November 24, 2011: Can An Act Of Self-Interest Be Called "Forgiveness"?

Some years ago my friend Doug Schmidt wrote a book on forgiveness and sent the galley proofs to Lewis Smedes, author of Forgive And Forget: Healing The Hurts We Don't Deserve. Smedes suggested that Doug include in his final draft some mention of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission. When South Africa emerged from apartheid, truth commissions were established in the mid 1990s wherein perpetrators of atrocities - even murder - could confess crimes they had committed under the old regime and receive amnesty. Smedes celebrated these commissions as examples of Christian forgiveness.

But were they? In a recent article on the assassination of Moammar Gaddafi ("Libyan Crossfire," Washington Post, Oct 27, 2011) Charles Krauthammer mentions in passing that South African forgiveness was granted in order to avoid civil unrest. He writes, "In...post-apartheid South Africa, it was decided that full justice — punishing the guilty — would be sacrificed in order to preserve the fragile social peace of the new democracy. The former oppressors having agreed to a peaceful relinquishing of power, full justice might have ignited renewed civil strife. Therefore, [this infant democracy] settled for mere truth: a meticulous accounting of the crimes of the previous regime. In return for truthful testimony, perpetrators were given amnesty."

Is that forgiveness? Something seems wrong. If I kill my neighbor in the US in 2011, I get lethal injection or life in prison. But if I raid a shantytown in South Africa in 1982 and kill a black man, all I have to do is say, "Yep, I did it," in 1995, and I get off scot-free? What accounts for the difference between the ways the two cases of murder are handled? Is it really because African Amnesty 1995 manifests grace, mercy, compassion and forgiveness while American Justice 2011 runs roughshod over these virtues? Should our system be more like theirs?

Nonsense. Generally it is right to punish murderers, and it is an abuse of justice to let them go. The exception is when we see that just punishment will result in more pain for us. Then we grant amnesty, though not from the goodness in our hearts so much as from the wisdom in our brains. It is folly to pursue justice at the cost of riots and retaliation and bloodshed. So we calculate consequences and act as righteous counterparts to Pontius Pilate, who condemned a man he knew to be innocent in order to avoid public mayhem. We release men we know to be guilty for the same reason.

Please do not misunderstand - I am not saying that the South African truth commissions did the wrong thing. They did the right, wise and best thing. They even gave the world a model for how to manage painful national transition without upheaval. But let us not put noble labels ("forgiveness," "mercy," "Christian reconciliation") on travesties of justice done mainly to benefit victims. True forgiveness is not quite so self-serving.

I think we often congratulate ourselves (or praise others) for acts of forgiveness whose real motive is mere self-interest. Nearly 20 years ago my guileless mother said she admired Hillary Clinton for the way she forgave Bill and preserved her marriage despite his infidelities. Hmmm. Well. It would not be right for me to say that I know what was in Hillary's heart. But perhaps it is permissible to leave some room for the cynical speculation that the grace she extended to her husband involved a shrewdly calculated plan to keep her own aspirations alive. Would she have forgiven him if he were a warehouse laborer incapable of furthering her eventual career as first lady, senator, presidential candidate and secretary of state? If so, then I take back my unseemly doubts about her motive and confess that Mom was right: Hillary Clinton is an extraordinarily gracious and magnanimous woman.

It is not hard, though, to find some pretty obvious examples of phony forgiveness that cry "fraud!" right in our faces. Consider sports. A college athlete runs afoul of the law, and Coach, after some necessary discipline, reinstates him with fatherly rhetoric about everyone deserving a second chance. Left unsaid is the fact that the athlete has a 40 inch vertical leap, runs the 40 in 4.4 seconds, and can probably help the team win enough games to keep Coach from getting fired.

Please forgive me for finding an especially giddy example of self-serving pardon in the depraved muck of South Park. In one episode Kenny's friends warn him that his new girlfriend is impure - they have heard that she gave certain satisfaction to a former boyfriend. Kenny responds not with dismay but with ecstasy over the prospect that he might be the next target of her favors. When he sees her next, she tearfully acknowledges that the rumor is true, and asks him, "Can you ever forgive me?" Barely able to contain his glee he puts a comforting arm around her shoulder: Of course darling. Of course I forgive you.

In recent years I have noticed in many evangelical sermons that the motive of self-interest for forgiveness is not merely tolerated or winked at but positively extolled. The reason we are supposed to forgive is because of the benefit we will receive. We'll get peace of mind and a joyful spirit and a release from bitterness if only we forgive those who have wronged us. Smedes concluded one of his sermons on forgiveness by saying, "The first person who gets the benefit of forgiving is always the person who does the forgiving. When you forgive a person who wronged you, you set a prisoner free, and then you discover that the prisoner you set free is you...When you forgive, you heal the hurts you never should have felt in the first place. So if you have been hurt and feel miserable about it, our Lord himself recommends forgiving as the only way to healing. I hope that you will try it for yourself."

Smedes is wrong. Jesus never recommended forgiveness as a way to heal your hurts. He commanded it as a way to please God and release others from their indebtedness to you. Smedes' notion of forgiveness is so severely twisted back on itself that the offending party becomes - in some cases - an irrelevance. For Smedes and other preachers I have heard, forgiveness is so much a matter of me getting my peace of mind that it does not even matter if the offender is alive or dead! A couple years ago I heard a well-known evangelical pastor tell his listeners that they must forgive people who abused them as children even if the abusers died unrepentant many years ago. What this preacher fails to understand is that "forgive" does not mean "get over your feelings of bitterness and resentment" but rather "release an offender from the obligations of his indebtedness." Forgiving the dead, then, is neither right nor wrong but simply nonsensical. It is like visiting a graveyard and saying to a corpse buried beneath the tombstone (and I suppose you had better shout pretty loudly), "You know that 100 bucks you owe me? You don't have to pay it back!"

Protestant Christians in particular may understand this point better if it is explained that we are to forgive people under the same kinds of conditions and circumstances that we would pray for them. Ask a Protestant why he never prays for the dead, and he might say (among other things), "Because it can't do them any good." Right then - so, what possible good can it do them to forgive them? None at all, of course. In a case like this, all the benefit of forgiveness goes to the forgiver and none whatsoever to the party forgiven. But to call an act so self-centered and self-focused "forgiveness" is to poison that high and noble word. We are commanded to forgive as God forgives us (Colossians 3:13). When God pardons us, we are the beneficiaries, not he. God will do just fine with or without us, thank you very much. He does not forgive us in order to free himself from the shackles of bitterness that ruin his day and leave him feeling grumpy. He forgives in order to bless us with wholly undeserved favor that cancels our debt and enables our everlasting joy.

Forgive others for their sake, not yours. Let whatever benefit you receive in consequence be a side effect rather than a goal.

The temptation among evangelical believers to frame the topic of forgiveness in terms of self-benefit is part of a much larger problem these days where nearly all the commands of God seem to be held at bay until we can get an answer to the question, "What's in it for me?". Then, only when we know we can defend obedience on the grounds of rational self-interest do we feel safe urging others to submit to God's will. In all the Christian literature promoting abstinence, for example, I dare you to find even one article whose main argument is "Fornication displeases God" rather than "Abstinence is good for you!" Lord willing I'll write more about that larger issue some day.

If you would like to pursue some further thoughts on forgiveness, please see the blog posts for October 27, November 3, and November 10 of 2009. As always, I welcome comments and interaction.