Beyond the Abyss 8

So what is forgiveness? Sharon Baker, in her new book (Razing Hell: Rethinking Everything You’ve Been Taught About God’s Wrath and Judgment), asks this question and makes this point:

In serving retributive justice, the offense would be held on to tightly, not forgiven unless and until the offender balanced the accounts through payback of some kind. In that case, there would be nothing to give away, nothing to release, nothing to forgive; the debt incurred by the offense would have been paid.

(I am driven to make an observation: for more than a decade scholars have been calling into question the Anselmian satisfaction theory because it borrows too heavily from medieval theories of justice and law. I ask the lawyers out there this question: Does this problem for forgiveness that Baker surfaces arise from a modern understanding of justice (or a biblical understanding of justice)?)

Baker comes into her stride in this chp by several observations:

First, she sees the entire plan of forgiveness in the Bible rooted in God’s love and grace: God graciously forgives.

Second, she sees this experience of grace to be what sets us loose from sin and slavery and to become reconciled with God.

Third, this prior act of God’s grace and love and forgiveness prompts — and precedes — and this order is obviously important to her — both repentance and repair.

So, forgiveness leads to repentance and repair.

Do you think the proper biblical order is “forgiveness leads to repentance and repair” or is repentance required for forgiveness to be experienced? Which comes first? Repentance or forgiveness? What’s your evidence?

God forgives all in Christ; all we have to do is receive it. [Phenomenology might probe this to find that “receive” entails repentance and intention to repair.]