Just Forgiveness: Exploring the Bible, weighing the issues

By Anthony Bash

Anthony Bash offers new insights into forgiveness from a biblical perspective, taking into account important findings in philosophy, politics and psychology. The book explores what the Bible says about forgiveness so that we can better experience its regenerative and renewing effects. It also looks at what the Bible says in the light of two thousand years of thought about forgiveness. It does so in the belief that, if forgiveness is to be meaningful, it must be just.

• Language: English
• Publisher: SPCK
• Release date: May 4, 2012
• ISBN: 9780281066018

Anthony Bash

Anthony Bash teaches New Testament at Durham University. He is also Vice-Master of Hatfield College, Durham University. Anthony is author of Forgiveness and Christian Ethics (2007) and Just Forgiveness (2011).

Book preview

Preface

I am grateful to Philip Law of SPCK for inviting me to write this book on forgiveness. Although it is not the first time I have written about the subject, this book represents a substantial development of my thinking – and not, I hope, a contradiction of what I have said in the past.

Geoffrey Scarre from the Department of Philosophy at Durham University has been a constant source of challenge and stimulus to my thinking in recent years. I am very grateful to him.

To those who have read parts of this book in draft form – Morna Hooker and Geoffrey Scarre – I offer my thanks. Eve Garrard, Peter MacLellan and David McNaughton have read an earlier draft of the book and have offered many insightful comments and suggestions. They modelled what it means to be generous in spirit towards the work of others.

Above all, I thank my wife, Melanie. She has been determined to ensure that I write short sentences in (relatively) day-to-day English, with more punctuation. I leave you to judge how successful she has been. With this project – and throughout our married life – she has been a wonderful friend and support.

I would also like to thank our children, Hannah, Simeon and Matthias, for being patient with a father who has been absorbed with writing and thinking about forgiveness.

About a year before I started to write this book, a friend and mentor, Paul Berg, former Vicar of Christ Church, Clifton, Bristol, died. Paul has had an enormous influence on me, as well as on thousands of other people during more than 20 years of ministry in Bristol. I dedicate this book in gratitude to his memory.

Anthony Bash

Hatfield College

Durham University

Part 1

QUESTIONS AND

ANSWERS

1

The dilemma of forgiveness

Whether we want to admit it or not, to forgive is not an easy thing to do.

For most of us, the greater the wrong done to us, the harder it is to forgive. It is relatively easy to forgive a ‘minor’ wrong, such as a forgotten invitation, an unfeeling remark or a ‘white’ lie. Most people find it much harder to forgive a wrong that they regard as ‘serious’. Of course, which wrongs people regard as serious and which they do not varies from person to person. Nevertheless, the point remains: wrongs can be hard to forgive. If we are honest, sometimes we never manage to forgive some wrongs: we just learn to live around them.

Norman Tebbit, a former British government minister, has described what it means to live around wrongs. He and his wife were injured in a bomb planted by Patrick Magee on behalf of the Provisional IRA at the Grand Hotel, Brighton, in 1984. Tebbit has declined to forgive Patrick Magee because, though Magee ‘regrets’ what he did, he is unrepentant. On the twenty-fifth anniversary of the bombing, Tebbit said, ‘most days I don’t think about my own scars or the bits of plastic that hold me together’.¹ He has also said that the bombing and its effects are not ‘on my mind most of my life’.² What he says illustrates how, with the passing of time, he has learned to get on with life, despite the bombing and its aftermath for him and his wife, and despite the fact that he has not forgiven the bomber.

Hidden issues

Most of us pay lip service to the idea that it is morally virtuous to forgive. Often we do not think too carefully about what we mean by ‘forgiveness’ and about the who, what, where, when, why and how of forgiveness. If we are to be forgiving in a thoughtful and responsible way, we need to face – and begin to answer – some of the hidden issues that to forgive raises. This book explores those hidden issues.

What do we mean by ‘forgiveness’?

We may wonder what exactly we mean when we say we forgive. We may ask ourselves, for example, how human beings can exonerate other people from the consequences of their wrongdoing. True, we may want to restore a damaged relationship by offering forgiveness. At the back of our minds, we may still say to ourselves that, though our forgiveness addresses the relational consequences of the wrongdoing, it cannot undo or reverse the moral consequences of the wrongful act. We may think that it is for God alone to do that – and that we are not God and that we do not intend to ‘play God’.

