Forgiveness and repentance (part 4): The pastoral dimension (ii)

(Read parts 1, 2 and 3.)

We’ve been considering the question of whether forgiveness can or should occur without repentance. Last time around, we looked at family life. Let’s turn from the everyday to the extreme. What do we say to the person who is outrageously sinned against? What do we say to the person who was abused as a child, the person who has been raped, the person who survives a murder attempt from a loved one, the person whose spouse commits adultery (and while we’re at it, given that many people think that adultery is not sufficient grounds for divorce, the view that forgiveness can only occur when there has been repentance means that we’re then left with the position that a spouse must not forgive an unrepentant adulterous spouse, but must not divorce them either—a view that people may want to champion, but they should still recognize it is somewhat weird pastoral advice), and the person who has been betrayed by someone close to them?

Often in such situations (especially with regards to pedophilia, where genuine repentance seems to be as rare as a perfect set of teeth on egg-laying farm fowl), repentance is a long way off, if it ever arrives. Is it really in that person’s best interest to hold onto that debt—that wrong done to them—for the rest of their lives? Is it really better to never release it, but to continue resisting the anger and bitterness that are the natural children of holding onto a wrong over a long period of time?

Here again, we need a robust sense of how different we are from God. As I argued in a previous series, our sins do not affect God; he is not harmed, lessened or injured by our sins against him. Our sins against God harm only ourselves. Nor do we give God anything when we worship him, glorify him, love him and serve him. In our relationship with God, he always gives and we always receive. Glorifying and loving God are for our benefit, not God’s. God commands us to love him and glorify him for our sakes, not his. If the world had never existed, or if the entire human race was left in its rebellion, it would not have diminished God one iota. God creates and saves purely out of love for us, not as a form of self-seeking. He commands us to glorify him for our sakes, not because he’s on a perpetual ego trip. His glory is our greatest good.

This is why God’s forgiveness of us is quite different from ours. His forgiveness is that of a judge, not a private citizen in a purely private squabble. He is passing a verdict of eternal condemnation or eternal vindication against us in his act of forgiveness. It is a personal act of forgiveness, yes, because we sinned against God. But God was not the injured party; he is not standing in the courtroom seeking justice for himself, but is seated on the judgement seat establishing justice for all. Unlike us in our dealings with those who sin against us, God does not have a horse in the race when it comes to our forgiveness or condemnation. It is all about us; God will not be lessened or benefited by the outcome one way or the other. That is why his forgiveness is entirely of grace and love, and his justice has nothing of revenge in it. God stands above and over our sins and our services, the ever gracious, ever-loving, unmoved mover.

But us human beings are nothing like that. If you sin against me, you harm me. You can permanently injure me—physically, emotionally, mentally—such that I carry those wounds throughout my life. You can destroy my reputation, take away my wealth, break my body, kill or drive away everyone who loves me so that I am left completely isolated, take away my freedom and even deprive me of life itself. Our sins against each other cause real harm to one another. We do not stand in the same relationship with one another that God stands in with us. We can be genuinely and substantially harmed by another’s sin.

And so, when we forgive someone, I would suggest that it is to our benefit far more than theirs. When we do not forgive someone, then we continue to carry the weight of their sin against us, we continue to count and mourn what we lost by their actions, and we continue to be defined by the harm we suffered at their hands. Their sin does not remain in the past, but remains our constant companion throughout life, spreading its cold, clammy fingers over every joy and good gift that we receive. Emotionally and mentally, we are better off if we can be liberated from the debt that people incur against us. Furthermore, as Matthew 18:21-35, the parable of the unforgiving servant, indicates, there is an eternal dimension to our releasing others from the debts they owe us. We, not they, are the ones truly liberated from sin in eternity. Like all of godliness, we seek our own best interest by doing what is right, just as God seeks our own best interest in all his actions towards us—both his gifts and his commands. He commands us to forgive for our sake.

The rub is, the worse we are sinned against, the harder it is not to be consumed by bitterness, desire for revenge, and the ongoing sense that the original sin is being added to constantly by the offender’s lack of repentance to us day after day. It is, I would suggest, in a person’s own best interests to work towards forgiveness—especially when they have been seriously sinned against. To tell them that they can’t (or worse yet, to say that they can forgive, but that they are obliged not to) means that they are locked into the sin done to them, dependent on their offender to release them—for until he or she repents, there can be no forgiveness, and thus no freedom from the burden of having been sinned against. They must hold onto the sin done to them, but not nurse it; they must keep a sense of having been wronged fresh in their mind, but not give into anger or bitterness; they must continue to love their offender as they love themselves, but not give the offender the one thing that love desires: full forgiveness. It is an impossibly twisted exercise in Zen godliness that would defeat Yoda himself. It deserves a round of applause given by a single hand.

The final injury of such bad pastoral theology often comes in those situations where the offender does repent. For if a person must not forgive until there is repentance, then once repentance has taken place, they must forgive—quickly and sufficiently perfectly to result in full reconciliation between the two parties. The same people who required them not to forgive because reconciliation wasn’t possible will now require them to forgive straightaway because reconciliation is now possible. And so a person, who may have to work towards such forgiveness over the course of years (remembering that we are dealing with the extreme cases here)—beginning with a simple choice to not seek revenge, moving on to praying for their offender (that God will bless them and do good to them for their own sake) and finally beginning to put the hurt away—is often required to do the whole lot in one once-for-all, act. It is a test of faith and faithfulness that increases in proportion to the harm done to them, and so is hardest on the very ones most injured and sinned against. But surely the call of Jesus is exactly the opposite—to be tender with the least of his people and to carry the burdens of those most weighed down.

Those most sinned against, who have been genuinely and profoundly (not merely) hurt but harmed, surely number among those we are to treat with especial care and gentleness—the least of Christ’s little ones. I suggest that this is only really possible when we see that forgiveness (as opposed to reconciliation) does not depend upon the other party’s repentance, and that forgiveness is a work-in-progress that (especially when the hurt is profound) could take a long time. Those truly harmed by another need to start forgiving and not have to wait until their offender does the right thing. Furthermore, they need the space to work on forgiveness and not be pushed to be reconciled quickly just because the offender has come to their senses. Both of these require our forgiveness to occur without repentance as a condition and without reconciliation as the necessary conclusion.

We’ll continue this issue of the pastoral dimension with our next post, and consider the issue of false repentance by the offending party and the circumstances when the repentance offered is far less than the offense that was committed.

(Read part 5.)

36 thoughts on “Forgiveness and repentance (part 4): The pastoral dimension (ii)

  1. My one serious objection to this article is the statement: But us human beings are nothing like that. Now I’m a pretty flexible and progressive functional guy when it comes to grammar, but this is beyond the pale! We English speakers don’t use pronouns like that.

    Just wanted to get that in before anyone made any serious comments. Thanks for the post, Mark!

    Stephen.

  2. raspberry Stephen, for realses.  Youse is a grammatical pendant – not sure what a necklace and language have to do with each other but people is often calling I a ‘pendant’.  Or is that ‘peasant’…

    Slightly more seriously, glad you liked the post.  Grammar (and spelling) and I are A Work In Progress.

  3. Hi Mark,

    Thanks for this series. It’s an issue that has troubled me for 20 years, and I go back and forth in my opinions. I’ll admit that I have not found your argument entirely persuasive, but you have raised some good points.

    One point especially you keep returning to – that God’s forgiveness is not dependent upon our repentance. It depends upon what you mean by dependent, of course! I’ve always been taught that faith and repentance are necessary for salvation – as per Mark 1 “repent and believe the gospel!”

    Now we nuance that, like the reformers, and say that the repentance is the necessary by-product of the faith. As Luther said, “We are saved by faith alone, but not by a faith that is alone”. But it seems that the vast majority of evangelical teachers would say that where there is no genuine repentance, there is no salvation.

    My question for you is simple and genuine – do you believe it is possible to be forgiven by God where repentance is absent?

  4. Hi Craig,

    Good to hear from you.  You’re welcome for the series.  I too have shifted on this view over about twenty years – although in my case I hstrongly held the view I’m now critiquing until that took a fatal blow during Peter Jensen’s third year doctrine lectures at Moore College, and then has crystalised increasingly in the direction I’m now arguing for.

    One point especially you keep returning to – that God’s forgiveness is not dependent upon our repentance. It depends upon what you mean by dependent, of course! I’ve always been taught that faith and repentance are necessary for salvation – as per Mark 1 “repent and believe the gospel!”

