An Alternative & More Helpful Theology of Forgiveness (With Audio)

Let My People Mourn

TIMOTHY KELLER, FORGIVE: WHY SHOULD I AND HOW CAN I?

I’ve been wanting to write this post for sometime now. I think it was a year or so ago that I read the late Tim Keller’s book on forgiveness. While I differ greatly theologically from Keller, there is much that I appreciate about his life and legacy. Keller, for many, was a pastor who let us know that it was okay to think. More than okay, in fact, it was a necessary part of being a pastor. I think it’s important to see the ways that people like Keller allowed pastors to focus more deeply on study which, for some like me, necessarily meant disagreeing with many of his conclusions. Ultimately, I will strongly disagree with some of his conclusions below but want to do so while honoring the work he did, and the integrity with which he did it.

While I hadn’t really read much of Keller for sometime I wanted read his final book. It’s important, I believe, to hear what people feel the need to say or accomplish as they know their days in this world are drawing to an end. How much more when the topic of a final book is forgiveness? I also know that I need to do work in this area and so wanted to hear what Keller had to say. One of the first things that I will say about this book, and I believe this is true generally of Keller, is that he diagnoses the problem well. The most read article in the history of Comment magazine is an article by Keller titled “The Fading of Forgiveness.” This is also the title of a subsection of the introduction of Keller’s book I am referencing here, Forgive: Why Should I and How Can I?^⁠¹ Keller really shines in talking about the fraught conversations around forgiveness and thus the increasing disappearance of forgiveness in our western cultural moment. He does well in talking about many of the problems associated with forgiveness in chapter 2, providing several examples ranging from being pressured into forgiveness without seeking the necessary accompanying justice, to the inverse, being pressured not to forgive. Much from the introduction through to the third chapter is an extended explication of his popular article “The Fading of Forgiveness.” By the fourth chapter, however, I began to grow increasingly uncomfortable not with the necessity of forgiveness in our age, but Keller’s theological assumptions that accompanied it.

Much of my issue with Keller’s writing on forgiveness is that it is deeply rooted in his penal substitutionary atonement assumptions. He writes, for example,

Because God finds sin not merely infuriating but grievous, we glimpse in the being of God that there is not only an insistence on punishment for evil and injustice but also love, even for his fallen people. It is this apparent tension between God’s holiness and his love—between the necessity that sin be punished and the desire for sinners to be delivered—that becomes the basis for the forgiveness that God appoints, achieves, and offers to us. It is one that equally honors justice and mercy.^⁠²

First, I am not convinced that God is insistent on punishment, but more to the point, there most certainly is no tension between God’s holiness and God’s love! Later in chapter 5 these themes of holiness and punishment converge again:

“It is the holiness of God that moves him to punish sin (Leviticus 11:44–45, 19:2, 20:7; 1 Kings 9:3–7).”^⁠³

He then goes on to affirm Herman Bavnick’s shocking argument “against the ‘shallow idea that forgiveness is natural for God.’”^⁠⁴

Here we begin to see that his ideas presented about forgiveness are not in the theological periphery; they about the very essence of God.

“The tension is great. Which is it? Is he a loving God who forgives the guilty or is he a just God who punishes the guilty? He is both—but how is that possible? The true answer is not revealed until the New Testament.”^⁠⁵

While I believe that Jesus is the fullest revelation of God given to creation, I am increasingly wary of any theology which jumps too quickly to the conclusion that ‘we really don’t understand this until we get to the New Testament.’ Jesus reveals to us in deepest clarity what God is like, yet if we cannot look back and see that this is the same God revealed in the Hebrew Scriptures we are reading poorly and, frankly, dangerously. I haven’t been able to stop thinking of Rabbi Irving Greenberg’s post-Holocaust reflections on the suffering God. He writes:

This God had not stopped the Holocaust maybe because this God was suffering and wanted me to stop the Holocaust. As a Jew, I had hesitated to use language of God suffering, because it seems to be a Christian patent. But it’s not so. I came to see this has been a central belief of the Jewish people—that God shares our pain. Indeed Christianity was never more Jewish than when it expressed it in those terms—that God suffers with humans.^⁠⁶

If there is a unique New Testament revelation it is found in 1 John 4:8 where the essence of God is explicitly stated: “God is love.” “Is” is the key word here. We are not dealing with an attribute of God but God’s very essence. God’s love is therefore not in conflict with anything, and the suffering love revealed in Jesus is, according to Greenberg, deeply Jewish in its roots. How could it not be? We are monotheists, after all.

