Matthew Ichihashi Potts, the senior minister of Harvard’s Memorial Chapel, and Yale theologian Miroslav Volf, join Theology Lab for a conversation on forgiveness, reconciliation, salvation, and memory. Greg and Scott offer a special running commentary to bring additional focus to the episode. The episode was posted on November 13, 2026.
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What does it mean to say that the death of Jesus is necessary? Are there different ways to understand that? Differently, in the future, whether we call it the eschatologial age to come or heaven, will we remember wrongdoing? If that question sounds strange, this episdoe sheds light on why it matters!
Description
What does it mean to forgive someone? Does forgiveness require reconciliation? And why did Jesus have to suffer and die?
In this episode of Theology Lab, Yale theologian Miroslav Volf and Harvard theologian Matthew Ichihashi Potts explore Christian forgiveness, repentance, reconciliation, and the meaning of Jesus' suffering.
They challenge common assumptions about forgiveness, examining why forgiving someone doesn't necessarily mean restoring a relationship, why genuine reconciliation requires repentance and accountability, and whether forgiveness can be unconditional.
The conversation also explores:
The meaning of the cross and atonement, drawing on the writings of Julian of Norwich and Hans Urs von Balthasar to consider whether Jesus' suffering was a punishment for sin or the ultimate expression of God's love.
The key question: Will we remember the wrongs committed against us in heaven?
Whether forgiveness and reconciliation should be understood as the same thing or (somehow) different.
What has to be in place for repentance to really work. How is the call to repent not just a command or demand but also an expression of grace?
Resources
📚 Matthew Ichihashi Potts, Forgiveness: https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300276824/forgiveness/
📚 Miroslav Volf: https://www.abingdonpress.com/product/9781501896255/
Frequently Asked Questions:
Please note these are generated (and human-reviewed) questions:
Frequently Asked Questions
1. What is the difference between forgiveness and reconciliation?
This depends on how we understand the terms, of course. Sometimes forgiveness means releasing someone from the debt of a wrong they have committed against you; in this episode you’ll hear a view about forgiveness as non-retaliation. Reconciliation focuses more on restoring a relationship and rebuilding trust. As Miroslav Volf and Matthew Potts explain, you can forgive someone without necessarily reconciling with them, or at least something like complete reconciliation.
2. Does forgiving someone mean you have to restore the relationship?
No (or, at least, this is suggested in parts of the conversation). Forgiveness does not automatically require reconciliation. If someone continues to cause harm or refuses to take responsibility, it may not be safe or appropriate to restore the relationship. Reconciliation requires repentance, accountability, and a willingness to change.
3. What role does repentance play in forgiveness?
Repentance involves acknowledging wrongdoing, taking responsibility, and turning away from harmful behavior. Volf and Potts explain that repentance is essential to rebuilding trust and creating the possibility of genuine reconciliation.
4. Why did Jesus have to suffer and die according to Christian theology?
The episode explores whether Jesus' suffering should be understood as punishment for human sin or as a demonstration of God's extraordinary love. Drawing on Julian of Norwich and Hans Urs von Balthasar, Potts and Volf consider the cross as God's willingness to enter into human suffering to rescue and restore humanity.
5. Should Christians forgive and forget?
Not necessarily. Volf argues that genuine forgiveness requires truthful remembering of wrongdoing, rather than simply forgetting what happened. However, he suggests that in the life to come, painful memories may no longer need to arise because reconciliation will be complete. Potts explores a somewhat different perspective on the role of memory in God's ultimate reconciliation.
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Forgiveness, Reconciliation, and the Meaning of Jesus' Suffering
Featuring Miroslav Volf and Matthew Ichihashi Potts
Introduction
Scott: Hey, it's Scott. This is a Theology Lab on the topics of forgiveness and the meaning of Jesus' suffering.
Yale theologian Miroslav Volf joins us, as does Matthew Ichihashi Potts, a theologian and senior minister of Harvard's Memorial Church.
We're going to do something new. Greg and I are going to try to make this episode a little more accessible by offering commentary throughout the conversation. We'll define some terms that may be new to you and explain what's at stake in the discussion.
Don't forget to like the video and subscribe to Theology Lab. I also invite you to interact with what you hear in the comments. I'll do my best to respond.
We get started with Matt and Miroslav discussing some popular misconceptions about forgiveness and reconciliation.
1. Common Misconceptions About Forgiveness
Miroslav Volf: One misconception I encounter very often is that forgiveness is primarily a gift we give ourselves. It's a way of dealing with resentment, a way of getting the burden of the past off our backs so we can move more lightly and move better into the future.
