Abstract
When it comes to forgiveness, who can and who should forgive? Do those who need forgiveness need first to repent? Or is there really nothing to do from our side?
Forgiveness has from the beginning been central to Christian experience and teaching, but that doesn’t mean that we are always clear about what it really means. When, in September of last year, a memorial event was held for the murdered American Christian activist Charlie Kirk, his widow Erika bravely and uncompromisingly declared that she forgave the killer because this was what her faith required her to do. This attracted global attention. So too did the remark by the American President later on in that same event: ‘I hate my opponent and I don’t want the best for them’ (as reported by the BBC on 22 September 2025) – though he, too, identifies as a Christian.
It is not to diminish the power of Erika Kirk’s testimony to observe that a wronged person’s readiness to forgive is only one element in a process that should culminate in the restoration of right relationships among all involved. To be forgiving has long been considered a moral trait especially required of Christians, but the ancient question as to whether anyone but God alone can truly, fully forgive – that is, to forgive in such a way as to make forgiveness an effective power in the world – is not without force.
In his article on ‘Christian forgiveness as unconditioned and inalienable gift’, Kazusa Okaya cites the French philosopher Vladimir Jankélévitch’s saying that ‘forgiveness died in the death camps’. The context for Jankélévitch’s intervention was a proposal to introduce into French law a statute of limitations relating to crimes committed during the Nazi occupation, meaning that, as critics of the proposal said, war criminals would have been able to re-enter public life without a stain on their record from May 1965, a mere 20 years after having participated in the murders of, in some cases, tens of thousands of people. As Jankélévitch also pointed out, many of those who would have benefited from such a statute had not even asked for forgiveness. Ulrike Peisker (‘Sexual abuse and violence within Christian churches and the precarious role of forgiveness in their aftermath’) points to analogous issues in contemporary church life, afflicted as it is by wave after wave of sometimes extreme and extensive sexual crimes.
Jankélévitch did not ultimately deny the possibility of forgiveness, but his exploration of the relationship between forgiveness and the unforgiveable remains an intellectually thrilling and morally demanding lesson in the real difficulties in play here. Forgiveness – as the American President perhaps inadvertently testified – still goes against the grain of what many believe to be just and right. Although many cases of violence that are less publicized than the killing of Charlie Kirk involve those who have been harmed being asked on camera whether they forgive the wrongdoers, it is no longer self-evident that they are expected to do so – and perhaps even less self-evident is what this would involve. At national and individual levels, there are many stories that illustrate the good that can come from forgiveness and ultimate reconciliation – but nothing has got easier since Jesus spoke words of forgiveness that his listeners believed were the exclusive prerogative of God.
In other articles, Teofilo Pugeda meditates on the biblical saying that we shall return to the dust of which we were made. His meditation is timely – not only because many will be reading this edition in Lent, but also because he shows how it testifies to the shift in consciousness that the ecological crisis is requiring of us. The intrinsic vulnerability of human existence is also a pivotal theme in Becca Stevens and Rob James’s article on the interrelationship between vocation, vulnerability and the authentic self, while Roberto Montefinese’s ‘Water and the Spirit’ introduces us to the Venerable Bede’s exegetical writings on baptism and regeneration – which, as he notes, have been much less studied than the history that became the foundation stone for England’s self-understanding as a Christian nation.