Can Forgiveness Make Sense? (Part 2)

Author’s Note: This paper was written for and initially presented at the first annual symposium of the Society for Women of Letters (June 2022, Asheville, NC).

The Lord’s Prayer as Model and Means of Forgiveness

The Lord’s Prayer is the model that Christ offered his disciples when they asked for his instruction on how to pray. Wesley Hill’s primer on the prayer offers a helpful rundown of how the church has historically understood its import, and most of my discussion that follows is informed by that book.[1] The prayer consists of six petitions (or seven, depending on how the final section is handled). The opening three petitions center on God’s character and reign, and the others turn to the human condition, invoking God’s aid for what ails us. It’s a rich prayer, with quite a bit to unpack. But I want to focus primarily on how the full context can help us better appreciate and practice the difficult art of forgiveness.

Needy Creatures

We’ll start with the second half, the petitions aimed at the human condition. There we find Jesus acknowledging our agonizing need: our need for sustenance, both physical and spiritual; our need for grace, protection, and rescue. Regular recitation of this prayer, Hill explains, trains us to rightly envision our plight, as utterly dependent on God’s provision. Not just in the past as though God winds us up and leaves us to our own devices, but moment by moment, “this day,” we are sustained by God’s provision. What an antidote to the self-reliance enshrined in our contemporary American culture.

This reminder of who we are as God’s creatures is also a comfort as we consider the prayer’s appeal for forgiveness and deliverance from evil. Human beings are all in the same boat, we find—all, victims and victimizers alike, buoyed up only by God’s allowance. All of us are in dire need of saving from the sin that surrounds and infects us, the sin that’s “more pervasive and intractable than individual peccadilloes or improvable behaviors,” to use Hill’s language.[2] These petitions of The Lord’s Prayer strike at the very root of human corruption, the lie that tells us we are our own, that we can do as we please, and are unaccountable to anyone else. And most importantly for our purposes, the lie that the evil perpetuated against us cannot find refuge in our own hearts.

This is not to suggest a moral equivalence between large infractions and small. That bit of received wisdom often hampers our attempts at forgiveness, either asking us to minimize harm done to us or overestimating the harm we ourselves have done to others. As Cornelius Plantinga explains, “All sin is equally wrong, but not all sin is equally bad.”[3] He continues, “The badness or seriousness of sin depends to some degree on the amount and kind of damage it inflicts, including damage to the sinner, and to some degree on the personal investment and motive of the sinner.”[4]

If anything, The Lord’s Prayer is realistic about the nature and extent of sin in this world and the damage it does to God’s creation. Petition VII puts a face on the evil one who seeks to devour us, infiltrating and enlisting those who give themselves over to his service. “What we need to be rescued from,” Hill says, “isn’t just the devices and desires of our wayward hearts, as real and dangerous as those are, but also the malevolence of a personal being bent on our suffering.”[5] The temptation to revenge, as gratifying as it may feel, is to turn ourselves over to that destruction. Marilyn Adams explains, “To return horror for horror does not erase but doubles the individual’s participation in horrors—first as victim, then as the one whose injury occasions another’s prima facie ruin.”[6]

In Stump’s essay that I referenced earlier, she provides some language to help us think through these gradations of guilt. There she catalogues, on a sliding scale, the damaging effects sin has on the perpetrator him or herself, to include defects to the person’s psyche, memory, and empathic capacities, and sin’s harmful and unjust consequences in the world, whether resulting from the wrongdoer’s action or inaction.

Who God Is

These details matter to the one wrestling with forgiveness. A naïve understanding that jumps quickly to reconciliation can easily leave open the door for yet more harm, to both parties. It is not good either to sin or to be sinned against. The Lord’s Prayer dispels such naivety by virtue of its portrait of God, a loving Father who invites us into holy and flourishing fellowship with him. A world infected by sin and human corruption is incompatible with the promise we have in this prayer of God’s kingdom to come and his will to be done on earth as it is in heaven. Whatever forgiveness is, we can be sure that it is part and parcel of the resounding victory of the prayer’s final lines: God’s kingdom, power, and glory ultimately transcend and defeat whatever now is currently arrayed against them. This is the truth that The Lord’s Prayer opens our eyes up to, and the vision that enables us to enter into the spirit and process of forgiveness, trusting no less than God himself to bring it to completion. What Weisenthal could not be, as stand-in for the Jews that the Nazi soldier harmed, Christ himself can fulfill—both as the one to bear the harm done and the one to offer the ultimate absolution.

