Introduction
I have long thought that when someone wrongs us, we should forgive them, not only for their sake, but also for our own. If we don’t forgive, the memory of the wrong can eat us up with bitterness—so we need to forgive, difficult though that can be, even if it is inappropriate or impossible for some reason to express that forgiveness to the wrongdoer. But from time to time I’ve wondered about the relationship between forgiveness and justice, and come to believe that justice is something a Christian should not necessarily expect this side of eternity. Jesus, after all, was done an unfathomable injustice when he was crucified. Justice came only in eternity, when ‘God exalted him to the highest place and gave him the name that is above every name’ (Philippians 2:9).
But recently I have wondered how this might apply to the Christians of Ukraine. Some have suffered monstrous cruelties. Without justice can one expect them—or does God ask them—to forgive Mr Putin?
So when I came across an article by Miroslav Volf1 entitled Forgiveness, justice, and reconciliation (posted 5 May 2022) on the Religion and Ethics pages of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s website, my attention was immediately captured—doubly so when I saw that it was attached to a recording of a radio interview in which Stan Grant2 questioned Volf on this very topic.
Volf’s article is in a philosopher-theologian’s language, and I struggled to grasp it. This post is partly the result of my attempt to understand, and I hope I have not twisted his meaning too much.
I was already aware of Volf’s commitment to the issue of forgiveness in his 1996 book Exclusion and embrace, resulting from his own attempts to come to terms with the atrocities enacted on people he knew during the Yugoslav Wars, which began in 1991. Volf’s concept of “embrace” is clear enough: “we ought to embrace our enemies as God has embraced us in Christ.” (Volf 2019:12), Embrace is the endpoint of reconciliation, namely restored relationship. Later on, he writes,
The practice of “embrace,” with its concomitant struggle against deception, injustice, and violence, is intelligible only against the backdrop of a powerful, contagious, and destructive evil I call “exclusion” (2019:81)
In its extreme form, “exclusion” treats others as so “other” than oneself that it dehumanises them and in the worst case leads to ethnic “cleansing” (a horrible euphemism).
How are forgiveness and justice related?
Then what, for Volf, is the relationship between forgiveness and justice?
The search for justice is implicit in forgiveness. If you forgive me for something I have done, you imply that what I did was unjust. At the same time, you are saying that you are letting go of your claim for justice against me in order restore our relationship.
For your forgiveness to succeed, I need to receive it; that is, I need to know that what I did was wrong. I need to express repentance, and perhaps to change my behaviour or make restitution. This is the basis for restoring our relationship—for what Volf calls “embrace”.
The model and source of Christian forgiving is our gracious God. All of us are wrongdoers, and for justice to be served we should pay for our wrongdoing. But, through the crucifixion of Jesus, God himself has paid for my wrongdoing so that justice has been served: God forgives me, making no further claim against me.
But for God’s loving forgiveness and grace to succeed, I need to receive it. This means recognising my wrongdoings, believing that though Jesus justice has already been done, and repenting. This leaves leaves me free to enter God’s embrace, free to enter into a loving relationship with the glorious and gracious God of the universe.3
The will to embrace
Volf expands on the relationship between justice and the will to embrace.
Since the God Christians worship is the God of unconditional and indiscriminate love, the will to embrace the other is the most fundamental obligation of Christians.
The will to embrace other people should be a constant part of our lives. Since Christians believe that every human being, including us, is marred by an evil that transcends the individual, we dare not categorise people as “good” or “evil”, “innocent” or “guilty”, “us” or “them”. This is a failure to see their full humanity, and it stands in the way of embrace. In circumstances of conflict, we should not be seeking forgiveness and justice for a particular category of people, but as part of bringing peace to a “world in which justice and injustice, innocence and guilt, crisscross and intersect”, recognising that undeserved grace trumps whatever we think people might deserve.
Only the will to embrace enables us to see both our adversaries and ourselves through their eyes and to see any justice there may be in their claims. (Of course, it may prove that their claims are a perversion of justice.) The opposite stance is hatred. It is blind to anything of justice in the others’ claims, regards their claims as covertly unjust, contributing further to injustice. To agree on justice in a situation of conflict, we must want more than justice: we must want embrace.
When we struggle for justice, what is our goal? Seeing to it that our own side wins and the offender gets what they deserve? Or healing relationships, i.e., embrace?
