Can anything good come out of universalism? /s
Just finished reading: “Beyond Words: On the role of silence in film and faith” (2025) by Arthur Aghajanian, whose main idea is that filmmakers can use and sometimes—but not often enough—do use silence to draw viewers in to spiritual experience.
Just finished reading: “From Dietrich Bonhoeffer to James Cone: The complexities of forgiveness in a racialized Society” (2024) by Reggie Williams, whose main idea is that in America, Black forgiveness is a maintainer of the status quo.
Some striking quotations:
- “Can forgiveness find a footing in broader systemic realities?”
- “To encourage [Black people] to see their suffering as righteous obedience to God in Christ is to sanctify a perpetual social death.”
- “In a moment of racial distress, forgiveness becomes a reflex response that serves the social maintenance of racial hierarchy.”
Some quick reflections: This is why forgiveness without amends is usually bad.
Potts is right that punishment and recompense will always be incommensurate with the wrongdoing (except for restitution, which can come close). That’s how you can say that forgiveness and justice can and do coexist: Forgiveness doesn’t say nothing is due; forgiveness says that what’s been paid is enough. Nothing more is due.
Just finished reading: “Forgiveness ≠ Reconciliation: Wisdom for Difficult Relationships” (2024) by Yana Jenay Conner, whose main idea is well summarized by the title. This was my favorite article in the Winter 2024 issue of Comment. Conner helped me realize that Matthew 18 contains a righteous unforgiveness: “And if he refuses to listen…let him be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector" (v. 17). And these two partial quotations struck me as beautiful: “I was a daddy’s girl without a dad…” and “Even if I was interested in adjusting my grip on the cross…”
Just finished reading: “Promise, Gift, Command: Mapping the Theological Terrain of Forgiveness” (2024) by Brad East, who main ideas can’t really be summarized but can be itemized. According to East, forgiveness is:
- from God [meaningless],
- peculiarly Christian [false],
- integral to but not the whole of the gospel [agreed],
- administered by the sacraments [false],
- tricky [can be, but not as a rule],
- when we extend it, evidence that we have been forgiven ourselves [can be, but not as a rule], and
- something about which he still has several important questions [good, because he is muddled and hasn’t written a cogent essay here].
Just finished reading: “Out of the Depths: How Forgiveness Brought a Sex Offender Into the Light” by a man who fell and “Into the Depths: The cost of forgiveness will be your life” (2024) by a wife who forgave.
The man who fell submits that both easy acceptance and permanent excommunication are not good, the former creating dysfunctional communities by ignoring the woulds of the aggrieved, and the latter destroying the sinner. (For my part, I’ll add that the latter also creates dysfunctional communities.) His wife forgave him, doing neither of the above. And by that, he was saved. It even elicited repentance, he says.
The wife who forgave says she forgave he husband, and it has cost her a lot. But it’s the way of Christ, and it, she says, has made her holy.
Just finished reading: ”New Eyes: Forgiveness is not erasing” (2024) by Amy Low, whose main idea is that there is danger that forgiveness will unjustly erase the past. There is also a danger that unforgiveness will spoil potential futures for aggrieved and offender alike. Let us avoid both ditches as we walk the path.
I dedicated the new TV I bought to the Lord. That felt like syncretism.
“Go, eat delicacies and drink sweet drinks and send portions to whoever has none prepared, for the day is holy to our master, and do not be sad, for the rejoicing of YHWH is your strength” (Nehemiah 8:10, Alters). The enjoinment to enjoyment along with generosity, both in the name of the Lord, warms my soul.
Just finished reading ”Punishment and Retribution: An Attempt to Delimit Their Scope in New Testament Thought” (1965) by C.F.D. Moule, who argues that Retribution as satisfaction of abstract scales of an abstract justice is a sub-Christian and sub-personal idea. Punishment as reformatory, protective, or deterrent is fine. My take: Agreed, although he doesn’t spend enough time or brain reinterpreting the biblical passages that challenge this thesis, nor offering much of a picture of how the punishments mentions in the New Testament do work. In fact, he spends most of the article very weakly dismissing counterevidence.
