Individualism Damages True Forgiveness

Western culture is permeated by individualism. On the positive side, individualism emphasizes that every human being has dignity and self-worth—as opposed to being a collection of insignificant atoms in the mass of humanity—and encourages responsibility. The flip side is that individualism promotes, as its central value, an individual’s self-interest. Individuals act on their own behalf, and the needs of the individual are regarded as more important than the needs of the community.

Authentic forgiveness is never just about a single individual’s need or self-healing; it is a social transaction, restoring and reconciling a broken relationship between the offender and the offended. Due to the emphasis on self-care, forgiveness in an individualistic culture has ceased to be an interpersonal bridge and become an intrapersonal process of self-healing that is unrelated to the community. Unfortunately, in Western cultures, unilateral forgiveness has become the norm due to psychological and sociological reasons such as self-love and the understanding of forgiveness as a private act of intrapsychic release.

Today, individualism influences many churches around the globe, the understanding and practice of forgiveness among Christians is distorted. The kind of forgiveness taught at these churches places less emphasis on the restoration of impaired relationships and lays more stress on intrapsychic release. Gregory Jones, in his book Embodying Forgiveness, explains that the unilateral act from an individual paradigm trivializes forgiveness. It makes it therapeutically easy, but the result is damaging to the Christian community because there is no sense of restoration of communion and reconciliation of broken relationships. The unilateral act of forgiveness causes the offender to ignore the need for repentance and reconciliation, which are crucial aspects of authentic forgiveness, both theologically and biblically.

Christianity is not solitary. The Christian community should not be directed by individualism. McClendon believes that the communal life of Christians was formed through the covenant meal hosted by Christ at the Lord’s Table. Since then, disciples have been connected to one another as community. To maintain community, both Christ’s costly forgiveness of human beings and human beings’ costly forgiveness of one another are essential. Forgiveness, writes Augsburger, “is not a private act of intrapsychic release but instead a truly social transaction of interpersonal reconciliation. The conflict belongs to the community as well as to the disputants … and the understanding of forgiveness is focused on regaining the others as brothers and sisters.”

- John C. W. Tran, Authentic Forgiveness: A Biblical Approach, 2020.

Two Aspects of Authentic Forgiveness

Forgiveness is a divine gift offered by God to overcome hurt, brokenness, bitterness, and hatred, in order to release people from their past, reopen the future, and empower them to risk further relationship.
 
Authentic forgiveness comprises two aspects: mutual recognition that repentance is genuine, and reconciliation of the broken relationship. Practicing authentic forgiveness brings transformation, both personally and communally that God intends.
 
Forgiveness, however, is understood and expressed differently in different cultures. Some forgive by overlooking, some by forgetting; some forgive to avoid conflict-without discussing in depth each party’s responsibility-and some forgive to achieve self-healing without dealing with the broken relationship. Such deviations from biblically based forgiveness cannot fully renew people or empower them to break out of the cycle of brokenness and blind retaliation. 
 
Authentic forgiveness is not merely about harmony; it requires discussion of the issues in depth, genuine confession and repentance by one or both parties, and reconciliation.
 
Many people misunderstand what forgiveness truly is. It is not forgetting the past, overlooking wrongdoing, maintaining harmony at all costs, or a one-sided act to release pain. Rather, it is a social transaction that comprises genuine repentance by the offender, the offer of forgiveness by the victim to the offender, and restoration of the broken relationship of the parties involved.
 
Authentic forgiveness offered by the victim is consummated when there is genuine repentance by the offender and reconciliation of broken relationship between the parties involved. Genuine repentance of the offender should consist of three elements: remorse, restitution, and renewal.

 

- John C. W. Tran, Authentic Forgiveness: A Biblical Approach, 2020.

Forgiveness Is Not……

Conflict, evil, and hurt are inevitable in life. We need to forgive and be forgiven because forgiveness is a transforming process. In his book Helping People Forgive, Augsburger explains that this process “allows us to change our minds, begin again, and risk further relationship.… This breaking of the cycle of blind retaliation or judicial retribution allows persons, relationships, or institutions to start over, to begin again.”