A well-known definition of the verb ‘to forgive’ is that it is to ‘forswear resentment’. What people mean by this is that victims forgive when they irrevocably abandon or renounce (that is, ‘forswear’) that indignant sense of injury or insult or those strong feelings of ill-will or anger (‘resentment’) that can lead them sometimes to want (or even to seek) revenge.

Of course, to forgive is to forswear resentment, but to forswear resentment is only part of a much more complex interpersonal process that we call ‘to forgive’. In particular, to forswear resentment does not take account of justice or of relationships – two elements of forgiveness that today we regard as integral to forgiveness. It also says nothing about the fact that people can forswear resentment for reasons or for motives that we may not regard as forgiving. They may forswear resentment, for example, because they are pathologically passive, or wish to avoid conflict, or because they are without a properly developed moral compass. When driven by such motivations, what people do (if we can properly call it ‘to forgive’) is a less richly textured response to wrongdoing, and one that is of doubtful moral value.

Forgiveness and justice

Many of us are uneasy about forgiveness because we think that to forgive compromises justice. We correctly think that, on the one hand, it is right to hold people to account for what they have done and that, on the other hand, to forgive is a moral virtue. If we were to consider more deeply what we do when we forgive, we would agree that to forswear resentment does not mean we no longer hold a wrongdoer to account. However, for most of us it is difficult – if not impossible – to continue to hold someone to account for a wrong and to forswear resentment about that wrong. For us, justice (with the moral accountability that justice insists on) and forgiveness seem to be in conflict. Seen this way, forgiveness appears to present an uncomfortable challenge – even a threat – to justice.

The longing for justice seems to be ‘hard-wired’ into the way human beings think and feel. We see this from an early age in children who, often long before they understand what words like ‘justice’ mean, have a very developed sense of fairness, especially when it comes to their own supposed rights. (I suspect we have all heard children say, ‘It’s not fair.’)

Our own experience tells us that the longing for justice does not go away in adulthood. For example, The Times reported on 9 April 2010 that a senior US special forces commander, Vice Admiral William McRaven, visited a family in Khataba, Afghanistan, to ask for forgiveness for the actions of soldiers who had been under his command. The soldiers, following faulty intelligence that probably was maliciously directed, killed five people, believing they were terrorists. Those killed had been at a party to celebrate the birth of a child. The troops attempted to cover up their actions. Haji Sharabuddin said to Vice Admiral McRaven on behalf of himself and the surviving family members that the family wanted justice. It was only then, he said, that ‘I will make a decision [about whether to forgive]. Maybe I will [then] forgive them.’

What makes justice unusual as a moral virtue and as a subject for philosophical enquiry is that it touches almost all of us personally and deeply. It is not a concept from which many of us are detached, in the way that we might think we may be detached from some of the apparently obscure questions that philosophers sometimes rightly explore. Justice – and forgiveness – are day-to-day issues that impinge on how we live, react and treat others. Whoever we are and whatever is our interest in justice (personal, academic or social), we all have a stake in the question, ‘What is justice?’

Justice is a difficult concept to describe. In this book, when I speak of justice I mean what seems fair to you and me. Justice also has to be seen in a psychological and social context as something that promotes personal wellbeing and collective good. Of course, justice is also a virtue that philosophers derive from general moral principles and explicit moral insights. Thus, justice is

an affect (an emotion or feeling);

of good effect (from a psychological and social viewpoint); and

without moral defect (that is, a moral virtue).

Can’t, shan’t or won’t forgive

We should distinguish victims who do not wish to forgive from victims who cannot forgive. We may ourselves know people who have tried hard (but unsuccessfully) to forgive and even sought professional help (such as from a counsellor), and who still cannot forgive. Perhaps they cannot forgive because the wrongs they have suffered have gravely damaged them psychologically or because they are too dehumanized or too broken by what they have experienced. To ask them to forgive is to ask them to do the impossible. They may change and be able to forgive in time, but for the present, they can no more forgive than fly to the moon.

Some people question whether it is always right to forgive. Archbishop Desmond Tutu has written a book entitled No Future without Forgiveness (1999), and most of us rightly believe, along with Archbishop Tutu, that a world dominated by hate, bitterness and revenge is not a world in which we would want to live. Even so, we may sometimes wonder whether to forgive is necessarily the right thing to do every time there is wrongdoing.

