The Judgment of Grace: Forgiveness in Christian Life

The psychiatrist Robert Coles tells of a friend, a devout Roman Catholic, who was hospitalized with cancer.1 On one of Coles’s visits to the hospital he found his friend quite angry. A priest had recently been to visit the friend. The priest wanted to know how the patient was managing to “cope.” He proceeded in what Coles calls a “relentless a kind of psychological inquiry.” How was the patient “feeling”? How was he “managing,” in view of the “stress” he had to “confront”? The friend was enraged by such questions, for he wanted to talk with the priest about God and His ways, about Christ’s life and death, about the Gospel of Luke (a particular favorite) about Heaven and Hell––only to be approached repeatedly with psychological words and phrases. As the friend characterized it to Coles: “He comes here with a Roman collar, and offers me psychological banalities as God’s word!”

The friend commented that he was prepared for the priest’s next visit. Among other things, he was going to ask the priest to read Psalm 69. Coles cites one part of that Psalm: “Save me, O God; for the waters are come into my soul. I sink in deep mire, where there is no standing I am come into deprivation, where the floods overflow me.” Coles concludes by commenting “There are, of course, many kinds of burdens in this life. I wonder whether the deepest mire, the deepest waters, for many of America’s clergy, not to mention us laymen, may be found in the dreary solipsistic world so many of us have learned to find so interesting; the mind’s moods, the various ‘stages’ and ‘phases’ of ‘human development’ or of ‘dying,’ all dwelt upon (God save us!) as if Stations of the Cross.”

When a psychiatrist criticizes our culture, and particularly our church, for becoming overly therapeutic and solipsistic, there is legitimate cause for concern. Such language helps to suggest, I think what would otherwise be a rather odd circumstance: a Christian theologian suggesting that we need to reassess the place of forgiveness within Christian theology and Christian life. For, after all, if there is any topic that seems assured not only of a place, but of a central place, in Christian theology, it would be forgiveness. It is a prominent theme in Jesus’ life and the New Testament more generally; it is part of both the Lord’s Prayer and the Apostles’ Creed; it is understood to be a crucial dimension of both baptism and eucharist; and it raises crucial issues L. Gregory Jones Ph.D., Department of Theology, Loyola College, Baltimore, MD about the relationships among doctrines of God, Christ, the Church, and ethics and politics.

Yet Cole’s story reveals the dominance of non-theological modes of thinking and acting. These modes have become deeply embedded in too much “Christian” discourse, and particularly in our conceptions of forgiveness. Hence in this essay I will argue that we need to reclaim the centrality of theological language for Christian faith and life, specifically by examining one set of issues surrounding a Christian account of forgiveness.

The essay moves through four stages: 1) I will identify problems that have emerged in contemporary conceptions of Christian forgiveness 2) I will contend that God’s forgiveness reflects the judgment of grace, enabling us to live a new life as forgiven and forgiving people; 3) I will show how God’s forgiveness enables Christians to engage in practices of forgiveness and reconciliation, practices whose telos is holiness and 4) I will suggest that there may be times where “loving enemies” is as far as we can move on the path of forgiveness and reconciliation.

Problems With Forgiveness In Modernity

I want to identify four particular problems that have impoverished our contemporary understandings and practices of forgiveness. First, most generally, forgiveness has become an increasingly marginal notion in Western culture and intellectual life. Modernity’s emphasis on such themes as individual autonomy, acts rather than character, inevitable progress, and the fascination of technique have all helped to marginalize conceptions of forgiveness and/or to undermine practices of forgiveness.

If all that matters is individual autonomy, then forgiveness and reconciliation—which are designed to foster and maintain community—are of little importance. If all that we evaluate are acts rather than people’s character, then forgiveness––which reflects a quality of character and thus cannot be confined to an “act” that people do—is relatively insignificant. If we are on a path of inevitable progress, then there is little need—as forgiveness requires—to reflect on, and attempt to rehabilitate, the past. If what ultimately matters is the successful use of technique, then we will only deploy forgiveness if it is useful to further control and technical mastery.

