{"id":5979,"date":"2016-12-05T04:26:36","date_gmt":"2016-12-05T04:26:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2016\/12\/05\/forgiveness\/"},"modified":"2016-12-05T04:26:36","modified_gmt":"2016-12-05T04:26:36","slug":"forgiveness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2016\/12\/05\/forgiveness\/","title":{"rendered":"Forgiveness"},"content":{"rendered":"

Suppose you are father of a daughter who has been brutally raped.  The rapist is apprehended, tried, and found guilty.  Suppose further than the man convicted really is guilty as charged and pays the penalty prescribed by the law, and that the penalty is a just one (the penalty that justice demands, as I would put it). The man serves his time, is released from prison, and yet you still harbor strong negative feelings toward him. You are assailed by murderous thoughts.  You fantasize about killing him.  After all, he violated your sensitive daughter in the most demeaning way and scarred her psychologically for life, snuffing out her vibrancy and souring her on life and men.    What the miscreant did cannot be undone no matter what punishment he endures.  But despite the negative feelings, you decide to forgive the man.  And let us further suppose that you forgive him not just for your own peace of mind, but to restore good relations with him.  (Suppose he is an acquaintance or co-worker of yours.)<\/span><\/p>\n

Now if I understood what my young friend Steven was arguing a while back, his point was that this is not a genuine case of forgiveness: because the miscreant has paid his debt, there is nothing to forgive him for<\/em>.  Even if you forgive him before he serves his sentence, knowing that he will serve it, you have not truly forgiven him.  Steven's thought, which he takes to be an explication of Christian forgiveness, is that true forgiveness exonerates the person forgiven: it removes the guilt and moral responsibility and with them the need for restitution and punishment. One cannot both truly forgive and demand that justice be served. True forgiveness is such that it cannot be made conditional upon the satisfaction of the demands of justice.<\/span><\/p>\n

I think only God could forgive in this sense.  So if this is Christian forgiveness, then I wonder whether it has any relevance to human action in this world. <\/span><\/p>\n

That's one concern.  Here is another, which may well rest on theological misunderstanding.<\/span><\/p>\n

Curiously, in orthodox Christianity, God does not forgive man in the above sense: he 'holds his feet to the fire' for the 'infinite' offense of disobeying the infinitely perfect and good God.  Is God not a Christian?  Because the guilt man incurs by the primal disobedience of the first parents is infinite, there is nothing finite man can do to set things right either individually or collectively.  Only God can restore right relations between God and man.  So the triune God sends his Son into the world to assume human nature.  This God-man is sacrificed in expiation of the infinite guilt incurred by Adam and Eve. Only God can atone, by substitution, for man's infinite sin.<\/span><\/p>\n

Why didn't God simply forgive man for Adam's sin?<\/span><\/p>\n

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<\/a>'The Punishment Must Fit the Crime' and Lex Talionis<\/a><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/fieldset>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Suppose you are father of a daughter who has been brutally raped.  The rapist is apprehended, tried, and found guilty.  Suppose further than the man convicted really is guilty as charged and pays the penalty prescribed by the law, and that the penalty is a just one (the penalty that justice demands, as I would … Continue reading “Forgiveness”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[58,512],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5979","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-christian-doctrine","category-forgiveness"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5979","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5979"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5979\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5979"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5979"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5979"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}