    Yars, I’m being a little bit naughty because I’m not saying every time (or at all in the posts, I think), “is dependent on in an instrumental and not meritorious way”.  But I can live with that.  If I did say that I’d get even more accusations of being a pendant, or maybe a pennant.  Anyway, I’m sure I’d be pennitent after the fact.  Or at least have a perchant thatways. 

    Ahem.  For the record, I don’t think I anywhere suggest or accuse people who take a different tack than what I’m proposing from making repentance something that earns God’s forgiveness.  I’ve written the posts assuming that people see repentance as necessary but only as an instrument, not merit.  I will eventually argue that that’s not possible, repentance simply is a ‘work’ whether you’re Catholic or Protestant, but I hold off making that point as long as I can so as to address the issue as though repentance is like faith – an instrument, not merit. 

    As far as repentance and faith being necessary for salvation, I am going to give a resounding ‘yes’ or ‘no’ depending on the precise way you mean that.

    Now we nuance that, like the reformers, and say that the repentance is the necessary by-product of the faith. As Luther said, “We are saved by faith alone, but not by a faith that is alone”. But it seems that the vast majority of evangelical teachers would say that where there is no genuine repentance, there is no salvation.

    Agreed, and the way you have stated things here is absolutely true.  I am in no way at all advocating a forgiveness from God that leaves someone in an unrepentant state.  The question is all to do with what you have classified as a ‘nuance’.

    My question for you is simple and genuine – do you believe it is possible to be forgiven by God where repentance is absent?

    Okay, the simple answer is ‘no’.

    And we’ll finish this in the next comment.

  5. concluding

    The slightly more complex answer depends on what precisely you mean.  Let me ask you two questions:

    1. Do you believe it is possible to be forgiven by God where there is no being made part of the church of God?

    2. Do you believe it is possible to be forgiven by God where there is no hope of the resurrection?

    Now, I would hope that if you had to answer the questions simply you’d give a straight ‘no’.  But if you had a little more freedom you’d want to know exactly what is being asked here.  There are two possibilities:

    A When God forgives he also gives repentance/incorporation to the Church/hope of the resurrection.  So one cannot be in a state of forgiveness without also living a life of repentance/being part of the Church/having the certainty of resurrection from the dead.

    B. God will not forgive someone until they are repentant/have been incorporated into the Church/have ensured that they will definitely be raised from the dead.  That is, that repenting/ joining the church/ ensuring one’s resurrection is the means and instrumental condition for God’s forgiveness, and doing this is the way to receive God’s forgiveness.

    In case B, my answer is a resounding ‘No’ to all three questions – yours plus my two.  Repentance, hope, being part of God’s people are like a huge number of other things (such as the gift of the Spirit) – absolutely certain gifts of the gospel.  No one receives the gospel and is without them.  But there is only one instrument whereby forgiveness and union with Christ is received, and that is faith. 

    Against some bizzare heretics that, as far as I know, have never existed, we do not guarantee our resurection as a means to being reconciled with God.  Against Catholicism, Orthodoxy, and some strains of New Perspective thinking we do not get reconciled with God through being joined to his people.  And against some muddle-headed Evangelical thinking, we do not repent in order to receive God’s grace.  God’s grace makes repentance both possible and certain.  (and now we really are beginning to creep into the territory of the final post).

    That’s not just a ‘nuance’ – of concern simply for theological pedants with too much time on their hands.  That’s the Reformation.

    As always Craig, a very perceptive contribution and question.  Thank you.  Feel free to chase this further, as I think this is one of the key hinges to the whole question.  I’m more than happy to try and point to the Scriptures that I think pushed the Reformers (and should push us) in this direction.

  6. Hi Mark,

    Many thanks for your comments, I find them helpful. Some things are become a little clearer. I may be playing devil’s advocate a bit here – I want to push your arguments, but I’m not wedded to my position.

    If I understand you, you deny that repentance is an instrumental action with regards to our forgiveness – not in the same way that faith is. If we take the RC view of repentance as a good work of atonement, that is certainly true.

    But I’ve just been having a quick squiz at Calvin on repentance, and he redefines the term as a turning toward God, and argues that in a sense, faith is comprehended within repentance. (He then gives a few overlapping defs of repentance, and says that faith and repentance must be distinguished. The frenchman makes my brain hurt).

    But my point is that it is in this latter sense that I believe people on my side of the fence are using the term “repentance” – that is, a turning toward the person who was wronged, a reaching out for reconciliation. I feel this is an important point to make, as your posts seemed to characterise our position as treating repentance more as a meritorious work, a “making amends” sort of thing.

  7. So many thoughts – and I’ve been trying to keep this brief.

    I should do you the courtesy of answering your questions (though I think they were rhetorical?). Like you, I’d say “No” to both. And I definitely get the point you are making about these things being consequences of faith.

    We (at least) would not say, “You must join a church before you are forgiven”. Point taken.

    However, if we see repentance as a “turning”, then I think most of us would be happy to say, “You must turn to God before you are forgiven.”

    And I think that’s what my mob is saying – for real forgiveness to take place, the offender must want it. Mark, have you ever said, “I forgive you” to someone who doesn’t want it? I have – and the results are not pretty! In the past I’ve told people to forgive others, but keep their forgiveness a secret, because the offender will go ape.

    So we ended up with forgiveness that is unsought by the offender, and kept secret by the offended,. Is this really what Christian forgiveness is all about?

  8. One of my problems is that I still don’t quite understand what human forgiveness actually is. God’s forgiveness is easy to understand – it means that he doesn’t give me hell for my sins. It is giving up the lawful right to exact a punishment.

    The only human situations that are analogous are when one person is in authority over the other. For example, my son does something naughty, and I tell him that I’m not going to punish him as he deserves – that is forgiveness.

    But the sort of situations we are speaking about are not like that. Say someone at work spends six months slandering me, and hurts my relationships and my career to a severe degree. What does forgiveness actually mean, here? I Have no lawful right to inflict a punishment on such a person. The analogy with God’s forgiveness breaks down.

    If I can understand this, I believe it will make a number of the other issues at hand much clearer.

  9. Hi Craig,

    Wow! This is really good stuff.  I’ll take it in the order you’ve written it, but you’ve really pushed the discussion out really well.  I’ll try and emulate your efficiency in using words, but no guarantees.

    If I understand you, you deny that repentance is an instrumental action with regards to our forgiveness – not in the same way that faith is. If we take the RC view of repentance as a good work of atonement, that is certainly true.

    Yes, I am denying that.  But I don’t think that saying repentance is a good work is simply a RC position.  I think that’s the view of the Reformers, more or less.  The RC position was to say it was a good work and that it was necessary for salvation.  Some Reformers try to then fix the problem by subsuming repentance under faith, some, like John Bradshaw http://www.peacemakers.net/unity/jbsermonofrepentance.htm seem to me to keep an essentially Catholic view but add qualifiers to distinguish it, and others like Calvin (far more helpfully in my view) make a carefuly distinction between the two and so say that repentance is a gift of the gospel, not a means to it.

    <blockquote>But I’ve just been having a quick squiz at Calvin on repentance, and he redefines the term as a turning toward God, and argues that in a sense, faith is comprehended within repentance. (He then gives a few overlapping defs of repentance, and says that faith and repentance must be distinguished. The frenchman makes my brain hurt).<blockquote>

    Heh.  Book 3, Chapter 3 of the Institutes http://www.ccel.org/ccel/calvin/institutes.v.iv.html is absolutely critical to this debate in my opinion, so I’m glad you went there – the series will end by pointing people there and encouraging them to go read, mark and inwardly digest it.

    I will encourage you to reread it again Craig, as I think you’ve missed steps in Calvin’s exposition.  Calvin is engaging with a wide range of solutions to the ‘what is the relationship of faith and repentance’ problem that had been proposed by Reformers.  As is his tendency in such situations, he tries to be as positive as he can about views that he still rejects. 

    He also is very concerned to not ‘flatten’ the biblical data.  So he invariably offers a single synthethised definition on the topic, but will often acknowledge other dimensions not captured in his definition later in the discussion.  He often offers what he sees as being at the heart of the concept, not somethig that necessarily captures the thrust of every verse relevant to the topic.  But he doesn’t want to squash those other verses either…hence what appears to be a head spinning ‘yes but no’ approach.  I think it is simply brilliant model of reading the Bible and doing theology.  I wished more biblical studies guys and theologs would emulate it.
    So, Calvin actually rejects the idea that repentance is comprehended within faith, and gives, as you say, mutually overlapping definitions – each one capturing a slightly different aspect of the issue.  But his critical points are:
    1. Faith and repentance are distinct.
    2. Repentance comes when we are united to Christ and receive both the status of being righteous and the grace to start pursuing righteousness (an argument he also makes in his Reply to Sadaleto.

