Forgive: Why should I and how can I? (part 1)
Book Review (Timothy Keller)
Every day I pray the Lord's Prayer at least once, which means I daily pray "forgive us our sins as we forgive those that sin against us". (Or, some variation of this in English or another language!) And I am now almost always mentally reminded of what Jesus says just after this in Matthew:
6:14 “For if you forgive others their sins, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. 6:15 But if you do not forgive others, your Father will not forgive you your sins.
It's been a hard year in the forgiveness stakes for me, waiting patiently in the difficult hope that a fellow Christian will forgive me. But as I pray, I am pointed to a more pressing concern, and in fact a far more important concern because while I can do nothing practical about their forgiving me, I can do everything about me forgiving others, and so I ask myself: do I/can I/have I/am I practising forgiveness towards others in my own life? And are there people that I am not forgiving? And if so, how will I move towards forgiveness?
Keller's book on Forgiveness piqued my interest when I heard about it on a podcast earlier this year. So I was looking forward to its release. In this post and the next, I'll summarise and review the whole thing.
Intro:
Keller opens with a survey of our time and culture, noting the growing strong sense of the need for justice, and cognisance of the way that forgiveness has been weaponised to indulge, excuse, and extend abuses of power and practices of injustice. Yet at the same time we resonate with the profound practice of forgiveness. How do we put the needs for justice together with forgiveness in a way that doesn't wipe out the former? This question is given extra force in the light of recent years.
1
Keller begins in Matthew 18, where we might expect him, because it's the most profound and extended treatment of forgiveness in terms of the connection between God-Human and Human-Human forgiveness. I don't think that's a difficult passage to understand, so much as a difficult one to realise in our own hearts and lives. Keller makes a few major points on the way through: the staggering, possibly infinite nature of the slave's debt; the costliness of forgiveness to the forgiver. He also uses the parable to put forward a four-fold definition:
brought the man to him : truth-telling about wrong-doing
pity on him : compassionate understanding of the perpretrator
forgave the debt : absorbing the loss oneself
released him : restoration of relationship
On the last point, Keller notes that there is a genuine openness and desire to reconcile, but that this step depends on the forgiven perpetrator. In the parable, the forgiven slave's subsequent actions immediately break that possibility. But, forgiveness that does not aim at and remain open to reconciliation falls short of real forgiveness.
Furthermore, Christian forgiveness functions across three dimensions, and the parable connects these. Vertical : our experience of God's forgiveness, Internal : forgiveness in the heart that can then flow outwards, to Outward : extension of forgiveness and the practice of reconciliation.
The sharpness of this parable is that it cuts us to the heart - we are the Unforgiving Forgiven, we are the ones whom the grace of God has come to, and yet in our own sinfulness, we "are blocking the actual effect of the gospel in [out] life". Keller is forceful here, because the text is forceful, "God's mercy must and will make use merciful - if it doesn't, then we never understood or accepted God's mercy in truth."
The solution to our own unforgivingness is not trying harder, more moralism in forgiving, But to "meet the living God through repentance and faith", it is a change of self that comes by our own encounter with the forgiving God.
2
Chapter 2 opens with the #MeToo movement, and the conflict over forgiveness that accompanies it - isn't forgiveness just a tool of oppressive patriarchy and misogyny that allows perpetrators to get off easy? Keller doesn't shy away from this, and gives us a taxonomy of doing forgiveness wrong. Firstly, the pressure to non-conditionally forgive - when people are told to forgive and forget, move on, without any reckoning with the wrongs done. This kind of cheap grace is far too prevalent, and is weaponised, especially by churches, to keep abuse and injustice in place. Secondly, to transactionally forgive - when we make forgiveness conditional on earning or meriting it. This is not really forgiveness, it is the exacting of the cost through punishment. Thirdly, Keller points to the cultural pressure to not forgive at all, that wrongs ought not be forgiven. This pressure has at its core a right impulse - that forgiveness, especially on the first model, has and is so often a way to deny justice, and enable wrongdoing. It lacks accountability for sin.
Keller spends the rest of this chapter exploring beliefs and views that support and underwrite the above three approaches. He speaks about our individualistic therapeutic world - forgiveness seems like an imposition of our community, and it's wrong to impose that on individuals. Forgiveness is only valid, in this context, if it promotes inner healing and release for the victim. Then, the rise of a new honour/shame culture, in which we gain honour as victims, and we exhibit vindictiveness to perpetrators of our perceived moral codes.
3
Chapter 3 is on the 'history' of forgiveness. Beginning with Arendt, Keller advances the thesis that forgiveness primarily makes sense as the effect of Jesus Christ on history. He takes a bit of a tour through Greek religion and philosophy, considers the non-retaliation of early Christianity, the way forgiveness and other-centered ethics challenges and conflicts with honour-centered ethics, and finally a short tour through the cultural aesthetics and resonances of forgiveness.
