a season to remember the beginning of forgiveness

Like any overachieving seminary student would do for the holidays, I composed a reading list to work through over the holidays. I think I am actually going to finish my list before my next quarter starts. Exciting!

Currently, I am reading through James William McClendon's Ethics: Systematic Theology Vol. 1. He separates his book into three large sections so that he can give a preliminary account for how a Christian community can start to embody an ethic that mirrors that of Jesus' life and the narratives in the Bible. In the second section on the Christian community as a community of "watch-care," McClendon talks about the importance of forgiveness. He writes, "Christian community is exactly one in which forgiveness not punishment is the norm. Such forgiveness has as its goal...the restoration of a rupture in the community" (227). After showing the importance of forgiveness for Christian communities, McClendon dives into the content behind the word forgiveness. He answers the question, "What does forgiveness actually do?" His answer to this question has some interesting implications for looking at Jesus as the incarnation of God, the message of this holiday season that I have celebrated since my childhood days.

McClendon follows a definition of forgiveness that separates forgiveness into an act and an attitude. Forgiveness, to be forgiveness, has to have both. He calls the act of forgiveness, the structural and judicial side of forgiveness where a person who has been wronged grants the wrong doer for his or her infraction. This act of pardon is two-sided because one person says "I forgive," while the other person receives the "I forgive" and reciprocates by saying "I accept your forgiveness." 

From a Christological perspective, the implications for the act of forgiveness are quite obvious and not very surprising. If you are more along the lines of the Arminian camp when it comes to salvation, a camp that I identify with, then you, like me, would say something to the effect, "God has forgiven me through Jesus' life and death. So, the ball is in my court to accept this forgiveness." Again, this implication is not very surprising, and I have heard similar things from different theologians about forgiveness (e.g. Miroslav Volf), but McClendon's account of forgiveness really started to rock my world when he writes about the attitude of forgiveness.

McClendon characterizes the attitude of forgiveness as "the relinquishing of ongoing resentment by establishing new ties between forgiver and forgiven" (227). McClendon exegetes Isaiah 43:25 in order to flesh out this attitudinal aspect of forgiveness. In this Isaiah passage, God tells Israel through the prophet, "I will not remember your sins." McClendon says that this cannot be a literal forgetting of sins because a few verses later (v. 27) God recounts many of Israel's sins. How could God say that God will not remember sins while at the same time recounting all those sins? Seems paradoxical or inconsistent does it not?  McClendon explains this seemingly paradoxical statement from God by saying that to forget in this passage, or "not remember," must mean that God is not going to harbor resentment for Israel's sin even though God knows and remembers these sins. Thus, for McClendon, forgiveness, rather than being an attitude of forgetfulness, is a special kind of remembrance—one that remembers the wrong doing without holding resentment for the wrong doing.

McClendon then brings this attitude of forgiveness into the Christological realm. He writes, "[I]f we follow Jesus' way, the forgiving one takes the offense up into his or her own life ([like] he took all our offenses upon him), [and] makes the other's story part of his or her own story" (228). By blending or combining our story with another, according to McClendon, we are no longer able to separate ourselves from our neighbor so that we truly love our neighbors as ourselves. Thus, forgiving as an attitude is remembering that the forgiven and the forgiver are united together through Christ.

McClendon ends his discussion on the attitude of forgiveness with a sentence that has changed the way I see Jesus as God incarnate and the effect of Jesus' death on the cross. He writes, "[From the attitudinal perspective,] forgiveness is this: one takes another's life up into one's own, making the offender a part of one's own story in such a way that the cost of doing so overcomes the power of injury, healing it in a new bond of union between them" (229). Rather than looking at Jesus' life and death as the victory of God over Satan where Jesus is the bait that Satan swallows whereby Satan loses all power and control over us (Christus Victor view of salvation), or looking at Jesus as the substitution for our sins whereby Jesus gets us "off the hook" with God, McClendon's view gives a different perspective on the effect of Jesus' life and death: the blending of people's lives and their stories with Jesus' life and story whereby redemption and forgiveness occurs.

Soren Kierkegaard, under the pseudonym of Johannes Climacus, argues in Philosophical Fragments that the only way for God to pull humans out of their situation of sin and untruth was to become a God-man, which is Climacus' word for Jesus as fully human and fully God. Combining Kierkegaard and McClendon, by becoming this God-man, Jesus took up our life and life stories into his life and life story with the effect that his story becomes our story. He redeems our narratives through his own narrative. My prayer is that we can remember this blending of narratives that began with the birth of Jesus, the birth that we celebrate on this day, and that from the forgiveness we receive from Jesus we can mirror that same forgiveness in our own life. Merry Christmas. peace