Christianity turns the practical social purposes of forgiveness into a nightmare that requires eternal repetition of every person’s shamefulness
A functional understanding of forgiveness is to repair a transgression of social customs and structures so as to maintain those customs and structures. These practices are functional in that the consequences of what has to be restored are necessary even if people are so accustomed to them that people do not recognize that restorative purpose. Here are four examples of the varieties of forgiveness. There are matters of etiquette such as saying you are sorry if you have stubbed someone’s toe or been late for an appointment. The insult is easily repaired though the person who has to wait may be leery of meeting someone on street corners. Apologies are easily made in that no great harm has been committed in the first place. It is hardly satisfying for someone who killed a love one in a car accident to phone and say sorry about killing someone.
Another kind of forgiveness is the forgiveness of debts on the grounds that the debt undertaken was misinformed or too attractive to be declined even if the debt is extremely burdensome. It was a mistake for the allies to insist on reparations for Germany as part of the Versailles agreement because the onerous burdens might destabilize Germany’s future. It is wise to forgive southern European loans that had been made available to them by the creation of the Euro because that would leave them immiserated even though they were too tempted to turn down the loans and even though over time they were paid off. Bankers should not offer loans that couldn’t be repaid. So student loans should be forgiven because the students thought the loans were necessary so as to get a college education and providing loans through the government was a bad policy. It would have been better to provide smaller amounts of scholarships to fewer students than burden them with loans with no end in sight., the loans less greedy than ambitious, which is a good thing even though the general treasury pays for the forgiveness.
A third kind of forgiveness takes place when divorced people become cooperative if not cordial with their exes despite their animosities because children are involved or even just to get past their marriage so as to go on with other relationships even though the animosities are deep and so fiction suggests divorces are often accompanied by revenge sex or rebound affairs. Remarriages are happy occasions but a move to have divorcing ceremonies does not seem to have taken on.
A fourth kind of forgiveness though not often seen as that is a closure whereby people are ceremoniously interred so as to be collectively recognized as a person who is dead and awarded with some recognition of their lives, sometimes more willing to admit them warts and all. Another closure that amounts to forgiveness is the curious practice of regarding imprisonment or execution as bring closure to the families of the person assaulted so as to accomplish justice, which means punishment to the perpetrator as well as the victim in the name of getting past the perhaps horrendous event, “closure”, a term used because punishment, as opposed to incarceration of a dangerous person, seems to have little other purpose than to deter professional and so rational criminals. Closure like other forms of forgiveness are ways to end the disruption of social life.and a social situation or emotion is the one that accomplishes the end of sustaining social structure.
Here is an existential rather than a functional description of forgiveness. It is a way to move into the future by putting aside the past so that people are not burdened by the past and have a fresh start. That is true of all the examples cited. You forget a grudge or a stabbed toe so as to add new history. Your debts are clean so you can borrow again. You don’t live with the past by getting rid of a lot of personal baggage with the ex. You want to finally get beyond the loved one who was slain. On the other hand, revenge is the opposite of forgiveness because it tries to revive or rekindle an old event that you wish had gone differently. You harbor a grudge or an insult. You refight the reasons you came to hate your ex-spouse.You remain in perpetual arrears because of bad decisions made previously. You promise at the grave that the killing is never over. This can supply some immediate satisfaction but transforms the vengeful person to be overcome with hate and animosity. People can engage in forgiveness because their imaginations allow them to reconstruct time, to alter and abolish bad things in the past rather than relive the past, engaging in what Freud would think of as compulsion mechanisms, whereby the offense is reviewed again and again, revenge the way of resurrecting the offensive event as if doing so could have altered it so it didn;t happen, the killer killed in the midst of his or her killing. The mind does all sorts of tricks on time such as also forecasting a better future or a golden past.
