Nearly twenty years ago in West Nickel Creek, Pennsylvania, Charles Carl Roberts IV entered a one-room schoolhouse and gunned down ten schoolchildren. Six of the children died. In the aftermath, the Amish community whose children were the victims, did not respond with demands for retribution. Instead, they extended forgiveness. They not only posthumously forgave Roberts, who had taken his own life, but also expressed compassion toward his family: during his funeral, they formed a crescent ring around his family in order to shield them from the media’s intrusions. Thoughtful and morally sensitive people have widely different reactions to the Amish response, including curiosity. What set of commitments could make sense of extending forgiveness in the face of such evil? And could any such commitments be reconciled with the moral outrage that seems fitting for victims to express, especially when they are members of groups that have been systemically oppressed?
Cristian Mihut’s Gracious Forgiveness presents an account of forgiveness (“curative forgiveness”) designed to answer these questions. The book is unlike any other I’ve read. It not only offers a close and philosophically sophisticated reading of the Jewish and Christian scriptures—uncommon in contemporary philosophy of religion—but also approaches these texts in a highly distinctive way, tracing connections between images, themes, and practices within the Jewish and Christian traditions. This approach gives the book an unusual feel. Philosophers are practiced in digging, probing, analyzing, explaining, and systematizing. They are less accustomed to working within a more literary vein, identifying tropes within texts, forging links between them, and calling attention to how they fit into narratives and illuminate larger themes. Gracious Forgiveness is an example of a philosopher working with the latter approach. I found it refreshing.
The central metaphor the book unpacks is that of bearing away sin (nasa awon). Chapter Two explores the ways in which Jewish scriptures and rites employ this metaphor to describe God’s actions; it offers (among other things) interpretations of the so-called grace formula (Exodus 35: 6–7), the book of Jonah, and the rite of Yom Kippur. The exploration culminates in an account of divine curative forgiveness according to which it is an expression of God’s faithfulness (hesed) that consists in a commitment to put distance between individuals or communities and their sin and to absorb the consequences of sin—the latter being understood, roughly, as living with the pain of unatoned sin (34). Chapter Three extends the treatment of nasa awon to the Christian scriptures, reading them as “radicalizing and deepening” (50) an understanding of God according to which, through Christ, God bears burdens and absorbs evil. The discussion is wide-ranging. In addition to New Testament exegesis, the chapter engages with contemporary theologians such as Miroslav Volf, rejects Eleonore Stump’s “mindreading” model of sin-bearing, and offers an account of how Christological forgiveness is modeled on physical healing. I found the discussion of the role of physical touch, and how the healing model is expressed in and absorbed through participation in religious rites, especially interesting.
That God engages in retributive justice is a commitment common to both the Jewish and Christian traditions in some of their most prominent manifestations. Chapter Four takes up the question of whether curative forgiveness can be reconciled with divine reactive justice (divine justice in reaction to wrongdoing). Mihut contends that such forgiveness is incompatible with retributive justice, at least as it’s been understood by luminaries in the Christian tradition, such as Anselm. Rejecting retributivism, Mihut champions a “communicative-restorative” model of reactive justice, according to which God plays the role of a mediating third party between offender and victim (91). The chapter closes by offering a reading of the Jewish and Christian scriptures, ranging from Genesis through Matthew’s Gospel, in which they articulate this understanding of justice.
Chapter Five’s account of curative forgivingness, Mihut writes, is in several respects the centerpiece of the book’s project (12). Here the focus shifts from God to human beings. Mihut develops a two-tiered account of the trait of forgivingness. On one tier, the trait involves a “reproach-reducing, benevolence-maintaining sensitivity” (122) toward the offender, one which consists in “imaginatively separating the offender from the offense” (123). Tellingly, Mihut rejects the idea that this sensitivity is aptly exercised only in response to an offender’s expression of repentance; pre-emptive forgiveness is often fitting. On the second tier, forgivingness includes a conception of one’s life as part of a narrative in which “God has been continually at work in healing sin-disordered people and relationships” and human agents are called to do the same (124). These two tiers of forgivingness correspond to the two dimensions of curative forgiveness in which forgivers put distance between offenders and their offense and absorb the consequences of wrongdoing, not “passing the pain. . .experienced on to others, even on to. . .offenders” (ibid.). It is here that the book provides an answer to a question raised earlier about the Nickel Mines Amish: What could make sense of their extending forgiveness in the face of such evil? The answer is that they embody forgivingness so understood. When the occasion called for it, the Nickel Mines Amish expressed what “was in their cultural DNA for centuries” (140).
