A topic unjustly neglected in contemporary theology, forgiveness is often taken to be either too easy or too difficult. On the one hand is the conception of forgiveness that views it mainly as a move made for the well-being of the forgiver. On the other hand, forgiveness is sometimes made too difficult by suggestions that violence is the only effective force for responding to injustice. In this exciting and innovative book, L. Gregory Jones argues that neither of these extreme views is appropriate and shows how practices of Christian forgiveness are richer and more comprehensive than often thought. Forgiveness, says Jones, is a way of life that carries with it distinctive concepts of love, community, confession, power, repentance, justice, punishment, remembrance, and forgetfulness. In Part 1 of Embodying Forgiveness Jones first recounts Dietrich Bonhoeffer's own struggle against the temptation to make forgiveness either too easy or too difficult in his thought and, even more, in his life and death at the hands of the Nazis. Jones then considers each of these temptations, focusing on the problem of "therapeutic" forgiveness and then forgiveness's "eclipse" by violence. Part 2 shows why a trinitarian identification of God is crucial for an adequate account of forgiveness. In Part 3 Jones describes forgiveness as a craft and analyzes the difficulty of loving enemies. He deals particularly with problems of disparities in power, impenitent offenders, and the relations between forgiveness, accountability, and punishment. The book concludes with a discussion of the possibility of certain "unforgiveable" situations. Developing a strong theological perspective on forgiveness throughout, Jones draws on films and a wide variety of literature as well as on Scripture and theological texts. In so doing, he develops a rich and comprehensive exploration of what it truly means to embody Christian forgiveness.

Embodying Forgiveness

A Theological AnalysisBy L. Gregory Jones

William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company

Copyright © 1995 Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8028-0861-5

Contents

Introduction..............................................................xi1. The Cost of Forgiveness................................................32. Therapeutic Forgiveness................................................353. Forgiveness Eclipsed...................................................714. Characterizing the God Who Forgives....................................1015. Forgiveness, Repentance, and the Judgment of Grace.....................1356. Practicing Forgiveness.................................................1637. The Craft of Forgiveness...............................................2078. Loving Enemies.........................................................2419. Is This a Story to Pass On?............................................279Index.....................................................................303

Chapter One

The Cost of Forgiveness

Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the Reclamation of a Christian Vision and Practice

"Forgiving doesn't mean risk your life." This is the headline in a recent column written by Andrew M. Greeley for Religious News Service. Greeley's focus is domestic violence, more specifically the dangers of Christians telling women that they ought always to forgive their abusers. Greeley writes, "Sure, forgive him because he is not in full control of his own actions. But forgiveness does not require you to risk your own life or that of your children. Quite the contrary, self-esteem and concern for your own selfhood (a gift of God) constrains you to send him on his way before it is too late."

Greeley's advice offers an important corrective to rhetoric about forgiveness that perpetuates and exacerbates problems rather than addresses them. People caught in situations of extreme violence, including abuse, do not need to be told, indeed should not be told, that they should be willing to die, even if this is couched in abstract ideals of forgiveness or of sacrifice or of self-denial. Such observations and injunctions, often grounded in Christians' misreadings of their own Scripture, perpetuate the suffering and prevent the sufferers from being able to respond appropriately.

At the same time, however, Greeley's advice too easily invites continued misunderstandings about forgiveness. For in important ways, Christian forgiveness does require our "death." To be sure, not just any death is required, nor should that requirement result in collusion with those who diminish and destroy human life. But Christian forgiveness requires our death, understood in the specific form and shape of Jesus Christ's dying — and rising. For as we participate in Christ's dying and rising, we die to our old selves and find a future not bound by the past. The focus of this dying and rising is the Christian practice of baptism, and it also involves a lifelong practice of living into that baptism, of daily dying to old selves and living into the promise of an embodied new life. This, at least, is the claim Paul makes in his letter to the Romans (6:1-11).

Paul's focus in this passage is not on forgiveness per se. Even so, the larger horizon of his argument in Romans suggests that the practice of forgiveness receives its primary intelligibility from Christ's death and resurrection and that Christians learn to embody forgiveness as a baptismal community — indeed, as the Body of Christ. According to Paul, those who have been baptized have entered into the community defined by whomever or whatever they are baptized into; to have been baptized into Christ, as Paul characterizes it in Romans 6:3, is to have entered into the community ruled and defined by Christ — more specifically, by Christ's death and resurrection. According to Paul, baptism is a training in dying — specifically to sin, to the old self — so that people may be raised to newness of life. Further, this new life is given its shape by the Kingdom that Jesus announced and enacted.

That is, as they are initiated into the practices of God's Kingdom, the forgiving grace of Jesus Christ gives people a new perspective on their histories of sin and evil, of their betrayals and their being betrayed, of their vicious cycles of being caught as victimizers and victims, so that they can bear to remember the past well in hope for a new future. But this is not simply a release from the past; it is also freedom for holiness, a holiness that requires prophetic protest and action directed at any situations where people's lives are being diminished or destroyed. Paradigmatically, such forgiveness in the pursuit of holiness is embodied through the practices of Christian community. That is, the new life of holiness signified by baptism is found and lived in communities of God's Kingdom: People learn to embody forgiveness by becoming part of Christ's Body.

The danger in Greeley's advice is that he dissociates forgiveness from any sense of death and new life, specifically that found in the practice of baptism. Consequently, he diminishes the cost of Christ's forgiveness as well as the hope that is entailed thereby. By situating forgiveness as a largely symbolic gesture (done because "he is not in full control of his own actions"), Greeley fails to grapple with the ways in which Christian forgiveness might provide a more radical critique of situations of abuse and a more radical hope for the future than his perspective allows. It can be so as people embody forgiveness in the specific practices and friendships of God's inbreaking reign.

This suggests that people are mistaken if they think of Christian forgiveness primarily as absolution from guilt; the purpose of forgiveness is the restoration of communion, the reconciliation of brokenness. Neither should forgiveness be confined to a word to be spoken, a feeling to be felt, or an isolated action to be done; rather, it involves a way of life to be lived in fidelity to God's Kingdom. Baptism provides the initiation into God's story of forgiving and reconciling love, definitively embodied in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. In response, people are called to embody that forgiveness by unlearning patterns of sin and struggling for reconciliation wherever there is brokenness.

That is, forgiveness is at once an expression of a commitment to a way of life, the cruciform life of holiness in which people cast off their "old" selves and learn to live in communion with God and with one another, and a means of seeking reconciliation in the midst of particular sins, specific instances of brokenness. In its broadest context, forgiveness is the way in which God's love moves to reconciliation in the face of sin. This priority of forgiveness is a sign of the peace of God's original Creation as well as the promised eschatological consummation of that Creation in the Kingdom, and also a sign of the costliness by which such forgiveness is achieved. In this sense, then, forgiveness indicates the ongoing priority of the Church's task to offer the endlessly creative and gratuitous gift of new life in the face of sin and brokenness.

Christian forgiveness involves a high cost, both for God and for those who embody it. It requires the disciplines of dying and rising with Christ, disciplines for which there are no shortcuts, no handy techniques to replace the risk and vulnerability of giving up "possession" of...