Illustrations by Keith Negley
“To err is human,” poet Alexander Pope famously wrote, “to forgive, divine.”
Pope’s observation was first published in 1711. If he is correct, we have forgotten our better natures over the last three centuries. Today’s world suffers from a deficit of forgiveness: whether from personal slights or from grave offenses, public discourse has seen a resurgence of naming, blaming, and shaming. In the digital age, not only do old sins live forever in public memory, but new ones are catalogued all the time. Mistakes and gaffes go immediately viral, and popular online platforms such as the “pettyrevenge,” “justiceserved,” and “maliciouscompliance” communities do not merely publish but venerate instances of retribution against employers, ex-lovers, and others, with plaudits offered for the most creative retort. Our dirty laundry remains hung out for all to see until the end of time or the servers blink off, whichever comes first.
If this were not bad enough, a more general problem is at stake: once offended, the human heart loves to act as judge and jury, rendering the maximum possible sentence — sowing the seeds of resentment and the grounds for further hostility for years to come. If such a tendency is not new but is in fact as old as time, then what, we may ask, lies beneath it, and how can we break the cycle?
In his new book “Forgive: Why Should I and How Can I?” (Viking, 2022), Tim Keller offers a vision of personal and social renewal through the practice of gospel-centered forgiveness, a renewal that requires truthfulness, sacrifice, and moral courage but which ultimately yields justice, mercy, communal restoration and, finally, peace. Taking his core texts from Jesus’ teaching in Matthew 5 and 18 — the Sermon on the Mount and the parable of the unforgiving servant — Keller offers a comprehensive framework for grasping God’s own concept of forgiveness.
The approach of “Forgive” is fourfold: first, to help us understand what forgiveness is, historically and biblically; second, to help us see our need for it, both as sinners and as people who live and dwell within a social fabric; third, to help us seek it and find it from God through Jesus; so that fourth, we can engage and forgive the wrongdoers in our own lives, as well as seek forgiveness for the wrongs we have done. Charting the vertical pathway of forgiveness from heaven to earth and the horizontal pathway from person to person, Keller introduces a third pathway of internal forgiveness, one in which we inwardly pardon the wrongdoer between those other two steps.
Each pathway is necessary to achieve true forgiveness. Mapping all three in turn, Keller’s aim is to open the eyes of our heart (Ephesians 1:18) to our continual need for grace that the gospel offers.
Making It Personal
Longtime readers of Keller’s work will find his erudition and range of cultural reference on display once again in “Forgive.” Examples from Mozart to “Les Misèrables” pepper the chapters, and numerous taxonomies, fine conceptual distinctions, and even recipe-style frameworks accompany his analysis. It is tempting to react strictly sociologically to his claims, to keep the discussion of #MeToo and other secular movements in frame — but despite his shrewd assessment of these topics, Keller refuses to let readers stay safe in the cocoon of meta-commentary. Instead, “Forgive” regularly cuts us to the quick, reminding us of the frightful intimacy of sin and the costly demands of forgiveness, how uncomfortably personal such matters become.
Keller’s aim is to open the eyes of our heart to our continual need for grace that the gospel offers.
I have a friend — we’ll call him Andrew — whose father died when Andrew was still a teenager. His father was a defining presence in Andrew’s life, and an even larger absence in his wake, an absence Andrew has grappled with for more than 25 years. Unable to forgive his father for leaving him so early, Andrew’s anger has spilled into other relationships, and has become a filter by which he views the world: he now struggles to forgive others for their faults, holding grudges for years, and refusing to let even the slightest offenses go.
“Spiritually speaking, to not forgive somebody is to put yourself in a kind of jail,” Keller writes. “The self-centeredness that grows when you stay angry at somebody, when you hold things against them, when you continue to regard them as if they’re liable to you and they owe you, is a prison.” In our encounters I have mourned Andrew’s self-incarceration, his preference to stay behind those prison bars and let his wounds fester — and yet from those bars the gospel holds out our release, offering keys to a liberation more powerful than any we could fashion on our own.
First is a mirror, showing us our own depravity, both our own capacity for wrongdoing and for the distortions that pride can wreak on victimhood: “If you’re having trouble forgiving,” Keller writes about the story of Joseph and his brothers in Genesis 50, “you’re forgetting you’re a sinner, not God.”
Second is a bridge, in the person of Jesus. His atoning work on the cross reconciled us to God, whereby He became both sacrifice for our sins and advocate, arguing before the Father that those in Him can no longer be condemned (Romans 8).
Third is an olive branch: to extend to our wrongdoer, willing their good in love and praying for the reformation of their own heart to hate the sin they once condoned. Like a surgeon distinguishing between the tumor she excises and the patient, the goal in excising sin from sinners is to restore the larger body to health. Altogether, in the biblical framework, the process of naming the trespass, identifying with the perpetrator, absorbing the debt, and pursuing reconciliation helps us enter into the heart of real forgiveness, and join the search for shalom in a broken world.
The Politics of Forgiveness
Do such thoughts sound radical? They don’t — but they should. Until recently in human history, such concepts would have been novel at best, and ludicrous at worst. Indeed, some of the most illuminating observations on forgiveness are found not in the expositions of relevant Scripture but in the history and etymology of the concept: his discussion of the linguistic links between wrath, wraiths, and wreaths, for example, is vintage Keller. In the ancient world, forgiving others was seen less as a virtue than as an expression of power, akin more to pity toward the plebes beneath you than to the remission of a debt and the restoration of community. When offended, honor was not answered with violence, forgiving a wrongdoer was in essence dismissive, akin to shooing away a pesky fly.