The goal of reconciliation is to create relationships in which people listen to each other and give themselves to each other in love. It leaves no place for exclusion, and attends to justice rather than circumventing it.
Mistakes
In his article, Volf describes what he considers to be two mistakes that can be made in this process. The first is to seek “peace” without calling out wrongdoing. This is not forgiveness, he says. It betrays those who suffer injustice, violence or deception, and it also betrays Christian faith, because struggling against injustice is fundamental to Christianity. Prophetically denouncing injustice has a prominent place in Christian faith. To “forgive” someone without pursuing justice is tantamount to treating the perpetrator “as if their sin were not there”. It is wrong because it abdicates responsibility for influencing the perpetrator to change their behaviour. I think I have at times been guilty of this. The idea that justice comes only in eternity can be an excuse for not pursuing justice, forgiveness and reconciliation in the present.
The other mistake was made, Volk suggests, in the Kairos Document, written in 1985 by South African theologians opposed to the apartheid regime and to the theology of pro-apartheid churches. The document rejected calls for reconciliation whilst the oppression of parts of the population continued: to ask the oppressed to be reconciled with their oppressors was to ask them to accept their oppression. Such a request, the document said, was sin — ‘cheap reconciliation’: reconciliation was only possible after justice. But Volk doesn’t entirely agree with “first justice, then reconciliation”, because he thinks the sense of injustice and the struggle against injustice is part of the route to forgiveness and reconciliation. Complete justice is in any case impossible. Even if it were possible, Volk doubts that most of us would be comfortable with it. The biblical precept of “An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth” strikes us as too severe (we fail to realise that it was originally intended to prevent excessive vengeance). In any case, full justice demands more than exact retribution. If you hit me, my hitting you back will not achieve justice. You have violated me, and this also requires justice. Most of us would feel that complete justice in this sense is not to be desired.
The “first justice, then reconciliation” stance is thus logically faulty. If full justice is an impossibility, then “first justice, then reconciliation” makes forgiveness impossible. And justice alone does not bring about healing of relationship. Peace does not necessarily mean living in harmony, living without rancour. This depends on forgiveness, a refusal to let the redressed wrong negatively affect one’s relationship with the perpetrator.
Further, if forgiveness were something that one expected to happen after justice, then one would be wronging the perpetrator by not forgiving them. But this is not how we understand forgiveness. Failure to forgive may show lack of virtue, but it does not wrong the perpetrator. Forgiveness is a gift that the wronged party gives to the perpetrator. If it is not given until justice has been done, then it is not a gift— it is not forgiveness as we normally understand it.
Forgiveness in the public realm
The process of forgiveness that Volf lays out is a reflection of God’s forgiveness of mankind through the cross of Christ. But, he comments, Protestant Christians in particular have not always made the connection between God’s forgiveness of us and our forgiveness of others. Instead it has been assumed that God’s forgiveness of us has to do with our inner shame and guilt, and that a different ethic should apply to the worldly processes of interpersonal relationships, politics and economics. This has allowed Christian faith to be misused to legitimise violence: this is not its proper nature.
Ukraine
The anthropologist Maurice Bloch argues in this book Prey into hunter that religion is in essence violent because its adherents eventually want to impose their beliefs on the whole community. Volf responds that Christianity, properly construed, values above all “the death of the self to her own selfcentred desires” and the goal of living in peace (think of the lion lying down with the lamb, Isaiah 11:1-9), Christians will not seek to impose their values on anyone because that is a contradiction of those very values.
Volf writes:
There are two main ways in which religions contribute to the violence between the conflicting parties: by assuring the combatants of the (absolute) rightness of their cause and the correlative (absolute) evil of their enemies; and by sacralising communal identity of one party and correlative demonising of others.
Both these ways are true of Putin’s aggression against Ukraine. By framing the war as Christian Moscow’s “denazification” of Kyiv—a horrible irony—he declares Russia holy and Ukraine evil. He is not the first leader to tie national identity to Christian faith, but this case is complicated by the fact that Putin perceives Kyiv as the cradle of Russian civilisation, and claims on quasi-spiritual grounds that there is no such thing as a separate Ukrainian ethnicity, thereby committing himself to the “exclusion” of Ukrainians. To lose such a war is tantamount to damage to one’s identity.
