Forgiving and Excusing

Forgiveness, God 0

I find that when I think I am asking God to forgive me I am often in reality (unless I watch myself very carefully) asking Him to do something quite different.  I am asking Him not to forgive me but to excuse me.  But there is all the difference in the world between forgiving and excusing.  Forgiveness says, “Yes, you have done this thing, but I accept your apology; I will never hold it against you and everything between us two will be exactly as it was before.”  But excusing says “I see that you couldn’t help it or didn’t mean it; you weren’t really to blame.”  If one was not really to blame then there is nothing to forgive.  In that sense forgiveness and excusing are almost opposites….

A great deal of our anxiety to make excuses comes from not really believing in it [forgiveness], from thinking that God will not take us to Himself again unless He is satisfied that some sort of case can be made out in our favour.  But that would not be forgiveness at all.  Real forgiveness means looking steadily at the sin, the sin that is left over without any excuse, after all allowances have been made, and seeing it in all its horror, dirt, meanness, and malice, and nevertheless being wholly reconciled to the man who has done it.  That, and only that, is forgiveness, and that we can always have from God if we ask for it.

— C. S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory, quoted in A Year with C. S. Lewis, edited by Patricia S. Klein, p. 263-264

Care and Protection

Compassion, Forgiveness, God, Healing 0

But a person with a shattered life . . . doesn’t first need Christ to forgive her or to forgive through her.  Before anything else, she needs Christ to cradle her, to nurse her with the milk of divine love, to hold her in his arms like an inestimable gem, to sing her songs of gentle care and firm protection, and to restore her to herself as a beloved and treasured being.

And that’s what Christ does.

— Miroslav Volf, Free of Charge, p. 206

Strong Views of God’s Love

Forgiveness, God, Love 0

What makes us universalists is not that we have unusually weak views of sin but unusually strong views of divine love and grace.  Where sin abounds grace abounds all the more.

I have argued that eternal conscious torment is not a just response to sin; and in the eyes of some, this amounts to an underestimate of the severity of sin. . . .  However, just because I do not think that a sin incurs infinite demerit, it does not follow that I deny it incurs very serious demerit. . . .

For the universalist, hell is something to be avoided at all costs, just as Jesus warned us.  To object by saying, “Well, if hell is not forever, it doesn’t really matter if someone has a spell there,” is like suggesting that because you will recover from the long and painful illness, it isn’t worth taking precautions to avoid it.  It is like telling an Old Testament prophet not to bother warning Israel to repent, because God will always restore them after the judgment anyway.  The prophet would reply that it is better to avoid the judgment in this first place, and the prophet is surely correct.  I wonder if I could pose a counter-question to our critics:  “Is it perhaps you who fail to take God’s love and grace as seriously as it deserves?”

It seems to me that the only major Christian doctrine threatened by universalism is the teaching that those in hell have passed beyond the point of no return; and, as this belief is quite detachable from the web of Christian belief without doing any damage to the rest of the web, I can only conclude that, although it is a widely held doctrine, it is peripheral in its structural role in Christian theology.  I can be removed and replaced without doing harm to Christian theology.  Indeed, if I am right, once we remove and replace it with a universalist view of hell, we have a much more coherent web of beliefs than we had before.

— Gregory MacDonald, The Evangelical Universalist, p. 165-167

Forgiving the Unrepentant

Forgiveness, God 0

It is possible to close ourselves to grace, both human and divine.  But only grace can pry open the door that has been shut in its face.  So God continues to give to the ungrateful and to forgive the unrepentant.  Christ stands before the closed door of a grace-resistant heart and knocks gently with a nail-pierced hand.

So should we.  When things go well, gifts engender gifts, and forgiveness gives birth to forgiveness.  That’s the power of giving and forgiving.  When things go ill, gifts fall on hard soil, and forgiveness remains barren.  That’s the impotence of givers and forgivers, for they can only “knock at the door” by giving and forgiving.  And then they must wait . . . and knock again and wait — trusting that the Spirit of the resurrected Christ will make the seed of their forgiveness bear fruit.

