I don’t buy “Positional Forgiveness”

    The topic of “forgiving someone who hasn’t repented” (called “Positional Forgiveness” for the remainder of this article) came up last night. I don’t like the idea, but I couldn’t remember why. Now I remember, so let me make my argument for why I despise this idea.

    That might seem like too bold a claim for something that is held by the majority of Christians I’ve met in my life. After all, Jesus said:

For if you forgive others their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you, but if you do not forgive others their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses. -Matthew 6-14-15 ESV

    And if I know anything, I know that 1) God has forgiven me of every wrong I’ve ever committed, 2) He always stands ready to forgive me, and 3) He will do so when I come to him in repentance and faith because Christ bore all my sins on the cross. Seems simple: 1) God effectively forgave me before I ever repented (Justification), 2) God always stands ready to forgive me (you might say “Positional Forgiveness”), 3) and God will always forgive me when I come to him in repentance and faith (“Transactional Forgiveness”). Since God forgives me in this way, I should forgive others in the same way. But my forgiveness is not effectual: I cannot take someone else’s sins and place them on the Cross of Christ. So that aspect of forgiveness is out. I can, however, stand ready to forgive others and actively forgive them when they repent, so clearly those two are a requirement.

    Well, duh. We should be gracious and loving and kind like God himself, who commanded us to “love our enemies” and “do good to those who spitefully use you.” It’s his example we’re following in that. The problem comes when you take those expressions of God’s character (kindness, faithfulness, graciousness, slow-to-anger, abundant in steadfast love) and confuse them with the act of “forgiveness” itself. The fact that “God always stands ready to forgive me” is a part of the process of forgiveness, but his posture of grace should never be confused with the actual act of forgiveness.

    What positional forgiveness does, then, is create a category error that brings with it unintended consequences. “Positional Forgiveness” effectively redefines what forgiveness is and in the process removes our capacity for true reconciliation. There are three problems that I intend to discuss concerning this.

    The first is that positional forgiveness confuses our limited capacity to forgive with God’s effective forgiveness. I’ve discussed this one above already and don’t have much to add on the subject, save that it is impossible for us to forgive a person who has not repented (“can two walk together unless they are agreed?”). This is why in Matthew 18:15 the impetus is on the person who witnessed the sin, not the one who sinned (“If your brother sins against you, go and tell him his fault”). That sin creates a real divide in the relationship; it cannot be forgiven until it has been repented of (“if he listens to you, you have gained a brother”). The priority of forgiveness, then, is reconciliation. It’ not about my own selfish desire to have my ego-stroked or to police the whole world into my own standards (which is why Matthew 18:16 also requires more witnesses for the process to move any further down the discipline path). This is about the protection and purity of the church, with the intention that we are united in service of Christ, with our highest priority being living in a right relationship with him and our fellow man. You can’t do that alone. And sometimes when the sin is private (just between the two of you) there simply is no solution but to wait for the one who sinned to repent of not repenting when he/she should have.

    The second problem is that positional forgiveness makes “forgiveness” achievable apart from reconciliation. Obviously this is closely related to the first, but it’s not the same. Realizing that we are, in fact, not God, many Christians aim for an approximation of the type of forgiveness he offers to us. We can’t forgive people like that, but we still have to try. And so what we end up saying is “Even if that person does not repent, I still forgive him/her.” This is a very subtle lie. It’s similar to the type of situation where one person sins and the other person doesn’t even notice. But it is not the same: this (“Positional Forgiveness”) requires explicit knowledge of sin being committed with no intent of pursuing reconciliation. There is a reason that so many of these situations are with people who we will never talk to again in this life, because the type of excommunication called for in Matthew 18:17 is the public acknowledgment of a dead relationship. Sin kills everything it touches: it will kill our relationships with others if we allow it to. Sometimes, a dead relationship is the only choice. But that’s not forgiveness and it’s weird that we think it is.

    This subtle lie (“Even if that person does not repent, I still forgive him/her”) likes to ignore the imperative of Matthew 18:15. It sees rebuke and correction as an extreme measure to be taken as a last resort (rather than the first response we are commanded to do in such a situation). It sits around waiting for reconciliation to magically happen. It also likes to twist scriptures like this:

So if you are offering your gift at the altar and there remember that your brother has something against you, leave your gift there before the altar and go. First be reconciled to your brother, and then come and offer your gift. -Matthew 5:23-24 ESV

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen those verses translated this way:

“So if you are offering your gift at the altar and there remember something you have against someone else, forgive that person so God will hear your prayers.” -Matthew 5:23-24 according to cultural consensus.

