Indemnification is a promise, usually as a contract provision, protecting one party from financial loss. This is sometimes stated as a requirement that one party "hold harmless" the other. Indemnification is a type of insurance, which protects one party at the expense of the other. Indemnification can either by direct payment or reimbursement for the loss. Indemnification clauses cannot usually be enforced for intentional tortious conduct of the protected party.

Corporate officers, board members and public officials often require an indemnity clause in their contracts before they perform any work.

In addition, indemnification provisions are common in intellectual property licenses in which the licensor does not want to be liable for misdeeds of the licensee. A typical license would protect the licensor against product liability and patent infringement.

Freeing of slaves and servants

Slaveowners are said to suffer a loss whenever their slaves or servants are granted their freedom. A tacit belief exists that harm is caused to slaveowners whenever slaves or servants are released. Slaveowners may be paid to cover their losses.

In 1807-08, in Prussia, statesman Baron Heinrich vom Stein introduced a series of reforms, the principal of which was the abolition of serfdom with indemnification to territorial lords.

Haiti was required to pay an indemnity of 150,000,000 francs to France in order to atone for the loss suffered by the French slaveowners.

In the 1860s in the United States, U.S. President Abraham Lincoln had requested many millions of dollars from Congress with which to pay slaveowners "for the loss of their property." On July 9th, 1868, part #4 of the Fourteenth Constitutional Amendment dismissed all of the claims that slaveowners had been injured by the freeing of the slaves.

This did not prevail universally; when the slaves of Zanzibar were freed in 1897, it was by compensation since the opinion that yet prevailed was that the slaveowners suffered the loss of an asset whenever a slave was freed.

Costs of war

After wars, the losers have sometimes been required to pay indemnities—the costs of the war incurred on the part of the victor. The nation that wins may insist on being paid compensations for the costs of the war, even after having been the creator of the war.

• Following the Sino-Japanese War of 1894-95, the Treaty of Shimonoseki required that China pay Japan the sum of 200,000,000 taels (or liangs).
• China incurred an indemnity which resulted from massacres of foreigners during the Boxer Rebellion. The payment of 450,000,000 Haikwan taels, or $330,000,000 became necessary.

Usage in Blackstone

Oftentimes terms are taken from the economic or legal sphere for theological, ethical or philosophical usage. The use of the term indemnity is of very recent vintage. It does not appear in the King James Bible, nor in Shakespeare's corpus. It not defined in The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church nor in A Dictionary of Christian Theology. Its earliest usage appears to have been in Blackstone's Commentaries, a work of jurisprudence with a philosophical bent. Blackstone moves the term indemnity in a theological direction:

• CHAPTER THE TWENTY SECOND. OF COMMITMENT AND BAIL: “and what satisfaction or indemnity is it to the public, to seize the effects of them who have bailed a murderer, if the murderer himself be suffered to escape with impunity?”

Here "indemnity" appears as a parallel to "satisfaction" (a theological term), meaning a fulfilling a debt, redressing a wrong, assuaging resentment, balancing accounts.

• CHAPTER THE THIRTY FIRST. OF TITLE BY BANKRUPTCY. After a discussion on a debtor of good character being allowed to pay pennies on the dollar of debt, Blackstone writes, “BESIDES this allowance, he has also an indemnity granted him, of being free and discharged for ever from all debts owing by him at the time he became a bankrupt; even though judgment shall have been obtained against him,…”

Here, indemnity appears as a form of grace, as over and above his resolving his debts, he is free of the obligation to continue payment from future earnings.

Indemnity in Unification Church Belief

In the Unification Church, indemnity is a theological term involved in what is traditionally called the absolution of sin or reconciliation of God with human beings. It begins with the understanding that human beings, individually and collectively, reside in a "midway position" between God and Satan. Their ultimate fate, whether they associate with God or Satan, or just remain in the middle, is determined by the acts ("conditions") they make (or fail to make). God and Satan negotiate their claim over the conditions human beings make through an intricate set of determinants and, based on that claim, one or the other will take the person or collective to their side. The making of conditions that take us to God's side is called "indemnity." The making of conditions that take us to Satan's side is called "sin."