Another misconception is that it's easier to repent than it is to forgive.
I think that's a mistake. Forgiveness is, in some ways, an arduous gift, especially for someone who has been deeply injured. It's very difficult. And then repentance is somehow supposed to be easy because it's done by a person who was powerful enough to harm somebody.
I find that forgiveness is often experienced as a noble act that ennobles the person who forgives. Repentance, on the other hand, means standing exposed.
Very few people want to stand exposed. It's very difficult to bring people to the point where they can embrace that about themselves and open themselves up.
In the theological tradition, repentance was seen as a gift of the Holy Spirit. That recognizes its difficulty and the captivity in which a person who does wrong is held by that wrongdoing.
Matthew Ichihashi Potts: I agree with Miroslav. I think the close association of forgiveness with the emotional control of my anger, or the reduction of my anger, is a problem.
The other thing I would add is that forgiveness often collapses into reconciliation very easily. They're related, but they're not the same thing.
It would be very difficult to imagine a form of reconciliation that did not involve some form of forgiveness or some careful reckoning with wrongdoing. But because they're related doesn't mean they're the same.
I think sometimes, even in our everyday language, when we ask for forgiveness or offer forgiveness, what's being communicated is, "I'm ready to reconcile now," or, "Will you reconcile with me?"
But someone who offers forgiveness doesn't necessarily need to be ready to restore the relationship.
Scott: Here's what I think is helpful to know going into this conversation.
There are two things to pay attention to. First, are forgiveness and reconciliation automatic partners? Do they always go together? Are they the same thing?
The other question is simply: What is forgiveness?
If you sit with that question for a moment, it becomes a little puzzling. We often talk about forgiveness as letting something go. But what if it's something I feel within me that I simply can't shed?
Forgiveness is deeply important, but it's worth thinking about what we mean as Christians when we talk about forgiveness and why it's so important.
One term we should define is reconciliation. We can understand it as two things that were previously separate coming together into some kind of harmony, peacefulness, or better unity.
2. Does Forgiveness Require Reconciliation?
Matthew Ichihashi Potts: The way I think about forgiveness, drawing together the various teachings in the New Testament, especially the teachings of Jesus, is that Jesus is trying to help Christians imagine a form of justice that does not include or require retaliatory harm.
There's a way forward that does not require harm for harm's sake.
One of the ways forgiveness and reconciliation collapse together in the theology of atonement is that it's very easy to read the death and suffering of Jesus as a kind of compensatory harm for the sin of which we're guilty.
And the second issue is that, because of the nature of our relationship with God, when God offers forgiveness, reconciliation comes with that offer.
The thing that worries me about forgiveness being too closely allied to reconciliation in human relationships is this: Let's say I forgive someone because I feel obligated to forgive. Let's say I offer unconditional forgiveness to someone who still threatens harm to me.
I should not have to reconcile with that person.
God will never be in a situation where God is threatening harm to me. The terms of that relationship are different.
I might threaten harm to God or to the ones God loves, but God is not threatening harm to me.
We can see how this gets complicated very quickly. Because in our conception of God's offer of forgiveness, reconciliation seems to be inherent in that offer. Theologically, that may lead us to align forgiveness and reconciliation in human relationships as well.
Then you add another layer: reading the cross as punishment, transferred punishment, or substitutionary punishment. You can see the moral and theological muddle that arises from those close associations.
Scott: Matt, are you saying that when God forgives us, reconciliation comes with that, but that's not necessarily the case with forgiveness between human beings?
When I offer forgiveness to another person, we're not immediately reconciled. Is it different with God? Or do we mistakenly assume that the way God relates to us should be equivalent to how our relationships with one another should work?
Matthew Ichihashi Potts: I'm saying something close to that. There may be theological problems with the way I'm formulating it off the cuff, but I do think there's something different about God's vulnerability to us and our vulnerability to one another.
The profound vulnerability of Jesus on the cross is an exposure before the enemy, before us as enemies. After the death on the cross, the offer of reconciliation is freely extended to us.
When we think about human relationships, at least on this side of the eschaton, those calculations become much more complicated.
If I'm meant to love my neighbor as myself, and also love myself, then I have to gauge the risk someone poses to me before I reconcile with them.
I may need to wait for God to reconcile all things to God's self in God's own time. It may not be something I can accomplish within the scope of my own lifetime.
I may be able to offer forgiveness in my lifetime, but if reconciliation requires the cooperation of the other person, and they aren't ready to avoid violence or turn away from harm, then I may need to delay reconciliation until the relationship is safer.
