Problems With Forgiveness

In the last post, we discussed how Christians are required to forgive those who harm them. It’s also important not to miss some potential problems in exercising forgiveness—misunderstandings and mistakes about forgiveness.

The first common mistake is to excuse the wrong. There’s a French proverb, “Tout comprendre, c’est tout pardonner.” ("To understand all is to forgive all.”) While it is true that sometimes understanding someone’s background or reasoning may explain why they did something, or why it wasn’t malicious to do, the fact is that many things are just wrong and no amount of understanding is going to help. We often push people who have been harmed to excuse the wrong. “She didn’t really mean it that way.” “It wasn’t really his fault.” “She didn’t really have a choice.” Pretending something is wrong isn’t forgiving it; it’s excusing the wrong. Minimizing the wrong doesn’t help with forgiveness, and it’s an additional offense against the person harmed. This mistake is actually very common in the religious world, not least with victims of sexual abuse, but often with emotional abuse. Some poor victims of harm, especially in family situations, have been taught to turn themselves inside out trying to explain why their abusers weren’t really harming them.

An even worse mistake is blaming the victim. If the victim hadn’t trusted him with the money or left her without enough support, it wouldn’t have happened. If you had just done what your mother wanted, she wouldn’t have abused you. Worse yet, the victim of sexual abuse may get blamed. “The way she’s dressed, it’s no wonder she got raped.” “No one could have resisted such a young and beautiful girl” (justifying abusing a minor child in the family). I don’t care if a teen-age girl is dancing naked in the streets, she is not fair game for you, gentlemen. Blaming the victim is to ally oneself with evil.

Another mistake is demanding instantaneous forgiveness by ourselves or for ourselves. Forgiveness is a deep spiritual process that is quite painful and takes a fair amount of time for most of us. Often, instant forgiveness is demanded by those who don’t really want to face what they’ve done. The attitude is, “I said I was sorry, so now get over it!” If we are the ones who have offended, we may need to spend some time bearing the pain along with the person we’ve harmed.

Another mistake is equating forgiveness with reconciliation. We are required to forgive, which means accepting the burden of the harm and turning over long-term justice to God. We may not be required to be reconciled. If a person isn’t repentant, reconciliation could be very dangerous and expose the victim to risk of further harm. Even if an offender claims to be repentant, it may not be safe to relax the boundaries. Many offenders are highly manipulative liars. Reconciliation should only happen when it will actually be safe to do so. For instance, sometimes, a wife should forgive a husband in an abusive, domestic violence situation, but should not move back in with him until there has been some long-term, demonstrated change.

Another mistake is trying to forgive people when we are not the person harmed. Jesus went through his ministry forgiving people’s sins. Before he forgave one man, he said, “Man, your sins are forgiven you.” (Luke 5:20 ESV.) And it deeply shocked the hearers. The lawyers and religious teachers said, “Who is this who speaks blasphemies? Who can forgive sins but God alone?” (Luke 5:21 ESV). Exactly. We don’t have the authority to forgive sins that are committed against other people and not against us. This principle has historically been abused in churches, when leaders “forgive” a pastor for some kind of moral sin, showing “grace” as if they were the main ones harmed. (Obviously, if a pastor engages in serious sin, he is also harming his congregation. But there may be a more significant primary victim.)

A related mistake is equating forgiveness with positional reconciliation. Another way of looking at this one is the assumption that forgiveness should erase the consequences of the wrongdoing. In this model, the offender’s repentance (sincere or faked) is considered to require “grace” in the form of restoring him to his position. This has been a really common problem with sex abuse in the church and sex abuse in families. Going through the motions of repentance gets an offender back to his position of power and influence. The reality is that recovering alcoholics shouldn’t be bartenders, people who’ve committed child sexual abuse should never work with children, and some sins permanently disqualify you from ministry or positions of responsibility over people. It has nothing to do with forgiveness and everything to do with what kinds of temptations different characters can sustain—and the risk of further harm to innocent people if they fall again.

While forgiveness is central to the Gospel, it’s also complex, and trying to take shortcuts can do spiritual and other harm. So yes, we must forgive and help others forgive, but wisely.