    The text actually says that you are aware of something you have done that someone else is holding against you. This assumes that 1) the sin is known by at least you and another person and 2) your brother is holding it against you, waiting for you to correct it. It is heartbreaking to me that so many Christians can make a complete ruin of their relationships by knowing what they did in order to offend a brother/sister in Christ and go through life blaming the other person for the conflict without ever even attempting to mend the broken bonds. This is why they do it: because “I don’t need to seek reconciliation: I’ve already forgiven them.” Maybe I’m a hypocrite here because there are definitely relationships I have that have been long dead and I wouldn’t even know where to start. But the fact that this lie is in the way of a mutual goal of repentance, true forgiveness, and reconciliation means that those relationships will stay dead apart from the grace of God (“can two walk together unless they are agreed?”).

    The third problem is that “Positional Forgiveness” should just be called “Repentance.” Sometimes we have to “forgive people” for stupid things. Some of them aren’t even sins. Not everything that offends me is a sin. And even if something is a sin while it offends me, it’s not always my responsibility to forgive that person. I don’t go out of my way to tell our toddlers that I forgive them when they finally go down for a nap after being a bunch of cranky-butts. I’m just glad they did: no forgiveness required. And sometimes another person really did do something mean in a tone that suggested his/her motives were wrong, but it might be better to just let it drop rather than try to pry into motives to know for sure. These are the places where, sometimes, we just don’t even notice sin and/or we probably shouldn’t. There are legitimate expressions of human nature that may or may not be sinful depending on the motivation and context in which they occur: for these, we should make gracious assumptions (unless there is a valid reason not to) and not go out of our way to escalate the situation (unless there is good reason to).

    And coming back to “not everything that offends me is a sin,” there are times when my offendedness is the real sin that needs to be repented of, not the person who committed the offensive act. We all know this is true when we see Jesus or the Apostle Paul stirring up crowds that are ready to kill them for merely speaking the truth. Obviously it’s the crowds that were wrong. But there’s another subtle lie possible when we say “He/she doesn’t need to repent: I already forgave them.” That lie is “this petty grievance has transformed itself into my claim to moral superiority.” This will be easiest to express in an example. Every artist knows the feeling of offense at a critique or being ignored:

“She said mean things about my drawing.”

“They didn’t subscribe to my youtube channel.”

    Can you imagine going up to someone to be reconciled for those stupid complaints? I imagine it would look something like this:

“Hey: I just wanted to let you know, that even though you didn’t read my novel of a blog post, I forgive you for being a jerk.”

    That’s not forgiveness: you’re just dumb. Your goal isn’t reconciliation: your goal is to soothe your own guilty conscience.

    We don’t need to forgive people who stir up in us thoughts of bitterness, anger, betrayal, or any other negative emotional response. Heck, sometimes those aren’t even wrong. Sometimes trust is lost. Sometimes the pain is real. David cries out for God to destroy his enemies: I’m not going to suggest that he did so like a stoic void of emotion only considerate of what the most proper thing would be. But they definitely can be sin (and more often than not they are), even when we’ve convinced ourselves they’re justified. What we really need to do is repent of our own pride and lack of faith. What we really need to do is take that pain, that sorrow, that anger to the throne-room of God and lift our complaints to him. If there’s sin, we need to repent of it and correct what we can. If there’s any place we can be healed, Christ has already suffered on our behalf. If there’s anyone who can make the situation right, we are appealing to the highest court of all. That’s exactly why David took his pleas for vindication to God. He wasn’t sinning. He wasn’t forgiving them. He was crying out for vindication, trusting their fate and his own fate to the God who judges righteously.

    Having said all that, I don’t buy the idea of “Positional Forgiveness.” I’ve seen first hand the damage it can produce. I think it’s one of the reasons Christians have a hard time being open and honest with one another, because it (along with all the other unwritten rules concerning good-Christian manners) has produced a culture where reconciliation is about me-and-God to the exclusion of me-and-you. We literally cannot be open about sin for fear of stepping on the landmines of being gentle and lowly in our “cult of kindness,” so we transform our own bitterness and pride into a virtue rather than laying it at the foot of the cross. So I try to be gracious (though I often fail), I confront sin when I see it (and it’s appropriate), and I don’t forgive people until they repent. I can’t tell you to stop thinking of forgiveness as something you can do apart from repentance, but I sure hope you’ll think about it.