Forgiveness as weakness

Some think to forgive means that we no longer hold people to account for what they have done. They say we are ‘to forgive and forget’, as the popular saying goes, because ‘life is too short’ to remember past wrongs or not to forgive. Others may respond that not holding a wrongdoer to account is a sign of weakness on our part, a failure to be tough enough to stand up to the wrongdoer and to name wrongdoing as wrongdoing. Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) cruelly wrote that ‘one who makes himself into a worm cannot complain afterwards if people step on him’. Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) went so far as to argue that forgiveness was immoral because it exalted weakness and made people deny or repress the natural desire that they have to ‘get even’ and to seek revenge.

No right to forgiveness

Wrongdoers can ask for forgiveness but cannot demand or expect it. It may be churlish, heartless or lacking in grace for a victim to decline to forgive a wrongdoer. The refusal may even be spiteful and malicious, driven by the desire to cause as much hurt as possible to the (now repentant) wrongdoer. Even so, a wrongdoer cannot demand something to which he or she is not entitled by right.

Dead victims

If the victim has died, there will be no one to forgive the wrongdoer. Simon Wiesenthal’s book The Sunflower (1997) illustrates the moral and personal problems that this can bring.

The book begins with an account about Karl, a German soldier (whose surname we are not told). Karl lay dying in a hospital. He asked Wiesenthal, then a prisoner in a concentration camp, to forgive him for a dreadful atrocity that the soldier, along with other soldiers, had committed. Wiesenthal was not one of the victims of the atrocity. The dilemma Karl faced was that there was nobody left alive from the atrocity to forgive him. Wiesenthal chose not to forgive Karl. He leaves us with the impression that Karl died tormented with guilt for what he had done, knowing that no one had forgiven him.

The question the book poses is whether Wiesenthal should have forgiven the soldier, even though Wiesenthal was not one of the victims of the atrocity. Personally, I do not think Wiesenthal could have forgiven the soldier, because the soldier had not wronged Wiesenthal. Only victims can forgive those who wrong them.

Repeated forgiveness

Some of us find that forgiveness is not a ‘once and for all’ act. Forgiveness is often more like a process, and sometimes a never-ending process. Long after we thought we had forgiven, anger, bitterness or even vengeful feelings about the wrong may sometimes still trouble us. Forgiveness is something we revisit and go on revisiting, as we discover new layers of hurt or experience new feelings about the hurt. People typically have to revisit forgiveness if they live with continuing loss from the wrongdoing.

No repentance

Should we forgive if the wrongdoer shows no contrition about the wrongdoing? Perhaps the wrongdoer celebrates having done the wrong, and has a cruel and vindictive attitude about the wrong. ‘Why should I forgive?’ the victim asks. ‘To forgive in these circumstances is to collude with what the wrongdoer has done. It amounts to failure to stand up and say that the wrongdoing was wrongdoing. I am not going to take this lying down.’

Norman Tebbit has written and spoken about this dilemma. He has said, ‘forgiveness is not a one-way street. The transgressor cannot be forgiven unless he acknowledges the evil of what he has done, and shows remorse and repentance . . . I can no more forgive a sinner who does not repent than a priest.’³

A wrongdoer may deny that there is anything to forgive. For example, the wrongdoer may think that the act is not morally wrong. I suggest that to offer forgiveness in such a situation is absurd, because the supposed act of forgiveness lacks integrity as a morally reasonable act. For though the victim may think there is something to forgive, the wrongdoer does not. Many people think that until the victim’s view about the wrong corresponds with the wrongdoer’s view about the wrong, forgiveness (in the strict sense of the word) is impossible.

We sometimes forget that, on occasions, people long to forgive someone but cannot because the wrongdoer denies wrongdoing. Where this happens, it can be psychologically very difficult for a victim to achieve closure on a matter. The wrongdoer’s denial of wrongdoing may add to and reinforce the initial hurt the victim suffered.

As I was editing this chapter, I read an interesting BBC report that makes this same point.⁴ The report refers to those who have been the subject of medical negligence, and says that many such people do not wish to sue for damages but ‘just want a simple apology’. It gives as an example a 21-year-old man who died from a treatable illness due to a series of errors and systems failures in a hospital. His next of kin did not wish to sue the medical practitioners but felt constrained to do so by what the report calls ‘a wall of resistance’ and the ‘refusal by the hospital to apologize and admit that mistakes had taken place’. The deceased’s mother was reported to have said that ‘a simple apology at the time of her son’s death would have been