Forgiveness

I am writing this chapter as someone trained in philosophy, and I am conscious that it passes rapidly over several topics that have occasioned many centuries of theological dispute. I hope that the theologians will find the philosophical ideas interesting enough to compensate for the theological naivety. There has indeed been a great deal of philosophical work in the last fifteen years on the topic of forgiveness. Most of it, however, has been about forgiveness between human beings. This chapter is primarily about God's forgiveness of us. To understand this, we indeed need to make use of concepts drawn from interhuman relations. As always, when talking about God, we have to use such concepts with caution. In this particular case there is another reason for this same caution. Our ideas of what it is to forgive each other have been influenced in many ways by thoughts about how God forgives us. It is an overstatement to say, as Hannah Arendt does, that “the discoverer of the role of forgiveness in the realm of human affairs was Jesus of Nazareth.” It is true, however, that our idea of forgiveness has been significantly shaped by Jesus, and Jesus ties our forgiveness of each other to God's forgiveness of us. For example, in the Lord's Prayer (Matt. 6:12, King James Version [KJV]), he tells us to pray to the Father to forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us. He also tells us, the other way around, that we have to forgive as we have been forgiven by God (Matt. 18:21–35). The present chapter moves back and forth between the forgiving that we humans do for each other and God's forgiveness of us.

As Nicholas Wolterstorff points out, Jesus is applying to the context of our forgiving each other an idea of forgiveness that was already present in the Hebrew Scriptures in the context of God's forgiving us. These Scriptures give a significant role to sacrifice as God's visible vehicle for this forgiveness. In this chapter I make sacrifice a central theme. My claim is that this is important in understanding the way in which Jesus’ death plays a role both in God's forgiving us, on the basis of the atonement, and in God's justifying us, and so in our reconciliation with God.