    Reread it, with your eyes open to whether my two point summary does him justice, and tell me what you think.

  10. continuing

    But my point is that it is in this latter sense that I believe people on my side of the fence are using the term “repentance” – that is, a turning toward the person who was wronged, a reaching out for reconciliation. I feel this is an important point to make, as your posts seemed to characterise our position as treating repentance more as a meritorious work, a “making amends” sort of thing.

    Hmmmn.  Sandy has opined something similar in commenting on a previous post in the series.  You guys could be right, and I’m stacking the deck a bit unfairly in how I’m putting things.  The other possibility is that you are reading into my words a sense (a concern?) you are beginning to feel about your own view of the place of repentance in forgiveness. Obviously the latter is my hope, but I’ll keep my eyes out for whether you and Sandy are more on the money here.

    I’m actually very happy with a ‘turning to the other person’ as a kind of working definition for repentance that captures the heart of it.  However, in the footsteps of one of my heroes, Calvin, I want to add and push forcefully for a couple of other dimensions, that I think we often hold onto only weakly, if at all.

    That is that repentance must focus on acts and not just the relationship.  Often the problem is with someone who hasn’t turned against the person, but just keeps sinning against them within the relationship.  If our definition of repentance doesn’t include a focus on repenting from specific acts then it’s harder to address that issue.

    The other is that repentance includes the need to make amends for the wrongs done.  This seems to have almost vanished from our discussions and thinking, but is really quite important.  Until I’m prepared to make amends to you for the wrong I’ve done you, I am not genuinely seeking reconiliation with you.  Often that ‘making amends’ is nothing more than an apology, and so we don’t even reflect on it.  But there is no repentance without it, in my view.

    So those are there in my thinking, but not to try and force a legalistic view of repentance on ‘the other team’ but to embrace what I see as a wider ambit of repentance for all of us.  But for the heart of the concept – I’m with your team – repentance is a turning towards the other person. 

    It’s just that in ‘our circles’ I hear that so often I wasn’t going to waste words on something that is ‘common knowledge’ anyway.  That would be suitable for an article, but a blog should be a bit more ‘piecemeal’ than that I think.

  11. However, if we see repentance as a “turning”, then I think most of us would be happy to say, “You must turn to God before you are forgiven.”

    Yep.  That sounds fairly obvious.  But I think you’ve taken sides with the Catholic side against the Reformer side with this statement.

    This really, really matters, so I’m going to try and address it at a bit of length.  It really is going to pre-empt a lot of what’s in later posts, but I think it matters enough.

    What does it mean to turn to God?  I think a view would have to include at a minimum:

    1. Ceasing be at enmity to God and beginning to love God.

    But, as Scripture reminds us, if we love God then we will keep his commandments (John 14:21, 1 Jn 5:3, 2 Jn 1:6).  Which means we need to add:

    2. Ceasing to disobey God and beginning to obey God.

    What does God command us to do?  Chief among his commands is to glorify him and serve him.  (Rom 1:21-23, 25 as a description of what it means to turn away from God, and so therefore the opposite is a description of what it means to turn back to God.)  So we should add those too:

    3. Ceasing to worship and serve false gods and begin worshiping and serving God.

    Now let’s look at those three: here we have someone who loves God, keeps his commands, worships and serves him.  They’ve clearly turned to him.  They’ve repented.

    But aren’t these also all ‘good works’?  If someone perfectly does these three things they would have no need of salvation, God would, on the last day, pass a verdict of ‘this person is righteous’.  Loving God, is, after all, keeping the first and greatest of the commandments (Mat 22:37-38).  ‘Good works’ aren’t simply external, legalistic, acts someone does.  Good works is being the kind of person and living the kind of life that pleases God.  Surely loving, glorifying and serving God, and keeping his commands are the very heart of true good works.

    So to say that someone has to turn God before God will forgive them is tantamount to saying that they have to begin to do good works before God will forgive them.  They mightn’t have to do much – just begin to want to love God, begin to want to obey him, begin to want to glorify and serve him.  But they have to start doing good works at some little tiny step before there can be forgiveness.  That is a basic structure that fits well with Catholicism – with the later scholastics’ “modern way” where we just make the smallest possible step towards God first, and then God responds with grace, and we respond to that, and so draw closer and closer to him in an ongoing virtuous cycle.

    To put it another way.  When I turn to God, I call on him as my Father.  Relating to God as Father is simply basic to a genuine repentance, a genuine turning to God.  There’s no earlier step before I become Christian, but where I am in the process of becoming a Christian, where I call on him as ‘God but not Father’.  I just call on God as my Father.  But Romans 8:14-16 points out that I call out ‘Abba, Father’ by the Spirit of God and that that is evidence that I have been given sonship.  Now unless I get given the Spirit of God before I become a Christian, then a key aspect of turning to God only becomes possible when I become a Christian.  It is the gift of the Spirit that turns me to God.  I just don’t have the resources to do that before then.

    The same goes for loving God.  If I love God before I am a Christian, then we have to either say that that love is my independent contribution (Hello semi-pelagianism, or Arminianism) and so downgrade seriously the Bible’s doctrine of sin, or we say that it is a product of the Sprit of God.  But if it is a product of the Spirit of God, then either I receive the Spirit before I receive Christ, rather than faith in Christ being the means whereby I am given the Spirit, or we posit some kind of ‘mini-gift’ of the Spirit, not quite the whole thing, but just enough to get the whole ball rolling – to make salvation possible.  And then we are spot bang in an analagous situation to the Catholic distinction between congruent merit and condign merit – we don’t love God the whole way, but enough to justify God responding to that by giving us more grace so that we love him more perfectly. 

    I am fairly sure that I am with Calvin and the Thirty Nine Articles on this one.  And that they are with the Bible and the gospel on it.  And that it really does matter profoundly.  Repentance is not an aspect of faith.  It is as an aspect of good works.  That doesn’t make it bad, it means that it arises as part of God’s salvation.  By faith, God gives us what he requires from us. 

    That whole discussion is probably a bit dense, but I’m not sure how to make it easier to follow without obscuring the issues.

  12. Craig, this next bit you wrote is simply fantastic.  It’s a great earthing the issues in a real concrete issue, that is just very clear-minded in addressing what’s going on:

    And I think that’s what my mob is saying – for real forgiveness to take place, the offender must want it. Mark, have you ever said, “I forgive you” to someone who doesn’t want it? I have – and the results are not pretty! In the past I’ve told people to forgive others, but keep their forgiveness a secret, because the offender will go ape.
    So we ended up with forgiveness that is unsought by the offender, and kept secret by the offended,. Is this really what Christian forgiveness is all about?

    Well, it is definitely the case that there is no forgiveness from God except where the offender wants it.  Hence why Calvin’s (and I think Luther’s) approach is the classic: preach God’s expectations for humanity (we can call that ‘godliness’, ‘the Law’ or ‘the need to repent’) until people realise they can’t do it.  They simply cannot please God.  Then they realise their need for salvation and turn to Christ in faith as the answer to their need. 

    So, yes, great point.  Between us and God, God only forgives the person who wants to be forgiven.  And that’s fundamental to the gospel.  ‘Wanting it’ is part of the Reformed definition of faith as a looking to Christ for salvation from sins and judgement.  That’s a clear point in your favour and against my view.

    However, there is a bit of complexity here too.  God forgives me for a whole lot of stuff that I don’t want forgiveness for.  Among the enormous raft of my sins against God, I am aware of only a small, very small fraction of them.  I would go so far as to say that with most sins forgiven by God, I don’t want forgiveness for them.  There is probably also going to be a set of sins that I am forgiven that I consider to be things that I did right – and so would be quite offended if it was announced to me that I have been forgiven these things.  So there is an important dimension of my relationship with God where sins are forgiven without my desire for that specific forgiveness.

    So, while I think your view of our forgiveness of each other captures this aspect of God’s forgiveness better (the need for faith for forgiveness), I think mine captures some of the more complex aspects (i.e. less central) aspects better than yours.  I would argue that the difference between human and divine forgiveness at this point is because we’re not like God so some mileage differs, but I can understand someone seeing it as an argument againt my view.

    I’ll pick up your key point in the next comment…

  13. continuing…

    As to the bigger point you’re making about forcing forgiveness upon someone who rejects it and keeping it secret from them, that’s a great and common issue.  I have a hassle with the way you’ve invoked it:

    Is this really what Christian forgiveness is all about?