Using faith as a resource of power in conflict is contrary to the life of Jesus. Even if elements of that faith are genuine, it is a faith that has been bastardised. There is a danger here. Christians are to resist evil, but in some cases the perception of evil becomes skewed, and resistance becomes almost a mirror image of what is resisted. We need to take great care of how we use our faith, how we find inspiration in our faith in our resistance to evil. The prospect of loving our enemy needs to remain, even the enemy who is committing atrocities at this moment. We need to avoid exclusion, which results only in ongoing conflict.
All over the world there is a hardening of identities, a growth in nationalisms and an increase in exclusion. But it is in opening our arms to those who wish us ill that we underscore our very humanity. How do we love the person who commits an atrocity against us? Volf responds that you love them by resisting them and by condemning what they are doing.
In the interview Grant asks whether Putin will ever be willing to receive forgiveness. Volf replies that at this minute Putin has only war on his mind. He points out that many of us have had the experience on a smaller scale of becoming captive to the evil that we do. “We have entered into a space where we are not our own, in a terrible sense of that word.” Volf thinks this is true of Putin, but hopes he will come into his own again.
Grant asks, what would it take for reconciliation and forgiveness to happen in the Ukrainian case? Volf says it would take repentance on Putin’s part, and also restitution. Desmond Tutu said there is no future without forgiveness, but he also said you cannot continue to benefit from your wrongdoings.
Struggling to forgive
Volf recalls that after he had given a lecture on reconciliation and forgiveness, his teacher, the theologian Jürgen Moltmann, asked him if he was able to forgive a Serbian leader who had done such terrible things in Croatia. Volf replied that he couldn’t, but that as a follower of Jesus he ought to be able to.
Exclusion and embrace is Volf’s testimony of his own struggle to think through how he might do what needed to be done. We need to stay with our incapacity, not give in to our inability, and make small steps in the direction that Christ calls us to go. The struggle between what we know deep down we ought to do and what we are unable to do is a struggle of faith, not a manifestation of faithlessness.
The wrongdoer’s perspective
Volf’s perspective is that of someone who has suffered a gross injustice, knows that they are required to forgive, and wonders where justice belongs in response to this.
The Gospels start in a different place—from the perspective of the wrongdoer. In traditional Judaism only God could forgive sins, as we see in the Pharisees’ attacks on Jesus when he forgives people. Jesus’ starting point is the sinner who needs God’s forgiveness and needs to repent in order to receive it. This is what John the Baptist was preaching before Jesus’ ministry had begun (Matthew 3:2, Mark 1:4, Luke 3:3). Jesus goes a step further. He says that we must forgive in order to be able to receive God’s forgiveness. He embeds this in what has become the Lord’s Prayer, and then underlines it (Matthew 6:12, 14-15). When Peter asks Jesus how often he should forgive someone who wrongs him, and suggests “seven times” Jesus replies, “No, seventy times seven times.” Seven was a Jewish number of completeness, and 70 x 7 effectively means “for ever”. But Jesus’ devout listeners would also have known that these were the numbers of years prophesied for the Babylonian exile in order to expiate Judaea’s sins (Daniel 9:2 and 9:24). By implication Jesus is announcing that the Kingdom of God inverts the old order: expiation is replaced by forgiveness (Wright 2006: 101-102).
He follows this up with the parable of the unforgiving servant. The king remits the servant’s debt, so huge that it is impossible to repay it, but the man then refuses to forgive a fellow-servant a comparatively small sum. When the king hears of this, he throws the man into prison to be tortured until the debt is repaid (i.e. for ever) (Matthew 18:21-35). The point is that God forgives us a debt that is beyond thought of repayment (Yancey 1997:63), and if we refuse to forgive, we close our hearts to his forgiveness (Wright 2002:40) and place ourselves outside God’s kingdom. Our debt to God is incalculably large. If we fail to forgive others, we are losing sight of our own indebtedness. Paul reminds his readers, “Be kind and compassionate to one another, forgiving each other, just as in Christ God forgave you.” (Ephesians 4:32)
Luke is more explicit than Matthew in linking repentance to forgiveness. Jesus says, “If your brother or sister sins against you, rebuke them; and if they repent, forgive them.” (Luke 17:4) And when Jesus appears to his disciples after the resurrection, he tells them explicitly that, like John the Baptist, they are to preach linking forgiveness to repentance (Luke 24:46-48):
“This is what is written: The Messiah will suffer and rise from the dead on the third day, and repentance for the forgiveness of sins will be preached in his name to all nations, beginning at Jerusalem. You are witnesses of these things.”