4
Chapter 4 is a walk through the Scriptures on the topic of forgiveness. Keller takes us through the OT, looking at words, concepts, and motifs of forgiveness. He spends an extended time reflecting on Psalm 130, as a case study on divine forgiveness, and particularly pointing out how the basis of forgiveness in the OT remains 'murky'. He also comments on the goal of forgiveness:
the ultimate goal of divine forgiveness. The psalmist says that he is waiting for the Lord. He is not, ultimately, seeking just reprieve or exemption from punishment. Rather, his goal is God himself. (p. 61).
Forgiveness in the fullest sense, biblically, is not simply asking for a pardon or remission—it is always after restored relationship. The goal is never merely therapeutic—a release from inward pain. (p. 61).
He then explores the New Testament on the same theme, before pointing us to the basis of forgiveness - the cross of Christ.
5
If you've read some Keller, after a while you get used to his usual triangulations. Very often he'll depict something as "not A nor B, but a third way". Sometimes that's done by synthesis, or by splitting, or by some other process. It's very useful and persuasive. Anyway, here I think it's done at its best, because chapter 5 explores "The God of Love and Fury" - how can God be both loving and angry, just and forgiving? He takes us back to the Old Testament again to show the full force of this tension, unresolved in the OT, but essential to our understanding of God
God is not just a God of love or a God of wrath. He is both, and if your concept of God can’t include both, it will distort your view of reality in general and of forgiveness in particular. (pp. 74-75).
This is expressed in a double paradox: The wrath of God expresses love, because God is ultimately angry at evil, and demands that human beings love; The love of God expresses wrath, because when we see the objects of our love either engaging in evil, or suffering harm, we are angry for them (and possibly at them).
It is this paradox and tension that leads us to, and to understand, the cross of Jesus. For at the cross, God is both "just and the justifier" (Rom 3:26) - in the former he satisfied Justice, in the later he expresses forgiveness. Because wrong creates a debt, and Christ pays our debt, God forgives our sin, but more than that, it would be now unjust to demand that debt from us - it has been paid!
This chapter closes with two questions for self-reflection, in terms of whether one grasps the mercy of the cross. Simply put, when confronted with your sin, does it move you closer to God, or further away? A proper grasp of God's grace means recognition of our sin drives us to him, not away. The second question isn't directly asked (I think this is a flaw in the writing at this point!), but for those whose view of God as absent/distant/unreal - will it work to be a relativist about what you do, but a moral absolutist about what others do? Or is that incoherent and unsatisfying?
6
This chapter is entitled "Justice and Love, Honor and Abuse", and begins by taking us back to ancient honour-shame cultures, in which defence and advancement of one's societal honour was what matters, and so forgiveness makes no sense. Keller points to Proverbs (20:3, 29:23) as examples of a culture in which defending one's honour at all costs was in fact not honourable - a view of strength as not asserting itself in dominance that was counter-cultural to the ancient world.
He then takes us to Leviticius 19:17-18 to explore how the OT law functions to create a "covenent community" characterised by both love and justice, expressed in both forgiveness and confrontation of wrong. Three things are forbidden in this text: (1) seeking revenge, (2) hating in the heart, (3) bearing a grudge. Two things are commanded instead, (1) rebuking (calling out wrong as wrong), (2) loving.
Justice and love must be combined in us because they are combined in the Lord. Justice and love can be combined because they are combined in the Lord and he will help us. (p. 90)
If we don't, and if we pursue justice without love, we will end up in vengeance.
At this point, Keller takes a sharp turn to tackle a confronting topic; he raises the issue of sexual abuse and the work of Rachael Denhollander, and makes comment on the podcast series The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill, and the persistent backlash and critique of traditional doctrines of atonement as legitimating and enabling abuse and its perpetuation. I listened to that podcast and it caused me to reflect a far bit on the way Mark Driscoll was held up in some of my own circles in the mid 00s, and to weep at the abuses within his church. I've also followed and read the work of the Denhollanders (Rachael, and her husband Jacob), and been moved by Rachael's powerful work of testimony and advocacy. Rachael Denhollander is a profound prophetic voice, because she has consistently and tirelessly worked to argue for the need for justice, due process, and a real reckoning for abuse in the church, at the same time she is deeply committed to an evangelical theology, and to forgiveness. In no sense would she abandon justice or forgiveness, but has and lives a theology that unites them both in the work of Christ. At the cross, God himself, not a third party, comes and takes the penalty.
I won't walk through the whole material from the Denhollanders (read for yourself), but I agree with what they say - only a profound encounter with justice will do, because only in naming, acknowledging, and confronting the reality of evil as evil, allows us to not sweep it aside and minimise it and act as if it's not that big a deal. At the same time, in the cross it is God himself who identifies with the victim, because he became a victim, and acted to overcome evil, and abuse, and oppression, and uphold justice. And precisely because he has done that, forgiveness is available first to us (whoever we are) and then to those that might wrong us. But that forgiveness never undermines justice, never excuses wickedness, never enables sin.
That's part 1 of my review. Part 2 is here, where we turn to the practice and the practicalities of forgiveness.