The enormous significance of the term in Unificationism can be seen in this passage from the Exposition of the Divine Principle, in which indemnity emerges as the paradigm underlying the entire story of God's history in relation to the human race. The context of this passage is a discussion of cases of returning something to its original position, or recovery of something that was lost:

• "We call this process of restoring the original position and state through making conditions restoration through indemnity, and we call the condition made a condition of indemnity. God's work to restore people to their true, unfallen state by having them fulfill indemnity conditions is called the providence of restoration through indemnity."

The text goes on to discuss the degree to which a condition of indemnity might "compare with the value of what was lost." The condition of indemnity may have value equal to what was lost. This would be the classic "eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth" resolution. Two, it may have value less than what was lost. Recalling Blackstone, this would be as in a case of the bankruptcy of a trustworthy person, in which, as the Divine Principle text states, "the debtor can pay back less than the total amount and still satisfy the entire debt. The outstanding example of this is redemption through the cross." The third case is a special case, when "what was lost" is specifically a previous indemnity condition. It refers to a situation in which a person or group has the opportunity to "meet a condition of lesser indemnity" but fails. At that point the person or group "must make another indemnity condition…, this time at a price greater than the first." Thus the magnitude of the indemnity conditions necessary multiplies as sin echoes through history and human beings either fail or only partially fulfill the opportunities to reverse the tide. Archetypal sins, the human fall, the first murder, Ham's crossing of Noah, Abram's expulsion of Hagar and Ishmael, repeated generation after generation, build across time into tsunamis pounding civilization with terrifying force.

Indemnity's Cognates, including Karma

One scholar provided a long list of cognates for the term indemnity in Unification faith: expiation, satisfaction, reparation, atonement, penance, restitution, propitiation, redemption, retributive justice, reconcilliation, ascenticism, self-denial, purification, voluntary mortifiation, ransom, commutative justice, samsara, the imitation of Christ, recapitulatio, karma, Tien Tao (the way of heaven), prayaschitta and Kippurim. [Footnote: Francis Clark, "The Principle of Indemnity," in Deane William Ferm, Restoring the Kingdom (New York, NY: Paragon House, 1984)]

The Asiatic teaching of “karma” deserves some attention. It means, simply put, "deed" or "act" and more broadly the universal principle of cause and effect, the action and reaction which governs all life. Karma is not fate, for man acts with free will creating his own destiny. According to the Vedas, if we sow goodness, we will reap goodness; if we sow evil, we will reap evil. Karma refers to the totality of our actions and their concomitant reactions in this and previous lives, all of which determines our future. Not all karma rebounds immediately. Some accumulate and return unexpectedly in this or other births. That the phenomena transcends time is common to Unificationist indemnity and eastern belief. Unification rejects the claim that persons reappear on earth, but affirms that missions that are associated with persons reappear. For example, the mission to make indemnity conditions necessary to prepare Israel for the messianic coming failed in Elijah, so John the Baptist inherited this mission and was even called Elijah by Jesus and the Saducees. So too, the mission to father the God-centered world failed in Adam, so Jesus inherited this mission and was even called Adam by Paul (1 Cor 15:45).

The term karma provides a useful context for the understanding of indemnity, but it does not have the same meaning, in particular because karma treats the universe as a realm of law in which imbalance will be redressed sooner or later, whereas indemnity operates in a universe in which personhood, a judge and attorneys, argue and interpret the law and its application. Law may require repayment, but indemnity—as per Blackstone—introduces the possibility of grace being granted by the party to whom the debt is owed. The same universe features an evil master controlling the environment and extracting endless payment for a single mistake.

The presuppositions of the Buddhist theory surrounding karma are consistent with the Unification theory surrounding indemnity. First, action really is happening; it's not an illusion. Second, one really is responsible for one's actions. Third, actions have results and those results can be good or bad depending on the quality of the intention behind the act. But the doctrine of indemnity adds supernatural, or spiritual, agents, God and Satan, who compete for the devotion of human beings and the right to claim individuals and collectives such as lineages, nations, religions and, ultimately, the entire human race, in this environment. Thus, the Judeo-Christian personalistic universe provides a context more apt that Hinduism and Buddhism to understand indemnity. In the story of Job is presented the contest of God and Satan over the human soul. In the story of Adam and Eve, we witness the same; again, God and Satan, the serpent, compete for human allegiance. In the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, Jesus' self-sacrifice repudiates Satan's claim not only on him, which was illegitimate to begin with (i.e., he committed no sin), but on all who believe in and call upon him.

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