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 word of the year this year is “get to”: Everything I do, I get to do. (Hat tip: Ethan.)
This is what self-exhortation (in this case, to be a better listener) sometimes sounds like in my house.
“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.
“All a man’s ways are pure in his eyes, but the LORD takes the spirit’s measure” (Proverbs 16:2). The first part isn’t true of everyone all the time. But it’s probably true of everyone some to most of the time. And certainly very often true of me. Lord, help us to discern.
I cannot reliably control my circumstances. I cannot at all control other people. But I can control my (current) self. Herein lies happiness.
A truism, perhaps. But one worth repeating, especially to someone like myself who scores, mostly to his chagrin, as an 8 on the Enneagram.
Proverbs also very frequently locates wisdom in how we receive correction.
Proverbs so often puts the locus of wisdom on what we say.
Our culture’s current and very understandable hangups about the injustice of forgiveness can be resolved by defining it as threefold:
- dismissal (of a wrong) as impetus to retaliation
- dismissal as impetus to resentment
- dismissal as impetus to alienation or reduction in standing
That list is not only a division, but also perhaps a progression: First, in very clear obedience to our Lord and to keep our communities and society from tearing themselves to shreds, we refuse to retaliate, despite our probably justifiable anger.
Second, and perhaps only as (a lot of) time passes but facilitated by both free ventilation and the wrongdoer’s repentance, we moderate our anger until it thoroughly dissipates. This part is an art, not a science: In the knowledge that we’re all quite capable of sin and likely blind to some of our own wrongdoing, we constantly tack toward total abatement of animosity and we refuse to cling to ill will; however, knowing that there are indeed things God hates, neither do we falsify anger’s cessation. As long it hangs around, we give it air when it’s time to give it air and let it motivate us to good deeds and systemic rectification.
Third, and properly only once the offender has confessed his or her sin, made amends, requested forgiveness, and otherwise shown ample evidence of complete repentance, we open the door to the end of ostracism, estrangement, and other relational sanctioning.
Technically, the second and third are interchangeable in order. Anger can and does linger even after witnessing repentance. But often, wrongdoers remain unrepentant, or at least inauthentically or unsatisfactorily repentant, which, while it renders the second form of forgiveness difficult, depending on the gravity of the offense renders the third form of forgiveness so hazardous to wrongdoer and injured alike that love requires it be withheld entirely. It is thus listed here last, even though, ideally, it’s something we should want, and deeply. If we love our enemies, how can we not?
God can and on some occasions does extend the last kind of forgiveness in the absence of amends because He is unassailable, rendering forgiveness less hazardous. But even He, for the sake of moral hazards to the sinner and the sinner’s neighbors, 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, including making amends with our neighbors when our sin against God is coterminous with our sin against them.
I preached a meditation on hope in the New Testament to help the folks of University Baptist & Brethren Church ring in the first Sunday of Advent. (Here’s video evidence.)
There is a very fine line between abstruseness and nonsense. And neither writer nor reader can distinguish for sure.
If your hope for heaven holds that nothing you do here matters, then to hell with it.
Heaven is not a judgement-free zone.
Kitchen towels are much more effective at soaking up water if, instead of constantly moving them around, you let them rest. My attention is a kitchen towel.
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:
- For one, I’m explicitly working for other people. That relieves me of the kind of internal pressure I feel when I’m working on my own stuff.
- It also helps that those other people for whom I’m working are trustworthy and trust me. That means I basically have liberty to do as I please.
- I have liberty to do as I please as long as I color within the lines a distinct mission: To maximize the security, resilience, utility, and accessibility of DiamondBack’s information. That unity of purpose helps.
- Finally, five days a week I enjoy eight-hour expanses of time in which do the work.
- Oh, and I’ve largely managed to avoid working under deadlines.
Might I import those circumstances into my non-DiamondBack life? Yes. And in :
- I can view myself as explicitly working for God.
- God is trustworthy and trusts me to do as I please.
- The unity of purpose is easy to identify: The great commandments.
- As for time: Why so serious? What’s the rush? All of life is a gift.
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.
Here’s my latest working definition: “forgive”
“Hold fast to reproof, don’t let go. Keep it, for it is your life” (Proverbs 4:13, Alters). Lord, may I cherish correction.
Forgiveness is dismissal, as of a debt or a sin. There are two kinds of forgiveness:
- internal-states-oriented forgiveness, and
- 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.
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.)
So far, Potts’ Forgiveness: An Alternative Account seems beautiful…and spurious.
Name a movie in which there’s a disagreement between child and parents and the parents turn out to have been unequivocally right.
I’ll wait.
The difficulty in answering this question is representative of a major cultural problem. Filial piety is miles better than whatever it is we’re doing now (just-try-to-keep-the-kids-safe-and-happy-ism?), but it stands zero chance of ever working if it gets zero support from culture machines.
O, for hymnody that combines awe, piety, and moral effort.
NO OPINIONS!