As you might have guessed, after the theme of punishment the theme of substitution makes its appearance:

The law has been perfectly fulfilled in our substitute, and so now it would be unjust for God to turn on us! For God to punish us for any sin would be to exact two payments for the same debt (since Jesus has already paid it). Now Jesus stands before the Father, in a sense, demanding not mercy but justice for us. We have both his law and his love for us. We could not be more secure.^⁠⁷

And now we get to what I see as the crux of the problem with Keller’s writing on forgiveness:

Only a grasp of what Jesus did on the cross—the doctrine of substitutionary atonement—can prevent these spiritual distortions we have been describing. Only this doctrine keeps us from thinking God is mainly holy with some love or mainly loving with some holiness—but instead is both holy and loving equally, interdependently. Only this view of God makes the spoiled or the neglected into the healthy and the loved.^⁠⁸

Three times the word “only” is used. In the end, then, in an age of wrestling with the necessary and difficult questions regarding forgiveness, according to this view we can only arrive at the right conclusions by holding on to this specific theory of atonement. Keller holds some good practical tips on forgiveness, but he also holds what I believe to be some very damaging views. He writes, for example, about the “angel that brings death” in the Exodus narrative and concludes:

“It means, first, that the “angel that brings death” (Exodus 12:23, CEV), the bearer of the wrath of God on evil and sin, did not go only to the homes of the Egyptians. The divine wrath on sin is no respecter of persons. It came to every home in Egypt because every home deserved it.”^⁠⁹

Not only do I disagree, but I think that this is deeply harmful, particularly if we are holding our forgiveness of others within this framework of atonement. “Every home deserved it” is far different from saying that we are all broken and need forgiving love. And did every home deserve death? Did the Israelite children playing within their homes and the mothers kneading bread there deserve death? Further, is it right to assume that all of the Egyptians deserved death? Did the midwives who helped deliver the Hebrew babies deserve death along with the babies they delivered? A forgiveness rooted in “everyone deserved death” can only play out in disastrous ways towards those who have experienced deep trauma. This, in my view, is precisely the problem with holding forgiveness only within the framework of penal substitutionary atonement: it cannot deal well with the evil that happens to many who don’t deserve any of it. Not everything is about general human sin, and certainly not everything is about the punishment “we deserved” that Jesus took. None of this is helpful to the abused child or the battered wife.

Ultimately, I believe that Keller’s desire is to see people become healthy and help us return to the necessity of forgiveness in a fraught time. However, I believe what is needed is an alternative account of forgiveness that is able to not only address the problem of forgiveness, but offer a healthier solution and one that does not have to fit within the narrow and potentially damaging framework of penal substitutionary atonement; one that is more nuanced and helpful to those who have endured trauma. Thankfully, there is a book that does just that.

MATTHEW ICHIHASHI POTTS, FORGIVENESS: AN ALTERNATIVE ACOUNT

Matthew Ichihashi Potts engages both some of the greatest philosophical minds on forgiveness, but also has stunning dialogue with four works of fiction — Kazuo Ishiguaro’s The Buried Giant, Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead, Louise Erdrich’s LaRose, and Toni Morison’s Beloved — which help shape his book in significant ways. I recently read a very good academic book which attempted to engage key fictional works, yet I couldn’t help but feeling I didn’t understand enough about the novels going in to properly engage the material well. Ichihashi Potts, however, does a stunning job of giving you enough background with each of the novels to be able to form the connections which results in giving greater clarity to his work, not less clarity. In fact, while Robinson’s Gilead is one of my favorite novels, I walked away with a new appreciation for the novel and with a greater curiosity for some of the themes I overlooked in my reading. I look forward to reading it again with fresh eyes.