Prayer joins us in this process. It is a rebellion, as David Wells describes it, “against the world in its fallenness, the absolute and undying refusal to accept as normal what is pervasively abnormal.”[7] The Lord’s Prayer, then, is a clear-eyed, realistic assessment of our current status against the backdrop of what should—and ultimately what will—be, given God’s nature. Hill explains, “When we pray, ‘Your will be done, on earth as in heaven,’ we are aware of how God’s will is not being done in our world. We are asking God to overcome this contradiction, to act in such a way that life on earth increasingly resembles the peaceable and joyous life of God, of heaven.”[8]

Like the Persistent Widow in Jesus’ parable, when we fully embrace The Lord’s Prayer, we refuse “every agenda, every scheme, every interpretation that is at odds with the norm as originally established by God.”[9] We confess, along with Volf, that we cannot forgive on our own steam but that on Christ’s we can and should. We affirm that God’s kingdom is victorious over any and all attacks upon it, including the ones where we have found ourselves in the line of a perpetrator’s fire. Although this affirmation takes the form of a petition in The Lord’s Prayer, it’s functioning more as an alignment, of our purposes and spirit with God’s. Through recitation of the prayer, Hill says, we are “stretching our hearts so that we may learn to desire truer, greater realities.”[10]

This greater reality is our ultimate promise: deliverance from oppression, healing, and restoration from the disfiguration caused by sin and death.[11] Healing both for harm we have done and harm done to us. It is out of God’s character that his plan for salvation, his deliverance from guilt and the death and damage of sin in all of its instantiations, comes. And this is God’s plan, The Lord’s Prayer tells us, that is already underway and available for us right here and now, even if it is not yet fully realized. Only a God who has entered in to our suffering, who has taken on human flesh and dwelt among us can provide that remedy.

Christ as Our Deliverer

In Jesus Christ, God’s own son, we find all the resources that potential forgivers need. Christ is everywhere present in The Lord’s Prayer, both as the one inviting us into fellowship and as the very bridge we walk across to approach God’s throne. Christ is also the means by which God’s will is enacted in this world, the way the curse that we labor under is reversed, how our crisis of forgiveness is resolved. In the Garden of Gethsemane, Christ cries out to his Abba, Father, asking that the cup of suffering and death he is about to drink be passed from him. Even still, in an agonizing act of obedience and an illuminating echo of The Lord’s Prayer, Jesus declares, “Thy will be done.”

This divine action is the paradoxical linchpin of our faith and what ultimately makes sense of forgiveness’ counterintuitive demands. Hill explains it this way:

It’s clear to us that the will of God in heaven is the perfect, eternal love of Father, Son, and Spirit, unmarred by any suffering or dying. What is less intuitive—but what Gethsemane and, later, Calvary force us to notice—is that the will of God is also the way of the incarnate Lord into the far country of our suffering and dying, where he is mocked, spit upon, strung up, and left to suffocate. That is what it looks like for the will of God to be done on earth as it is in heaven because that is the only way our earth can be saved.[12]

Our forgiveness—whether enacted or received by us—our ability to heal and be healed, rests alone on the work of Christ on the cross. And that is the promise we must cling to as we undertake our own hard work of forgiveness. There’s a suffering involved in that process, to be sure, but we can know that that suffering is not in vain. Hill again: “God must also be at work in suffering, in darkness, in torment, because only if God confronts the horror we’ve made of the world, bears it, and bears it away can the triumph of God’s love be assured.”[13]

But let me not leave you with a promise of suffering. I recognize that’s not much of a comfort. My intention instead is to leave you with a word of hope, to help us fix in our minds the beautiful reality that lies on the other side of our earthly travails. Recently, I had the opportunity to hear N. T. Wright speak at Lanier Library in Houston, with a message that draws together the various threads of my argument and underscores the hope we have in our struggles to forgive. Turning to Romans 8, Wright highlighted how our own times of trial, our own Gethsemane moments—when we, like Christ, call out to our Abba, Father (Romans 8:15)—these are the precise places in which we can perceive, and even participate in, the divine life of God himself.

