One of the great
developments in our post-Christian, Western culture is the absence of
forgiveness. Instead of a process of
forgiveness we are left with a process of punishment. The two religions in the world that have put
forgiveness at their centre are Judaism[1]
and Christianity; what we have replacing them in the West are an unforgiving,
postmodern tribalism and, especially in Europe, a growing Islam.
At the centre of the
Jewish religion in Biblical times was the tabernacle or Temple. The activity of the Temple was worship and
sacrifice. Worship was given to the one
God who identified Himself—in the very midst of His people’s rebellion and sin—as
the God who is ‘merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in
steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for
thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, but who will
by no means clear the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the
children and the children's children, to the third and the fourth generation’
(Exodus 34.6-7).
Before the heavy hand of
justice falls on the children’s sins, God is steadfast in love, forgiving
transgression and sin. Even more
profoundly, this God is able to bring justice through His love and
forgiveness. This God is worshipped
through obedience and praise, not moral choice and self-justification. One can only have forgiveness if there is right
and wrong, and one can only have righteous judgement if there is justice. Otherwise, there is only heartless
condemnation according to self-made standards that shift with the wind.
The daily sacrifices at
the Temple highlighted forgiveness in God’s presence. The whole burnt offering, the sin offering,
the guilt offering, and the peace offering required blood from the sacrificial
animal to be placed on the altar. There was
a process of forgiveness. It included
the willingness of the worshiper, his acknowledgement of his need for
forgiveness, his contrition, his acceptance that his wrongdoing was also sin
against God, his penance, and his request, through his sacrificial offering to
bear away his sin, that God would forgive him and be reconciled to him. This ritual
process of forgiveness set things right: God has commandments for how we, His
creatures, should live; He will forgive us when we come to Him in repentance
and seek forgiveness.
Christianity affirms all
this, adding only that there is no need for ongoing sacrifices. We acknowledge that Jesus Christ ‘suffered
once for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous, that he might bring us to
God, being put to death in the flesh but made alive in the spirit’ (1 Peter
3.18). Our faith is the faith of
forgiveness—without, as Exodus 34 and the cross of Jesus remind us—ignoring or
denying the reality of sin. At the
centre of Christian community is no longer the tabernacle or Temple but the
cross of our Saviour who died to take away our sins. And we are called to
forgive as we have been forgiven. As
Paul says, ‘Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another,
as God in Christ forgave you’ (Ephesians 4.32).
The rejection of
Christianity in Western society is also turning out to be a rejection of a
process of forgiveness. This was, at
first, a surprising twist, since postmodern culture at first sought to include
the marginalized and celebrate diversity.
This seemed to have some overlap with forgiveness, since there is a welcoming
and inclusiveness to both. Yet
postmodernity at first denied any objective truth and therefore any need to be
forgiven, and then it constructed a political correctness in Truth’s place that,
like Sauron’s eye in J. R. R. Tolkien’s writings, probes the land for any who
have not submitted in order to crush them.
We are left with only a
process of punishment. Franz Kafka saw
this coming early in the twentieth century with amazing foresight. In The Trial, written in 1914 or 1915 and
published in 1925, a man, Joseph K., is arrested for an unknown crime. Some inaccessible authority prosecutes him,
convicts him, and has him executed by an apparatus. The original name of the book better reveals
the point of the story: Der Process.
Justice that lacks personal and human elements will become a cold, hard
process. Such a process is, in the
language of electronic, social networking in our computer age, a mere algorithm
before which there can be no contrition, no repentance, and no forgiveness. There are only accusations and punishments.
A Western, post-Christian
culture is today filled with stories of Der Process. People are accused of sexual impropriety
twenty or forty years later by single witnesses or even by a person who heard someone
else claiming to have witnessed something.
There is no process of justice to determine the credibility of the
complaint if the complaint fits a narrative, a politically correct narrative,
that the public wishes to believe is true.
Accusers are shielded as victims from the accused; their accusations are
brave and applauded while the accused is defamed, shamed, and tried in the
court of public opinion. Justice is
served merely by accusing someone of some politically incorrect act, sexual impropriety,
racial slur, or association (or collusion) with the wrong person or group. One is condemned for refusing to go against
one’s conscience rather than support the morality of the masses. What fits the narrative must, it is believed,
be true not because the person committed the act but because the social narrative
is advanced by the accusation.
In such a society, not
only is there no justice, there is also no forgiveness. There is only the process of punishment, the
apparatus. People must be ‘outed’ for
their past, alleged crimes against the politically correct narrative, not
forgiven. They are escorted from the public
square with no opportunity to deny the charges, let alone admit them and ask
for forgiveness. There is no mercy, no
grace. Shrill voices ring out over loudspeakers
with condemnation, with hate toward those accused of hate, finding cathartic relief
through imagining violence against others.
The apparatus to bring punishment with neither justice nor mercy whirs
into action.
We are well into Georg
Orwell’s 1984, depicting, at the time of its publication in 1949, a future
society in which bureaucrats would process politically incorrect crimes. A godless society will make up its own sins,
sins against the not-under-God State.
Its absoluteness cannot be questioned, and its impersonality has only a
process without forgiveness. Justice cannot
be depicted as a blindfolded woman; it is better represented now as an
awkwardly built, efficient machine erected by a Jacobin mob. Instead of a tabernacle with sacrifices for
repentance and forgiveness at its centre, today’s society has a Coliseum where
crowds cry out for the blood of the accused strapped to the Apparatus. Justice no longer has any place for
forgiveness. In a Godless age, it has
been distorted into Der Process of punishment for socially constructed, politically
incorrect crimes.
[1] Cf. the powerful message by Chief Rabbi Jonathan
Sacks, ‘An Unforgiving Age’; available online at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?
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