Confronting the trivialization of true forgiveness under the influence of an individualistic culture, Augsburger also describes what true forgiveness is not. It is not something you do to yourself for your own good, to free yourself from pain or to cease being a victim; forgiveness is not taking control so that you can refuse to be held hostage emotionally by an event or person and can focus your energies on the future; forgiveness is not something you have the power to choose independently of the other’s attitudes or actions; forgiveness is not merely a refusal to accept injustice as inevitable or tolerable; forgiveness is not offered simply as a release from self-absorption and self-destruction; forgiveness is not a private ritual of release where there is no atonement and no power to bring about reconciliation. None of these things are true forgiveness; nevertheless, they are important because they offer wisdom about letting go of being in control of the relationship, the situation, and the hurt, and they are helpful in moving victims toward healing. These are prerequisites for authentic forgiveness because they form “the groundwork of restoring attitudes of love on which forgiveness will stand if it is to ever happen.”

A great many Christians perceive and practice forgiveness in a distorted manner. Such distortions arise mainly due to their understanding of forgiveness being tainted, in varying degrees. For example, some forgive by forgetting the past and focusing on the future; some forgive by passive acceptance; others forgive in order to avoid conflict and maintain harmony; still others forgive in order to achieve self-healing, yet without dealing with the damaged relationship; and some forgive by pretending all is well again.

This is not authentic forgiveness. God not only wants people to unilaterally forgive and be healed, he also wants them to repent and reconcile with one another through a process of true forgiveness that is biblically based so that complete healing can occur and genuine communion can be restored.

- John C. W. Tran, Authentic Forgiveness: A Biblical Approach, 2020.

The Foundation of Forgiveness

 To “forgive” those who hurt us without genuine repentance by the offender is not true forgiveness. Augsburger writes that it is how a person finds “a mystery of a forgiving heart while the other person in the drama goes another way.” Augsburger writes that a victim’s forgiving heart is focused on an inner battle between raging against the offender and letting go and being healed. This forgiving heart is only the first step of Jesus’s teaching about true forgiveness. It is the “love of our neighbors” and the “love of our enemies” which together form the foundation of forgiveness. Forgiveness requires going beyond the forgiving heart and inviting repentance, risking the self in restoring the relationship. Seeing the other person as having real worth again and seeking to restore perceptions of love are the two feet required in order to walk toward forgiving. 

True forgiveness is a process, and this process begins with taking whatever steps possible “toward attempting to restore, reconstruct, and rediscover a relationship.” Jesus commanded his disciples to go to the other person to rebuke, to forgive, and to reconcile (Matt 5:23–24; 18:15, 21–35; Luke 17:3). 

Authentic forgiveness cannot happen without a forgiving heart. But a willingness to forgive demonstrates courage, for the victim must fight an inner battle to overcome anger and let God bring healing. This forgiving heart is the first step in Jesus’s teaching about forgiveness. This forgiving heart is the first step in Jesus’s teaching about forgiveness. It is part of loving your “enemies” (Matt 5:38–45; Luke 6:27–28) as well as loving your “neighbor” (Matt 22:39).

- John C. W. Tran, Authentic Forgiveness: A Biblical Approach, 2020.

Why We Must Read Books

Books are vital in cultivating wisdom—not only for the truths they contain, but also for the way they help us think. In our distracted age, books give us perspective, focus, and space to reflect. Reading books—a wide variety, from different eras and places and worldviews, both fiction and nonfiction—keeps our anachronism and self-centeredness in check. They educate us, help us make connections across disciplines, and open up the world.
 
Books Help Us Connect, Explore, Think Well

When we read books, we are stepping into another’s shoes. We are entering the author’s world, giving our attention to the author’s perspective for an extended time. This last part is key. It’s hard to develop empathy when you only read a tweet by someone; but a book-length immersion in someone’s world creates the opportunity for understanding. The act of reading a book is literally the act of being “quick to listen, slow to speak.” In literary fiction, we develop empathy by getting inside characters’ minds. We may love or hate them, but to the extent that we listen to and live with them for a time, we can learn from the particularity of their existence. Research shows that literary fiction especially helps readers develop empathy—a better understanding of the complexity of what others are thinking and feeling.
We read to connect, but also to explore. Even though we technically read a book without ever physically going anywhere, we all know the feeling of how a book transports us to other places and other times.
 
