Does it seem to you that Western culture is growing increasingly merciless and unforgiving? Maybe it doesn’t. Maybe you think the opposite is true, given the rate at which behaviors traditionally understood as wrong are being normalized—but that has nothing to do with mercy or forgiveness. Actually, that trend underscores my point; given the increasingly pharisaical tenor of Western society, true toleration of behavior is disappearing into polarization, leaving only approval and anathematization as options.
I wrote that five and a half years ago; if anything, I think it’s truer now than when I wrote it. Contemporary Western culture has rejected Christianity as legalistic in the service of a harsher legalism. It has condemned the historic Christian faith for believing in sin, and in the process has lost the understanding of grace. As it has rushed to caricature and demonize the Puritans, it has become puritanical in the worst sense of the word (a sense which, ironically, would not actually apply to the historical Puritans).
If you don’t believe me, just ask Anne Applebaum, who is no conservative Christian. As Applebaum summarizes the current state of things in the US,
No one—of any age, in any profession—is safe. In the age of Zoom, cellphone cameras, miniature recorders, and other forms of cheap surveillance technology, anyone’s comments can be taken out of context; anyone’s story can become a rallying cry for Twitter mobs on the left or the right. Anyone can then fall victim to a bureaucracy terrified by the sudden eruption of anger. And once one set of people loses the right to due process, so does everybody else. Not just professors but students; not just editors of elite publications but random members of the public. Gotcha moments can be choreographed.
The problem, I believe, is that as a culture we have become lovers of justice. That might seem to be an exceedingly strange thing to identify as a problem—isn’t justice a good thing? Yes, it is, but being a lover of justice is highly problematic. It sounds like a noble thing, and we’re able to tell ourselves it is; but whether quickly or slowly, those who love justice come in the end to love justice as they define it. This is because we instinctively believe that justice is something which is owed to us and to the people we care about: justice means we get what we think we deserve. As the missionary and theologian Lesslie Newbigin observed, “Each of us overestimates what is due to him as compared with what is due to his neighbor,” and we use the language of justice to try to enforce that overestimation. That’s why in Micah 6 God tells his people to do justice, not to love justice. Otherwise we’re just liable to end up like the archetypal lover of justice, Inspector Javert:
Loving justice precludes forgiving others, because forgiveness feels unjust. From a selfish perspective, it is: true forgiveness is renouncing the right to demand (or enact) judgment. It is the surrender of our claimed right to determine what justice we deserve. As John Piper says, it means something profoundly unappealing:
One of the main obstacles to forgiving, forbearing, returning good for evil, blessing those who hurt us, is that if we do this—if we really return good for evil, not the kind of manipulative way that hopes to really draw attention to the other person’s guilt, but I am talking about a really authentic blessing, treating them with kindness and hope from the heart—if we do that, then very few people, if anybody, will know that we have been hurt. And that is the challenge.
If we return good for evil, we are not moping around. Our countenance is not cast down. Our shoulders are not shrugged. We haven’t withdrawn into a silent funk. We are not drawing attention to our woundedness. We are acting in a cheerful, hopeful, gracious way, and nobody will have any idea that we have been insulted or put down or wounded or cheated. And almost everything in my sinful soul cries out against that.
We want people to know that we have been hurt. We want people to pity us or at least sympathize with us or recognize that our effort to return good for evil is a noble effort in the face of much difficulty. . . .
And perhaps most of all we want the person who has wounded us to be aware that they have wounded us, and we don’t want to act in a way that looks as if they didn’t hurt us—that looks as if it makes light of the fact that they wounded us or insulted us or put us down or criticized us in an inappropriate way or cheated on us.
As such, forgiveness only makes sense in a Christian or Jewish context. As believers in the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, we can trust two things to be true which can make all the difference here. One, we can trust
that God knows we have been hurt, that God understands, and that God attends to us. . . . When God sees us returning good for evil, he knows everything. He knows we have been insulted or treated unjustly or cheated or whatever. He knows it. And he is sympathetic, and he is attentive, and he sees that we are returning good for evil when harm has been done to us. He sees that we are obeying him.
Two, we can trust that God is just, and that (as Abraham put it) the judge of all the earth will do right. We can trust that whether or not we see justice done now to our satisfaction, justice will be done, we will be vindicated, and all will be made right. Surrendering our claim to pronounce and enforce justice does not mean that evil will win, it means we are relinquishing the case to the only One who is perfectly just, who is also the only One who has all power to do justice.
Once we trust God for his justice, we can lay down the suspicion that forgiveness is a sucker’s bet—and laying that down frees us to see something of great importance: God calls us to forgive others as much for our sake as for theirs. Unforgiveness anchors us to the past. It keeps our wounds raw and bleeding until the one who inflicted them gives them permission to heal. After all, if we want them to know we have been hurt, we have to keep hurting until they acknowledge it. That allows those who have victimized us to keep re-victimizing us, over and over, constantly, without having to lift a finger. If they wanted to hurt us in the first place, why would they now want to stop?
By contrast, forgiveness liberates us. In leaving our oppressors to God, we unshackle ourselves from them; in releasing our grip on them, we remove their hold on us. We are free to live without reference to them, evicting them from their rent-free space in our minds and hearts. We are free to reject and leave behind their agenda for us. We are free to heal.
The most effective way we can defeat our enemies is to forgive them. Anything else gives them power over us. Forgiving them releases us from their power.
Photo ©2020 Sebastien Marty. Public domain.