Right out of the gate, the author addresses head on the problem of equating forgiveness with atonement:

“God’s forgiveness in the Christian West is one effectively interchangeable with the theology of atonement…Human beings owe God goodness or honor or holiness or all three, but, having failed to live up to these virtues (so the story goes), they now owe God a debt of some kind.”^⁠¹⁰

Noting that the metaphors with such a theory of atonement are typically economic, Ichihasi Potts writes that the answer to the problem of forgiveness within this atonement frame is “simple bookeeping, really.”^⁠¹¹ But this, he believes, is precisely the problem:

But if we have paid any attention at all, we should have noted on our way into paradise that the cost of settling our accounts has been an astonishing cruelty: the torture and execution of Jesus of Nazareth, the condemnation of a Son by an unrelenting Father, the self-immolation of a brutalized God, and the uncritical valorization of suffering for generations of Christ’s disciples to comes…For all the Christian talk about unconditional forgiveness, in this foundational example of divine forgiveness God does not forgive for free. There are conditions and there are costs to God’s pardon, and they are steep.^⁠¹²

In fairness to Keller, he tries to address some of the sticky issue like this in his subsection of “An Abusive God?” in chapter five, but the brief answer, in my view, isn’t at all compelling or helpful. Keller writes,

“In the cross, God’s wrath and his love now blaze for you and not against you.”^⁠¹³

The “now” here is everything. It would seem that prior to this God’s love and wrath did, in fact, blaze against us. As quoted above, “The law has been perfectly fulfilled in our substitute, and so now it would be unjust for God to turn on us! For God to punish us for any sin would be to exact two payments for the same debt (since Jesus has already paid it).” But this just proves the point: payment was demanded and Jesus had to pay it in order that God might stand fully for us. Tying these views to human and divine forgiveness becomes deeply problematic according to Ichihashi Potts. He points out that the words aphiemi and remittere are used in a variety of way and that to boil these words down to “entirely economic” metaphors is problematic. The biblical use of the words, and therefore the implications, are far more complex than those wanting mere economic exchange admit. Further, the issue with appeasing God’s anger, for Ichihasi Potts, lies more with God instead of human sin:

“To put things more directly and somewhat more starkly, the idea of appeasing God’s anger through sacrifice suggests that the obstacle to full and final reconciliation with God is a problem God has with God’s own feelings, rather than a problem we humans have with our sin.”^⁠¹⁴

The brilliance, both academic and pastoral, of Ichihasi’s work is that it is a “modest, theological, defense of forgiveness.”^⁠¹⁵ He explains:

I offer a modest theological defense of forgiveness: a defense, because I insist that forgiveness is real and that it is worthwhile; modest, because I concede that much of what passes for forgiveness in thought and custom should be largely set aside; theological, because I set that all aside due to its complicity with what I see as a misguided theological tradition of interpreting Jesus of Nazareth’s death.^⁠¹⁶

He goes on to talk about the things that forgiveness is not:

“First, forgiveness is not about feelings.” (7)

“Second, and relatedly, forgiveness is not about reconciliation.” (8)

This is important since he believes that “restored relation is, strictly speaking, the work of reconciliation, a work I characterize as crucially distinct from forgiveness.”^⁠¹⁷ This has incredible pastoral implications. He doesn’t deny the power of potential reconciliation, of course, but puts it in its proper place by a) differentiating it from forgiveness and b) recognizing that reconciliation often is not realized.

“Forgiveness may in some cases prove a first step to reconciliation, or it may simply occasion a lasting estrangement.”^⁠¹⁸

And finally,

“Third, forgiveness happens in time.” (9)

This too is an important point precisely because of his emphasis on non-retaliation (which we’ll get to in a moment) and the necessity of properly viewing what time can and cannot accomplish. He writes, for example:

“If you kill my brother, no act can restore what has been lost. This restorative penal fantasy, and retributive punishment’s constant conceptual linkage to forgiveness, skews our moral reflections upon these issues.”^⁠¹⁹

Notice here that it is not only penal substitution that he sees as problematic, but also retribution. While very different in nature, both of these have essentially the same issue with regards to time: they believe they can undo events which cannot be undone. Unforgiveness, and the faux-forgiveness he has been addressing, keeps a person stuck in time (past) rather than allowing them to move into a future in which

“forgiveness requires and inspires imagination. To refuse the retributive attempt to undo the past is to accept the past and to be open to the only possible future that can follow from it.”^⁠²⁰

Therefore,

“Any attempts to recover those irreparable losses—whether they operate under the language of punishment or pardon—are misguided at best.”^⁠²¹

Why is this important? Because,

“To remember the past, I suggest, is to regard it as past.”^⁠²²

WHAT IS FORGIVENESS?