There is a growing body of research that shows the powerful ways reading books—long, immersive reading in contrast to the fragmented, quick-scan reading we do online—strengthens our brains’ abilities to think well.
 
Books Confront the Noise
 
At a time when the glut, speed, and tailored-to-you nature of information is making us ever more prone to misinformation and unsound wisdom, reading books offers a powerful antidote. Books confront the “too much information” problem by focusing our attention on one thing for a longer, deeper time. They confront the “too fast” problem by forcing us to sit with one writer’s perspective for long enough to really grapple with it. Books challenge the “too focused on me” problem by putting us in another’s shoes.
 
Books give us solid grounding at a time when everything is up for grabs. They offer rubrics to better evaluate the barrage of information we face in today’s world. In a world of snapshots and soundbites, books offer fuller context, and as Andy Crouch writes, “generally speaking, the older the book, the deeper the context.”
 
Books Help us to Change
 
But reading is not merely a defensive act. To read and learn well we must also be teachable, willing to let our guard down enough to be impressionable (but not gullible). When we open a book we should be ready to be changed, open to being convinced, eager to learn something we didn’t know. If you think you know everything, you’ll have no use for books; if you are humble and curious (key foundations for a life of wisdom), you’ll devour them.
 
This is a key, yet countercultural, aspect of reading well. We live in a “death of expertise” world, after all. Our prevailing hermeneutic is suspicion. We are more comfortable proclaiming ourselves experts than we are being swayed or influenced by others. That’s why today’s discourse is at an impasse. We’ve so emphasized “you do you” liberty that expert knowledge, educated consensus, and logic no longer matter. It’s the problem educators face when they so emphasize students “learning to think for themselves” that the teacher’s own credentials and authority to adjudicate right and wrong answers loses any force.
 

Greatest Book

Still, we must put these books in their proper place. It would be folly to build one’s wisdom diet around great books but not also the greatest book, the Bible. Without the reference point of God, the “truth” of books is relative. One reader might find a book true, while another finds it false. There can be no consensus on canon if there is no transcendent reference point for words like good, true, and beautiful. “The only guarantor of communal truth is transcendent truth,” writes David Lyle Jeffrey. “Without intellectually accountable access to the Greater Book, very many lesser, yet still very great, expressions of truth may go without understanding.”
 

- Brett McCracken, The Wisdom Pyramid:

Feeding Your Soul in a Post-Truth World, 2021

 

The Words under the Words

The words you choose can change the decisions people make. Psychologists call the mechanics of this choice “framing.” They’ve found, for example, that more people will decide to have a surgery if they are told that the “survival rate is 90%” than if they are told that the “mortality rate is 10%.” They’ve also found that having to pay a “surcharge” for using a credit card rankles people more than if they were simply told they would get a “discount” for using cash. They’ve even found that people enjoy meat labeled “75% lean” more than they do the same meat labeled “25% fat.” Framing, it seems, extends all the way to taste buds.

Think about more than just the straightforward definition of the words you use. Think about the connotations of those words as well—the ideas they might evoke, the reactions they might elicit, the images and emotions they could stir up.

--- Patrick Barry, Good with Words: Writing and Editing, 2019.

Discomfort of Growth

Writer Alice Walker on the discomfort of growth:

"Some periods of our growth are so confusing that we don’t even recognize that growth is happening. We may feel hostile or angry or weepy and hysterical, or we may feel depressed. It would never occur to us, unless we stumbled on a book or a person who explained to us, that we were in fact in the process of change, of actually becoming larger than we were before.

Whenever we grow, we tend to feel it, as a young seed must feel the weight and inertia of the earth as it seeks to break out of its shell on its way to becoming a plant. Often the feeling is anything but pleasant.

But what is most unpleasant is the not knowing what is happening. Those long periods when something inside ourselves seems to be waiting, holding its breath, unsure about what the next step should be... for it is in those periods that we realize that we are being prepared for the next phase of our life and that, in all probability, a new level of the personality is about to be revealed."