Yet even those who share core religious commitments with the Nickel Mines Amish may find themselves uneasy with their response. Outrage seems called for, and it isn’t easy to see how that fits with forgivingness. In the book’s final chapter, Mihut contends that the two can fit together, arguing that anger can be apt, especially for those living under circumstances of oppression. The key move is to reconceive practical deliberation as a dialogue between different parts of the self—some of which may express rage while others may express states such as empathy (160). Given the circumstances in which we live, agents shouldn’t expect or aim to achieve fully harmonious, integrated selves; the moral life sometimes calls for dissonance between different parts of the self. Though the point is important, I found myself unsure whether the chapter established that agents can simultaneously harbor anger toward an agent and exercise full-fledged forgiveness (as opposed to other states such as care or empathy).
The above represents the main outlines of Gracious Forgiveness. I warmly recommend it to anyone interested in issues at the intersection of ethics and philosophy of religion—and to those curious about how religious commitments bear upon and shape our understandings of forgiveness.
I do, however, have questions about the account of forgiveness the book offers. Mihut’s grasp of the Jewish and Christian scriptures, and his recognition of their philosophical import, are remarkable. But I wonder about the book’s treatment of the biblical image of bearing away sin (nasa awon). The image is supposed to provide insight into the character of forgiveness, ordinary and extraordinary, human and divine. I am unsure to what extent it does. Call to mind a garden-variety case of forgiveness: when constructing next year’s teaching schedule, you wrong a colleague by neglecting to take into account his personal needs. Though your colleague is understandably upset by this, he forgives you. In forgiving you, does your colleague bear away your offense (sin, wrongdoing)? I doubt that he does. If any image seems apt, it is that of releasing you—whether from merited anger or a claim to hold you accountable. But releasing you in this way looks different from imaginatively separating you from your wrongdoing and absorbing the consequences of your offense, the two elements of curative forgiveness.
It is true that, when your colleague forgives you, he (in some sense) separates you from your wrongdoing. But there are various ways to do this, only some of which are compatible with his forgiving you. For example, had he imaginatively separated you from your wrongdoing by, say, blocking the wrongdoing from his mind, and carrying on as if the offense didn’t happen, he would not have forgiven you. The imaginative separation needs to be of a specific sort. It is not apparent to me that biblical uses of the image of bearing away offense, and the way it is conveyed in religious rites such as the scapegoating ritual of Yom Kippur, provide insight into (or place constraints on) the types of imaginative separation constitutive of forgiveness.
Mihut variously glosses absorbing the consequences of wrongdoing as exercising forbearance (33), suffering the pain of the consequences of the offense (33), and (roughly) ceasing to be hostile toward the offender (53). My concern is that ordinary cases of forgiveness often do not involve these things. They needn’t involve forbearance or suffering the pain of the consequences of the offense (there may be few consequences and little pain caused). Nor need they be performed from a disposition to do so. And while many cases of forgiveness may involve the cessation of hostility, I do not see how such cessation could happily be described as absorbing the consequences of wrongdoing. Your feeling hostility toward me may be a consequence of my having wronged you. But in ceasing to harbor such hostility, you don’t thereby absorb it. Again, a more apt image seems to be that you’ve let go of the hostility or released me from it. Let me add that the clearest examples of activities that count as absorbing the consequences of wrongdoing are those that, in the ordinary case, wouldn’t be appropriate for, or couldn’t be reasonably expected of, victims to perform. For example, working to mitigate the suffering caused by a wrongdoing, or entering into another’s grief in solidarity, are ways to absorb the consequences of a wrongdoing. But ordinarily neither activity is something that is appropriate for, or could be reasonably expected of, a direct victim of a wrongdoing.
For me, these reflections raise the question of whether the biblical image of bearing away sin points to a phenomenon distinct from but related to forgiveness. The phenomenon lies in the vicinity of taking extraordinary steps in order to effect relational repair or reconciliation. One step in this process is separating wrongdoers from their wrongdoing, which could be done in a variety of ways, such as excusing the wrongdoing or letting bygones be bygones. The other step involves incurring costs to one’s well-being, such as suffering unwelcome consequences of an offense. But, for the reasons expressed just above, the activities of separating wrongdoers from wrongdoing and incurring costs to one’s well-being—even when taken to effect relational repair—seem to me distinct from forgiving. Toward the beginning of Gracious Forgiveness, Mihut floats the possibility that the “biblical phenomenon of forgiveness is essentially untidy and amorphous” and that the English term “forgiveness” expresses a “cluster concept” (10). This observation seems to me on the right track. We should probably be open to the idea that there are different kinds of forgiveness. But I harbor doubts as to whether the phenomenon of bearing away burdens is best thought of as one of them.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thanks to Cristian Mihut and Jada Twedt Strabbing for their comments on a draft of this review.
Reviewed by Terence Cuneo, University of Vermont