Those who have faced a crisis of forgiveness will certainly resonate with Paul’s acknowledgment that we often do not know how we are to pray. In trying to forgive painful hurts, we struggle to understand how justice can be achieved or why mercy must be extended. In that moment, Paul affirms, we can be sure that “the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groans too deep for words” (Romans 8:26). This co-laboring with God in our prayers of deep sorrow is the backdrop for the glorious assurance of Romans 8:28, a verse that Wright translates in this clarifying way: "God works all things towards ultimate good with and through those who love him.”[14] That’s true for our crises of forgiveness. Lament in the face of our overwhelming challenges, the times when we most keenly feel our frailty and most desperately need deliverance, is the very seedbed of the hope we cry out for.[15]

The Lord’s Prayer is really a lifeline to that hope, which will not disappoint. It’s a promise bigger than we can even imagine, although Jesus invites us to try. The petitions of The Lord’s Prayer, when we enter fully into its mindset, we recognize as pointers, pointers to the life we are made for and that God longs to welcome us into. As Hill explains, “This is what the final praise in the Lord’s Prayer means to direct us toward: there is coming a time when we will have no more need to ask God for bread, for absolution, or for rescue. All of our tears will have been wiped away, death will have been finally defeated, and the earth and its people will be at peace and thriving.”[16] And that is a promise we can cling to, a story big enough to house justice and mercy, and a power strong enough to fuel our will to forgive.

[1] Wesley Hill, The Lord’s Prayer: A Guide to Praying to Our Father (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2019).

[2] Ibid., 61.

[3] Cornelius Plantinga, Not the Way It’s Supposed to Be: A Breviary of Sin (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1995), 21.

[4] Ibid., 22.

[5] Hill, The Lord’s Prayer, 82.

[6] Marilyn Adams, Horrendous Evils and the Goodness of God (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 2000),

[7] David Wells, “Prayer: Rebelling Against the Status Quo,” Summit Christian Fellowship, June 17, 2020, accessed May 29, 2022, https://summit-christian.org/blog/2020/06/17/prayer-rebelling-against-the-status-quo.

[8] Hill, The Lord’s Prayer, 42.

[9] Wells.

[10] Hill, The Lord’s Prayer, 45.

[11] Hill, The Lord’s Prayer, 34-35.

[12] Wesley Hill, “Praying the Lord’s Prayer in Gethsemane,” First Things, April 2, 2015, accessed May 29, 2022, https://www.firstthings.com/blogs/firstthoughts/2015/04/praying-the-lords-prayer-in-gethsemane.

[13] Ibid.

[14] You can find this translation in Wright’s God and the Pandemic (Zondervan, 2020). Glenn Packiam’s review of the book (found here: https://www.glennpackiam.com/post/n-t-wright-on-god-and-the-pandemic) also includes it.

[15] I’d love to claim credit for this phrasing, but it was all N. T. Wright. “Lament is the seedbed of hope” is a line from his talk that will stick with me for some time to come.

[16] Hill, The Lord’s Prayer, 94.

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Marybeth Baggett is professor of English and Cultural Apologetics at Houston Baptist University. She earned her PhD in Literature and Criticism from Indiana University of Pennsylvania, and — along with her husband— recently has published Telling Tales: Intimations of the Sacred in Popular Culture (Moral Apologetics Press, 2021).

Can Forgiveness Make Sense? (Part 1)

Author’s Note: This paper was written for and initially presented at the first annual symposium of the Society for Women of Letters (June 2022, Asheville, NC).

The Sunflower

Simon Wiesenthal is a Holocaust survivor renowned for his role in tracking down and bringing to justice fugitive Nazis who fled at the close of World War II. While still a prisoner, Wiesenthal was one day brought to the room of a dying SS member at the Nazi’s request. The soldier wanted to unburden himself of his guilty conscience and find absolution before his imminent demise. To that end, he hoped that Wiesenthal would serve as a stand-in for the specific Jews that he had directly harmed. Forgiveness from him, the logic went, would release the Nazi from his guilt and bring him much-needed peace.