There is no forgiveness in the Old Testament and that may be the reason the Old Testament seems harsh even though not particularly bloodthirsty. When Adam and Eve err they are not forgiven as if they were spoiled children going a bit far in their impetuosity. When the waters ebb after the Great Flood, God does not forgive himself for having ravaged the Earth but says only that He will not do it this time again. Maybe it is the nature of the Hebrew God that he is unbending, never saying He is sorry, and so un like the Greek Gods who can change their minds. The Hebrew God is always right and so never needs forgiveness or even considers that. God discusses how many good people in Sodom will redeem the city, but God goes ahead anyway and destroys the city. David does not feel a need for forgiveness or asks for it when he sends Uriah the message thatUriah should be sent in the front lines. He just has to live with the consequences. Forgiveness is not needed as a factor in social life except for trivial things. People, rather, are all like Dorian Gray, all their blemishes on their souls however much people can parade themselves as virtuous.
Functionally speaking, it is unnecessary or perplexing to repeat a n offer of forgiveness more than once or twice. You don’t have to say “I’m sorry” for weeks after stubbing someone’s toe except as a sort of joke. You only have to pay your debt and interest once. You may bury the peacepipe with an ex but not have to renew your separation vows regularly. Closure is closure, should such a thing happen. But Christianity is different. It prolongs the experience of forgiveness for as long as possible, savoring the experience itself as a virtue so that a person is a perpetual penitent, always in the wrong and suitably abased. You groove on your own wretchedness, that the basic and essential mystery, beyond the Mass and the adoration of the saints and the grandness of the cosmos. The genius of christianity is that it is able to encapsulate this wrenching experience with liturgy and specious reasoning so that Christians can take up as much or as little of the anguish of being penitent as they care for, shifting to other religious matters while still attesting as a formula of words that every one of them is deep down lousy and should always be aware of that. Freud thought Christianity and all other religion was an illusion whereby to imagine an ultimate father figure, and Nietzsche thought religion would allow the poor to get their revenge, but I am suggesting that Christianity in particular is a cult surrounding and intensifying an anxiety attack so that one extends it as best one can for the relief that will come from letting it go for a bit. Why people would prefer this particular mystery is mysterious, and so is no more than a formula of words that fills the air but is constrained by the ordinary things religion does, such as provide explanations and communities and a panoply of ceremony. That central experience occurred at a bad cultural point in the unfolding ofHebraic experience and has subsisted for reasons remote from the central experience. Innocent III was not feeling forgiveness but certainty when he killed the Albigensians.
Another functional aspect of forgiveness is proportionality. You ask or receive forgiveness more or less fulsomely depending on the violation breached. You pay larger fines or serve longer sentences depending on the degree of your transgression. You are more fulsome in your apology if you have insulted someone rather than stubbed their toe. You could be endless in thanking someone for saving a person/s life except that people forgive having to be thanked so that tube person saved is free rather than dependent. But in Christianity the appropriate response to even a minor infraction is not just a proportionate penance but the recognition that the insult never ends because it is an indication of one’s original sin and so must be forever asking forgiveness..
Moreover, forgiveness is a reciprocal process, while other emotions, like the appreciation of beauty or satiation are not, though it is questionable whether an unreciprocated feeling of love can be accomplished on its own or regarded instead as pining for love rather than achieving it. But for forgiveness to be complete, it has to be acknowledged as such by the person having the power to give forgiveness, and so Christians insist that God is merciful because he will always forgive the transgressor, allowing the infraction to be erased, if you ask forgiveness hard enough. But that is to propose that God has clean hands to offer forgiveness when it could be argued that such an avatar of earthly and human feelings has plenty of blood on his hands rather than saying people are always the culprit.
A fourth characteristic of functional forgiveness is that it is personal. It has to do with the person being hurt forgiving the transgressor. So the United States never said it forgave Germany for World War II but simply went past that, its own interest seeing to Germany would become an ally and whether when it was unified become again belligerent. Nations can be punished as in reparations but there is no need to forgive them. It is even a stretch to think that a Holocaust survivor has forgiven Germany rather than simply received reparations from it. You can make your peace with it by being less wary of the nation but that assess only, for some, after generations when people and nations have gone on to other things, and all it may mean is a willingness to buy volkswagens. No forgiveness. You can’t even give forgiveness vicariously. When I say I haven’t forgiven Chaney and Powell for lying about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, I am offering a joke about it was as if they had said it to me face to face rather than it being an insult to the American public in that Presidential advisors are not supposed to lie to the American people on serious matters. So we can say what Chaney and Powell did was unforgivable simply eans they had a chance to be statesmanlike and did not while it is forgivable in the simple sense that it is part of ordinary politics to support ethanol supports during an Iowa primary because politicians want to get elected and move on, supposedly, to more statesmanlike issues.