    The answer is obviously ‘no’.  But if I pushed the example back on you:

    The offender refuses to recognise what they did as wrong and the relationship will end unless you just drop the issue and neither forgive nor not forgive the action but treat it as though it was right.  Do you drop it and connive at sin, or do you end the relationship?  And whichever one you choose is this really what Christian forgiveness is all about?

    Then I think we get ‘no’ as well.  You offered us a tough situation,  which is what makes it so good – it’s a tough one that we all recognise as common.  But the nature of such situations is that you can’t find out what ‘forgiveness is all about’ from them – what we’re looking for is a solution that fits with our knowledge of how God has treated us in Christ and that seems calculated to express genuine love in that situation.  I’m putting up hard cases, not to say, “is this really what forgiveness is all about’, but to say ‘your view either doesn’t have an answer to this, or has a poorer answer than my view.’ 

    So, with that in mind, here’s my initial thoughts:

    I am commanded to forgive.  I have no freedom not to forgive.  But God was entirely free to not send his Son to die for us.  His forgiveness is entirely of grace, and while it is in no way opposed to his justice he could have walked away and forgiven no-one and still been perfectly righteous. 

    That means there is something profoundly different about my forgiveness from God’s.  I have an obligation, an ongoing debt, to forgive, which is not there in God’s forgiveness of me.  I rightly praise the sheer grace of God’s forgiveness to me, and see my forgiveness of others, not as similarly extremely gracious, but just basic, the least I could do as someone who has been forgiven so much.

    In such a situation, my forgiveness of you is not primarily about you at all.  It is primarily about my relationship with God.  If I refuse to forgive you then I sin against God far more than I sin against you.  The obligation to forgive you comes fundamentally from God to me, and only secondarily from God through you to me. 

    Given that, then I think I am prepared to say that, in the extreme cases there may be no need, (and much to be gained) from my ‘doing my righteous deeds in secret’.  I forgive you, and keep that to myself.

    What your and my relationship need is not so much for you to know I forgive you, but for you and I to reconcile – to turn to each other.  Sometimes (usually) that will be promoted by the sin and the forgiveness being explicitly addressed between us.  Sometimes (in cases where someone disagrees that they sinned, or where the sin is really tiny) it is counter-productive to that turning to each other to bring the sin and forgiveness up. 

    And so, I keep the forgiveness secret and don’t tell the person.  In much the same way that I keep my love for them secret and don’t tell them I love them, my patience with them secret and don’t tell them I’m being patient with them etc.  In fact, most of the time I just ‘do’ my godliness to other people, not ‘show and tell’ my godliness to them.

    I have never told someone who didn’t want my forgiveness that I forgave them (I always suspected the reaction would be what you mention).  But I do regularly forgive people who don’t want it.  I am not going to go around my various realtionships playing traffic cop, stopping every relationship because I’ve taken offense, raising the offense requiring repentance for it, then letting the other guy know I’ve forgiven them. 

    What I do is do the things that I think push the relationship forward and that help the other person act better.  Sometimes the best thing is to address the specific problem up front.  Sometimes the best thing is to let it go through to the keeper and encourage their repentance by acting in a way that encourages a different set of norms to be the norms in the relationship.  As best as I can with the wisdom God gives me I pursue a path with people where ‘being upfront’ and ‘keeping it secret’ are two ends of a spectrum within which I travel widely as I consider the demands of love within the specifics of this particular relationship.

    To me, that’s an expression of making reconciliation and love the driver of the relationship, and not being locked into a specific method for dealing with sin (challenge, repentance, forgiveness).  That method becomes simply a tool in the toolkit, not the whole shebang.

  14. Thanks for that Mark – there is much to chew on there. Regarding the nature of repentance, I will do as you suggest – read Calvin, and then work my way through your points. This will take some time and I suspect the debate will have moved on by the time I’m finished, but that is fine.

    One rather esoteric point occurred to me while reading through your argument – distinguishing the regenerative work of the Spirit from the indwelling of the Spirit avoids one of the difficulties you indicated. I believe this distinction is necessary if you accept that there were old testament saints with saving faith, but who did not have the Spirit indwelling.

  15. Regarding the remainder of your comment, I think you are correct to bring up the issue of hidden/unacknowledged sin. It’s certainly an issue with my position.

    I think I need to understand better what you mean by forgiveness, though (as per the final point in my previous post but one). In some ways it almost sounds like you just mean a charitable attitude in one’s heart toward the offender.

    One dictionary definition of forgiveness I found said it meant giving up feelings of anger and resentment. Is this all forgiveness is between humans – is it simply about feelings?

  16. Hi Craig,

    This will take some time and I suspect the debate will have moved on by the time I’m finished, but that is fine.

    Possibly, but I think comments on these posts stay open for two or three weeks, so there could be opportunity for you to come back and ‘muse aloud’ as to where your thinking is up to and why.  I’m fairly confident that a good number of Sola readers would be keen to hear your thinking.  I know I would.

    …distinguishing the regenerative work of the Spirit from the indwelling of the Spirit avoids one of the difficulties you indicated.

    Yars, good point.  That’s the fairly natural way to go as the solution to my ‘mini-gift of the Spirit’ problem. 

    My hassle is that while I think that’s a good solution for faith as the means of salvation, it’s not so much for love.  My impression, from passages such as Rom 5:5, Gal 5:22, and Col 1:8, is that the NT relates Spirit-generated love with the indwelling of the Spirit.  All of those passages look really, really odd if they’re describing something that happens before I am united to Christ and which is the means whereby I am united to Christ.

    My hunch, without ever having chased it down carefully, is that Calvin would consider OT believers not just as regenerate (in our sense of the word) but as united to Christ in a ‘same but different’ way as us.  For them too, repentance is a fruit of receiving the gospel in an OT way, not a means to that end.

    I think I need to understand better what you mean by forgiveness, though (as per the final point in my previous post but one).

    LOL!  Nice gentle hint.

    I would have responded to that too, but I had already done five comments in a row on a single thread. 

    Bruce Wayne needs to work up a bat-obsession, develop a whole bat-themed ensemble and gadgets and get Commissioner Gordon to shine a big shadow of a bat into the perpetually overcast sky to scare evildoers.  I’m pretty sure all I have to do to scare off Sola readers is have my name appear on the ‘recent comments’ section several times in a row…

    So I thought I’d wait until there was another comment or two on this thread before speaking again.  But now that’s happened, I’ll discuss that over the next two comments….

  17. Turning to the question of what human forgiveness is…

    I think I need to understand better what you mean by forgiveness, though (as per the final point in my previous post but one). In some ways it almost sounds like you just mean a charitable attitude in one’s heart toward the offender.

    Heh, one moment I’m making repentance sound legalistic, external, and Roman Catholic, and the next as though forgiveness is to do with an inward attitude?  I’m either doing something right, or very, very wrong.  smile

    One dictionary definition of forgiveness I found said it meant giving up feelings of anger and resentment. Is this all forgiveness is between humans – is it simply about feelings?

    Yars, ever since someone (in a published book no less) tried to ‘prove’ the egalitarian case by quoting a dictionary meaning of ‘equality’ (I mean really!  Could you make it any more obvious that for you modern culture defines all the concepts before you turn to Scripture and let it speak to the issue?) I’ve tended to not use dictionaries to find the meaning of important theological and ethical terms. 

    I don’t think human forgiveness is just to do with feelings, any more than I think repentance is just to do with turning to another person, or sin is just a ‘disruption in the relationship’.  We’re in a post-60’s, sentimental, fluffy, tree-hugging era that hates hard edges, objectivity, and lines in the sand so I’m happy to work with all those meanings I just thumped and even (when they’re understood correctly) agree that a couple capture the heart of issues.  But forgiveness really isn’t fundamentally to do with feelings at all.

    I think you pointed us more in the right direction when you first raised the question:

    One of my problems is that I still don’t quite understand what human forgiveness actually is. God’s forgiveness is easy to understand – it means that he doesn’t give me hell for my sins. It is giving up the lawful right to exact a punishment.

    I think you nailed it right here.  It is giving up the lawful right to exact a punishment.

    Biblical justice between human beings in the OT is sometimes scary for a modern Westerner (at least in my observation of how even Christians often respond to it), it often seems barbaric, uncivilised.  It is proportional judgement.  What wrong I do to you needs to be done to me in return.  If I cause you to lose an eye, the just thing is that I lose an eye in return.  In some circumstances (such as damaging property) the right thing isn’t to destroy property in return but to recompense for the damage suffered.