Wiesenthal chronicles this encounter in his 1969 book The Sunflower, and his account is worth reading in its entirety, including the symposium that makes up the second half of the book. It’s difficult for me to convey either the brutality of the atrocities that the Nazi describes or the pathos of his confession. Wiesenthal does so masterfully and, importantly, the author contextualizes that deathbed scene within his own day-to-day horrors of life in the concentration camp. As we well know and as the book vividly reminds us, the Nazi’s confession is a mere drop in the bucket of the hell that Hitler’s forces unleashed on those the German fascists deemed undesirable.

The book’s title refers to the sunflowers planted on the graves of Nazi soldiers to honor them, a ghastly tableau that Wiesenthal could see across the way from the camp. That tribute was a painful contrast to the indignities heaped on the many deaths that daily surrounded Wiesenthal and his fellow prisoners, and this uncanny sense of shared humanity across a gulf of inhumane difference pervades the exchange between Wiesenthal and the dying Nazi.

That meeting also upended the given power dynamic of the Third Reich: the Nazi sought something from the Jew that could not be coerced. Forgiveness would be either freely given or withheld. While the SS man disclosed his secrets, Wiesenthal grappled with how to respond: “He sought my pity, but had he any right to pity? Did a man of this kind deserve anybody’s pity?”[1] It’s clear from the exchange that the Nazi has in fact repented and fully realized his need for the peace that comes only through forgiveness. But was that enough for Wiesenthal to bestow it upon him? And what difference would forgiveness make since, as Wiesenthal notes, “[h]e was confessing his crime to a man who perhaps tomorrow must die at the hands of these same murderers.”[2]

Ultimately, Wiesenthal could not bring himself to share words of forgiveness, leaving instead without opening his mouth. The decision was almost instinctual, involuntary, and it haunted Wiesenthal for many years. He sought counsel from others when he returned to the camp, hoping they might be able to explain and perhaps even justify his visceral rejection of the dying man’s pleas. As the years wore on, he wondered if his response was, in fact, cruel. Out of this mystery and Wiesenthal’s inability to solve it, even a quarter of a century later, came this question, which he posed to notable public figures to solicit their responses: “You,” he asks, “who have just read this sad and tragic episode in my life, can mentally change places with me and ask yourself the crucial question, ‘What would I have done?’”[3]

The Dilemma of Forgiveness

The fifty-three responses that came in were all over the map, though most (thirty four in the expanded edition) argued that Wiesenthal was right not to forgive. Only ten posited that forgiveness was necessary. The other nine were uncertain. Harshest among the denials was Jewish-American writer Cynthia Ozick who condemned the Nazi, seeing even his confession as manipulation and abuse of power. “Let the SS man die unshriven,” she exclaimed. “Let him go to hell.”[4] On the other side, South African bishop Desmond Tutu put a pragmatic spin on his Christian response: “It is clear that if we look only to retributive justice, then we could just as well close up shop. Forgiveness is not some nebulous thing. It is practical politics. Without forgiveness, there is no future.”[5]

Most of us will never be in the position of either the SS officer or the Holocaust survivor, neither needing to be forgiven for such unthinkably heinous wrongs nor needing to forgive such large-scale, unimaginable atrocities inflicted upon us or upon those we love. Nonetheless, reflecting on the extreme case of guilt and injustice that Wiesenthal’s story presents and the crisis of forgiveness it evokes is still worthwhile, doubly so for those of us who claim Christianity since forgiveness is deep down at the very root of our faith.

To begin, let’s think a bit about the impulses behind the different responses to Wiesenthal’s question. Reading them, one realizes the richness of this topic and the complexity of the question that he poses. His respondents dig into the nooks and crannies of what forgiveness is, they search out what it requires, consider the implications of forgiveness or its denial, and weigh the psychological struggle involved. Even if you already have a strong sense about which response is right, I’d encourage you to withhold judgment, just for now, and sit a while with the tension. In Exclusion and Embrace, theologian Miroslav Volf brings to bear the terms of the gospel to the weighty questions of alienation and injustice. Volf’s own history as a Croatian living through the Balkan warfare of the late twentieth century informs his reflections and prevents him from regurgitating simple answers.

Volf’s preface well captures the tension that I’m asking you to consider. The book, he says there, was prompted by a question that Jürgen Moltmann asked him after a talk he gave arguing that we have a moral obligation to embrace our enemies. Could Volf embrace a četnik, one of the Serbian fighters who had so thoroughly ravaged his country and its people? To put the question on Wiesenthal’s terms, could Volf muster fellow human feelings sufficient to forgive one who had done him and those close to him such harm?

