FORGIVENESS: Body and Soul posted a thought-provoking comment on forgiveness; meanwhile there’s been a lot of discussion in Amy Welborn’s comments of whether and how and who should forgive the 9/11 attackers and sexually abusive priests. Here’s the email I sent B&S;, cleaned up and augmented but still fairly rambly. Sursum Corda also has a very good post on this subject that sums up my more theological thinking on the subject.

Obviously I don’t know since I wasn’t there, but my gut response is that Wiesenthal should have forgiven but should NOT have told the guy he forgave him. Charity doesn’t mean giving people what they ask for (sometimes that’s pretty uncharitable!); it doesn’t mean relativism; it isn’t a get out of jail free card. To my mind, the Nazi was seeking a cop-out, cheap grace, and not only did Wiesenthal have no obligation to give him what he asked for, IMO he should not give him what he asked for. (It’s almost a magical attitude really–“If I can get some random Jew to forgive me, my sins will be washed away! And if I have to intrude on his life, call up all his pain, re-open his wounds, too bad–I need my forgiveness!” This misses the difficulty of repentance, of being accountable, of the necessary suffering that repentance brings. And

obviously it’s cruel to Wiesenthal.)

Too often, I think, we equate charity with doing what the other person wants–this is why people tell battered women to forgive their batterers, God loves the batterer, blah blah blah, rather than focusing on the fact that God hates the abuse which seems like the more immediately pertinent point. This is a reversal of the standard complaint against the phrase, “love the sinner, hate the sin.” The usual problem is that hating the sin becomes hating the sinner. Here, loving the sinner eclipses hating the sin. Adam Smith’s line, “Mercy to the guilty is cruelty to the innocent,” is false–but there are ways of extending mercy to the guilty that make it true. The difficult task is to find ways of being merciful to the guilty without being cruel to the innocent. It’s not “un-Christian” to call 911 and have the abuser locked up, for example. Calls for forgiveness can be terribly callous, but they’re not inherently callous. Sorry for rambling there.

The Pope, of course, didn’t say “I forgive the attackers” but asked us to pray that God shows them mercy. I think that’s an appropriate challenge.

And I’ll just say one other thing: We are used to thinking of justice and mercy as opposed to one another. The Pope has asked us to pray that God shows mercy to the terrorists of September 11; this has been read as a statement that God should not show His justice to the terrorists, that justice is erased by mercy. This reading seems so strange to me in part because one of the major things that drew me to Christianity in the first place was St. Anselm’s treatise on the Incarnation. Anselm argues that the Incarnation was necessary to fulfill both God’s justice and His mercy. We may choose which aspect of God’s work to emphasize, but at all times His mercy and His justice work in harmony; He does not express one and suppress the other. Thus when He shows mercy to the terrorists, He will necessarily also be giving them just punishment. If they’re in Hell, they’re there because they rejected His mercy, not because it was never made available to them. Having rejected the mercy, they are left with only the justice, and justice without mercy means damnation for any of us, since by our own merit we can’t possibly “earn” Heaven. So when we pray for God to show mercy, I don’t think that in any way negates justice.