So, what is Ichihashi Pott’s understanding of forgiveness? He focuses on two things: mourning and non-retaliation. First, mourning:

Throughout this book I characterize forgiveness as akin to mourning. Forgiveness seeks to live in the wake of loss. It accepts that what has been lost cannot be restored, and then it aims to live in and with the irrevocability of wrong. If forgiveness is a moral good, then it is good only in the sense that mourning might be construed a social or psychological good—not because mourning itself is a wonderful and enjoyable thing, but because it is the way we learn to struggle with and through and in a loss we cannot redeem.^⁠²³

Second, forgiveness is nonretaliation:

Forgiveness is the habit of nonretaliation; or better, it is the judgment nonretaliation renders. We cannot forgive virtues. We forgive only sins. But as it issues its condemnation of sin, as it resolutely names a violation that cannot be undone, forgiveness also accepts that past as unalterable and so imagines what possibilities for the future its battered history might bear.^⁠²⁴

CONCLUSION

There is much more to say about Ichihashi Potts’s book, but I simply want to conclude by noting that while this is a rigorous academic work, I also think it is deeply important for pastors and for those desiring to forgive. Too often our talk of forgiveness paints God as somehow changing God’s stance towards us. This is what I see in Keller and, even if well meaning, it has tragic implications both theologically and with regards to the practicality of forgiveness. Keller is right in that both he and Ichihashi Potts call for forgiveness in a time when forgiveness is under attack in a sense. They both uphold the value and necessity of forgiveness. Yet in Ichihashi Potts’s work what I find is a forgiveness which does not place either narrow theological demands (such as a particular view of atonement) or a deeper weight (such as reconciliation) in the work of forgiveness. This does not mean that the work is not demanding — mourning is always demanding — but it is demanding in order to free us from the shackles of the past not by forgetting it or downplaying it, but by refusing to stay there either by being shackled to an overly simplistic yet heavy understanding, or through retaliation. Instead, the work of mourning becomes deeply important, and forgiveness as an act of mourning makes forgiveness accessible to the wounded and a necessary step onto the path of a more open future. On a personal note, I needed his words. In reading his work I realized that part of my own work was precisely to mourn in order to move forward. I have often engaged in faux-forgiveness, believing I have let something go when in reality I have simply buried it. Grieving does not allow us to hide from our pain and the ways we were wronged. The truth is, I have carried this work which, again, is determinately academic, in prayer. Any rigorous theology which leaves its reader seeking to pray is, in my view, a true work of theology. I cannot recommend this book highly enough.

Speaking of prayer, I also hope that in the midst of a my critique I have been fair to Keller who I truly believe sought to lead people to forgiveness. While I certainly reach points of disagreement, I want to end this post by saying that I pray for the Keller’s family. Whenever I heard Tim Keller speak I sensed a gentleness that can only come from a person who has learned to forgive. While I disagree, even strongly at times, with some of his theological conclusions, I am grateful for his life and ministry.

“Eternal rest grant unto him, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon him. May he rest in peace.”

*Cover Art Source: https://magazine.hms.harvard.edu/articles/profound-sadness-prolonged-grief

1. Timothy Keller, Forgive: Why Should I and How Can I? (New York: Viking Press, 2022).

2. ibid., ch. 4, ebup.

3. ibid., ch. 5.

4. Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, vol. 4, Holy Spirit, Church, and New Creation, ed. John Bolt, trans. John Vriend (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 2008), 179–80. Quoted in Keller, Forgive, ch. 5.

5. ibid., ch. 5.

6. Rabbi Irving Greenberg, “Easing the Divine Suffering,” in Bob Abernethy and William Bole, eds., The Life of Meaning: Reflections on Faith, Doubt, and Repairing the World (New York: Seve Stories, 2002), 69. Quoted in Richard Kearney, Anatheism: Insurrections: Critical Studies in Religion, Politics, and Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 61.

7. Keller, Forgive, ch. 5.

8. ibid.

9. ibid., ch. 6.

10. Matthew Ichihashi Potts, Forgiveness: An Alternative Account (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2022), 4.

11. ibid.

12. ibid.

13. Keller, Forgive, ch. 5.

14. Ichihashi Potts, Forgiveness, 161-162.

15. Ichihashi Potts, Forgiveness, 6.

16. ibid.

17. ibid.

18. ibid.

19. ibid., 9.

20. ibid., 10.

21. ibid.

22. ibid., 209.

23. ibid., 10.

24. ibid.