Part One HUMAN FORGIVENESS

Chapter One FORGIVENESS OF FINANCIAL HARM

The notion of forgiveness finds its origin in the world of finance, and refers to the dismissal of monetary obligations, or debts.  From there, it has been applied in a wide variety of contexts, including those of central concern in this book: the roles it plays in the divine plans for personal and universal salvation.  But the central logic of the financial relationship remains intact, however the notion of debt might be expanded to include things other than money and however the forgiveness of such debt might figure in God’s dealing with rational creation. 

It will be a good starting place, therefore, to take a closer look at the core notion of forgiveness.  That will provide us with the vocabulary and conceptual framework to advance our investigation into the matters of eternity in the chapters to come.

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Let’s begin with a simple illustration of forgiveness in everyday life. Suppose I’m driving home one dark and snowy night, and in a moment of disorientation I turn into my neighbor’s driveway instead of my own. Immediately realizing my mistake, I hit the brakes hard, but the driveway is slick with ice and snow, and instead of stopping I skid forward and run with some force into the back of her parked car.  The noise of the impact accompanies my own angry outburst.

Mortified, I climb out of my car just as my neighbor, having heard the noise, comes out her front door to see what happened.  She walks over through the falling snow, and standing side-by-side we survey the damage. Fortunately it could have been much worse. Her rear bumper and my front bumper have matching injuries, but they are minor, and the cost of the repairs will almost certainly not even rise above the level of our insurance deductibles: maybe a few hundred dollars for each of us.

Still and all, since the accident was clearly and indisputably my fault, I immediately experience myself under a financial obligation to cover the cost of the repair to her car.   However mad I might be with myself, however many potential excuses are running through my mind about the snowy weather and the obscured street light, whatever mitigating circumstances I can come up with to relieve my sense of personal chagrin, the facts of the matter are so plain that there is no way to dispute my full and unqualified financial obligation to reimburse my neighbor for whatever it will cost to have her bumper repaired, or to pay for it directly myself.

But now suppose that my neighbor realizes that at this particular moment in time, my domestic circumstances are so financially straitened that even the few hundred dollars it will take to repair her bumper would impose a very difficult burden on me. And being the exceptionally decent person she is, she turns to me and says something along the following lines:

“Hey, listen, neighbor. I know this is about the last thing you need right now, so let’s just pretend this didn’t happen. Don’t worry about my bumper. Come on inside and have a cranberry muffin, hot out of the oven!”

Wouldn’t we all wish for neighbors like that!  Figuratively speaking, when I ran into her car, I created an IOU, and her reaction amounted to tearing up the IOU and tossing it in the air, to blow away into the snowy night.  And then offering me a muffin!

Here we have a small but perfect illustration of forgiveness in its purest original meaning. I have incurred a financial obligation – a debt – of the simplest, most straightforward, most unambiguous variety.  I am fully aware of it, I admit it and the justice of it, I recognize my full responsibility for it.  I am indebted to her, and until such time as I cover the cost of repairing her bumper, I will remain in her debt.  Again speaking figuratively, it’s like a burden which I must now carry, day and night, until I pay someone to take it off my shoulders, either directly to the body repair shop, or indirectly to my neighbor by way of reimbursement.

But then my neighbor spoke her words of forgiveness, and immediately, with no effort on my part, my obligation disappears.  The burden has been, as if by magic, lifted from my shoulders, without my having to pay anyone.  One moment it’s there, like a weight pressing down on me.  The next moment, it’s gone, and I am again as financially unencumbered as I had been before I made the fateful wrong turn into her driveway.  Or to put it another way, the financial relationship that had existed between my neighbor and myself has been completely restored to what it was before that unhappy maneuver.

I’ve been forgiven.

So my debt is forgiven. But now we come to the important point, the point that must be fully understood in our simple little illustration, in order eventually to appreciate why it is and how it is that forgiveness lies at the very heart of Christ’s revelation and instruction.  Here it is:

Although the debt is forgiven, the cost of repairing the bumper remains.

If her car is to be repaired, my generous neighbor will have to take money from her own bank account and give it to the garage.  Staying with our image, the burden I was carrying has not just magically dissolved, as if tapped by a fairy’s wand.  What my neighbor has done, in effect, is to lift the burden from my shoulders and place it on her own.  Her act of forgiveness has not eliminated the cost of my misadventure into her driveway – it has simply transferred the cost to herself.

