Why Jesus Used the F-Word
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| "Stephen is Consecrated Bishop" by Vittore Carpaccio |
Two years ago, I decided to stop using the f-word. No, not the actual F-word, but another f-word that had been causing damage: forgiveness.
Forgiveness: the virtue that formed the foundation of my Christian youth. The concept I had learned about from countless Bible verses, Sunday School lessons and VeggieTales episodes. I had fully accepted the idea that I needed to forgive those who did wrong to me as God had forgiven me. And if I had wronged someone, I needed to beg them for their forgiveness. Those who refused to forgive denied the most core tenet of Christianity, and I felt little patience for such people. To abandon forgiveness was nothing short of heresy. You might as well be one of those jerks yelling at Larry the Cucumber.
Of course, I had formed these opinions years before the fallout. The Calvinist church of my childhood imparted to me great deal of theological and ethical indoctrination, but none of that was enough to keep me from leaving. None of it could prepare me for the child sexual abuse scandal that rocked my denomination. I spent 2018 coming to grips with my community's deep failure to defend the innocent. Our leadership had turned a blind eye to decades and decades of mistreatment, and now the news was coming out. I read story after story of awful trauma, wondering "How could this happen?" But in hindsight, it shouldn't have surprised me.
What We Sowed
I came to understand that this scandal had not occurred in spite of our ethics but because of our ethics. An idealization of forgiveness had directly caused the denomination to minimize the impact of abuse and protect the abusers. A running theme in these abuse stories was elders' attempts to make victims forgive those who had scarred them. This caused an even greater wound. We had bastardized forgiveness, employing it in pursuit of a 14-letter word that had become an obscenity of its own: "reconciliation." Reconciliation, once a beautiful concept in my eyes, played a key role in so many mishandled spousal abuse cases at my church. Pastors urged wives to sit down with their manipulative (or even physically violent) husbands in order to "save the marriage." So many awful things were done in the name of bringing people back together.
I found myself in a theological crisis. I sat dumbfounded a bar table one night, quietly listening to my friend explain that he didn't believe Jesus preached forgiveness.
"You see, if we read Jesus from a Jewish perspective, we'll find that Jesus never called for people to forgive the people who hurt them."
I kept my mouth shut, because I knew what I couldn't tell him. He was emphatically wrong about the teachings of Jesus, who quite literally forgave the people that murdered him. But it didn't matter that my friend was wrong about Jesus, because he was right about our situation. Church leadership had used us, gaslighted us and alienated us, and it had done far worse to other people, who bore physical scars. As much as I believed that Jesus preached forgiveness, I knew I could never call upon these victims to forgive or reconcile.
I concluded that as a privileged person who will never fully understand or identify with the experience of the most marginalized, it served little purpose for me to pontificate about how they should approach forgiveness. That is a separate, sacred realm that I dare not touch.
I must instead work to deconstruct the systems that create otherness and have-nots, paying specific attention to how my own power and privilege prevent reconciliation.
Hindsight
If I am to speak charitably about my old church, I will say they sought to embrace what Miraslov Volf called a "theology of embrace." The theology of embrace, according to Volf, seeks to make space for "the other" – the person whom we would typically view as an outsider to our social group– to view them and relate to them as a fellow human. He argued that we must first and foremost identify people "in their humanity" before making judgments about them (XXVIII). This was my church's intention: to break down walls of hostility. But the leaders made devastating errors along the way.
First, my church leaders appropriated a theology of embrace to the wrong context. Volf in his classic 1996 book Exclusion and Embrace was speaking to the problem of animosity between different people groups. For example, Volf struggled as a Croat with Serbian friends in the 1990s (5). His Croatian peers wanted him to cast off his Serbian relationships in the pursuit of an ethnic purity. In order to more fully grasp his Croatian identity, he would need to reject and demonize his Serbian roots.
My church was not working at all toward loving the outsider. In fact, my denomination's leadership spent much of 2018 promoting a slander campaign aimed at the whistleblowers who accused them of wrongdoing. They very successfully demonized any non-church members who criticized our handling of abuse, implying that we could not trust those who came from outside our walls. I began to understand why former members had described my church as a cult. My community did not value self-reflection. We immediately labeled negative comments from "the world" as the devil's attempts to erode the gospel. Instead of working toward reconciliation with "the other," we focused on on swiping our own problems under the rug. This leads to the other glaring problem of my church's theology of embrace.
Second, we had proposed solidarity without any acknowledgement of marginalization. This occurred when pastors encouraged, or even forced, victims of abuse to meet with those who hurt them. One commonly heard comments like "Well, we all have things to apologize for," or "Jesus has forgiven us, so we need to forgive each other," which placed responsibility on the victim for creating reconciliation. In addition, it minimized the victim's suffering by claiming that the hesitancy to forgive is just problematic as abuse. We must flatly deny any comparison or equivalency. Of course, the victim may choose to initiate forgiveness and reconciliation of their own free will, but this process must occur in a special space.
And What Sort of Space is That?
Before forgiveness and reconciliation can take place, we must first create a space that values "the harassed and helpless," as Volf puts it (14). We must build an environment that listens to and responds to the voices of the needy first and foremost. That is the spirit of Acts 6, in which the apostles readily answered the petition of the needy Hellenistic widows. No negotiation, no qualifications. Just a response to needs. If we wish to embrace, we must address our power dynamics. If the rich person truly desires to reconcile with the poor, they must do as Zaccheus and pursue accountability (Luke 19:8). Embrace without accountability is no embrace at all, but a smothering – a stranglehold of coercion disguised as reconciliation.
I exaggerated in my first paragraph. I do still use the word "forgiveness," but never as a mandate. Of course, I would never rob a marginalized person of the freedom that comes with forgiveness, but this is a walk they must make without my coercion. As for me, I must evaluate my own actions and my role within the church community. What sort of spaces am I working to build? Does my community promote reconciliation without restitution? Does it promote forgiveness without fairness? And does the "reciprocal self-donation" that Volf so hopefully envisions (16), reign in our space?
Works Cited
Volf, Miraslov. Exclusion and Embrace. Rev. ed. Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2019.
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