“No, I cannot,” Volf finally answered, “but as a follower of Christ I think I should be able to.”[6]

While writing Exclusion and Embrace in an attempt to work out this struggle, Volf confesses, “My thought was pulled in two different directions by the blood of the innocent crying out to God and by the blood of God’s Lamb offered for the guilty.”[7] Herein lies the tension: “How does one remain loyal both to the demand of the oppressed for justice and to the gift of forgiveness that the Crucified offered to the perpetrators?”[8] To opt for one felt a betrayal of the other, either to further disenfranchise the already oppressed or to disavow his faith. Even worse, the longer Volf sat with the tension, the more it seemed that God was at odds with himself, at once delivering the needy and restoring the wrongdoer. Just what kind of toxic, dysfunctional family is God trying to make?

Can these two apparently irreconcilable divine actions somehow align? Surely the God who loves the wronged party also loves the one who hurt him, but mustn’t love of one require punishment of the other? Many of our doubts about the demands of forgiveness stem from our own psychological and imaginative limitations, which makes one wonder whether a rational case for our obligation to forgive matters if it’s simply impracticable for us to carry out.

Scripture’s Mandate

And yet scripture calls us time and again to forgiveness, even going as far as to bind our own forgiveness to the forgiveness we offer others. We see this link explicitly articulated in the Parable of the Unforgiving Servant in Matthew 18 and in The Lord’s Prayer (Matthew 6:9-13, Luke 11:2-4). “Forgive us our sins as we forgive those who have sinned against us,” so the fifth petition of the prayer goes. As C. S. Lewis explains in his classic Mere Christianity, “There is no slightest suggestion that we are offered forgiveness on any other terms. It is made perfectly clear that if we do not forgive we shall not be forgiven.”[9]

A world without forgiveness, as Bishop Tutu noted, is unimaginable. This side of Eden, sin—and the death it entails—sadly is a persistent presence, at least that’s the case while we wait for God’s kingdom to reach its crescendo and bring to consummation the victory Christ inaugurated on the cross. Ever since Cain, human beings harm each other daily—in big and small ways. Lamech’s attitude to such mistreatment that we find in Genesis 4 makes a certain kind of sense: “I have killed a man for wounding me,” Lamech boasts to his wives. “[A] young man for striking me. If Cain’s revenge is sevenfold, then Lamech’s is seventy-sevenfold.”[10] On human terms, payback for wrongs is logical, necessary even. But who wants to live in a vortex of infinite vengeance, bound forever to lex talionis?

By contrast Jesus’ vision of unlimited forgiveness laid out in Matthew 18—seventy times seven—sure seems more appealing. But might it also feel, at least for some, like a burden, even for far more commonplace hurts than Wiesenthal experienced? Wouldn’t boundless forgiveness simply invite yet more harm? Wouldn’t unending grace exacerbate power imbalances and force the already exploited into deeper levels of oppression?

I confess that this is the burden I personally carried when I came up against my own crisis of forgiveness some years back. Someone I counted as a close friend had thoroughly betrayed me. To use Lewis Smedes’ rubric of the difficult cases of forgiveness, the hurt this person caused me was three-fold: personal, unfair, and deep.[11] No easy Band-aid could fix the problem. Compounding the suffering I endured in the wake of that betrayal was the support my friend garnered from mutual acquaintances who saw my grief and withdrawal from the relationship as the fruit of bitterness and a failure to forgive. The next few years proved a crucible for my faith as, much like Volf, I had to grapple existentially with the dilemma of forgiveness noted above. I didn’t have many resources to help and certainly could have used Smedes’ book, Forgive and Forget, as well as others I’ve more recently found. Instead, voices that flattened out forgiveness—seeing it as either anathema or a piece of cake—only made that process more difficult. Smedes frames the challenge this way: “Forgiving is love’s toughest work, and love’s biggest risk. If you twist it into something it was never meant to be, it can make you a doormat or an insufferable manipulator.”[12]