Hence there are cultural reasons why forgiveness has been marginalized in contemporary thought and life. Even so, Christians cannot simply blame the Enlightenment or modernity for our contemporary predicament. A primary reason for forgiveness’s marginalization in modernity is Christianity’s ambiguous legacy. This is the second problem that has impoverished our understandings and practices of forgiveness.

Christianity’s ambiguous legacy is the result of transformations within our own conceptions and practices. Forgiveness is theologically crucial for both the people of Israel and the early Christians. Indeed, for the early Christians, crucial to the “grammar” of forgiveness is a set of communal practices necessary for rightly characterizing, and witnessing to, the eschatological salvation wrought by the Triune God.

But as Christianity increasingly distances itself from its Jewish roots and becomes the established religion in the fourth century, forgiveness begins to take a different shape. While I cannot in any sense do justice to the complex social and historical factors leading to these different shapes, it is none the less important to note that conceptions of forgiveness have been significantly altered. For example, the confession of sin which was in its origins primarily— though not exclusively—a communal practice, has moved from the community to individualized and increasingly privatized context. Further, Christian piety has turned increasingly inward. God’s forgiveness has become understood principally as an individual transaction between God and a particular person, largely devoid of its eschatological context and with virtually no consequences for either Christian community or social and political life.

Hence in contemporary Christian theology and life, while the rhetoric of forgiveness remains a part of our worship, the conceptions and practices of forgiveness have been radically transmuted. Such transmutations have helped to contribute to the separation of Christology from theology, ecclesiology, and ethics. Thus Christianity’s own ambiguous legacy has helped to marginalize the significance of forgiveness.

A third problem, one explicitly noted by Coles, is that we Christians have increasingly secularized our own language. Outside of the contexts of worship (and sometimes even within worship), we have tended to adopt non-theological language to describe Christian theology and Christian life. For example, instead of baptism, we talk of “christening” or even of “getting the baby done.” Instead of sin and grace, we talk about “accepting that you are accepted.” And instead of practices of reconciliation, we talk about “managing conflict” or “coping with difficult people.” Indeed it would seem as if Christians—including lay people, clergy, and theologians—have become immunized against the use of theological language for characterizing our lives in general, and forgiveness in particular.

Unfortunately, such immunization against theological language has not also been effective against “therapeutic” language. Thus a fourth problem with conceptions of forgiveness is that the grammar of Christian forgiveness has been largely coopted by a therapeutic grammar. Theodore Jennings has characterized our culture as being caught by “mental health moralism and therapeutic narcissism.”2 When forgiveness is seen primarily in individualistic and privatistic terms, we lose sight of its central role in establishing a way of life not only with our “inner” selves but also in our relations with others.

This contrast may seem to be only a matter of emphasis, with “therapeutic” language emphasizing the intrapersonal dimension and what I have been calling “theological” language the interpersonal dimension. Both of them, it might be argued, are theological in that they are ultimately concerned with right relation to God. Further, the argument might continue by rightly emphasizing that Christian forgiveness needs to be attentive to, and in dialogue with, psychological and psychoanalytic concerns if people are to become holy. If degrees of emphasis were the only, or even the primary, issue, then there would hardly be cause for alarm or even concern.

But “therapeutic” language has increasingly distorted the grammar of Christian forgiveness. Despite the overlaps between “therapeutic” and “Christian” forgiveness, there are crucial differences. For example, Robert C. Roberts, in a critical assessment of Lewis Smedes’s Forgive and Forget: Healing the Hurts We Don’t Deserve makes the following observation:

It is hard to imagine Saint Paul exhorting his readers to forgive one another ‘for each of you has a right to be healed of your hate.’ It is typical of him to tell them to forgive one another because Christ has forgiven them and in doing so they will be like Christ, or for the sake of harmony in the church, or because in forgiving one another we will become fit for the kingdom of God or ready for the judgment day. In other words, when asked for a rationale for forgiveness, Paul does not speak in therapeutic terms, but instead in terms of what is fitting, given certain beliefs about the history of God’s actions, the character and actions of Jesus, the nature of the church and the coming kingdom.3

Further, Roberts criticizes Smedes’s therapeutic conception because it endorses forgiving God if, by so doing, we are enabled to find peace and heal ourselves. By contrast, within the grammar of Christian forgiveness, it makes no sense to speak of “forgiving God” because God is not blameworthy.

