@RandalRauserYour 95-year-old grandmother lost her family in the concentration camps of Auschwitz. One day she tells you that after converting to Christianity in 1950, she became convinced that Jesus wanted her to forgive Hitler and so she did. What is your reaction?
i) I'd probably make no attempt to correct her. Even when people are wrong, there are times when it's best to let it slide.
ii) As I and others have argued, there's no duty to forgive the impenitent.
iii) What's the point of forgiving the damned? It doesn't absolve them. The damned will never benefit from human forgiveness. It makes absolutely no difference to them.
iv) At best, it has a psychologically therapeutic effect on the person who forgives them. Sometimes that helps them to let go of the past and move forward.
v) That said, why should we forgive those whom God refuses to forgive? If God hasn't forgiven Hitler, why should I?
vi) But even assuming that she has the prerogative to forgive Hitler for when he did to her, she has no prerogative to forgive him for what he did to others. She can't presume to act on their behalf without their consent.
This brings to mind Simon Wiesenthal's book The Sunflower:
ReplyDeleteA young dying Nazi soldier asks a nurse to bring in a Jewish person so that he can beg for forgiveness from the Jewish person for his sins against the Jews. The Nazi had participated in burning down a house full of Jews and gunning down those who were trying to escape. The nurse brought in Wiesenthal. The Nazi begged for Wiesenthal to forgive him on behalf of the Jewish people. But Wiesenthal said not a word; he simply walked away.
At the time, Wiesenthal reasoned to himself that the only people who could forgive the Nazi for his crimes were the Jews whom he had killed in cold blood, but they no longer lived, hence there was no forgiveness possible for the Nazi. It wasn't Wiesenthal's prerogative to forgive the Nazi.
In this respect, I agree with Wiesenthal. The only people who could forgive this Nazi were those against whom he sinned - and perhaps their loved ones such as their parents and siblings. I suppose that's true of any murder and his victim(s).
At the same time, murder itself is a sin not only against the murdered, but a sin against God himself, for God forbids murder, which God can do since he's the moral law giver, as it were. Not to mention in an ultimate sense God created this particular person. In any case, murder is a sin against God himself too. So it takes God to forgive. At least that's how it seems to me, but I grant I could be missing something.
In the sense that forgiveness is a reciprocal transaction, one cannot forgive the impenitent...though one can unilaterally let go of the bitterness and hatred.
ReplyDeleteCorrie ten Boom spoke of her momentary inability to forgive a particularly cruel concentration camp guard who had converted after the war and had approached her to reconcile. She quickly recalled, however, how much she herself had been forgiven and, in the power of the Holy Spirit, extended her hand.