Forgiveness Means You Were Wrong

Reading Tom Wright on forgiveness, he is spot on. Reminds me of a couple of the Chesterton Father Brown stories (the Chief Mourner of Marne, the Arrow of Heaven, in which Father Brown comments on the difference between Christian forgiveness, and the mere excusing of something (as a means of social acceptability).

Forgiveness Means You Were Wrong by Tom Wright

In classic Christian teaching God's free offer of forgiveness always stands, but to accept forgiveness means, well, accepting forgiveness. It doesn't mean hearing the word of forgiveness and saying, in effect, 'well, that's OK, because actually there wasn't anything to forgive'. You can't pretend to accept forgiveness and turn forgiveness, as you do so, into 'tolerance' or 'well, it didn't matter that much.'

Forgiveness means that it did matter, that it was wrong, and that it won't be held against you. To accept that is to agree with the fact that it was wrong and that you need forgiving; which is to say sorry. Not to say sorry is not to accept forgiveness, almost analytically.

Part of the difficulty in the recent cult of apology is the people go about apologizing for things they didn't do and wouldn't have done, but apologizing on behalf of their predecessors. This has all kinds of oddities about it.

It may well do some good in terms of reassuring people whose communities have suffered under a long burden of unresolved anger and resentment that the point has been taken; but it ought to issue, if it is really genuine, in a searching after wisdom to see where similar mistakes are being made today.

And there is then a danger that the 'apology' is simply a way of saying 'I agree with the current politically correct version of what happened many years ago', which may, but may not, necessarily help anything forward.

http://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/onfaith/nicholas_t_wright/2007/04/forgiveness_means_you_were_wro.html#more