In fact, thinking of financial debts as weights makes this very easy to visualize.  In this imagery, my neighbor in forgiving me is taking the burden off of my shoulders.  But it is of vital importance to note that after taking if from me, she does not have the option of simply tossing it away on the side of the road.  Once she has assumed the burden, she is now in the same condition I was prior to her kind act of forgiveness: for her bumper to be repaired, she will now have to pay someone to take the burden off her. Forgiving someone’s financial debt is assuming that person’s financial burden.

And what is true of our simple illustration is true of financial forgiveness of any size or scope.  If I take out a ten thousand dollar loan from my local bank, and then find myself unable to repay the loan, the bank manager may write off the loan, forgive my debt – not likely, but possible!  By simply signing a waiver, she releases me from my obligation.  But as with my neighbor, that doesn’t mean the financial liability simply disappears; it means the liability is shifted from me to the bank itself, to the debit of its books or the reduced remuneration of its shareholders.[i] 

To repeat, the essential point is that a financial obligation doesn’t just disappear when it’s been forgiven, like scraps of an IOU blowing off into the night. The weight of the debt is simply shifted from one party to the other, to the creditor from the debtor.

Another way of expressing this is to say that the act of financial forgiveness is transactional: it amounts to a transaction in which the creditor takes ownership of the debt.  In our example, the cost of repairing the damaged vehicle now belongs to my neighbor; it is no longer my debt, it’s hers.  She owns it now, it is now her responsibility to deal with as she chooses.  For all intents and purposes, she is now related to the damage as if she had caused it herself.  In this imagery, her forgiveness is like a writ of sale for a piece of property, only her payment consists in the forgiveness, and the property consists of the damage.  I now possess her forgiveness; she now possesses my responsibility for the accident.  We may even say, she now owes it to herself to repair the damage.  A transaction of financial responsibility has taken place.[ii]

Having provided ourselves with a simple and clear case of financial forgiveness, we are now in a position to let it teach us a number of things about the nature of such forgiveness, and those things, elementary and mundane as they may seem on first pointing them out, will in fact provide the conceptual framework upon which we will be able to conduct our investigation of the deepest spiritual matters.  The principles governing the passage of a toy boat across a backyard pond are the same as those that brought the Pilgrims across the seas, and we can generally understand such principles more easily in their simpler and more accessible exemplar. 

The first thing we learn from reflecting on our basic illustration is that financial forgiveness of harm presupposes actual financial harm.  Beneficial acts offer no occasion for forgiveness, because they do not create an appropriate creditor/debtor relationship.

Suppose that instead of running into my neighbor’s car on a wintry day, I had instead on a summer day, remembering that she been having trouble with her back lately, brought my own lawnmower across and mowed her lawn.  Here there is no opportunity for her financial forgiveness.  If she came out of the house, surveyed my handiwork, and said I forgive you for this, I would have to assume that I had unwittingly somehow done her financial harm, perhaps by cutting back the new species of grass she was growing, unbeknownst to me.  Lacking any such discovery of hidden harm, there is simply nothing for her to forgive, and I would have to assume that her words of forgiveness were spoken facetiously, or in reference to some other unrelated action of mine on some prior occasion.[iii]

Financial forgiveness can only be accomplished in response to actual financial debt.  In the absence of such actual debt, even if the formulae for extending forgiveness – certain customary words, for example, or signing a document – they accomplish nothing in the way of actual forgiveness.  They are like the words or actions of an actor in a play or a novel.  They are not examples of forgiveness: they are forms without substance.

The next thing we learn by reflecting on our basic illustration is that there is one and only one person who can forgive me, and that’s my neighbor.  Other sorts of things might happen that would resolve our situation without any cost to me, but those would not be cases of forgiveness.  Another neighbor, for example, having heard the crash, might come running from across the street and offer to repair my neighbor’s bumper for no charge.  That would be very neighborly of him, but it would not be forgiveness.  It would be removing the occasion for forgiveness – an act of generosity of a different variety.  The Good Samaritan from across the street would be bailing me and/or my neighbor out, but not forgiving either one of us.

Or while we’re inside her house eating muffins, my neighbor’s fiancé might drop by, hear the sad story of my mishap, and offer to pay for the damage himself.  This will also be a loving and generous act on a par with that of our friend from across the street, but not an act of forgiveness.  The fiancé is covering his beloved’s losses, but he’s not forgiving her (or me).

This is to say that an act of financial forgiveness is by its nature the resolution of an actual and binary relationship of financial obligation between a creditor and a debtor, the one who owes and the one who is owed, and it can only be accomplished by the creditor, the one who is owed. 