    That has to be kept in mind when one turns to a passage such as Mat 5:38-42 and its exhortation to turn the other cheek.  Whereas proponents of ‘no forgiveness without repentance’ usually see this passage as something other forgiveness, related, but not really forgiveness itself, that simply shrouds ‘forgiveness’ in mystery as far as I can see, and fails to take seriously how Jesus connects it to the principle of ‘an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth’.  If I do not seek a loss of an eye for my loss of an eye, then I have forgiven the person.  I have absolved them of the debt that they incurred for the harm they caused me.  Now I can do that grudgingly and resentfully and so be nasty about it, continue to hold it against them, try and ‘make them pay’ in little passive-aggressive ways and the like.  But the baseline meaning of forgiveness has been met – they don’t have to pay the debt their sin against me incurred against them.  (Obviously, Christian forgiveness is qualified by terms such as ‘sincerely’, ‘freely’, and ‘from the heart’ in various passages, so the forgiveness we offer is more than that baseline.  But forgiveness is always going to be at least what you described.)

    Because we’re all sensitive new-age kind of guys we don’t like thinking in legal categories or making justice a key feature of our relationships (unless we’re preaching justification by faith or propitiation of course, then we parachute in the whole forensic framework into our obsession with being relational) so forgiveness and repentance keeps getting abstracted and internalised in our discussions of its human dimension.  But I think the core meaning is fairly objective.  You wronged me.  You are now in my debt.  And I am entirely in my rights to enforce my rights against you.  Forgiveness is to tear up that debt and not require it to be repaid, and so treat you and relate to you on the basis that you are not my debtor.

    to be concluded…

  18. Concluding…

    Taking that to your couple of examples:

    The only human situations that are analogous are when one person is in authority over the other. For example, my son does something naughty, and I tell him that I’m not going to punish him as he deserves – that is forgiveness.

    No.  That is not forgiveness.  It might be mercy (or it might be being indulgent) but it is not forgiveness. 

    You do not discipline you son because he has commited an offense against you.  You discipline your son in order to encourage him towards a good and righteous life.  There will be times when he never did anything against you directly and you’ll discipline him significantly, and times when he’s really hurt you but it’s not really something that you see discipline is called for – you will deal with it more ‘man to man’ on a very personal level.

    Disciplining is, I think, on a different ‘track’ to the issue of forgiveness, however much that the two are entangled because a child’s misbehaviour is usually also a defiance of parental authority, and enstrangement of the parent then makes it hard for them effectively parent the child.  Nonetheless, I’m not sure of anywhere in Scripture that draws a close link to parental discipline and forgiveness. 

    Thinking the way you’ve put it here pushes us towards the view that there is no moral difference between a spank and physical abuse.  And for me, that inability to immediately see an obvious difference is one of the great signposts of how simplistic and impoverished our society’s moral thinking has become (at least among the chattering classes).

    But the sort of situations we are speaking about are not like that. Say someone at work spends six months slandering me, and hurts my relationships and my career to a severe degree. What does forgiveness actually mean, here? I Have no lawful right to inflict a punishment on such a person. The analogy with God’s forgiveness breaks down.

    Yes you do have a lawful right.  You even have a legal right: you can take her to court.  And, in NSW, you’ll probably win, defamation laws being what they are.  You do not have the authority to act on your own behalf and so just take money off this person that you think is equivalent, or go around slandering them in return, you need to put the case in the hands of a third party – a judge.  But you have the lawful and legal right to do that.

    But morality is more than legality, more than human laws, there is a lawful right even when there is no human law.  You have the moral right in your relationship with the work colleague to treat them as someone indebted to you, and to constantly relate to them in a way that prods them and reminds them that they are in the wrong in their realtionship with you.  The person should do what they can to undo the damage: fix your reputation, tell people they mispoke about you, and should do what they can to ‘make it up to you’ as well.  And you have a moral right to expect that even if there is no human law that you can use as a tool to enforce it.  (And this is where the emotions start to enter in – for we often experience the moral-but-not-legal dimension as primarily to do with emotions and feelings).

    At its minimum, forgiveness means letting go of that lawful right you have to have the person make amends and restitution – whether by legal coercion or moral persuasion.  You neither seek to put their eye out in return, nor do you seek to have recompense for the loss of your eye.  You put the offender in the clear.  And if you do it wholeheartedly, sincerely, and freely then your relationship is not marred by the unpaid debt either.  (It might not be same as it was when the relationship was innocent – that’s another issue again that goes to the issue of what is reconciliation and whether it is really ‘turning the clock back’ on the relationship to before the sin occurred or whether it’s something else; but the important thing for this discussion is, the relationship is not lived under the shadow of the debt.)

    With some kind of understanding in the mix like this, then I think it’s very profitable to then talk about emotions, and relationships, and the like.  But I think forgiveness becomes very mysterious if I we don’t have something as objective and hard-edged as this as the baseline.

    Not sure how helpful you’ll find that, but that’s where my thinking is at the moment, as the next post in the series indicates.

  19. Thanks Mark, that is extremely helpful. To be honest, you went down an entirely different road to the one I thought you would – but that keeps things interesting.

    I’m not sure how many will bother to have read this far, but they will be blessed if they have. It’s possible that MM should approach you about writing the “Lifebook Guide to Forgiveness” at some stage…

    I concede immediately your point about the distinction between forgiveness and mercy relating to discipline.

    Let’s focus on the second example of workplace slander (and lets assume it was too subtle to be the subject of a defamation lawsuit, for the sake of simplicity).

    I’m intrigued by your suggestion that the person who has slandered me has created a moral debt that I’m legitimately entitled to collect upon. I initially rejected such an idea when I came up with the scenario, because I was thinking “eye for an eye”, and I couldn’t imagine God’s economy would allow me to “slander” in return!

    But you suggest “collecting” on the debt would look like this –

    …to constantly relate to them in a way that prods them and reminds them that they are in the wrong in their realtionship with you.  The person should do what they can to undo the damage: fix your reputation, tell people they mispoke about you, and should do what they can to ‘make it up to you’ as well.

    My gut tells me that you are on to something here. It’s still a little fuzzy, but I think this may be the right track. Ironically, our Christian heritage means that we do not think in terms of moral debt. Perhaps the old Saxons understood forgiveness better!

    (cont)

  20. I’m still struggling to understand what forgiveness means in concrete terms in such a scenario. If I “give up” my right to collect on the slander debt, what does that mean? That I never mention it again? Is it as simple as that? That still feels a bit undercooked to me.

    As Sandy noted earlier, it’s interesting to see that both sides of this debate effectively land in the same place. When I’ve counselled people who have been badly hurt by others (mostly divorcees), I’ve encouraged them not to seek to hurt the other person in turn, not to shove the hurt in their face, not to seek revenge etc.

    I haven’t really seen that behaviour as “forgiveness”, though. More as acts of charity, love, mercy, grace… But I guess the ideas are all intertwined.

    I guess I’ve seen forgiveness as involving both parties in some sort of interaction, and as resulting in a degree of reconciliation. Hence the need for the offender to actively seek forgiveness. But my views are far from settled.

    (cont)

  21. I can see some issues with your broad definition of forgiveness though, especially as it relates to our interactions with society.

    For example, should the abused girl we hypothesised about earlier not report her abuser to the police? Has she given up her moral right to justice?

    Another example that occurs to me. Should have a man who is severely injured in a car crash not make a claim against the at fault driver (and his green slip?) Has the injured man given up his moral right to seek the compensation that may well allow his family to go on eating while he is off work recovering?

    Christians have landed in different places on this issue. If I recall correctly, Calvin even thought it was ok for Christians to sue each other!

    (cont)

  22. Having found so much that is useful in your comments (and I mean that sincerely), I still wonder if the weight of scripture is against your position.

    I look at scriptures like the following –

    If your brother sins, rebuke him, and if he repents, forgive him, and if he sins against you seven times in the day, and turns to you seven times, saying, ‘I repent,’ you must forgive him.” (Luke 17)

    If your brother sins against you, go and tell him his fault, between you and him alone. If he listens to you, you have gained your brother. But if he does not listen, take one or two others along with you, that every charge may be established by the evidence of two or three witnesses. If he refuses to listen to them, tell it to the church. And if he refuses to listen even to the church, let him be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector. (Matthew 18)

    For me, it seems difficult to square such verses with the understanding of forgiveness you are describing. It’s possible that further meditation will offer a resolution…

  23. Hi Craig,
    It really is a privilege having a conversation like this with you, mate.

    I’m not sure how many will bother to have read this far, but they will be blessed if they have. It’s possible that MM should approach you about writing the “Lifebook Guide to Forgiveness” at some stage…

    First my creation posts on my blogs and now this?  You’re just trying to create work for me.  smile I have started working one day a week for MM, so who knows what Tony’s fiendish mind might come up with?

