Scott Stilson

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There is a very fine line between abstruseness and nonsense. And neither writer nor reader can distinguish for sure.

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If your hope for heaven holds that nothing you do here matters, then to hell with it.

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Heaven is not a judgement-free zone.

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Just re-listened to A Home and a Hunger (2017) by Caroline Cobb. Very devout singer-songwriter Bible stuff that sounds like a fledging, lady Andrew Peterson. Gabe Scott’s tasteful CCM production, including bouzouki, banjo, lapsteel, dulcimer, and dobro, helps make that comparison. More Bibley than Peterson. Highlights: “There Is a Mountain,” “All Is Vanity (Ecclesiastes),” “Emmanuel (Every Promise Yes in Him),” and “Only the Sick Need a Physician.” Two of the other numbers cry out for a full-on gospel music treatment. I’m glad talented lyricists are still writing very Christian (instead of merely theistic) songs for the church and getting good production value.

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I don’t feel at work the stress I feel at home, where stress accompanies not only the drive to get things done, but even the desire for recreation!

Why the difference? I’m not certain. But my surmises are several:

Might I import those circumstances into my non-DiamondBack life? Yes. And in :

From that last point, maybe the shorthand of it all is to feel that I get to do all the things: Whether I’ve actively decided to do something or that something is decided for me, it is all gratuity. Even adversity stimulates thought and the growth of wisdom and resilience. That’s how I feel at work. (How fortunate is that?) May I bring that feeling to bear in the rest of my life.

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I make lists. Here’s one: “Scriptural snippets that may indicate everyone makes it to The Party.”

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Here’s my latest working definition: “forgive”

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“Hold fast to reproof, don’t let go. Keep it, for it is your life” (Proverbs 4:13, Alters). Lord, may I cherish correction.

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Forgiveness is dismissal, as of a debt or a sin. There are two kinds of forgiveness:

  1. internal-states-oriented forgiveness, and
  2. relationship-oriented forgiveness.

Let’s take the protagonist of Secret Sunshine as our illustration. [spoiler alert] She can dismiss her son’s killer’s sin as reason for anger or rumination as soon as her anger and rumination is spent. She should try to reach the end of her anger and rumination, although these things do often take time. This is the sense in which love keeps no record of wrongs. This is the sense in which we say forgiveness frees us.

She ought not, however, dismiss her son’s killer’s sin as reason for distancing herself from her son’s killer or for wishing her son’s killer to be incarcerated until such time as that killer has made amends, requested forgiveness, and otherwise shown ample evidence of complete repentance. If she forgives him before those preconditions are met, then she is foolish and shortsighted, risking his further harm to herself, harm to others, and the killer’s moral deformation.

God can extend such forgiveness on some occasions because He is unassailable. And sometimes He does. But even He, for the sake of the other moral hazards, usually does not. We are to confess our sin against Him, point gratefully to the Cross as our amends, request forgiveness, and bear fruit in keeping with repentance.

Relationship-oriented forgiveness is still something we should want. Deeply. If we love our enemies, how can we not?

In the internal states sense, I have forgiven my father his shortcomings as a man and father. In the relationship sense, his sin no longer poses any moral hazard to me or to anyone else, so reconciliation is possible to the degree that his character allows.

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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.)

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Holy smokes. Beloved is not remotely a Christ figure. Claiming as much amounts to literary malpractice.

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So far, Potts’ Forgiveness: An Alternative Account seems beautiful…and spurious.

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Crucifixes > crosses.

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Idea for a novel: Upon His arrest, Jesus goes ahead and does appeal to the Father to send twelve legions of angels. Then what happens?

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In response to Brad East, Tyler Hummel, and a baptism I attended today, I feel compelled to say that I, for one, currently detect zero indication—in scripture as well as in observation—that there is magic at work in baptism and the Eucharist. That is precisely why they need to be attended by high ceremony.

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O, for hymnody that combines awe, piety, and moral effort.

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Surely, Psalm twenty and three shall follow me all the days of my life. ✏️ 🎤 🎵

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Just re-listened to: Glo (2000) by Delirious? The technicolor final feather in the caps of this Sussaxon anthemic rock worship band whose early records, more than those of DC Talk or Jars, served as the heart of my enjoyment of CCM from 1994–2002. Delirious? released four more studio albums after this, but none of those hit the spot for me, which implies that my continued enjoyment of their early records may be a matter of nostalgia. But on Glo there’s a combination of the Muse-like sonic pleasures of their stellar 1999 outing Mezzamorphis with the get-really-into-it instrumental worship jams—which, as far as I was concerned, these guys invented—of 1996’s Live & In the Can that made and probably still makes Glo a favorite of mine.

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Heaven gets a rap among some well-educated liberals, such as Oliver Burkeman, as being escapist. But it need not be divorced from justice here and now. On the contrary, it is a motivating vision. And a therapeutic one.

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Faith, hope, and love can all be misguided.

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Hope is:

Fear is the undesired version of the same.

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Revive us, O Lord.
But this time, do it right. ✏️ 🎤 🎵

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Karl Barth and Warren Buffet look like fraternal twins and they were/are both polyamorous? It’s all too much.

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I have concluded that:

yet I still feel like a conservative Christian. It probably has something to do with me maintaining in my Christianity a robust vertical dimension. God is real, personal, and knowable. It seems so many who hold positions similar to those I outlined above jettison theology altogether—or at least any theology they feel comfortable sharing or acting on in any social context—limiting their observable Christianity to horizontal, that is, human-to-human relationships.

As such, it’s often hard to feel at home anywhere.

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Familiarity breeds laxity.

By this I mean that in my relationships with my wife and kids, I am not consistently stanced to apply the same effort toward socially sensitive demeanor and diction that I do in my relationships with friends, colleagues, and acquaintances. My habitus outside the family is more disciplined and sympathetic than that within. There’s a certain alertness and natural effort to fit with other people that seems to arise only outside the comfortable confines of home.

I’d like to reimport that stance back into my home life. Sure, home is for relaxation. But I sense in myself a slackness of love. Carla, Sullivan, and Éa deserve better.