Roberts’ starkest contrast is established by a quotation from Smedes’s argument. Smedes contends that

As we forgive people, we gradually come to see the deeper truth about them, a truth our hate blinds us to, a truth we can see only when we separate them from what they did to us… For the truth about those who hurt us is that they are weak, needy and fallible human beings… They are not only people who hurt us; this is not the deepest truth about them.4

In response, Roberts insists that

In the Christian view, the deepest truth about every offender is not that he or she is a ‘weak, needy, and fallible human being’ but that he or she is a forgiven sinner, one for whom Christ died. And not this only, but that he or she is one for whom, along with me, Christ died. We are in a common predicament. In God’s sight we are in need of being died for, and because Christ did so we are adopted daughters or sons. That the forgiven one is a child of God, in cosmic community with the forgiver, is what is ‘seen’ by the person who most deeply experiences offering Christian forgiveness.5

In this light, we will only adequately understand why Christians care about forgiveness if we remove it from its “therapeutic” context and relocate it within the larger doctrinal claims of Christian faith and life.

The Judgment Of Grace

Therapeutic language about forgiveness, grounded in the healing of hatred, encourages the abdication of judgment. In reaction against a harsh judgmentalism which many people have experienced (and which, to be sure, has caused much bitterness and broken relationships), it is suggested that we need to emphasize not judging others—just live and let live. Often Jesus’ words in Matthew 7:1 are invoked: “Do not judge, so that you may not be judge.”

But this misses the point of Matthew 7:1, as I will suggest further below. More importantly, and more to the point, such a view distorts the logic of God’s forgiveness that is focused in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. In the ministry and cross of Christ, we are judged in our sinfulness. There is no getting around that. But God’s judgment of our lives comes as a judgment that does not condemn. As the resurrection of the crucified testifies, God’s judgment is a forgiving grace which requires us–– and enables us––to confront our histories of sin, desertion, and betrayal so that we are set free for a new future with God and the others in the new eschatological community (see Acts 4:10-12, John 20-21).6 There is a great deal packed in to the last paragraph, more than can be adequately unpacked in this context. But I want to spell out a bit further some implications of that paragraph, implications that will help to illumine the nature of God’s forgiveness. We need to recognize that God’s forgiveness does not come apart from an acknowledgment of, and confrontation with, human sin and evil. God does not simply “overlook” or “ignore” our destructiveness. If that were the case, then there would be no need for Christ’s death. Rather, God confronts sin and evil in all of its awfulness. In so doing, God exposes our wounds, both those which have been inflicted upon us and those we have inflicted on others. There clearly is a judgment in God’s work in Jesus Christ.

However, God’s confrontation with sin and evil is not for the purpose of condemning us. Indeed, it is for the explicit purpose of forgiving us and healing our—and the world’s— wounds. It is a judgment of grace. As Karl Barth has suggested:

The judgment of the grace of God fulfilled there [i.e., the cross] was the work of God which could be fulfilled and was fulfilled only by Him. So, too, it is with the emergence here [i.e., the resurrection] of the grace of this judgment, the grace which as such does not cancel or encroach upon this judgment but leaves it behind as its presupposition, its first work.7

There is nothing we can do to earn God’s forgiveness, God’s healing. It has been accomplished extra nos through the slaying and raising of Christ. Thus forgiveness and healing come to us as a free gift of grace. It is in this sense that we rightly speak of God’s unconditional forgiveness and healing as signs of God’s Kingdom.

