The second part of the book is an examination of forgiveness in light of Murphy’s defense of hate. Murphy defines forgiveness as forgoing vengeance and overcoming the vindictive passions. If he’s right that these acts are good, Murphy thinks, it explains why true forgiveness is so hard. It’s not the difficulty of controlling a strong passion like a bad temper; it’s the difficulty involved in making a complex moral judgment, the difficulty of “knowing how far one can go in the direction of forgiveness without compromising values of genuine importance.” If the vindictive passions can be “instruments of our self-defense, our self-respect, and our respect for the demands of morality,” then in forgiving we make ourselves vulnerable and we risk losing our respect for ourselves and for the common good. We also risk the sin of scandal, suggests Murphy, because “failing to resent (or hastily forgiving) the wrongdoer runs the risk that I am endorsing that very immoral message for which the wrongdoer stands.”
These objections disappear, though, if we demand that the wrongdoer repent before he is granted forgiveness. By repenting, he comes to share the appropriate vindictive attitudes towards his own wrongdoing. If he is truly remorseful he will inflict more suffering on himself due to his guilty conscience than could be exacted from him were he defiantly unrepentant—and all of this happens without the difficult and costly work of punishing him. We can forgive him because he can’t forgive himself.
Of course, repentance has to be sincere for this process to work, and here we come up against the riskiness of forgiving—the chance that we’ll be taken for suckers. When we forgive, we release ourselves from our righteous anger and restore our relationship with the wrongdoer, but we take a chance that this relationship will be abused again...
I noticed that Jeffrie Murphy (the author of the book under review) is here reversing the normal model of forgiveness. To the extent people think about it, they tend to assume the forgiveness men extent must be like the forgiveness God extends--gratuitous, not given because the wrong can be undone but because God's loving extends even beyond his wrath or his justice. The upshot, in Christian ethics, is that one forgives whether or not the one who wronged recognizes or even cares about the wrongness of their action: only great faith (or great mercy) can make this possible, and the people to whom it's available are at a level of holiness far beyond that of normal men. And perhaps this is so. But it can become, starting from this perspective concerning the holiness of men, a way of removing some of the content from God's forgiveness.
Instead, Murphy is reminding his reader, God's forgiveness, though it will be freely given, is conditional on a recognition of the wrongness of a wrong act--and not just a recognition of it, but a desire to turn away from the path the wrong action begins--and this is the basis of what it means to 'repent.' Forgiveness is gratuitous, but only to the one who recognizes the need to be forgiven. Why not, Murphy seems to be suggesting, take this as our model for human relations?
(Of course, there are Scriptural reasons to think this is not the model for human ethics, that God's justice is perfect whereas man's is not, that God has the ability to forgive in the proper way and men do not; and certainly, any theological view must be set back into this understanding. But it does, I think, open up an interesting question.)
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