    I’ll grant that a long thread isn’t everyone’s cup of tea.  But I think it might be a cup of tea of choice for those who really wish there was something moderately substantial to help them think through an issue.  And I think this is the kind of issue where some people would like to chase the rabbit hole about as far down as Craig Schwarze wants to swallow the little red pill.

    I’m still struggling to understand what forgiveness means in concrete terms in such a scenario. If I “give up” my right to collect on the slander debt, what does that mean? That I never mention it again? Is it as simple as that? That still feels a bit undercooked to me.

    Well, it’s uncooked because I don’t like trying to push discussions out too far myself – takes so long to establish the point anyway, and I can never be sure exactly which direction the other person wants it to be pushed (did that on Barth in the impassibility series, and the whole thread became unwieldy).  The fourth post in the ‘pastoral implications’ section of the series should point in the direction you want. 

    But for the moment, ‘giving up’ your right to collect means that you don’t treat them as in your debt, and don’t expect any kind of recompense from them.  It doesn’t mean you pretend as though they didn’t sin against you, and it doesn’t mean that you don’t seek their repentance. 

    It means that you seek their repentance, and take note of the sin, the way any person who wasn’t directly hurt by their sin, and who loves them would.  You seek it for their sake, because they need to repent.  You act as though you are your brother’s keeper, and so your only interest is their good, not you getting paid on the debt.  You’re fairly indifferent as to whether you get an apology, or whether they put matters right, or make it up to you.  You still want them to repent – you just want it now because they’ll be better off, not because you want the debt fixed. 

    So you may encourage their recompense to you if you think that’s necessary for their good, or you may let it go entirely and give them a free slate if you think that’s more in the interests of pushing them on in a genuinely good way of life.

    As Sandy noted earlier, it’s interesting to see that both sides of this debate effectively land in the same place. When I’ve counselled people who have been badly hurt by others (mostly divorcees), I’ve encouraged them not to seek to hurt the other person in turn, not to shove the hurt in their face, not to seek revenge etc.
    I haven’t really seen that behaviour as “forgiveness”, though. More as acts of charity, love, mercy, grace… But I guess the ideas are all intertwined.

    Yes. One of the things that king-hit my commitment to your view was Peter Jensen in third year doctrine questioning whether it was really possible for human beings to love someone when they haven’t forgiven.  As I weighed it up I was reluctantly forced to conclude that it wasn’t really possible. Unforgiveness really hinders the ability to genuinely love someone from the heart as you love yourself. 

    I think for Jennie and I that was when first began to really see that forgiveness is a part of godliness, not something out on its own in a unique category, and in fact is a child of love, so to understand it in various pastoral problems you can start thinking in terms of how love deals with the various problems we wrestle with.

    I agree that both sides end up in the same place usually.  There do seem to be some cases where representatives of one side and reps of the other can take almost opposed positions however – for example whether someone profoundly harmed can start forgiving without waiting for repentance, and whether they need to forgive quickly once repentance has occurred.

  24. Hi Mark and Craig,

    I’m not sure how many will bother to have read this far . . .

    I for one am lapping up every word of it. If it’s a privilege to have the conversation, Mark, then it’s a double privilege to be allowed to be the fly on the wall.

  25. Hi Craig,

    continuing

    I guess I’ve seen forgiveness as involving both parties in some sort of interaction, and as resulting in a degree of reconciliation. Hence the need for the offender to actively seek forgiveness. But my views are far from settled.

    That’s one of the key issues.  If you continue to believe that, you’ll ultimately reject my view and go with yours.  If you decide that forgiveness and reconciliation are two distinct things that should go together but won’t always in a fallen world then you’ll probably end up with something like my view. 

    I think my forgiveness of you is fundamentally to do with the obligation I have as someone who is forgiven by God in Christ.  So it doesn’t need your involvement, or even knowledge. 

    However, that cuts against the grain of its teleology or purpose – forgiveness is designed to effect reconciliation.  So, as much as possible, it’s best if my forgiveness of you is in the context of mutual interaction and mutual reconciliation. 

    But not being able to fulfil that purpose doesn’t mean forgiveness can’t be done, or shouldn’t be done.  Sometimes that way will promote the most reconciliation possible under the circumstances.

    I can see some issues with your broad definition of forgiveness though, especially as it relates to our interactions with society.
    Christians have landed in different places on this issue. If I recall correctly, Calvin even thought it was ok for Christians to sue each other!

    These are great examples you’ve raised Craig, and I think your two observations here are really important: these have to do with our interaction with society, which means that they make the issues far more complex – the issue becomes more than just you and me. 

    Second, there’s a very wide range of views among Christians, which relates a lot to the division between the Anabaptists and the Reformers – whether the Church replaces society or is part of it. 

    Once again, having been an ‘anabaptist’ in my views on these matters, I’ve increasingly come around to the Reformers’ views – like Calvin, I think Christians can forgive and still sue (even suing Christians) in certain circumstances. 

    For me it’s analogous to war – I think it’s regrettable (like getting sick or injured) but not a moral scandal if Christians are found fighting on opposite sides in a war.  We’re still part of society. 

    For other Christians, the very possibility means that Christians must be anti-war – for them the Church more-or-less replaces society.  This issue is similar to that, in my view.

    For example, should the abused girl we hypothesised about earlier not report her abuser to the police? Has she given up her moral right to justice?

    Here, we need to move the scope of the question out further from just the relationship of the two people. 

    All sin is evil and will be punished by God.  But Rom 12 tells us that God has given the sword to authorities to punish evildoers and reward good.  Now, even though there is a sense in which to be angry with someone is to be guilty of murdering them, I don’t think God wants rulers to use the sword in response to anger.  There seems to be a category of sin that calls for the sword here and now in the world we live in. 

    Rulers are to use the sword against sinners like that.  And Christians are to submit to those rulers in their efforts along these lines.

    So the abused person should report the person, co-operate with the authorities etc.  But they do so, not to seek their justice, but as a commitment to justice in the global sense and of submission to authorities.

    I think it is analogous to Deut 13:6-11 requiring people to ‘dob in’ relatives who are proselytising idol worship and to be the first to cast the stone at the execution. 

    Unless they are absolved from the requirement to love their own family, that has to be an expression of a larger commitment being more important than the merely personal.  (As staggeringly hard as it might be for the average modern westerner to believe that such a thing is possible…)

  26. concluding

    Another example that occurs to me. Should have a man who is severely injured in a car crash not make a claim against the at fault driver (and his green slip?) Has the injured man given up his moral right to seek the compensation that may well allow his family to go on eating while he is off work recovering?

    Again, it’s going to depend a lot on how you see forgiveness commands fit with the rest of our obligations, and how ‘godlike’ you see our forgiveness.  Mat 5:38-48 and the like seem to exclude making a claim no matter what your view of forgiveness.  Certainly God doesn’t forgive us, then hit us up for ‘monies owed’ (despite certain scholastic thinking that separated guilt and debt so you were forgiven, but still needed to work off your punishment).  And the anabaptist strain in Christian thinking – that looks for a clearly supernatural ethic, and a very literal reading – is drawn to that as what we must copy.

    I’m more with the Reformers.  I think the Christian is set free so that not making a claim is a genuine possibility.  But it can be the right thing to make a claim – especially if you need to preserve your own life, or the lives of those you have responsibility for.

    In that situation, Jesus is pointing to the way and goal of how we go about it: no sense of getting a pound of flesh, a desire for any other solution, a preference for keeping it as impersonal as possible, just seeking the bare minimum necessary to discharge our responsibilities. 

    It’s a less supernatural kind of godliness – not ‘heaven breaking in’, more ‘life in this world shaped by the word of God’.  Less anabaptist, more Reformer.  I think it is far more gracious all around. 

    This way of thinking makes better sense of passages like 2 Cor 8:1-3 where Paul holds up the Macedonians as an example of giving all they can afford and more, but does so to put forward the principle that we should give generously what we can afford 2 Cor 8:12-15.  It’s less of a ‘must follow this rule’ and more of a ‘set free to follow doing good as far as you can’.

    Those are very undercooked answers – just a basic pointing in the kind of direction of the cash value of this approach.  Hope they do the job. 

    I’ll pick up the scripture passages you raise in our next round of comments – they deserve space of their own, not simply to be tacked on at the end of my multi-comment response.