Love and Forgiveness

Sometimes a word can obscure the complexity of the reality behind it, and my personal experience tells me that’s often the case with forgiveness. I’m drawing my definition of forgiveness from an essay by philosopher Eleonore Stump, where she says forgiveness is an entailment of love, a human obligation.[13] Love, according to Aquinas, is two-fold: (1) a desire for the good of the other and (2) a desire for union with the other. Because these desires are located only within the person harmed, they can be accomplished without any action on the wrongdoer’s part. But Stump is quick to note that desire alone is not sufficient for the realization of the other’s good or for actual union with him or her. Another human agent is involved, and that person’s will and external circumstances may prevent those desires from coming to fruition. It is not good, for example, for either party to remain in a position that gives license for bad behavior to anyone involved. For that reason, forgiveness and reconciliation can, indeed, come apart. Ignoring this distinction is one of many ways that the concept of forgiveness can be watered down.

Before we turn to some more theological considerations, consider first some useful insights Smedes offers in his practical guide to forgiveness. First of all, Smedes emphasizes that forgiveness is a process, at least that’s the case for forgiveness of people who caused us personal, unfair, and deep hurt. Entering into that process requires uncompromising honesty. We cannot forgive harm that we do not acknowledge. As Smedes explains, “There is no real forgiving unless there is first relentless exposure and honest judgment. When we forgive evil we do not excuse it, we do not tolerate it, we do not smother it. We look evil full in the face, call it what it is, let its horror shock and stun and enrage us, and only then do we forgive it.”[14]

Smedes also acknowledges that forgiveness sometimes involves specialized cases—forgiving people who have died, for example. Life’s vagaries and vicissitudes preclude any one-size-fits-all approach that we might try to impose. The road to forgiveness, we find when we embark upon it, is unique to the harm done and to our current conditions. That is not to say we are thus on our own. We can certainly find solace and guidance in the testimony of others who have traveled their own paths of forgiveness, and his use of such stories is one of the best features of Smedes’ book.

When we undergo a crisis of forgiveness, it’s important then whose voices we listen to because of the many pitfalls that lie on that road. Even Christian voices, as previously noted, can sometimes unwittingly make the task of forgiveness much harder by thinning the concept out. I suggest that we see shades of this diminishment whenever the fifth petition of The Lord’s Prayer is isolated from its broader context and—intentionally or not—when it is launched as an accusation toward those who have been harmed. For all the reasons noted above, we need a bigger story of justice and mercy, one that reveals their inextricable link. We find that story in the full context of The Lord’s Prayer, through its bracing description of the human condition, its astonishing portrayal of the God who longs to liberate us, and its audacious plan for our salvation.

[1] Simon Wiesenthal, The Sunflower: On the Possibilities and Limits of Forgiveness, Revised and Expanded ed. (New York: Schocken, 1997), 52.

[2] Ibid., 53.

[3] Ibid., 98.

[4] Ibid., 220.

[5] Ibid., 268.

[6] Miroslav Volf, Exclusion and Embrace: A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness, and Reconciliation (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1996), 9.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Ibid.

[9] C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, Revised and amplified ed. (New York: Harper, 2001), 116.

[10] Unless otherwise noted, all biblical passages referenced are in the English Standard Version (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2001) biblegateway.com, accessed May 29, 2022.

[11] Lewis Smedes, Forgive and Forget: Healing the Hurts We Don’t Deserve (New York: HarperOne, 1996).

[12] Ibid., xvi.

[13] Eleonore Stump, “The Sunflower: Guilt, Forgiveness, and Reconciliation,” in Forgiveness and Its Moral Dimensions, ed. Brandon Warmke, Dana Kay Nelkin, and Michael McKenna (New York: Oxford UP, 2021), 172-196.

[14] Smedes, 79.

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Marybeth Baggett (associate editor) is professor of English and Cultural Apologetics at Houston Baptist University. She earned her PhD in Literature and Criticism from Indiana University of Pennsylvania, and — along with her husband— recently has published Telling Tales: Intimations of the Sacred in Popular Culture (Moral Apologetics Press, 2021).

One Good Reason to Believe in the Bible: Guilt (and man’s attempts to avoid it)

Editor’s note: Good Reasons Apologetics has graciously allowed us to republish their series, “One Good Reason” You can find the original post here.