Christians stretch or redefine the meaning of forgiveness as being a collective property. While every individual penitent can be required to ask forgiveness, mankind is transformed because people as a whole will be transformed so everyone will forgive Charlie Kirk’s murderer and thatGod, being what he is, can individually forgive every single one of a person for their transgressions even if it is done through the agency of a priest acting in God’s name and power on an individual basis. The collective is miraculously made individually. Chary Kirks wife forgives the murderer of her husband either as a formula of words or a deeply held view of the sanctity of all humans, including murderers, while Trump is not up to that generosity of spirit and prefers to nurse his grudge, enemies forgiven only if like Marco Rubio change their tune and pledge obedience, which is not forgiveness, which includes magnanimity but simply a war of everyone against everyone where some people have more advantage than others. Nothing needs to be forgiven because there is no social peace.
The biblical religions are out to impose regulations over nature. The Old Testament does so by imposing law onto custom and any other practice that seems pernicious. God is more important than nature even though for untold millenia religion was the expression of nature and its powers, these sanctified because of their power rather than in opposition to the power of nature. Christianity ups the ante. Not only will actions that seem natural come under the sway of God, but emotions, however deeply or naturally felt, will also become under scrutiny and some or most found to be wanting and so to be suppressed and perhaps eliminated. People will then become better people by becoming unnatural for as they prefer a new kind of being different from ordinary natural experience for and by people. A truly grand objective is for everyone to be always forgiving and getting forgiven, people perpetually reexamining their consciousnesses so as to find any speck of bad thoughts. That is a daunting measure that would create great pain if people did not pay it more than verbal attention and would be debilitating in that people would always be second guessing their emotions for purity. That is different from thinking of Christianity as liberating people into productive activity, which is what Weber said that Protestant ism did. But Christians do not turn themselves into what Christopher Hutchins regarded as subjects of a North Korean regime whereby fear is transformed into love because they simply don’t really buy into it, fitting religion into their lives rather than it overwhelming their lives.
If the Christian doctrine that people need perpetual forgiveness for their inherent vile emotions and actions, that is to relive again and again their trespasses and their ordinary feelings, which would be a state of affairs that might apply to mystics and people on the brink of mental illness anyway while most Christians would continue to lead more or less moral and decent feeling lives, preserving their own sense of self respect and engaging in Christianity as a community of decent people who observe rituals as an affirmation of their decency. But the Christian cannot get off that hook so easily. St. Paul is the first theologian and so like any other theologian is preoccupied with his open concerns and preoccupations. But Paul’s theology is incorporated in the body of the New Testament alongside the Gospels. What he says has higher stature than what later theologians have said. And he makes clear that all people are tainted with original sin, a concept that is not available in other religions and so to be taken seriously. What does this term mean other than a phrase to be evaded or dispensed with other than to say tjat people from time to time or frequently do wrong things and feel vile thoughts> It must mean that humanity is deeply and inevitably tainted so that they cannot lead decent lives. Everyone is a rice convert in that everyone has to eat from the trough of forgiveness just so as to be minimally decent. Otherwise, people are worms,.louses, cockroaches, or whatever term to show tier moral repulsiveness and that forgiveness can only take place within the Church even if following Vatican II other religions are recognized as having a degree of grace, which is to go too far, too beneficent, and contrary to Paul. If Paul is wrong, what other doctrines are wrong and which can be still believed or is it that the only doctrines that are sacrosanct are like the doctrine that Mary went to heaven, which is a formula of words that has no impact on life? I don’t know the Christian answer to whether original sin and the refashioning of the very human doctrine of forgiveness is to be regarded as real or merely a symbolic mamby-pamby idea that everyone should improve themselves everyday as best one can.