Even so, while there are no conditions for God forgiving us, repentance is crucial for us to receive that forgiveness. That is to say, God’s forgiveness becomes audible to us as we learn to see both the reality of the world under judgment and our participation in that fallenness. As Hans Urs von Balthasar puts it, “God forgives through free grace not on the basis of acts of penance, but… this forgiveness cannot become effective unless there is an expiatory conversion of the person.”8 Our conversion comes about as we recognize that we can confront our past, understood both in personal and social/cosmic terms, because we are no longer in bondage to it. We have been judged, and thus we acknowledge our sinfulness; but that judgment is wholly in the service of grace, healing and, as I will suggest below, holiness.

Judgment is important, because no matter how much we may try to forget the past and our history of sinfulness, unconfronted sin and bitterness find ways to influence our lives. That is why I think it is largely a mistake to say “forgive and forget.” Rather, the judgment of grace enables us, through the power of the Holy Spirit, to remember well. When God promises to “blot out [Israel’s] transgressions” and “not remember Israel’s sins” (Isaiah 43:25; see also Jeremiah 31:34), God is not simply letting “bygones be bygones.” Rather, God is testifying to God’s own gracious faithfulness. Moreover, such forgiveness provides a way to narrate the history of Israel’s sinfulness within the context of God’s covenant of grace. Such a narration makes it possible to forget the sin, to be sure, but to remember the past so that a new and renewed future becomes possible.

All of this suggests that the fundamental orientation of Christian life is that we are forgiven. As Stanley Hauerwas has suggested, more important than our learning to forgive is our learning to be forgiven.9 We cannot trade on our ability to forgive, or on our own self-righteousness and power. We must have an ironic relationship to our own acts of forgiving recognizing the prior need for us always to examine the ways in which we need to be forgiven. We are, fundamentally, people who are forgiven sinners. Such a posture takes us out of the realm of domination and control, enabling us to forgive because we have been forgiven.

This is a reminder that forgiveness inevitably involves power and the dynamics of power-relations. The granting or withholding of forgiveness entails an exercise of power; but if the understanding of forgiveness begins with an acknowledgment that we are all equally in need of God’s forgiveness, then this alters the dynamics of power and creates new possibilities for community. As Rowan Williams has characterized the importance of learning to be forgiven:

So to live a ‘forgiven’ life is not simply to live in a happy consciousness of being absolved. Forgiveness is precisely the deep and abiding sense of what relation— with God or with other human beings—can and should be; and so it is itself a stimulus, an irritant, necessarily provoking protest at impoverished versions of social and personal relations. Once we grasp that forgiveness occurs not by a word of acquittal but by a transformation of the world of persons, we are not likely to regard it as something which merely refers backwards.10

Forgiveness provides a new context for us to understand our lives in relation to God and each other, and also to discern more clearly God’s purposes from Creation to the promised eschatological consummation of that Creation.

The perspective I have been developing helps explain what is going on in Matthew 7:1. As the verses immediately following indicate, and as can also be gleaned from a reading of the whole Gospel (see particularly Mt. 18:15-20, about which more below), this text does not encourage the abdication of judgment. Indeed the avoidance of judgment reflects a lack of love and commitment. Rather, this passage reflects the destructiveness of a judgment—we might more appropriately call it being judgmental—which presumes to judge from a standpoint where the judge does not also think he or she either has been, or needs to be, judged. In such cases, judgment becomes the occasion for a self-possessive exercise of power. Rather, what the Gospel commends is that we learn that we are forgiven; and from that standpoint, judgment becomes an occasion for God’s grace.

Even so, we need to explore in a bit more detail the logic of God’s forgiveness. I have suggested that there are no conditions for God’s forgiveness, but that in order to appropriate that forgiveness we need to confess, repent, and learn to live as forgiven and forgiving people. If this is the case, what are the implications for the shape of Christian community and Christian life? That is to say, how are these christological claims linked to concerns within ecclesiology, ethics and politics?