Luke continues to link forgiveness to repentance as he writes Acts. Peter preaches as Jesus has instructed him (Acts 2:38):
“Repent and be baptized, every one of you, in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins. And you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit.”
And again before the Sanhedrin, about Jesus (Acts 5:31):
“God exalted him to his own right hand as Prince and Saviour that he might bring Israel to repentance and forgive their sins.”
Implicit in each of these quotations is that the one who repents and receives forgiveness does so because they have believed in Jesus. Peter says this explicitly when he preaches at Cornelius’ house: “All the prophets testify about him that everyone who believes in him receives forgiveness of sins through his name.” (Acts 10:43) The connection between faith and forgiveness is present in Jesus’ powerful words to Paul on the Damascus road:
“I am sending you to them [the gentiles] to open their eyes and turn them from darkness to light, and from the power of Satan to God, so that they may receive forgiveness of sin and a place among those who are sanctified by faith in me.”
Matthew’s and Luke’s gospels and the latter’s Acts, then, present the claim that someone needs to recognise their own wrongdoing and to repent in order to receive God’s forgiveness. As John puts it later, “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness.” (1 John 1:9) The gospels and Acts enjoin the wrongdoer to repent, believe and receive forgiveness. Volf, on the other hand, comes from the perspective of someone who already believes, has received God’s incomparable forgiveness and knows he needs to forgive someone who has done terrible wrong. At the same time they ask where the justice is in this.
Forgiveness without repentance?
There are places in the New Testament where forgiveness seems to be given without repentance, but …
Matthew explicitly mentions repentance less frequently than Luke, but this is a matter of emphasis. Repentance clearly plays a role in Matthew’s reports of Jesus’ teaching (4:17, 11:20-21, 12:41, 21:32). At the last supper, Jesus lifts the cup and says, “This is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins,” (Matt 26:28) but it is clear from the earlier references that receiving this forgiveness depends on repentance.
In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus preaches,
You have heard that it was said, ‘Eye for eye, and tooth for tooth.’ “But I tell you, do not resist an evil person. If anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to them the other cheek also.” (Matthew 5:38-39; also Luke 6:29)
I used to think that in this passage Jesus was telling us to immediately forgive an injustice and to continue to suffer wrong without challenging it. In other words, I thought the passage nullified a position like Volk’s. Now I think I was wrong. This is part of Jesus’ reinterpretation of Jewish Law . He is not talking about forgiveness here, but about one’s immediate response to a wrongdoing, in this case to an insult: do not repay evil with evil or, more specifically, do not respond to violence with violence. The question of forgiveness follows later.
Paul hardly mentions repentance in his letters, but just one mention shows that for him too sin requires repentance (2 Corinthians 2:21). The reason he little of repentance has to do with the context in which his letters are written. They are addressed to Christians, who have already repented and been forgiven, and his pastoral emphasis is on their need to forgive others, not on the need for his readers’ repentance (Eph 1:7, 4:32; Col 1:14, 2:13, 3:13).
Finally, on the cross Jesus prays, “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing” (Luke 23:34). Does this mean that the crucifiers don’t know that they are crucifying Jesus? Obviously not: they do know. But do they know who Jesus is? No, as the following verses show. They mock him for claiming to be the Messiah, but assume that he isn’t. Their ignorance is mentioned in Acts by both Peter (Acts 3:17) and Paul (13:27), and Jesus is evidently pleading for their forgiveness because of their ignorance, the more so as they have no immediate opportunity to realise that this is the most significant event in history. Knowledge will come later, and with it repentance and forgiveness.
References
Maurice Bloch, 1992. Prey into hunter: The politics of religious experience. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Volf, Miroslav, 1996 (revised and updated 2019). Exclusion and embrace: A theological exploration of identity, otherness, and reconciliation. Nashville: Abingdon.
Wright, [N. T.] Tom, 2002, Matthew for everyone, part 2. SPCK and Westminster John Knox Press.
Wright, N. T., 2006, Evil and the justice of God, SPCK and Intervarsity Press, 2006.
Yancey, Philip, 1997. What’s so amazing about grace? Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan.
- Professor of Systematic Theology at Yale University Divinity School in the US (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miroslav_Volf).
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stan_Grant_(journalist)
- I do not want for one second to imply that this is a full account of the crucifixion’s significance. It isn’t! for some reasonimpl