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.)
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.
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.
I have concluded that:
- hell as traditionally rendered is biblically indefensible and morally reprehensible,
- everyone will make it to the afterlife party eventually,
- believing in the Trinity and the virgin birth are not dogma but options, albeit ones I believe,
- monogamous same-sex marriage is a societal good,
- the universe is 13.8 billion years old,
- all biblical talk that seems to point to the Second Coming has already been fulfilled in the Transfiguration, the Cross, the Resurrection, the destruction of the Second Temple, and the conversion of the Roman Empire, and/or will be fulfilled for each of us when we die,
- abortion should be legal during some of pregnancy, and
- the Bible contains factual errors,
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.
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.
I have occasionally found myself wondering whether journaling and posting as frequently as I have been is good. Doing so requires time and attention that I could deploy toward other, more directly interpersonal matters. And it’s probably sometimes a neurotic response to the fear of death. But the fact is I do feel more fully alive when I have been writing. And just now, as I was grabbing a late-morning protein snack from the kitchen, it occurred that I would pay a non-significant sum to have access to the collected written output of my parents, my grandparents, or my great-grandparents. The more voluminous and representative of their psyches I knew their output to be, the higher sum I would pay. I want to know them. It would be good for me to know them. It would be good in the way similar to how reading a great novel is good: You get to know your fellow humans, you cultivate sympathy, and you get to know yourself, all of which foster loving, harmonious, sympathetic, self-controlled interactions with others.
If I can provide my descendants with a thick account of who I was, I find myself suddenly quite confident they will be the better for it. And not because I’m a paragon. No, even if I were a scoundrel, I think they’d be the better for it.
Just listened to: Portraits of a Mind (2023) featuring works composed by Ralph Vaughan Williams and Ian Venables performed by Alessandro Fisher, The Navarra Quartet, and William Vann. Maybe an hour of a tenor emoting impressionistic and devotional lyrics atop a string quartet and a piano isn’t your cup of English breakfast. It, or at least this particular hour of it, is certainly mine.
And maybe you’ll listen anyway to share in Vaughan Williams’ love for Dorian and Mixolydian modes, or to hear strong evidence in the Venables that the craft of contemporary art song lives on beautifully, or to wonder at or join in on the ardently devotional lyrics the agnostic RVW chose to set to equally ardent music.
If the 35–40 minutes it’ll take to read my essay about the reasons for and mechanisms of the cross of Christ is too verbose, Richard Beck, professor of Psychology at Abilene Christian University, has managed to encapsulate almost all of my answer in the just five short paragraphs that close this post.
The only fault I can find with his take isn’t really even a fault per se: He puts forward no explicit caveat that the forgiveness on offer is not human-to-human forgiveness but rather God-to-human only. I’m sure, however, Beck would agree with that if asked. I suppose also don’t agree with some of the ontology and hamartiology he puts forward in the posts leading up to the one I’m recommending.
But still, “A Theology of Everything: Part 7, Love Made Visible Within History” is well worth your four minutes.
The Holy Spirit ≠ spontaneity. The Holy Spirit ≠ awe at nature. The Holy Spirit ≠ frissons, feelings, or warm fuzzies. The Holy Spirit’s presence and activity may sometimes be coterminous with these phenomena. But He is not them, and the presence of these phenomena does not mean He is at work. Thinking otherwise can be quite misleading. Look instead for the fruit.
Related to my last post, the average Peruvian woman (4'11¾") would see me as pretty tall, but the average Dutchman (6'0") would see me as of average height. Meanwhile, the average adult blue whale would see me as larger than its food but still pretty tiny, and the average sugar ant probably wouldn’t see me to notice me at all, but if it did, would think me beyond colossal.
Of course, there’s a non-relative right answer: I stand 5'11¾ inches tall. But none of the four viewers in the above paragraph is wrong in seeing what they see. I’m not saying people couldn’t be wrong about my height or about the nature of God. But I am trying to give people like me who worry about the problem of religious pluralism a little less to worry about.
In in attempt to reply to Éa’s examining questions on Friday night that were essentially restatements of the problem of religious pluralism which came after she returned from a school field trip to Buddhist, Sikh, Hindu, and Jain temples in Pittsburgh, I stumbled into what I now take as a highly satisfactory answer: Think of how various people would describe me. Carla would describe me one way. Sullivan would describe me another way. You would describe me still another. A stranger on the street looking at me for the first time would describe me still a fourth way. And so on. In fact, everyone would describe me at least a little bit differently. The various takes on me would be accurate in part but inaccurate in others. Descriptive patterns and similarities would be evident, but never total. And a person who had never seen me wouldn’t really be able to describe me at all—nor even be able to say with any confidence that I exist. (Here we bump up against the problem of divine hiddenness, but that’s a different problem.)
Sure, I’ve recreated Hick’s elephant. But putting it in personal, rather than pachydermal, terms helps me embrace it more readily and thus be more at ease in our increasingly pluralistic world. So does explicitly allowing—no, stating as a sound prediction—that people in my illustration will obviously be wrong about me in some of the ways they describe me—even the people closest to me like Carla and Éa and Sullivan. That much is obvious when talking in terms of people. How much more so when talking about the invisible God?