Practices Of Forgiveness And Reconciliation

In response to God’s forgiveness, we are to engage in practices of forgiveness and reconciliation in Christian community. That is central to being the body of Christ. As the writer to the Ephesians puts it, “Put away from you all bitterness and wrath and anger and wrangling and slander, together with all malice, and be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ has forgiven you. Therefore be imitators of God, as beloved children and live in love, as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God” (Eph 4:31-5:2, NRSV).

That should come as no surprise. The central sacraments of the Christian church, baptism and eucharist,11 provide a similar context for reflecting both the decisive act of God’s forgiveness in Christ and the correlative implication that we ought to live in Christian community as a baptismal and eucharistic people.12 But what, more exactly, does that mean?

There is, to be sure, an asymmetry between God’s forgiveness and our own. We are not called to be Christ, but to be like Christ. We are to manifest God’s forgiveness of each of us, accomplished in Jesus Christ, in and through our relations with one another by the power of the Holy Spirit. In order to do so, we need to engage in the disciplines of Christian community that teach us, and train us, so that we can be transformed into people who not only are forgiven and forgive, but as people whose very lives are marked by forgiven-ness and are thus enabled for a new life of friendship with God and with others in the community judged, guided, and empowered by the Holy Spirit.

Rowan Williams nicely makes the point about the importance of Christian community in his discussion of a passage in Teresa of Avila’s thought.

So being able to forgive slights and injuries is a byproduct of that life of the kingdom of heaven which Carmel attempts to manifest. Becoming accustomed to the life of the kingdom is difficult, and it is perhaps because of this that Christ promises forgiveness to the forgiving, not to those who excel in outward observance: what matters in Carmel, what assures the sisters of mercy, is not observance or sacrifice or devotion but simply being a community of friendship (36.7). We are left with the suggestive paradox that forgiving is no great matter, as an event in itself––but becoming a forgiving person, through the disciplines of community, is.13

Such disciplines of community have as their telos not simply the righting of wrongs, but the cultivation of holiness both in the lives of individuals and as a community—all through the power of God’s Spirit.

That is, the grace of God’s forgiveness also makes possible new and renewed lives of holiness, Such is the process of living into our baptism, of living into our vocation as eucharistic people. God’s forgiveness transfigures us so that we are no longer bound to the destructive patterns of the past; rather, we are enabled by God to remember the past so that we can be freed for new life in faithful witness to God’s inbreaking Kingdom.

We become holy in the process of living lives of forgiven-ness, and hence also forgiving-ness. We are called to be holy not as some form of superhuman exercise of moral strength, but as a reflection of our gratitude for God’s forgiveness. We are not required to change in order to be forgiven by God; there is nothing we can do to earn that forgiveness. Rather, we are enabled by God to change and grow because we have been forgiven.

This is the reason why confession is such an important practice for Christians, and why it is so easily misunderstood. We are called to confess our sin to God and before one another in Christian community not in order to earn God’s forgiveness, or even in order to make ourselves worthy of God’s forgiveness. Nor do we confess simply to weigh ourselves down with the burden of sin and a self-denying humiliation.

Rather, we are enabled to confess in order to re-narrate our lives so that we are capable of appropriating God’s forgiveness into our lives as forgiven and forgiving people in community. Thus confession is not a means of earning salvation; it is a discipline of community which, through the guidance of the Holy Spirit, makes possible, and contributes to, our transformation into holy people. As the literary critic Frank Lentricchia has described it in a recent essay:

Bless me, father, for I have sinned. Oh my God, I am heartily sorry for having offended Thee, and I detest all my sins. The pains of Hell. When I was less than a teenager confession was coming out of church on a late Saturday afternoon having made a perfect Act of Contrition and having done my penance without a grudge and knowing with complete joy that should I be struck and killed by an automobile before I reached home I would go directly to Heaven, because God would find my soul beautiful. Now, at fifty, I think confession is telling who you are to someone who will not judge you a failure because you fail. To confess, to periodically relinquish privacy, to renounce solitude as an end in itself. It seemed a rehearsal for friendship; a discipline for community.14