I finally feel comfortable with my grasp of the relationship between non-retaliation, forgiveness, and reconciliation, together with God’s will regarding all three:
Mercy can be unwise.
Mercy is by definition unjust.
Just finished reading “Die With Me: Jesus, Pickton, and Me” (2006) by Brita Miko, who argues that we need to love and forgive even the worst of sinners if we’re going to follow Jesus. My take: Not if you think forgiveness should be granted without confession and repentance, as it seems Miko does.
To love God is to want to delight Him.
I am the In-Betweener:
I’m never satisfied.
Is that I’m keener,
Or am I just a bag of pride? ✏️ 🎤 🎵
Is it passionate love
Or just a love for passion? ✏️ 🎤 🎵
May all of our eros be agapified.
The degree to which you don’t buy the fundamental idea I put forward in this essay that amends are necessary for a just forgiveness is the degree to which you can stand even more amazed at the love of Jesus in subjecting Himself to crucifixion to provide that (proxy) amends. You may not believe amends are necessary for forgiveness (and if you don’t, that itself may be an indication of Jesus’ ideological success), but Jesus’ contemporaries and forbears did think so. If the idea is mere cultural contingency rather than ethical fact, that only makes Jesus’ sacrifice all the more amazing in its condescension—and thus more apt as reason to sit at His feet and align yourself with His overall ethical program.
“Having different gracious gifts, according to the grace given us: if prophecy, according to the proportion of faithfulness…” (Romans 12:6, DBH). If Hart’s translation is correct, then one should prophesy in proportion to one’s demonstrated faithfulness, not according to one’s faith, the latter word being the majority translation in this context vacant of meaning.
In other words, only prophesy if your deeds warrant you time with the microphone.
Part of 1 Corinthians 16 is as a good a motto as one can find: “Do everything in love.” Since so much of my life comprises words, and since the biblical proverbialists, Jesus, and James all emphasize the power and importance of our words, I’m going to provisionally subset the motto to concentrate its effect: “Say everything in love.”
Cheerful, curious, grateful, harmonious, sympathetic, brotherly, humble. That’s what I want to be.
“The secret to faith is to have two loves: one for God and the other for whoever happens to be standing in front of you at any given time” (Eloy Cruz to Jimmy Carter, as quoted by Randall Balmer in The Christian Century).
Listen, Merriam-Webster: You descriptivists do good work. It’s important we have maps of the lay of our linguistic land as it lies. But don’t purport to explain to the world that prescriptivists are only interested in “‘correctness’ set forth in ‘rules’ that [we] imagine.” Just like poorly developed roads, a poorly designed language (as I concede every language is to some degree) sometimes leads to confusion, frustration, and hazards. To suggest prescriptivists are always wrong to do what they do is the equivalent of saying city planners are always wrong to do what they do.
Misdevelopment of the land has consequences. So it is with lexicons—especially when the words in question are of moral value. Consider “forgive.” If “forgive” is “actually used,” as you write, “by writers and speakers of the English language,” to include by definition reconciliation, forgetting, and anger abatement, which in some circles, although thankfully not quite in your dictionary, resentment being different from anger, it does, then descriptivism can be guilty of abetting the deformation of our moral vocabularies and thus the persistence of harm, including domestic abuse and white supremacy, because despite your protestation, people look to your publications as a guide.
We need people alerting us to semantic hazards and dead ends.
Inspired by part of this interview with Lisa Silvestri, the author of Peace by Peace: Risking Public Action, Creating Social Change, which I may read soonish with my friend Neill—after I finish:
- Forgiveness: An Alternative Account, which Ruth and I both got excited about roughly simultaneously and thus co-purchased (co-purchasing books—what a fun idea! an interpersonal nano-library…),
- parts of Stricken by God?, another of Neill’s recommendations after he read my essay about the Cross, and
- Watchmen, recommended to me by both my son and my wife—
here is a list of what bothers me:
- barriers to walkability,
- the predominance of solo, receptive, junky entertainment,
- words whose poor definitional boundaries cause moral problems,
- faulty exegesis,
- parroting, and
- roadkill.