The third thing we must note at this preliminary stage about financial forgiveness is seemingly simple and obvious, but it is something that will have extraordinary importance when we move on to our discussion of much deeper matters:

Financial forgiveness may be more or less complete.

Suppose my neighbor, on surveying the damage and recollecting my pinched circumstances, had said something along the following lines:

“Hey, listen, neighbor.  I know times are tough for you these days and I wish I could just say let’s forget the whole thing.  But I’m a little pinched right now myself, what with my wedding coming up and all.  I tell you what let’s do.  We’ll split the repair cost fifty-fifty.  Now come on inside out of the cold: we’ll both drown our sorrow in some fresh muffins.”

She’s still forgiving me, but now her forgiveness is only partial: she’ll assume half the burden, take half the weight off my shoulders, absorb half the financial harm occasioned by my unfortunate turn into her driveway.  It’s still an act of forgiving kindness, to be sure; just not quite so generous an act.  And she still offered me a muffin!

The next thing to become clear about is that a single act may give rise to multiple opportunities for forgiveness, and yet the logic of the basic binary creditor-debtor relationship remains unaffected.

Suppose on that fateful winter day, there had been two cars parked in my neighbor’s driveway, hers and her fiancé’s, one in front of the other.  I skid precipitously forward and run into her car with such force that it in turn is forced into the car ahead, and both sustain damage.

Now there are two victims of my action, two people who have suffered financial harm resulting from my singular malfeasance, and I am indebted to them both separately: two separate debtor-creditor relationships have been created, and this complexity in turn gives rise to multiple possibilities for forgiveness.  One or the other may forgive me, both may do so, or (in the unhappiest case from my point of view) neither.

And the complexity increases with the number of victims.  Had my car slid on the highway instead of my neighbor’s driveway and caused a multi-car accident, a sizable number of creditors would have resulted, with a corresponding number of opportunities for forgiveness (and a logarithmic increase in the number of possible permutations).  But the nature of each of those various opportunities would have been the same as that between my neighbor and myself in our basic illustration: a creditor and a debtor, and the possibility of financial forgiveness on the part of the creditor.

As we approach the conclusion of our preliminary discussion of financial forgiveness, it is now important to note explicitly something that has been latent in our discussion to this point, namely, that financial forgiveness is an activity.  It’s not an emotion like fear or a feeling like a headache. Nor is it a condition of the person, like being aggravated or distraught or confused.  The forgiveness lies in the action, not in the motivation for the action.

Suppose my neighbor harbors a grudge of longstanding against me: I don’t maintain my lawn, and my dog once bit her fiancé.  Nonetheless she has always been taught and tries to live her life in accordance with the dictum  To err is human, to forgive divine.  Therefore, her smile a strained grimace, she pronounces her words of forgiveness.

Despite her inner struggle, the forgiveness is accomplished.  The financial burden is shifted from me to her, whether she’s feeling warm and generous about it, or resentful and angry.  The forgiveness lies in the action on the stage, so to speak, and not in whatever might be happening behind the scenes (although needless to say, there will be no offer of muffins in this particular production!) 

Or again, the bank manager who forgives my final installment of a loan repayment according to bank policy may be thinking about what she’ll order for lunch as she signs the release.  No matter; I’m forgiven.  She may not even have any personal acquaintance with me, or for that matter even have any idea who I am. No matter; I’m forgiven. She may in fact wish in her heart of hearts that the bank had no such policy of occasionally forgiving the delinquent debtor; she made regard the policy as ill considered, or unfair, or as a violation of the bank’s fiduciary responsibilities to its shareholders.  No matter. My loan is still forgiven, simply by the action of the pen in her hand.

The one constant in the various financial scenarios we are considering is the actual action or activity whereby the burden of the debt is shifted from the debtor to the creditor: the words spoken by my neighbor, the signature provided by the bank manager.  All the rest simply gives us more information about the basic action of forgiveness, about its motives or context.[iv]

Another way of putting this is that financial forgiveness names an accomplishment that can be verified by referencing a particular publicly observable action .  It has that in common with many other accomplishments.  Marrying someone is accomplished by an authorized individual signing a document.  Winning a marathon is accomplished by being first across a line.  Breaking the law is accomplished by an action in violation of an established statute. 

Similarly, forgiving someone is accomplished by doing something that can be publicly verified, whether word or deed.