Confession is thus taking responsibility for one’s own life and one’s own action. Even more strongly, it includes not only affirming our created goodness but also taking responsibility for our part in the judgment under which the world stands. In so doing, our selves are re-made so that we are capable of engaging in practices of forgiveness that foster holiness and re-create relationships—with God (in response to God’s prior forgiveness of us), with one another, and with ourselves.15 Confession and forgiveness thus are crucial practices which are integrally joined to other practices such as baptism and eucharist. These practices enable us both to sustain community and to witness to an alternative form of power—the power of Christ’s cross and resurrection. Such power does not destroy, but seeks to reconcile and make new. As Nicholas Lash suggests, we need an

appropriate engagement with destructive violence, the strenuous exercise of a kind of power set to the service of a kind of politics, construction of the kind of culture of reconciliation and the binding up of wounds which might embody, sustain, and publicly communicate the announcement of God’s peace.16

Hence a Christian theology which manifests the crucial links among Christology, ecclesiology, and Christian life will also have strong implications for ethics and politics.

Such links are forged by God’s forgiveness and strengthened by the vocation of holiness, that call to saintly living wherein we can absorb sin and evil without passing them on.

Even so, this all seems a bit too simple. For, among other things, we seem to have glossed over the difficulties entailed when one of the parties in a relationship is unwilling to confess, repent, or perhaps even to acknowledge that anything evil or sinful has been done. To explore this question, I turn briefly to a practice of forgiveness enjoined by Jesus in Matthew’s Gospel which also points to, at least contingently, some potential limits of forgiveness.

The text is Matthew 18, and more specifically verses 15-20. The passage reads as follows:

If another member of the church sins against you, go and point out the fault when the two of you are alone. If the member listens to you, you have regained that one. But if you are not listened to, take one or two others along with you, so that every word may be confirmed by the evidence of two or three witnesses. If the member refuses to listen to them, tell it to the church; and if the offender refuses to listen even to the church, let such a one be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector. Truly I tell you whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven. Again, truly I tell you, if two of you agree on earth about anything you ask, it will be done for you by my Father in heaven, For where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them (NRSV).

This passage points to a structure of resolving conflict through a practice of forgiveness and reconciliation. As such, its instructions are rather clear. Sin ought not to be glossed over; it must be confronted.

In many ways, this passage sounds rather threatening. It is not difficult to recall situations when confronted sin has produced greater destruction, not reconciliation. So we want to shy away from confronting our brother or our sister; ironically, our reason for doing so is often that we want to “keep the peace.”

But the logic of this passage suggests that we will only be able to “keep the peace in so far as we foster practices of forgiveness and reconciliation in which sin is acknowledged and confronted. The only way in which that will happen is if we recognize the priority of Christology to ecclesiology—or, more specifically, the priority of God’s forgiveness of us in Jesus Christ to our forgiveness of one another through the power of the Holy Spirit. In other words, we come to the practice of forgiving one another from the stance of those who have already been forgiven and acknowledge forgiveness as the Christian way of life.

But the text also recognizes the prospect that there will be circumstances in which forgiveness and reconciliation will not be, at least contingently, fully possible. Why? What then?

Loving Enemies On The Path Of Forgiveness And Reconciliation

According to this passage in Matthew, the reason forgiveness may not be fully possible, and hence would actually be unwise, is that the offenders may not acknowledge their need for forgiveness. If they persistently refuse to acknowledge this, so it is suggested, they ought to be treated as gentiles and tax-collectors. As Stanley Hauerwas has argued, such people “are acting like those who have not learned that they have been forgiven. To act like one not needing forgiveness is to act against the very basis of this community as a community of peacemaking”17 That is, these people are Christians who live as if there is no God.

