4 The Problem of Forgiveness
4
The Problem of Forgiveness
The last chapter’s ‘look below the surface’ may well have provoked in some readers an impatient response. ‘That simple supper in the upper room,’ you may be saying, ‘and even the confessedly agonized prayer in the garden and cry from the cross, all admit of much more straightforward explanations. Why must you complicate everything with your tortuous theologizing?’ It is an understandable reaction.
In particular, our insistence that according to the gospel the cross of Christ is the only ground on which God forgives sins bewilders many people. ‘Why should our forgiveness depend on Christ’s death?’ they ask. ‘Why does God not simply forgive us, without the necessity of the cross?’ As the French cynic put it, ‘le bon Dieu me pardonnera; c’est son métier.’1 ‘After all,’ the objector may continue, ‘if we sin against one another, we are required to forgive one another. We are even warned of dire consequences if we refuse. Why can’t God practise what he preaches and be equally generous? Nobody’s death is necessary before we forgive each other. Why then does God make so much fuss about forgiving us and even declare it impossible without his Son’s “sacrifice for sin”? It sounds like a primitive superstition which modern people should long since have discarded.’
It is essential to ask and to face these questions. Two answers may be given to them immediately, although we shall need the rest of the chapter in which to elaborate them. The first was supplied by Archbishop Anselm in his great book Cur Deus Homo? at the end of the eleventh century. If anybody imagines, he wrote, that God can simply forgive us as we forgive others, that person has ‘not yet considered the seriousness of sin’, or literally ‘what a heavy weight sin is’ (i.xxi). The second answer might be expressed similarly: ‘You have not yet considered the majesty of God.’ It is when our perception of God and man, or of holiness and sin, are askew that our understanding of the atonement is bound to be askew also.
The fact is that the analogy between our forgiveness and God’s is far from being exact. True, Jesus taught us to pray: ‘Forgive us our sins, as we forgive those who sin against us.’ But he was teaching the impossibility of the unforgiving being forgiven, and so the obligation of the forgiven to forgive, as is clear from the Parable of the Unmerciful Servant; he was not drawing any parallel between God and us in relation to the basis of forgiveness.2 For us to argue ‘we forgive each other unconditionally, let God do the same to us’ betrays not sophistication but shallowness, since it overlooks the elementary fact that we are not God. We are private individuals, and other people’s misdemeanours are personal injuries. God is not a private individual, however, nor is sin just a personal injury. On the contrary, God is himself the maker of the laws we break, and sin is rebellion against him.
The crucial question we should ask, therefore, is a different one. It is not why God finds it difficult to forgive, but how he finds it possible to do so at all. As Emil Brunner put it, ‘Forgiveness is the very opposite of anything which can be taken for granted. Nothing is less obvious than forgiveness.’3 Or, in the words of Carnegie Simpson, ‘forgiveness is to man the plainest of duties; to God it is the profoundest of problems’.4
The problem of forgiveness is constituted by the inevitable collision between divine perfection and human rebellion, between God as he is and us as we are. The obstacle to forgiveness is neither our sin alone, nor our guilt alone, but also the divine reaction in love and wrath towards guilty sinners. For, although indeed ‘God is love’, yet we have to remember that his love is ‘holy love’,5 love which yearns over sinners while at the same time refusing to condone their sin. How, then, could God express his holy love? – his love in forgiving sinners without compromising his holiness, and his holiness in judging sinners without frustrating his love? Confronted by human evil, how could God be true to himself as holy love? In Isaiah’s words, how could he be simultaneously ‘a righteous God and a Saviour’ (45:21)? For, despite the truth that God demonstrated his righteousness by taking action to save his people, the words ‘righteousness’ and ‘salvation’ cannot be regarded as simple synonyms. Rather his saving initiative was compatible with, and expressive of, his righteousness. At the cross in holy love God through Christ paid the full penalty of our disobedience himself. He bore the judgment we deserve in order to bring us the forgiveness we do not deserve. On the cross divine mercy and justice were equally expressed and eternally reconciled. God’s holy love was ‘satisfied’.
I am running on too fast, however. The reason why many people give the wrong answers to questions about the cross, and even ask the wrong questions, is that they have carefully considered neither the seriousness of sin nor the majesty of God. In order to do so now, we shall review four basic biblical concepts, namely the gravity of sin, human moral responsibility, true and false guilt, and the wrath of God. We shall thus see ourselves successively as sinful, responsible, guilty and lost. It will not be a pleasant exercise, and our integrity will be tested in the course of it.