Forgiveness (III)

William Temple's idea of forgiveness includes the point that that there is no duty to forgive those who have not repented of their offense. (He also rejects the opinion that forgiveness writes off the debt of the offender. Its purpose is not to write off debts, Temple says, but to restore the offender and the victim to fellowship. In restored fellowship, the offender will be more anxious to make amends than before he was restored.) The belief that forgiveness is owed only to the repentant dervies from the sayings of Jesus, such as the following:

"If thy brother sin, rebuke him; and if he repent, forgive him."

"If your brother sins against you, go and tell him his fault, between you and him alone. If he listens to you, you have gained your brother. But if he does not listen, take one or two others along with you, that every word may be confirmed by the evidence of two or three witnesses. If he refuses to listen to them, tell it to the church; and if he refuses to listen even to the church, let him be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector." (Matt. 18:15–17.)

At first sight, this kind of advice seems inconsistent with the ideal of unlimited forgiveness espoused in, for example, the Catholic Catechism quoted in the preceding post. It seems to me that the two concepts of forgiveness can be reconciled, however, by thinking in terms of the communities within which forgiveness is supposed to apply. . . . CONTINUE

In Matthew 18, forgiveness is clearly being viewed as a means for preserving intimacy within a limited community, the "church" of Jesus's followers, or, possibly, of Jews as a whole, envisioned as following Jesus's interpretation of Judaism: the fate of the unforgiven is not to be hated, but merely to be lumped with all the other unfortunates outside the Christian community (or at least, with non-Jews and those Jews who behave disgracefully, the tax-collectors. One would, incidentally, like to know what word is being translated as "church" here, considering that there was no such thing as a church in the usual sense at the time Jesus said this.) The "church" will maintain its own procedures, described here in embryonic form, for restoring fellowship among its members whenever division arises. Both the offenders and the victims are subject to the church's authority, and if the offenders refuse to acknowledge their fault as judged by the church, they will be cut off from the community. There will be no such thing as a member of the community who is unrepentant for an offense felt as such by another member. Indeed, if I am not mistaken, in the earliest period of the Church, it was assumed that after baptism, Christians would simply not sin any further.

Under such circumstances "unlimited" forgiveness becomes a practical possibility. The problem of forgiving some subhuman thug for casually erasing one's child from the face of the earth, for example, would not arise, because the thug would first have to become human in order to repent. For the sake of one's own soul, one would have to deal with one's hatred in such cases; but it seems to me that the best chance of doing this would be by adopting a detached attitude towards the offender, not by trying to love him and lift him into the ranks of humanity. There might be exceptions to this, but they would be extraordinary, not the basis for a general rule of conduct.

With the growth of the church, there is a risk that the idea of a restricted community of fellowship will be lost sight of, with the result that it may be assumed that forgiveness is commanded on behalf of unrepentant sinners who would never have been admitted into the early Christian community. If whole nations are nominally part of Christendom, the Christian will ordinarily live his entire life within the nominally Christian community, within which forgiveness is (again, nominally) unlimited. He may then well forget about the different moral status of those on the outside, the "Gentiles". (Though in the Middle Ages, I think that it was widely believed that one had no obligation even to keep one's promises to non-Christians, for example.) The fact that the community is only nominally Christian will also tend to make this distinction less important by making the whole idea of Christian forgiveness rather academic in many cases. Both Christianity and the distinction between Christians and non-Christians are diluted as the Church expands and grows old. In the modern Catholic Catechism quoted in the preceding post, we may be seeing a late stage of this dilution: the Catechism still refers to the Catholic community, but it is no longer clear that rules of conduct towards fellow-Catholics should be any different from those towards human beings in general. And why should they be, when there is often little distinction evident between the moral behaviour of Catholics and non-Catholics?

Modern liberalism takes the final step in this spiritual dilution and recognizes only the "community" of all human beings, every other group being seen merely as the private recreation of its members. Liberalism, the last stage in the decay of Christian orthodoxy, has nevertheless preserved the Christian ideal of universal love and forgiveness. But a truly universal love would mean loving evil as well as good; it is not only impossible to achieve, it is destructive to attempt it.