Such a description is consistent with the parable of the unforgiving servant which concludes Matthew 18 (18:23-35). The servant is punished because of his failure to manifest forgiveness in his relations with those who were indebted to him. The implication of both of these texts seems to be that, while repentance and confession are not conditions of receiving God’s forgiveness, they are indispensable means of acknowledging our need for forgiveness and hence embodying that forgiveness in our relations with others.

But what should we say about, and how should we act toward, these people who refuse to engage in practices of forgiveness and reconciliation, even if—or perhaps especially if—there are differences in perception about the wrongdoing? By such a refusal, they have excluded themselves from the realm of the Body of Christ, understood as the community of the forgiven, and so ought to be treated as such. The truthfulness of Christian community demands such judgment. This judgment of exclusion is what the notions of “gentile” and a “tax collector” would connote within the Jewish background of Matthew’s audience. As outsiders to the fellowship, they may even be termed “enemies.”

Before we move too quickly, however, we need to remember how Jesus treats such “enemies” as gentiles and tax-collectors. He continues to reach out to them, to bring them (back) into the fold of God’s covenant of grace.18 We should not coerce them into the fold, nor should we pretend that the conflict and division don’t exist. But neither should we “demonize” them, as we so often want to do with enemies, or turn them into “scapegoats.”19 Earlier in Matthew’s Gospel, in the context of the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus enjoins his disciples to “love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you” (Mt. 5:44). Such a call to “love your enemies” is startling in its frank acknowledgment that we will have enemies. While Christ decisively defeated sin and evil through his cross and resurrection, sin and evil’s influence have not fully come to an end. So in at least one sense, we still live on this side of the fullness of Easter.

But, even if we do and probably always will have enemies– –if we are faithfully following Jesus––we are nonetheless called to love them. That is a reminder that, in the absence of the fullness of forgiveness and reconciliation, the love of enemies remains an important step whose telos must always be the hope for reconciliation, the transformation of enemies into friends.

Such love of enemies has been embodied in many of the holy lives of those we call “saints.” Often such people are unknown to many others, but their faithfulness bore––and continues to bear––witness to the forgiving and sanctifying grace of God revealed in Jesus Christ. Yet there are also examples of people such as Archbishop Oscar Romero whose fidelity to the gospel became most clear in their refusal to demonize others, in their commitment to love even––and perhaps especially––their enemies.

Conclusion

I have been suggesting that the only way we can reclaim the place of forgiveness in Christian theology and life is to recover the distinctiveness of theological language. We should not be ashamed of doing so, however, for it is an extraordinarily rich language. It is the language of Christian proclamation, both in word and deed. It is also a language which not only is more faithful to Christian doctrinal claims about God, the world, and the nature and purpose of human life, but is capable of responding to the genuine and important cries of the world––and of individual people––for the cleansing of sin and the healing of wounds.

Even so, I have only begun to sketch the logic of a Christian understanding of forgiveness. Many important questions and issues have, for the sake of space, been pushed to the side; not the least of these are 1) sorting out the relationship between Jewish and Christian convictions about forgiveness; 2) identifying areas of disagreement and differences of emphasis among ecclesial traditions, both within the history of Christianity and in contemporary conversations and disputes; 3) exploring the implications of Christian claims about forgiveness in relation to accountability and punishment in social and political life, and 4) dealing with objections to a Christian account that have been offered by, among others, Nietzsche and Ivan Karamazov. Even more, that which I have identified and explored needs further development.

But as we live in this time between the times of Christ’s forgiveness through his cross and resurrection and the promised coming of the fullness of God’s Kingdom, let us be ever watchful. Let us be watchful for the ways in which we can testify to the forgiving, transforming and reconciling power of Easter in a world which all-too-often seems bent on finding new ways to crucify.20

This article first appeared in Theology Matters, Vol. 3, No. 4 (Jul/Aug 1997).