  27. @Mark, so many interesting points in your three comments… It’s quite late at night, so I’ll just throw down a few thoughts, and probably pick up again tomorrow or the day after.

    Regarding our hypothetical abused girl, of course I agree with you – I just wasn’t sure where you were going with the giving up your rights issue.

    As you point out, a distinction can be made between a personal and criminal “debt”. I discovered this a few years ago when I was seriously assaulted. Having watched American TV, I went to the police station and said “I want to press charges”. The policeman said, “You don’t do that – you make a statement.”

    In criminal matters, it is not we who are the offended parties – rather, it is the law that has been offended. We provided information to the law, and then the law (through it’s appointed officers) acts to collect on the moral debt that has been incurred.

    The bible tells us the upholding of the law in this way is a good thing, as we’d have Hotel Rwanda style horror in the streets otherwise. So yeah, it’s plain to me that the abused girl might well forgive her attacker, while the law would and should require accountability from the offender.

    (cont)

  28. I’ll be honest and say I’m starting to be persuaded by Mark’s arguments, though I still need to resolve tensions with the scriptural passages mentioned above.

    Reflecting on my own experiences has helped. About 10 years ago, someone hurt me very badly. I suffered quite a lot as a result of this hurt, and probably wasn’t completely free of the pain for a couple of years.

    To my knowledge, he has never accepted any responsibility, and certainly has never apologised to me. Yet I can say with great confidence that I hold no ill-will toward him, that I don’t consider him in my debt, and that I have nothing but good wishes for him. It feels absurd to claim all that, but then to go on and say that I haven’t actually forgiven him.

    To digress a little, it’s worth pointing out that the passage of time helped enormously here. Many Christians I know scoff at the idea that “time heals all wounds”. Yet there is some truth in this cliche. People find it much easier to forgive a wound 5 years after the fact, as opposed to 5 minutes.

    But this leads me again to wonder if forgiveness, as we perceive it, is any different to simply ceasing to feel resentment and bitterness. If I no longer consider you in my debt, it may be because I no longer resent your offense. Time has removed it’s sting.

    Or look at the same point another way. A person says, “I forgive you, but I feel bitter and resentful toward you.” Most of us could conclude that forgiveness had not taken place in this instance.

    Our feelings toward the person seem inextricably wrapped up in this issue – especially if we accept that an offender might still be held criminally and civilly liable for an offense, whilst receiving forgiveness from the offended.

    How much control do we have over these feelings? Can we choose not to be resentful? Can we choose not to be bitter?

  29. Hi Stephen,

    Glad you’re finding value for time spent on the thread.  Thanks for letting Craig and I know.

    Hi Craig,

    Okay, I’ve finally managed to publish my thoughts on Luke 17:3-4.  It’s a long series of comments and I’ve begun it here:

    http://solapanel.org/article/forgiveness_and_repentance_part_5/#5135

    So turning to Matthew 18:

    If your brother sins against you, go and tell him his fault, between you and him alone. If he listens to you, you have gained your brother. But if he does not listen, take one or two others along with you, that every charge may be established by the evidence of two or three witnesses. If he refuses to listen to them, tell it to the church. And if he refuses to listen even to the church, let him be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector.

    This passage is, I think, not in any particular tension with my position. 

    I assume that very few of us think that Matthew 18 is speaking of how to deal with all sins.  As Calvin observes in his commentary on it, you would never use this method on public sin – there you would just deal with it publicly, because it is already in the public domain

    And I think most of us recognise that you wouldn’t use this method for small sins – not taking enough care and so stepping on my toes when you could have avoided that by looking where you were going, for example.  Even if I’m not satisfied that you have ‘listened to me’ about your carelessness, it still seems overkill to move on to two witnesses and then bringing it to the church.

    So this passage is dealing with some kind of fairly serious sin that isn’t immediately public.  The nature of the sin is such that, if it is not repented of, it calls into question the offender’s Christian profession.  So the final step is not just that the two of us are not reconciled, but that he is excluded from the people of God.  The process is moving from private to very public.

    Accordingly, I think I can forgive my brother before starting on this process.  In fact, even if I wasn’t sinned against, I might still turn to this passage (among others) to get a sense of the principles at work before embarking on confronting a sinner. 

    This passage is not addressing forgiveness directly at all (although context shows it is connected).  It’s addressing repentance, reconciliation, and the increasing steps to take in the face of unrepentance.  It is only speaking directly about forgiveness if you’ve already decided that forgiveness and reconciliation have to arise together.

    That’ll do for the moment.  I’m a bit tired after the Luke 17 marathon, so I’ll pick up the rest of your great recent comments in a day or so.

  30. Hi Craig,

    Sorry it took so long to get to this comment, which again is great stuff, even though I dissent a bit from where you’re going with it:

    Reflecting on my own experiences has helped. About 10 years ago, someone hurt me very badly. I suffered quite a lot as a result of this hurt, and probably wasn’t completely free of the pain for a couple of years.
    To my knowledge, he has never accepted any responsibility, and certainly has never apologised to me. Yet I can say with great confidence that I hold no ill-will toward him, that I don’t consider him in my debt, and that I have nothing but good wishes for him. It feels absurd to claim all that, but then to go on and say that I haven’t actually forgiven him.

    Something similar for me, but happened a fair bit more than 10 years ago, and probably took longer than a couple of years to find freedom.  But I agree, under the circumstances you describe, how is ‘forgiveness’ anything more than what you describe your attitude to him to be now?

    To digress a little, it’s worth pointing out that the passage of time helped enormously here. Many Christians I know scoff at the idea that “time heals all wounds”. Yet there is some truth in this cliche. People find it much easier to forgive a wound 5 years after the fact, as opposed to 5 minutes.
    But this leads me again to wonder if forgiveness, as we perceive it, is any different to simply ceasing to feel resentment and bitterness. If I no longer consider you in my debt, it may be because I no longer resent your offense. Time has removed it’s sting.

    Or look at the same point another way. A person says, “I forgive you, but I feel bitter and resentful toward you.” Most of us could conclude that forgiveness had not taken place in this instance.
    Our feelings toward the person seem inextricably wrapped up in this issue – especially if we accept that an offender might still be held criminally and civilly liable for an offense, whilst receiving forgiveness from the offended
    How much control do we have over these feelings? Can we choose not to be resentful? Can we choose not to be bitter? .

    I disagree with you a fair bit in this, Craig. I agree feelings are really wrapped up in the issue of sin and forgiveness, but I don’t think you can collapse their presence or absence into forgiveness quite this way.

    You sin against me in some fairly serious way.  The effect of that is that you hurt me, possibly quite profoundly, and you may even harm me.  I suffer definite loss, and not a small, ‘just shrug it off and keep walking’ kind of loss either.  Under such circumstances I am likely to feel a whole range of emotions produced by that loss – anger, sorrow, desire for justice/vengeance, resentment, bitterness.  For most of us sinners we have no immediate control over those emotions appearing – they just sweep over us as a more-or-less natural response to being king-hit. 

    Let’s say that in the midst of this whirlwind of emotions I forgive you – put you in the clear.  Do the emotions go away?  Not on your life (except in fairly unusual circumstances where God makes a miraculous change in someone’s heart).  The wound is still there, the loss is still fresh, I can relieve the experience of having had something taken from me easily – almost anything can trigger it and put me back into the middle of those feelings.  But does that really mean that I haven’t forgiven?  Do I have to be master of my emotions to forgive?  Do I have to not grieve, not be angry, not resent the loss, not feel the seductive pull of bitterness or else there’s no forgiveness?

    Let’s say I lose my family in an accident – an amazing wife and two great sons taken from me by providence.  Have I only trusted God in that, and been content in his will for me (and them, be good not to be too solipsistic in such a situation) if there is none of the normal feelings associated with grief and mourning, if, in fact, there is no grief or mourning either?  It’s just joy, joy, joy down in my heart?  Or can trust in God and contentment in his will for me co-exist with anger, sorrow, resentment, depression and the like?

    I could only accept your take on things if I thought that human beings should strive to be impassible – self-sufficient, unaffected by anything outside us.  Only God is like that. We are passible, and it’s good for us to be that way.  That means we really are affected by what happens to us, and can’t just overcome it by a decision.

  31. concluding…

    Trusting God is not primarily about me – what I’m feeling.  It is fundamentally about the stance I take to God and how I relate to him in the circumstances of life.  The relationship, not my inner world, is the core meaning of faith.  That trust will look a bit different if my life has been one marvellous success after another, than if my world (or at least the bit I really care about) has just been taken from me.  It will be recognisably the same – I trust God.  But my emotions, my actions, that will vary in part based on circumstances.  And that’s good and right and proper.

