Best of intentions: the ethics of forgiveness

Christian Century, Nov 30, 2004 by Harvey Gallagher Cox

For Jews today, God's demand for confession and penitence is enacted during the Days of Awe between Bosh Hashanah and Yore Kippur'. In what is staged as a cosmic courtroom drama, the people gather and confess not only their own transgressions, but also those of the whole people. At the last moment, just as the book of life is being closed, God's verdict is announced. Because God is ultimately compassionate, everyone is forgiven and afforded the opportunity to begin a new year with a clean slate.

During the nearly 2,000 years since the earthly ministry of Jesus, the various Christian churches have also developed highly complex liturgies of repentance and forgiveness. But the core of the Christian understanding is crystallized in the ancient invitation to the commemoration of the Lord's Supper, which eventually found its way into the Book of Common Prayer. It reads as follows:

   Ye who do truly and earnestly
   repent you of your sins, and are in
   love and charity with your neighbors,
   and intend to lead a new life,
   following the commandments of
   God, and walking from henceforth
   in his holy ways: Draw near
   with faith, and take this holy
   Sacrament to your comfort; and
   make your humble confession to
   Almighty God, devoutly kneeling.

It would be hard to find a more compressed summary of the Christian understanding of repentance and forgiveness. First, this invitation assumes that human beings are free. They are endowed by God with the capacity for choice and are therefore responsible for their actions. True, in some of its forms, the Christian idea of original sin seems to qualify this key premise. Yet, recognizing the paradox involved, the overwhelming consensus of Christian theology is that however free will may be blemished or weakened within the actual conditions of history,, human beings nonetheless do have the ability to choose. Otherwise, the call for repentance would be meaningless.

This is not a trivial observation. Jesus" summons to repentance to all who came within earshot--the pious and the reprobate, the weak and the strong, the powerful and the socially marginalized--undercuts any kind of religious, psychological or sociocultural determinism. It constitutes a firm rejection of any notion of karma or kismet that would make God or destiny or behavior in a past life or childhood mistreatment responsible for one's actions. It suggests that although there can be mitigating circumstances, neither fate nor the psychological history of the person can be advanced as the sole reason for his or her conduct. Neither does it allow "it had to be done" or "nothing can be done about it" as excuses. It endows even the most victimized and oppressed peoples with a continuing and genuine responsibility, if only to struggle against whatever deprives them of their personhood. My offenses are ultimately mine. The cogito ergo sum of the Christian view of repentance is: Since I can repent, I am responsible.

The words truly and earnestly also carry an important message. They remind us that there is such a thing as inauthentic repentance. Ill our secularized culture this spurious repentance often appears in the "public apology" that falls short of the real thing. The psychiatrist Aaron Lazarre has pointed out that our public discourse is rife with such bogus apologies. A frequent form is, "I am really sorry that you feel that way" or words to that effect. The style of these utterances raises questions about whether they meet the standards of "truly and earnestly" preserved in the invitation to communion. Public apologies are often marked by the systematic elimination of personal reference and a reliance on the passive voice. The "I" somehow disappears. They rely on phrases such as "injuries ... may have been done" or "mistakes were made." This erasure of the subject betrays a continuing reluctance to accept personal responsibility.