You can see that I'm getting a little bound up even in the way I'm talking about this. We want to map horizontal forgiveness and reconciliation onto vertical forgiveness and reconciliation, but they don't map perfectly because the relationship between God and humanity is profoundly different from the relationship between human beings.
Except that the relationship between God and humanity is also human and human in Jesus. So we're brought back into the problem.
Scott: Miroslav, I want you to answer this question, especially given your work on the Trinity and its relationship to our social life.
Miroslav Volf: I'm happy to touch on that. I very much agree with what Matt has said.
By the way, Matt's book on forgiveness is fantastic. It's an amazing achievement, and I think it ought to be widely read, even when he and I may not see eye to eye.
I agree that forgiveness and reconciliation should not be identified with one another.
Forgiveness is an essential element of reconciliation, but it often begins to build trust when properly understood. It begins to build trust when forgiveness is received.
One can be forgiven without having received forgiveness. I think one receives forgiveness through certain forms of repentance.
Repentance is a broader category, but it's certainly related to forgiveness.
When forgiveness is received through repentance, that already begins to build trust because the person has owned what they have done. They have distanced themselves from that wrongdoing. They recognize that they were not at their best and did not do what they ought to have done.
That's one step, but even that isn't sufficient to rebuild trust or resume the relationship.
I would stretch that process out. In fact, forgiveness itself isn't a particular act. It's a practice that we grow into.
Even when we make a decision to forgive, we might wake up in the middle of the night three days later and take it all back because it doesn't seem right or because our intuitions and emotions push against it.
That makes forgiveness more complicated and prevents us from collapsing forgiveness and reconciliation into one another.
Scott: What we just heard is fascinating.
You can't expect the way God's forgiveness works with us to be exactly the same as the way forgiveness works with other people, because we're not like God. We aren't perfectly self-aware, loving, and completely honest.
This raises two questions for me.
First, pragmatically, how does this work from person to person? We'll get to that later.
Second, if human relationships are different from our relationship with God, are there ways our distorted human experiences get projected onto our relationship with God and actually change our understanding of the atonement in harmful ways?
That's what we're about to explore.
3. Understanding Julian of Norwich and Hans Urs von Balthasar
Scott: Before we move on, there are two figures Matt refers to in this section and later in the conversation.
The first is Julian of Norwich, a fourteenth-century English Christian mystic. Her writings are the earliest surviving works in English known to have been written by a woman.
She experienced a series of visions about God's unconditional love, which would come to define her legacy.
The other figure is Hans Urs von Balthasar, a Swiss Catholic theologian and one of the most influential theologians of the twentieth century.
He helped reframe the atonement, emphasizing not simply an angry God who needs a victim to absorb his wrath, but an act of love between the Father and the Son.
We're now going to explore the question: What does atonement mean? Why did Jesus die and rise again, and how does that inform our understanding of forgiveness?
4. What Does the Cross Mean? Rethinking Atonement
Miroslav Volf: I use a term from a particular school of theology whose originator is Hartmut Gese, a Hebrew Bible scholar. The idea was also taken up in some of the writings of Jürgen Moltmann. They were working on this when I was a doctoral student.
The basic idea is inclusive substitution.
The first point is that there is no third party involved. Christ is not somebody else onto whom God lays our sins. Christ is God.
There are only two parties involved. Whatever punishment or debt is being paid is essentially being taken from one pocket and put into another pocket, so to speak.
There is no third party.
The second point is that inclusive substitution may raise questions about whether it's sufficiently substitutionary, but this is how the idea works.
It's based on the laying on of hands on the goat in the Old Testament. It's a kind of reading of that act as the self-identification of Christ with all of us.
Inclusive substitution means that when Christ bore sin, he bore us with him. In Christ, we all have died, to use the Apostle Paul's terminology.
The entirety of humanity dies in Christ. This is not understood as the result of punishment, but as the result of sin itself, which separates human beings from their relationship with God.
Was the cross necessary? If you want to explore the logic of necessity, I don't think you'll get very far.
Was it fitting? Perhaps, given the history of salvation.
That's roughly how I understand it.
Matthew Ichihashi Potts: That's very helpful.
In my book, I lean toward some other accounts of atonement, drawing on the mystical writer Julian of Norwich and the contemporary Roman Catholic theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar.
They struggle with questions about God's wrath and anger, and I'm not sure I'm satisfied with all the ways they address those questions.
But the way they think about atonement is that God sends God's self, in the historical reality of Jesus and the cosmic reality of the Son, out of love, to exactly where we are.