For the time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching, but having itching ears they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own passions, and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander off into myths-2 Timothy 4:3 

On September 12th, 2021 a 90 year old man named John Shelby Spong passed away in his sleep. Spong was an American Bishop of the Episcopal Church in Newark, New Jersey from 1979 to 2000. In the course of his tenure as Bishop and afterward, Spong wrote a number of books expressing his thoughts on God and Christianity. Spong’s works were not what you might guess would come from a person who had risen to such a position of prominence in a Christian church. Spong called for a “fundamental rethinking of Christian belief away from theism and traditional doctrines.” 1 

Spong came up with what came to be called his 12 theses. Just as Martin Luther nailed his 95 theses to a church door at Wittenburg, Germany to call for a reformation of the Roman Catholic Church, Bishop Spong posted his 12 ideas for a new reformation of the Christian Church today. The 12 ideas Spong put forward included the ideas that the idea of God as we’ve always understood it is totally wrong, the story of a perfect creation and fall from grace is nonsense, there is no set of laws that can govern people for all time (think 10 Commandments), prayers to God are meaningless, the miracles of the Bible are untrue, there was no virgin birth of Jesus, the story of Christ’s death on a cross for the salvation of others is barbaric and primitive, and Jesus could not have been literally resurrected.

Of Bishop Spong’s 12 theses, the one that may be most telling is his belief that, “the hope for life after death must be separated forever from the behavior control mentality of reward and punishment. The Church must abandon, therefore, its reliance on guilt as a motivator of behavior.” 

I would argue that it was the last idea that led to him trying to sell the other 11 as facts, with much pushback from scholars I might add. With the exception of a few sociopaths, being guilty is a problem for us. In the course of interviewing many people suspected or known to have committed crimes, clues of someone lying  all boiled down to the person being physically uncomfortable with lying or facing the idea of their own guilt. I also  found that when a true confession came, there was a tremendous sense of relief by the confessor. The burden of hiding the truth was over, and they were almost always visibly relieved to let the truth be known, despite the consequences. 

Spong followed the patterns of many “critical” scholars who have attempted to dig holes under all of the things that the first 2000 years of Chirstianity claimed to be true of itself, such as the idea that God created everything perfectly, mankind is fallen, we have all sinned, and therefore we all need the sacrifice of Christ crucified to return us to fellowship with our Creator. In his attempts to remove an all knowing, all powerful God, creation, sin, guilt and Christ’s work on the cross, Spong was ultimately trying to provide another way out of guilt that he seemed to be accusing Christianity of using against its members. However, if we are honest with ourselves we all know the truth. We know we are guilty anyway. Like a defendant pleading not guilty, just because you say it doesn’t make it true.  

Like me, I am confident that you have done things you wish you could take back. You have had to be forgiven, or pay the price for things you’ve done. People know the guilt is there without needing to go to church. We make excuses for our behavior, but that doesn’t get rid of guilt. However, the sooner we acknowledge the truth of our own guilt, the sooner we can work to reconcile those we have hurt. Even if it’s the Creator of the universe.   

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Tony Williams is currently serving in his 20th year as a police officer in a city in Southern Illinois. He has been studying apologetics in his spare time for two decades, since a crisis of faith led him to the discovery of vast and ever-increasing evidence for his faith. Tony received a bachelor's degree in University Studies from Southern Illinois University in 2019. His career in law enforcement has provided valuable insight into the concepts of truth, evidence, confession, testimony, cultural competency, morality, and most of all, the compelling need for Christ in the lives of the lost. Tony plans to pursue postgraduate studies in apologetics in the near future to sharpen his understanding of the various facets of Christian apologetics. Tony has been married for 9 years and has two sons. He and his family currently reside in Southern Illinois.

The Moral Argument(s) and Christian Salvation, Part I: Forgiveness

Over the next three installments, we will extend the discussion of moral apologetics and Christian theology by connecting the moral argument—particularly one version of it—with three deep moral needs we as human beings display: our need to be forgiven, our need to be changed, and our need to be perfected. Each of these profoundly existential needs we possess as human beings corresponds to an important aspect of Christian salvation.

When I say “the moral argument,” I’m using that phrase in a general sort of way. In truth there’s more than one moral argument. There’s a whole range of them. If you prefer, you can think of one moral argument with a number of different parts. At least most of the time that works pretty well since the different variants of the argument tend to be rather consistent with one another. The specific formulation of the moral argument we will consider today is what John Hare calls the “performative” version or, for reasons that will become clear, an “argument from grace.”