    Forgiving you is not primarily about me either – what I’m feeling.  It is fundamentally about the stance I take to you and how I relate to you in the circumstances of life.  My relationship with you, not my inner world, is the core meaning of forgiveness.  That forgiveness will look different if I have ‘gotten over’ the loss you inflicted on me, than if I still experience that loss deeply.  I can put you in the clear both times – but in the latter case I will keep finding that my forgiveness has a long way to go, that my feelings keep encouraging onto an unforgiving path (hence Jennie’s post last year). 

    Yes, it is usually easier to forgive down the track than at the moment of the offense.  The valuation you place on the loss will usually decrease over time as you find that the experience of life shrinks the size of the loss in your estimation.  Either you experience other things in life and your life is enriched again, or you adjust to the loss and find that life is still worth living even with it.  Then as your sense of the loss shrinks, it becomes easier to absolve someone of it.  But that’s not just feelings – even though feelings are really in play.  It’s also about the stance you take to the loss, and to life in general.  Whether you close in on the loss and define yourself by it, or increasingly let it go and define yourself by life more broadly.  That’s an orientation, a stance, a choice (often a choice that is so profound that you never consciously ‘choose’ it at all).

    To put it the other way.  The fact you feel this way now is the sign that you forgave then – right back when you felt angry, bitter, hurt and the like.  If you hadn’t forgiven then, you likely wouldn’t feel the way you do now.  Some people grow increasingly bitter over time (especially sons with fathers, or father-figures) about hurts received, or lack of good things that they should have received but didn’t and that shadows their lives.  Some towns, countries, people-groups have inter-generational feuds because people never get over what his great-grandfather did to my great-great-grandaunt.  That’s not feelings, that’s a stance that interacts with feelings in a vicious cycle.

    Forgiveness isn’t feelings.  In the short-term feelings can make forgiveness easier or harder, and will shape what the forgiveness ‘looks like’.  But in the long term, forgiveness, or the absence of it, will be the driver of feelings.

  32. To put it the other way.  The fact you feel this way now is the sign that you forgave then – right back when you felt angry, bitter, hurt and the like.  If you hadn’t forgiven then, you likely wouldn’t feel the way you do now.

    There could be something too that, and the same thought occurred to me while I was writing. If the distinction you are making is correct, it is quite important. When people say they are “struggling to forgive”, what they usually mean is that they are struggling with feelings of anger, bitterness and hurt. People assume since they are still feeling these things they have not forgiven, and hence feel guilty and frustrated. If it were possible to make this distinction, it might be of enormous pastoral value.

    My major issue at the moment in this discussion is that forgiveness, as you define it, still feels a bit abstract. But I’ve generally found your arguments persuasive…

  33. Hi Cath,
    Turning to your second great set of observations.

    Those who struggle with un-forgiveness are struggling with the idea that forgiveness, or releasing someone from their debt, is ultimately unjust. It is unfair to cancel the debt, or what is owed to us in a restorative justice way.

    I’m not sure I agree with this, and I think it is fairly central to your whole argument in this post.  I’m sure some people are very noble and high-minded and think, “I’d really like to forgive this person but I don’t think it would be right – it just wouldn’t be just to cancel their debt against me.”  But I think most people think something more like, “I don’t care what you say, I’ll be damned before I forgive them for what they did!”  (And given Jesus’ teaching on how serious unforgiveness is, there’s a certain bleak irony in such sentiments.)

    When Jesus addresses the question of our need to forgive others, I don’t think he characteristically points us to how the justice problem can be solved.  I think he throws every motivation he can find at us, up to and including the kitchen sink. 

    It’s like Paul doing over Philemon regarding Onesimus.  Paul comes up with every possible motivation from high-minded and noble, to enlightened self-interest, to playing on affection and sympathy for Paul.  He throws everything he’s got into the ring because the decision matters so much, and almost anything could stop Philemon from making the wrong decision. 

    Jesus seems to do something quite similar in the Gospels regarding forgiveness.  It’s not one basic problem that stands behind all unforgiveness.  Mileage varies from person to person, and so the toolkit on display across the whole of Scripture to address the issue is actually quite comprehensive in my view.

    If it is God’s to avenge, the just requirements for full restitution can be left with God. When they don’t occur in this lifetime, then that is God’s problem to redress (Romans 12: 14-21).. This enables us to hold loosely to our rights for compensation and our desire that the perpetrator taste the suffering that we have experienced at their hands. It also enables us to leave space for the spirit to move in another’s life and not take it into our own hands the need to finish unfinished business.
    I believe that it is also God’s to heal. In a sense he is our cosmic insurance company. Once we put into God’s hands the responsibility to ensure that justice for the perpetrator occurs, we can also put into his hands our own need for justice and restitution as victim. This means we can accept what comes our way of restoration and healing – from His hands – either from the perpetrator or elsewhere, and let go of accounting with the perpetrator when this occurs.

    I think this is very helpful, and agree that as people internally appropriate it, it takes a lot of the sting out of things.  You basically give up altogether on trying to be the judge of just how much offense someone else caused you and leave that to God to work out. 

    As I’ve indicated to Craig, http://solapanel.org/article/forgiveness_and_repentance_part_4/#5156 I think forgiveness is easier for us sinners the smaller the debt we have to cancel is in our eyes.  So trusting God to judge rightly and getting out of the judging business oneself can only help keep the debt small in our estimation, and keeps us from acting as though we have rights to things, and thus makes forgiveness easier.

    To Be Concluded…

  34. Hi Mark,

    You said, “Our sins do not affect God; he is not harmed, lessened or injured by our sins against him.”.  Isn’t it true to say that our sins grieve God?  This may not “harm, lessen or injure” Him or His nature, as such, but doesn’t it affect God in some way?  In a sense couldn’t we even say that our sins have affected God (aroused His mercy?) to the point that they brought about his plan of salvation through Christ?

  35. Hi Andrew,
    Good to hear from you again.

    Isn’t it true to say that our sins grieve God?  This may not “harm, lessen or injure” Him or His nature, as such, but doesn’t it affect God in some way?  In a sense couldn’t we even say that our sins have affected God (aroused His mercy?) to the point that they brought about his plan of salvation through Christ?

    Yes, it is true to say that our sins grieve God.  Scripture says it, Gen 6:6, Eph 4:30, so I think I’d be on a untrustworthy limb to say that it isn’t true to say that. 

    But what does it mean to say that our sins grieve God?  If we say that it is a simple declaration that God feels sorrow the way we do, and that feeling just comes upon him unbidden then I think we end up in conflict with other things the Bible declares about God. 

    In a sense this is taking us back to the two recent impassibility series and to different parts of various conversations that occurred in the comments.  Let me give one tack on the question, not trying to be exhaustive, but to give a hint of the issues.

    Grief is an emotion that should elicit from us tender feelings towards the person feeling it.  If you grieve, or mourn, I should come and mourn with you (Rom 12:15), I should offer you comfort.  To use the old term, when faced with someone caught up in grief you are in the realm of pathos – tender heartedness and compassion.

    But are we really supposed to sit and mourn with God?  To offer him comfort?  To bear his burdens?  Should we feel pathos for poor God bearing a simply unimaginable burden of sorrow and mourning for all the sins that humanity commits?

    If God’s grief is an emotion just like ours then I’m not sure why the answer is ‘no’ except for the fact that we suspect ‘yes’ would be irreverant, if not blasphemous. 

    Scripture tells us what we must do when faced with sorrow, mourning, and grief, and never says, ‘but not in the case of God, by the way’.

    When Gen 6:6 says God was grieved, or sorry, when he saw humanity’s evil, the passage isn’t really conjuring up pathos for God so much as pathos for humanity.  God’s grief isn’t something that happens to him so much as how he responds to us, what he does to us.  It’s active, not passive. 

    Eph 4:30 isn’t saying, ‘Have some consideration for the poor Holy Spirit and don’t cause him any grief’ but is indicating that there are consequences for us for our actions as Christians – the relationship between God and us will be characterised by his grief rather than his joy.

    Now, the fact Scripture puts it the way it does drives home that God is invested in his stance towards us – his delight in or rejection of us and/or our actions.  These aren’t things God does that he keeps at arm’s length.  But I don’t think the point of language about God’s grief and joy is that we are changing God’s inner world of experience, rather that we experience the relationship with God differently.

    It’s a big question, but there’s a relatively brief sketch of where I’m coming from on this.  When I say we don’t ‘affect’ God, that’s at least a glimpse as to what I’m trying to say and not say.

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