Part Two DIVINE FORGIVENESS

Chapter Three THE SPIRITUAL DIMENSION

It is not the concern of this present work to prove the existence of the divine dimension, or more simply, to prove the existence of God.  Everything we have to offer from this point on will simply assume God’s existence; more specifically, we will assume the existence of the God revealed by Christian scripture to pious Christian reflection.  Our object henceforward is to describe the place and function of forgiveness in reality as reality is understood and believed in by Christianity.  Should per impossible those beliefs be mistaken, then what follows will have only academic interest to students of the Christian religion.  But to those invested existentially in the truth of Christianity, in the instruction and guidance and promises it provides, an understanding of divine forgiveness is the necessary preliminary to an appreciation of the nature, importance and role of forgiveness in the individual and corporate Christian life.

Let us then proceed to that investigation.

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In Part One, we limited our discussion of forgiveness to the purely human point of view. Virtually everything we’ve said about it would still be true if there were no God, or if Jesus had not revealed to us the ways of God’s kingdom.  The reality and significance of forgiveness would be exhausted by discovering its human application to situations in which someone has incurred harm as a consequence of the behavior of someone else. 

If we were merely material beings, on our own in the universe with only other material beings; if there were no living relationships beyond those we share with others like ourselves; if the consequences of our harmful behavior reached no farther than the human recipients of that behavior…if all these things were true, then the considerations we have presented in Part One would be substantially all there is to say about the concept of forgiveness.

Of course, forgiveness might still have a valuable role to play in a godless universe, and we might even there talk about the desirability of this particular method of conflict resolution, in comparison with its absence.  We might argue for its benefits both to society in general and to the forgiver in particular.  It’s worth taking a few moments here to talk about each, because they will continue to play their parts in the richer Jehovah-filled universe we live in, and which will provide the setting for our deeper analysis of Christian forgiveness.

So, to take the former sort of benefit, we might discuss the comparative societal preferability of forgiveness to other methods of resolution, to retributive justice, for example.  We might argue that a society in which forgiveness is at least occasionally operative among its members results in a society of greater stability and harmony than a society in which retribution, whether personal or delegated, is the sole method of dealing with harm. 

In making this case, we would no doubt point both to the tendency of human nature to overreact to suffered harm, and to the difficulty for delegated societal agency of accurately measuring the harm suffered by its members.

The Hatfield and McCoy saga would provide a powerful illustration of the tendency of human nature to overreact to personal harm, and of the ever-spiraling and spreading consequent social instability that can result from the unchecked operation of the nigh universal human impulse to seek disproportionate retribution.  Left to its own carnal devices, the dynamics of human nature tend all too readily to the multiplication of harm, rather than its limitation.  Thomas Hobbes famously summarized the societal outcome of individuals left to their own natural devices for resolving conflict as ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.’

Hobbes, of course, offered this as a rationale for allowing to social governance the authority for resolving such conflict, and we will return to that in a moment.  But for now, we’re simply considering what one might argue in favor of forgiveness as a socially desirable mechanism for resolving conflict among its members.  A society in which the growth of harm is, occasionally at least, curtailed by personal forgiveness would, according to this argument, be preferable to one in which the proliferation of that harm were left unchecked.  And this would surely be a powerful argument.

And as for delegating the responsibility for satisfactory retributive justice to governmental authority – a la Hobbes – the difficulties here are also considerable, with the possibilities for miscarriages of justice rivaling and perhaps surpassing those attending the Hatfield-McCoy difficulty. 

Governmental authority, after all, amounts to nothing other than the authority of people occupying certain social stations, and those peoples’ determinations can and almost certainly will be influenced to some degree by the elements of their own personalities: boredom, hastiness, outrage, professional aspirations, and so on.  Where a Hatfield’s disproportionate response might result from the seductive allure of vengeance, the magistrate’s might equally err through moral distaste or political ambition, or by any of the other myriad natural human proclivities that flesh is heir to.

And this doesn’t even touch on the deeper and more intractable difficulties of accurately measuring the harm experienced by someone else.  To return to one of our earlier examples, a magistrate charged with meting out punishment for a casual insult, lacking God’s knowledge of the human heart, can only hazard a guess at the depth and extent of the actual emotional harm suffered from the insult – mere human judgment could never accurately gauge the debt due this particular sufferer.    

Given these difficulties, an advocate for forgiveness – still speaking of a purely material world – might powerfully argue that a society in which personal forgiveness has a substantial part to play in the resolution of personal harm might be a more efficient and even a fairer society than one in which all such resolution was left in the hands of ‘blind’ administrative justice.

So, even if we were to restrict our investigation to a godless world, the case for forgiveness might be powerfully and effectively argued by pointing out the comparative communal benefits accruing to societies that grant personal forgiveness a significant role to play in the resolution of interpersonal harm over societies in which it is lacking.  Even Hobbes might be persuaded by such arguments.

And again, still setting religious considerations aside and speaking of a purely secular world, considerations might be advanced concerning the individual therapeutic benefits that often accrue to those who practice forgiveness of personal harm.  Psychological studies are replete with such illustrations.  When viewed through the prism of emotional recovery or psychic health human life affords many examples in which a grievance long harbored, once forgiven, is experienced by the sufferer as a release into an emotionally and psychically better place.

(To get ahead of ourselves for a moment, most studies of Christian forgiveness in the current era restrict their advocacy to illustrating – through anecdote and case histories – personal psychological benefits of this sort.  And while that is all well and good, and certainly does reflect many cases of lived Christian biography, the secular writer can point to similar benefits to non-Christians of the practice of forgiveness.  Such Christian texts, in other words, are generally focused on the personal benefits of forgiveness in general, and not of Christian forgiveness in particular, all the while omitting discussion of the precedent questions of its special nature, its special privilege, and its special responsibility.  Once we have completed our investigation of those foundational matters, we will return to the topic of special spiritual benefits of Christian forgiveness in the final chapter of this book.)

And so, to summarize, the activity of forgiveness, as we have analyzed it earlier, has much to recommend it, even outside the context of Christian truth, even in a world containing no spiritual order beyond that of rational material beings.

But we do not live in such a universe.  Ours is a God-created universe in which we stand in a relationship to our creator God, the nature of which has been fully revealed by Jesus Christ.

And if we accept that as a starting point, and then turn again to the activity of forgiveness, what we will find is that forgiveness acquires dimensions and functions in addition to those we’ve discussed so far, and an importance both to ourselves and to God that is impossible to exaggerate.  Indeed, as we shall see, Christian forgiveness – forgiveness practiced by Christians – is the central and foundational element in personal salvation as well as the God-ordained means of bringing about the reconciliation of all of humanity to Himself. 

In a word, it’s the Key to the Kingdom of God.