— Miroslav Volf, Free of Charge, p. 205

The Opposite of Resentment

Forgiveness, Gratitude, Trust 0

Along with trust there must be gratitude — the opposite of resentment.  Resentment and gratitude cannot coexist, since resentment blocks the perception and experience of life as a gift.  My resentment tells me that I don’t receive what I deserve.  It always manifests itself in envy.

Gratitude, however, goes beyond the “mine” and “thine” and claims the truth that all of life is a pure gift.  In the past I always thought of gratitude as a spontaneous response to the awareness of gifts received, but now I realize that gratitude can also be lived as a discipline.  The discipline of gratitude is the explicit effort to acknowledge that all I am and have is given to me as a gift of love, a gift to be celebrated with joy.

Gratitude as a discipline involves a conscious choice.  I can choose to be grateful even when my emotions and feelings are still steeped in hurt and resentment.  It is amazing how many occasions present themselves in which I can choose gratitude instead of a complaint.  I can choose to be grateful when I am criticized, even when my heart still responds in bitterness.  I can choose to speak about goodness and beauty, even when my inner eye still looks for someone to accuse or something to call ugly.  I can choose to listen to the voices that forgive and to look at the faces that smile, even while I still hear words of revenge and see grimaces of hatred.

— Henri J. M. Nouwen, The Return of the Prodigal Son, p. 85

Love the Sinner

Core Value, Forgiveness, Love 0

Now that I come to think of it, I remember Christian teachers telling me long ago that I must hate a bad man’s actions, but not hate the bad man: or, as they would say, hate the sin but not the sinner.

For a long time I used to think this a silly, straw-splitting distinction:  how could you hate what a man did and not hate the man?  But years later it occurred to me that there was one man to whom I had been doing this all my life — namely myself.  However much I might dislike my own cowardice or conceit or greed, I went on loving myself.  There had never been the slightest difficulty about it.  In fact the very reason why I hated the things was that I loved the man.  Just because I loved myself, I was sorry to find that I was the sort of man who did those things.  Consequently, Christianity does not want us to reduce by one atom the hatred we feel for cruelty and treachery.  We ought to hate them.  Not one word of what we have said about them needs to be unsaid.  But it does want us to hate them in the same way in which we hate things in ourselves:  being sorry that the man should have done such things, and hoping, if it is anyway possible, that somehow, sometime, somewhere he can be cured and made human again.

— C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, quoted in A Year with C. S. Lewis, edited by Patricia S. Klein, p. 226

Positive Intention

Core Value, Forgiveness, Love, Marriage, Relationships 0

Positive intention is shorthand for talking about why you want your relationship to succeed, or what you are going to do to make it work, or how you can grow from a challenging experience.  It is the opposite of complaining.  Positive intention helps you see the big picture of a successful relationship and stops you from focusing on the little picture of disappointment or grievance. . . .  I want you to share stories with yourself, with your loved one, and with your friends and family that reflect a strong and positive commitment to your marriage.  These stories do not have to be long or detailed, but they should anchor your relationship in the idea of goodness and the continued possibility of success.

— Dr. Fred Luskin, Forgive for Love, p. 204

We Don’t Get What We Deserve.

Forgiveness, Relationships, Uncategorized 0

For a Christian, however, a bottom-line principle can never be that we should get what we deserve.  Our very existence is God’s gift.  Our redemption from the snares of sin is God’s gift.  Both are undeserved, and neither could have been deserved.  From start to finish, we are always given free of charge and given more than our due.  It is therefore only fitting that we give others more than their due — give them gifts that satisfy their needs or delight their senses and imagination, and give them the gift of forgiveness that frees them from guilt and the obligation to pay for their misdeeds.

— Miroslav Volf, Free of Charge, p. 203-204