So far we have learned that financial forgiveness, in its essence, is the transference of an actual financial burden from a debtor to a creditor, and that its accomplishment is a publicly observable action, not an emotion or state of mind.  We have learned that only the creditor can forgive the debt, and that the debt’s forgiveness can be more or less complete.  We have learned that a single harmful act may create more than one creditor-debtor relationship, the forgiveness of any one of which is independent from the others. 

All of these parameters of financial forgiveness will come into play as we move on, but before we do so, we must mention another, one which will play perhaps the largest part in our engagement with the deepest matters of the Christian life:

Forgiveness runs counter to our sense of fairness.

Our language is replete with expressions that reflect how deep seated the calculation of fairness is in our estimation of what should be done, in cases where there is some conflict of interest, especially where that conflict is the result of a perceived wrong on the part of one party.  Fair’s fair, we say.  He should pay, it’s only right.  He shouldn’t get off scot free here

When I ran into my neighbor’s car, I think we would all agree that it’s right that I be held accountable, that the cost of repairing her car should be my responsibility. Certainly if she had filed a police report and taken me to court, that would have been the court’s finding. But beyond that, it just seems right, doesn’t it?  It’s not just a matter of legality, it’s a matter of morality; or perhaps we should say, our laws – at least ideally – are passed to reflect our morality, our native sense of right and wrong.  We may debate how the recognition of fairness becomes so ingrained in the human way of regarding things, but it’s indisputably there. Even hardened criminals and sociopaths acknowledge it, as witness their moral indignation when they believe themselves to have been treated unfairly.

The significance of this might become clearer if we make a few changes to our basic illustration.

Suppose instead of a wintry night it was a clear and sunny afternoon.  And suppose I’m returning home from a bar where I’ve had too much to drink.  And suppose I’m having an animated and inebriated conversation with someone on my cell phone when I make the wrong turn into my neighbor’s driveway and smash into my neighbor’s car.   She comes running from the house and finds me leaning drunkenly against my car, looking sheepishly guilty, while from the cell phone still in my hand, someone is yelling: What happened, man?  What was that crash sound?

My neighbor may still forgive me, but it will now be doubly hard.  She must now not only bear the cost of repairing the bumper herself, but she must also act contrary to her own sense of justice as fairness, that fundamental moral point of view that we all share.

For many, both philosophers and ordinary people, the native intuition is that balancing the books somehow lies at the foundation of social morality, of our estimation of what should be done, of the way things should work.  Had my neighbor been like most of us, and not been the unnaturally sweet and kind soul she is, she would have reacted with righteous indignation to my morally inexcusable driving.  And notice that I didn’t just say indignation, I said righteous indignation.  She would not just have been angry at me, but her anger would have been experienced by her as justified.  And not just by her.  Any unbiased spectators of the scene would have been of the same opinion. And had she under those morally fraught conditions still chosen to forgive me, she would have been overriding, not only her own emotional response, but also her own rational sense of fairness.

And this is always the case with forgiveness, understood as an activity and not as an emotion.  Where the injured parties behave strictly according to the calculations of fairness, there is no opening for forgiveness. Justice and fairness are in essence calculative: a society of robots could be perfectly just. But forgiveness steps outside that calculation: that’s why forgiveness could never evolve out of a society of purely calculative agents. 

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We’ll conclude this opening chapter by saying a few words that will complete this introduction of our discussion of forgiveness, and point ahead to what we will build upon its foundation.

We’ve learned that financial forgiveness often involves, not just a personal financial cost, but a violation of our fundamental ethical principle, the principle of fairness.  It is exactly that calculation of fairness that forgiveness overrides. We’ve learned, that is to say, that financial forgiveness always involves bearing one sort of burden, and the potential for bearing another.  The first is the financial burden of a debt.  The second is the psychological burden of acting contrary to one’s own standard of justice.

Both of these factor into why forgiveness is sometimes hard, sometimes very hard, indeed. 

Consider my friendly neighbor.  The damage I did to her car was relatively minor: a bruised fender.  But it needn’t have been minor.  I might have struck her car so hard that it was completely destroyed.  Now not just the bumper, but the entire car must be replaced!

She may still forgive me.  But if she does, she’s assuming a far larger burden, one which we can imagine would be very heavy to bear.

So that’s one way in which financial forgiveness can be difficult.  The other, as we have seen, may in many cases be even more burdensome, and is certainly more difficult to quantify.  A gambling debt generally incurs less human moral sympathy that one acquired through mitigated circumstance; and just so, less inclination to assume its cost, and correspondingly greater reluctance to forgive.  

