Chapter Five  SIN

In our discussion  of human forgiveness in Part One, we established that such forgiveness can only meaningfully be extended in cases where someone believes himself – rightly or wrongly – to have suffered harm at the hands of someone else.  At this point, it is important to make explicit something that has heretofore only been tacit in that discussion, and that further qualifies the context for such cases: Not all non-financial harm caused by one individual to another is a suitable candidate for human forgiveness, but only such harm as results from what is perceived to be morally culpable behavior. 

If during a friendly game of tennis, I twist my ankle in attempting to return your serve, the injury, while unfortunate, creates no occasion for my forgiveness.  Why not?  Because you have done nothing wrong, you have not morally wronged me in any meaningful sense.  While I might on such an occasion use the language of forgiveness – It’s  ok, I forgive you, you rascal! – it would be be understood by both of us that I was speaking ironically, or perhaps to comic effect.  I would be feigning rather that registering moral aggrievement,

And similarly even for cases of more egregious harm.  If I legally sell you a firearm, and you subsequently use the gun to shoot someone, the shooting victim cannot coherently forgive me, even though I was part of the causal chain of events that led to the shooting, any more than the victim could coherently forgive my parents for having given me birth. 

Both stories could of course be elaborated in such a way as to make the forgiveness conceptually coherent.  If I believe that you had previously and mischievously oiled the part of the court on which I was returning serve, I might then rationally blame you for my accident; or if I sold you the firearm, despite knowing you to be prone to criminal violence, the shooting victim might reasonably blame me, along with the shooter.  Either incident might then at least offer a suitable occasion for forgiveness.  But absent such elaborations, the harmful human activities described would simply offer no opportunities for forgiveness.

The point is that not all cases of experienced harm are suitable candidates for forgiveness, but only those in which the infliction of harm is believed by its recipient – whether correctly or not – to involve some element of moral culpability on the part of the person causing the harm.  To put this another way, forgiveness in its extended uses beyond the realm of merely financial harm finds conceptual opportunity only in cases in which the recipient believes the harm to be morally blameworthy.  Forgiveness and moral culpability are thus conceptually bound together; forgiveness is a potential resolution of perceived moral indebtedness.

Secular moral terminology does not provide us with a convenient catchall term for referring to any and all activities that include at least an element of moral grievance: perhaps wrongdoing comes closest.  But traditional English religious terminology does provide us with such a term.  That term is sin, and that is the term we will use in the remainder of this book.

But whatever term is used, the point remains that forgiveness, whether human or divine, is conceptually bound up with those behaviors in which the experienced harm is perceived by its recipient to contain at least an element of moral malfeasance.

It is not within the scope of our present investigation to discuss the various secular moral theories of what constitutes malfeasance or wrongdoing.  Nor even is it within our purview to settle the hoary theological debate of whether sin – spiritual wrongdoing – simply amounts to disobedience to God’s requirements, or whether those requirements arise from something independent of God’s fiat: Is behavior sinful because God forbids it, or does God forbid it because it is sinful?, as the issue is often framed.

Our concern is simply with the harm that results from sinful behavior and its forgiveness, whatever the resolution of that ancient conundrum.  For our purposes, it will be sufficient if we can simply agree to the following generalization resulting from our earlier analyses: In divine forgiveness, God absorbs the counterpart harm to God caused by sinful harm occasioned to any of God’s children by another.  When I sin against another of God’s children – that is, against anyone – the counterpart vector of harm that extends into heaven creates the opportunity for divine forgiveness.  It is the sins of the paralyzed man in Capernaum against his unnamed victims that Jesus forgives, not any of the other human harms of which he may have been the source.  As moral culpability is conceptually bound with human forgiveness, so sinful culpability – however exactly that is reckoned in the divine calculus – is conceptually bound with divine forgiveness.

And with that agreement in hand, we are now equipped to proceed to a discussion of the momentous issue postponed at the conclusion of the preceding chapter: the nature of the harm done to God by sinful human behavior.