Only with the arrival of Christianity did ideas of loving our enemies and turning the other cheek grow widespread, for reasons that still fascinate historians today: Recent books by Tom Holland and Glen Scrivener examine this trajectory. But, at the core of this narrative, Keller writes, stands the cross: the place where God’s perfect love (of His creation) and perfect fury (of corrupting sin) converge, the center of the worldwide explosion whose shockwave is still rippling outward even now. Keller addresses the subject in perhaps his most magisterial chapter in the book.
Asked about this trajectory, Keller observed that, “At the uttermost foundation of a Christian universe is divine love. We are here because of [God’s] love. But in both the pagan and the secular view of the universe, reality is all about power. We are only here because various warring and competing powers brought us about. Either there was a battle between gods, or in the secular view there were various evolving releases and explosions of energy. Forgiveness did not make sense before Christian beliefs influenced society, and it will make less sense as they decline in influence.”
Here is the modern irony: Because current Christian notions of forgiveness are commonplace, we have forgotten not just their potency but our need for them. Again the sociological yields to the personal: recently I had a challenging encounter with Andrew, one that was sorrowful yet in many ways expected. After several years of attempting to minister to him, my exhortations for him to seek peace with the death of his father fell on deaf ears, and my offer of resources for his battle with a persistent addiction were rejected outright. The hostility that I had seen so often targeted at others finally levied its sights on me.
But I remembered the mirror. There is no version of this story in which I am the hero, the unsullied white knight riding in to save the moral day. For every hurt Andrew has felt and inflicted, I have inflicted just as many — some in his eyes, and some in others’ — a fact that the gospel requires me not just to acknowledge but to center. My advice was presumptuous; addiction knows my name too — even one of my own bitter thoughts, Jesus taught, is tantamount to murder. According to Keller, such honesty regarding our own sinfulness is the prerequisite for reconciliation, not coming out of false virtue or self-pity — the Scylla and Charybdis of the forgiveness-seeking heart — but instead out of an honest look at our continual need for grace.
The gospel requires us to recognize that, in contrast to so many modern therapeutic narratives, we are neither the hero of our own story nor of anyone else’s: there is only one true protagonist, and He is making all things new (Revelation 21:5).
Tensions and Questions
Keller is not an idealist, far from it. He recognizes the complexity of human relationships, and in his extended discussion of survivors of sexual abuse he acknowledges that forgiveness is a difficult, painful process, not a one-time, easy-bake recipe. As often as he urges love for the wrongdoer, he counsels wisdom for the wronged, suggesting that even within the church certain boundaries will need to be enforced and milestones reached prior to the restoration of fellowship. Moreover, in cases of particularly grievous offenses such as sexual abuse, justice may well require criminal penalties or barring offenders from holding offices of potential power or influence ever again.
The process of naming the trespass, identifying with the perpetrator, absorbing the debt, and pursuing reconciliation helps us enter into the heart of real forgiveness.
Such considerations raise a key tension regarding how far the wronged can or should go in their pursuit of forgiveness, and Keller wisely offers resources but not prescriptions for his readers. Yet here lies a felt absence: for most of his account Keller focuses on the vertical and the horizontal pathways of forgiveness, but not the kind of larger historical trauma visited by groups upon other groups (such as civil wars or ethnic cleansing) or the kind of forgiveness that a single person can extend to a category of people. The closest example in the book, of Holocaust survivor Corrie ten Boom forgiving a concentration camp guard for his cruelty, verges on this kind of forgiveness, but the discussion never fully explores what it would mean for her to forgive all Nazis — not just the one right in front of her.
Acknowledging this absence, Keller noted that it was a larger subject he wished he’d had time to explore, and suggested that Miroslav Wolf’s book “Exclusion and Embrace” covers the initial ground of grappling with historical wrongs. “It was written by a Croatian author in the early ‘90s,” Keller said, “addressing how Christians on all sides of the genocidal strife in the Balkans could ‘embrace’ (i.e. forgive) rather than ‘exclude’ each other.” Despite the book’s academic style and its grounding in a non-Reformed tradition, Keller encourages interested readers to seek out Wolf’s account.
To be honest, I struggled with this absence through much of “Forgive”, silently asking Keller to pull back the zoom on the lens, to see a forest where he had been focusing on individual trees. But of what else, I finally realized midway through, are forests composed? And does not an infection in one tree poison the whole wood? Only someone who has learned to truly pardon an individual perpetrator, bearing the cost of the crime and genuinely desiring their good, can extend that pardon to the next perpetrator, and the next after that — until forgiveness, grounded in mercy and seeking restoration, becomes not the exception but the rule.
To Forgive, Divine
Each of us has an Andrew in his or her life, someone who is hurting and hurts others, someone who has not yet found the pathway out of their pain. Reading “Forgive,” however, we quickly realize that all politics is local: that each of us is in our own way an Andrew, even if we have never fully seen it before. Such is the abiding lesson of Keller’s book: beyond the teaching, beyond the exposition, beyond the etymologies and the taxonomies and the recipes, stands the shadow of the cross, at once humbling us and ennobling us, reminding us of the transformational power of divine love.
I don’t know how God is working in Andrew’s heart, but I do know that He is working. I take comfort in the mentors, pastors, and counselors who speak wisdom into his life, and pray that this wisdom helps him forgive his father so that his other relationships can heal. I pray, too, that Andrew grows enough in his faith to see not his earthly father but his heavenly one, who longs to hold us all in His embrace.
This side of eternity, may such a prayer dwell richly in our hearts — that instead of petty revenge and every other form of human vengeance on offer, that God’s own healing may flow ever more powerfully into the world.
Benjamin Morris is a native of Mississippi who now lives and writes in New Orleans.