In the first six pages of Potts’ introduction, which are viewable if you scroll down here, he makes so many dubious logical moves that, depending on my current frame of mind, it will require either an act of will or a perverse curiosity for me to continue reading. He has basically written, “I can’t make sense of the biblical witness on forgiveness. So let’s just move on from the Bible and cobble together a completely new definition using other literature.” It’s an admission of interpretive failure on his part, not a successful problematization of the biblical witness on the subject.
“Isn’t it a moral hazard of some sort when a person who remains entirely unrepentant and absolutely allergic to reparations, who still menaces violence and still threatens victims, is offered forgiveness without any condition at all?” Yes, but the solution is to correct the unconditionality of the forgiveness—as per the Bible—not to redefine forgiveness beyond recognition.
“Why is it so often people of color and people already marginalized by systemic violence upon whom this forgiving responsibility falls?” Because powerful people seek to maintain their power by warping the biblical witness on forgiveness.
“What unjust purpose might the valorization of such suffering serve?” The maintenance of power over other people.
“Isn’t the offer of forgiveness more of a salve to the conscience of power than an instrument of victims' healing?” If forgiveness of the powerful by the powerless is unconditional, then yes.
“And isn’t it a moral outrage to pressure victims into offering this forgiveness, to mandate that those already subject to loss and victimization assume responsibility for redeeming their offenders?” Yes.
“When a law or code demands some recompense for wrong, how can we at the same time obligate or encourage the setting aside of that recompense?” We shouldn’t. To do so would be to misinterpret the biblical witness on the subject.
What he is trying to pass off as a definition of forgiveness is in fact a definition of lament and self-restraint, which are themselves a moral good in good time, but which are not forgiveness.
Why respond to bad hermeneutics by abandoning hermeneutics altogether? Why not hold the definition of forgiveness but change its mandates?
“Instead of attempting to parse or coerce an impossible consistency…” That is to beg the question, sir. You’re certainly not going to reach consistency if you already think it’s impossible!
“For all the Christian talk about unconditional forgiveness…” So the solution is to stop requiring forgiveness be unconditional, not to abandon forgiveness altogether by redefining it as something it’s not.
Why does the New Testament witness about forgiveness seems to have a little more weight of responsibility on the forgiver than on the offender? Because all exhortations to forgive assume that the offender has already tried to make amends**.** Forgiveness of a human by another human without amends is, in the Bible, not the way. The only reason God or Jesus sometimes do it is because there is no moral hazard posed to Them by our continued sin. They are untouchable. But even there, as a general rule, They require amends usually because of the moral hazard to the offender if they don’t.
Of course, this is not the only theological story we can tell about the death of Jesus. There are other interpretations of this sordid history, other accounts we can give of our hope in the cross. The outlines that have been carved into this atonement model are so familiar we barely question their necessity, but there is no necessary interpretive frame for the cross of Christ. We may preach Jesus Christ and him crucified, but that doesn’t mean we always know what to say or what it means. The metaphor that traditionally grounds this theology is entirely economic, usually given in terms of debt, obligation, and repayment,
You suggest alternative accounts of the Cross are possible. But then you abandon the attempt two sentences later! Don’t suggest you can but then not even try!
But aphiemi and remittere, the words translated as forgiveness from the Greek and Latin New Testament, concern not debt but distance in their literal etymologies. Aphiemi means to send away. To remit, at its root, is to establish a distance. When authority to forgive sin is granted Peter and the disciples, for example, the operative verb is luo, to set loose." So New Testament forgiveness is a slippery thing, to say the least.
First of all, who cares about the Vulgate? Second, there is no such thing as a literal etymology, at least not one that has any necessary bearing on the meanings of the words in question. (By the way, if you admit “literal etymologies,” then you greatly weaken the liberal dismissal of arsenokoitai as referring to all sex between men.) And what does the English word “remit” have to do with the Latin remittere, anyway! This is sloppy, sloppy, sloppy. And you have not in the slightest established that “New Testament forgiveness is a slippery thing.”
All of this is only to admit that aphiemi is used in the New Testament without a great deal of consistency (5).
“All” of this? “All” of what? You have not provided nearly enough evidence to substantiate this claim.
I’m not particularly interested in extrapolating from scripture a semantic consistency in the usage of these Greek words, (5)
Why not? Why say so? Again, just brushing the hard work aside.
[The Gospels] are contradictory stories studded with paradoxical aphorisms (5)
That is a huge assertion that Mark Jordan is offering, and here in Potts’ use without a single piece of evidence!
I therefore take the incoherencies and contradictions of scriptural forgiveness for granted. (5)
Or you could take them as invitations to explore and find out that what you thought were incoherencies and contradictions—of which, again, you haven’t even listed a single one—are actually things you didn’t understand.
If sin is distance, then God’s love will be signaled by the chasm Christ crosses to meet us rather than the torture he bears to win us.
It’s “God demonstrates His love for us in that…Christ died for us” not that Christ became human for us. I’m not saying God doesn’t demonstrate His love for us in the Incarnation. But don’t you say God doesn’t demonstrate His love for us in the Crucifixion.
He thinks through and articulates the social problematization of forgiveness as sometimes practiced today just fine. But his biblical hermeneutics are wholly unoriginal and unthoughtful. His attempt at exegetical problematization falls completely flat.
He sees a bad hermeneutic. But instead of correcting the hermeneutic, he just abandons all attempt. The effect will be to cave to secular ethics about the dismissal of sin and thus erase a virtue, and he’ll denigrate the Bible.
Is there a social problem with mandating conditionless forgiveness? Absolutely. Is there also a social problem with eliminating forgiveness altogether—which Potts doesn’t claim to be doing, but which he is effectively doing by redefining it? Absolutely. (There’s also an are-you-actually-following-Jesus? problem if you do so.)