You might remember in Book 1 of Mere Christianity C. S. Lewis says two things are at the heart of our understanding of reality: First, there’s a moral law, and second, we all fall short of it. On his claim we can start to build a performative moral argument. There is a moral standard that’s objective and universal. It’s binding and authoritative on us, but we invariably fall short of meeting it. This results in the “gap” between the best we can do and what morality requires. And this gap needs addressing. We find ourselves as having fallen short, and we know it.

How do we know we’ve got a moral problem on our hands? One way, you might say, is by our moral sense, which even plenty of secular thinkers recognize as in some way significant. Take Charles Darwin, for example, who thought it’s our moral sense that best distinguishes human beings from the animals. Indeed, he begins chapter 5 of Descent of Man with this admission: “I fully subscribe to the judgment of those writers who maintain that of all the differences between man and the lower animals, the moral sense or conscience is by far the most important.” He even says he considers the moral sense, our sense of “ought,” to be “humankind’s finest quality.” Elsewhere in the same book Darwin casts both “ought” and “disinterested love for all living creatures” as the noblest attribute of man.

Darwin intuitively felt the importance of morality, even if he ended up embracing a deflationary analysis of its import. Similarly Sigmund Freud. To Freud’s thinking, the problem of guilt is so severe that he diagnosed it in Civilization and Its Discontents as the single most important development of civilization—a problem so acute that it is the thing most responsible for our unhappiness. Perhaps what helps explain Freud’s conviction is that his analytic work found that nearly every neurosis conceals an unconscious sense of guilt, which in turn “fortifies the symptoms by making use of them as punishment.”

For both Darwin and Freud, the phenomenon of guilt was both interesting and important, even revelatory. Recall their depictions: Darwin thought our capacity for experiencing the moral sense and a painful conscience is by far the most important distinction between us and the animals; our sense of ought and disinterested love for all creatures, he believed the noblest virtue of man. And Freud took the problem of guilt as the single most important development of civilization. But they mistook its import, I suspect, embracing reductionist analyses and taking guilt itself as the essential problem, rather than the deeper malady of which guilt is but the symptom. Rightly construed guilt is semiotic, pointing beyond itself.

That we intuitively sense there to be a moral standard that we fall short of leaves us with a condition of guilt in need of fixing. And if we take our feelings of guilt as more than mere feelings, and something like a real objective condition of guilt, we are left wondering if there’s a solution. We need forgiveness for having fallen short of the moral standard—and not just falling short in the past, but continuing to fall short all the time. Forgiveness is a basic and chronic existential human need. 

I rather doubt Freud was wrong about guilt creating quite a bit of unhappiness, which makes it understandable that our secular friends see the need to deal with it, usually by trying to deny that we are really that guilty. Unaddressed guilt eats us up. And sometimes people do have an overactive superego and feel guilty for all sorts of things that they’re not really guilty of. But at other times, most of us intuitively recognize, our guilt isn’t a mistake, but a real insight into ourselves. We don’t need our guilt explained away, in those cases, but taken away, forgiven.

And of course this is one way that the moral argument serves as the perfect pathway to the gospel of Christ—indeed we have fallen short, and are in need of forgiveness. And God offers us that forgiveness through the death and resurrection of Christ. Not only does God offer us forgiveness, but we as his forgiven children can extend forgiveness to others. This is why it’s so imperative we maintain a stance of forgiveness toward our neighbors, modeling the grace God has shown us. And of course many will recognize that all of this broaches the whole theological topic of justification.

So you might wish to approach this philosophically—talking about guilt and our need for forgiveness, and then showing how philosophy leads you to the brink of theology. Or start with a theological discussion of justification, and then show how it comports with what we learned from our moral experience and what we might call general revelation. Or take the deliverances of theology like justification and use insights from moral apologetics to spell out part of what’s going on—that’s doing philosophical theology.

However we approach it, the moral argument, from this angle, functions as an ideal way to introduce the good news of the gospel. We have a problem, yes, but God offers the solution.

In the next installment we will discuss the moral argument and moral transformation.

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David Baggett is professor of philosophy and Director of the Center for Moral Apologetics at Houston Baptist University.

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