“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…”
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.
“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:
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.
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.
“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 your time with the microphone.
One option for fitting together the forgiveness on offer from God: If forgiveness is nothing more than disavowal of hatred and claims to requital or punishment, then He judges us, but He does not sentence us. And He always, always loves us and never hates us. It is still a terrible thing to fall into it. Fire and fear, and all that. But no punishment other than the mortification of being seen.
The Father did not abandon Jesus to crucifixion because He was angry with humanity.
Jesus’ crucifixion, rightly understood, puts an end to blood sacrifice. (Note the torn curtain.)
We are to imitate Jesus.
The Father does not like blood or violence.
How I disagree with Hardin:
Making amends, which is what some of the Levitical sacrifices, including the big one (Yom Kippur) were all about, is good and right.
God instituted, or at least did not contradict Jewish belief that He instituted, the Levitical sacrifices.
Jesus’ death affirms the logic of the Levitical sacrifices as just even if it simultaneously exposes their form (violence against innocent victims) as unjust.
It is unclear to me what Hardin can make of John the Baptizer’s insistence that Jesus was the “lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world” (John 1:29,36).
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.”
“If you find honey, eat just what you need, lest you have your fill of it and throw it up” (Proverbs 25:16). Anything, even very pleasant things like musicmaking or music listening, can become noxious if too much.
“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).