These are reasons why it’s often so hard to forgive in the mundane world of finance.  And as we now move into the world of the spirit, we will find that the difficulties there are vastly deeper and greater, yet fundamentally of the same sort.  We will see how forgiveness is perhaps the hardest thing of all to do in the spiritual life.  And we may eventually see why, for that very reason, forgiveness commands the central position in God’s plan of salvation, of why it is, in fact, the key to the Kingdom of God. 

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[i]           It is important to note here at the beginning of our investigation that there are two ways in which an opportunity for forgiveness – financial or otherwise – may arise between two individuals.  Consider Dave and Joe.  If Dave harms Joe, the opportunity for forgiveness lies with Joe.  Joe is the creditor and Dave is the debtor, and Joe may waive, or decline to waive, the obligation. But if instead, Dave benefits Joe, then the opportunity for forgiveness lies with Dave.  Now Dave is the creditor and Joe the debtor, and Dave may waive, or decline to waive, the obligation.

            In our basic illustration, I become my neighbor’s debtor by the harm I have caused her; in the case of my bank loan, I become the bank’s debtor by virtue of a benefit – the loan – the bank has provided me. What forgiveness is, though, is the same in both cases, the waiving of an obligation, the assumption of a burden for its payment, or non-payment.   What is different is the source of the obligation.

            Both sorts of opportunities for forgiveness figure prominently in the obedient Christian life, but it is only the former that is the topic of our present investigation.  Christ’s central concern is that his followers practice forgiveness of others for their sins, for their harmful actions, and we will be satisfied if we come to understand and share that central concern.

            An equally rich and interesting investigation from a Christian perspective, though, could be directed at the second sort of opportunity for forgiveness, where the obligation results from the provision of a benefit.  God, after all provides us with extraordinary benefits, beginning with life itself.  Those benefits spiritually obligate us in countless ways, and our failures to repay those debts are many and various.  The Cross may convincingly be understood as the forgiveness of those obligations. 

            But that is a topic for another book.

            Financial obligations may also of course be created by authoritative fiat, as when a government levies taxes on its citizenry.  Such obligations may arise neither from harmful actions of the people against their government, nor (in the case, for example, of a cruel tyranny) from benefits the government has provided its subjects.  But such debts are again not related to the subject matter for Christian forgiveness, and hence lie outside of our present concern.  

[ii]        Because we tend to think of transactions in terms of an exchange of material possessions – money for property, for example – this may seem like a strange way of thinking about forgiveness, but there are in fact many transactions involving things other than physical goods for other physical goods.  When I give you my word that I will take care of your house while you’re on vacation, you now have my word, and I have the responsibility of safekeeping your house.

[iii]         The same is true mutatis mutandis of cases in which the obligation results from a benefit provided by the creditor. Here again, the benefit must be actual, not merely supposed.  Consider again the action of my banker in signing my loan waiver.  Suppose I had already fully repaid my loan, and it is only through a bookkeeping error that my account still shows an outstanding obligation.  Here her act of affixing her signature to a bank document, however else it might be described, could not meaningfully be categorized as an act of forgiveness.

[iv]        As an aside, we should mention here that having established this is not to deny that a person’s behavior – in this case, forgiving – can often provide excellent reason for making inferences about the inner life of the person, about the qualities of his or her personality.  Always allowing for the complexities and peculiarities of the interior life, for the possibilities of deceit or self-delusion, the woman whose social life exhibits a pattern of generosity may confidently be expected to harbor a tender heart. The man who hazards his own well-being for a patriotic cause gives evidence of his dedication to his ideals.  And the one whose public life is populated with acts of forgiveness is in all likelihood possessor of a native empathy.  But these are probabilities, not certainties.  The novelist’s art is to explore these fascinating regions of the spirit, and we will ourselves return to the topic later.

            Nor is it to deny that the quality of the inner life is of the utmost importance.  The quality of that life is in fact central to Christ’s instruction in the matter of forgiveness.  Unless you forgive from the heart is the phrase he uses to provide the moral for the Parable of the Unmerciful Servant, and he is obviously speaking here, not only about the basic act of forgiveness, but about the spiritual underpinnings of the act.  The quality of mercy is not strained in the forgiveness Christ is seeking, but rather flows freely and naturally.  And when we come to the full discussion of that instruction, this topic will in fact be one of our own main concerns.