Volf and Barron on Forgiveness

When I was writing my Master’s thesis on purgatory in ecumenical dialogue, I was fortunate to stumble across the work of the evangelical scholar Mirsoslav Volf.  Volf, with his elegant reflections on the Last Judgment, proved to be the perfect evangelical interlocutor for the Catholic doctrine of purgatory.  I sometimes joke that he wrote my fourth chapter for me.  One of the many gems from Volf that made it into my thesis was this one, on the meaning of forgiveness:

We seriously misunderstand forgiveness . . . if we understand it as acting “as if the sin was not there” . . . There can be no redemption unless the truth about the world is told and justice is done. To treat sin as if it were not there, when in fact it is there, amounts to living as if the world were redeemed when in fact it is not.  (Volf, Exclusion and Embrace, 298)

I was reminded both of my own work and of this quote from Volf when I watched Father Barron’s reflections on today’s readings and 9/11:

Brett Salkeld is a doctoral student in theology at Regis College in Toronto. He is a father of two (so far) and husband of one. He is the author of Can Catholics and Evangelicals Agree about Purgatory and the Last Judgment?