However far we have wandered from God, God will send God's self to where we have arrived.
Even if that means going to the cross.
It's an act of extreme love.
Think about a parent who sees their child at the edge of a swimming pool. There's a bunch of brambles between the parent and the child. The parent is going to run through those brambles and do whatever it takes to rescue the child, risking whatever it takes.
Julian and, in his own way, von Balthasar are trying to say that Jesus' suffering is the sign of how much God loves us, not the sign of how much debt we need to pay.
It's also a sign of how far we have wandered from God.
God takes that suffering seriously. Salvation cannot happen without God embracing this vulnerability.
But I resist some substitutionary theologies that understand punishment as somehow compensating for sin or wrongdoing, and therefore require the God-man to suffer.
I think some caricatures of Calvinistic substitutionary atonement theology move in that direction. I worry about the implications of that for all kinds of moral and theological reasons.
Miroslav Volf: I'm fully with you and in agreement about that.
I'm also in agreement about the greatness of Julian.
Although I don't quite understand how suffering functions in Christ's work for her. I understand the spirituality of self-identification, but then she hears Christ say to her, "If I could suffer more than I did, I would."
What good would that do?
It almost seems as though the more suffering there is, the greater the effects might be. There's something in that display of love through suffering that I can't quite identify with.
Matthew Ichihashi Potts: I think that's right.
I don't endorse everything Julian says, although I think she's amazing.
I think echoes of medieval tendencies toward the glorification of suffering are present in her writing.
There's a moment just before Jesus says that to her. She sees Jesus suffering on the cross, and she's distressed because she loves him and his suffering is so terrible.
Then she hears a voice from heaven telling her to look up and that she will be rescued into paradise.
She is tempted to do so, but then says, "No, you are my heaven," and looks directly at Jesus.
She's turning away from a paradisal reward and toward love in the present, even in the midst of suffering.
This is mirrored when Jesus speaks to her.
She's asking Jesus what reward God the Father gave him for all his suffering. What did God give him because he suffered for her?
Jesus looks at her and says, "You were my reward."
He did this for her.
I think this points to something you said earlier, Miroslav: This is about a relationship between God and us. There isn't some third thing outside that relationship that serves as compensation.
I agree that the glorification of suffering is something worth questioning. But Julian is an important corrective to the way Christians often talk about God's wrath and the necessity of punishment.
She reminds us that the entire economy of salvation is built around love in some mysterious way.
Miroslav Volf: Almost as though atonement has no place there.
Scott: Greg, there's so much here. What are you thinking about right now?
Greg: Miroslav started that section with what sounded like a technical comment: There's no third party involved.
But it's a significant critique of how Christians may have distorted their thinking about God's atoning work on the cross.
What do you think he meant by the third-party idea?
Scott: There's this idea that punishment pays for something. But who is collecting the debt?
Miroslav is essentially saying that it doesn't make sense to imagine a third party collecting a debt. If the debt is owed to God, God is essentially paying himself.
The money is moving from one pocket to another. That exposes a flaw in the way substitutionary atonement can sometimes be misunderstood.
Greg: I appreciate the way he exposes that.
Scott: There was also some disagreement between Miroslav and Matt about Julian of Norwich and the topic of suffering.
I'm wondering if you have any thoughts about the nature of that disagreement and what's at stake.
Greg: I do. As a member of the Chinese diaspora, I found this very interesting because the idea of suffering more for someone you love is actually quite intuitive to me.
It made me think of the movie The Joy Luck Club from the 1990s. It captured the idea that there is no sacrifice a parent wouldn't make if it could help their children succeed.
There's no length to which a Chinese parent wouldn't go. If suffering more would help their children, they would do it.
That seems similar to the bramble analogy Matt brought up.
The suffering isn't for suffering's sake. It's a necessary consequence of going to whatever lengths love would take you to rescue someone or help your children.
So I actually found that very intuitive. I tend to fall on Matt's side of the argument, and I wonder whether there's a cultural dimension to it.
Scott: I love that you brought that insight into this conversation.
5. Is Christian Forgiveness Conditional or Unconditional?
Scott: Now we're going to focus specifically on forgiveness.
In the Gospels, Jesus makes statements such as, "Forgive us as we forgive others," in the Lord's Prayer. It seems that the forgiveness we receive from God is somehow conditioned on the forgiveness we offer other people.
There are other sayings like this in the Gospels.
But then, at the end of Luke's Gospel, when Jesus is on the cross, he looks at the people who have put him to death and says, "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do."
There's no calculation of how much they've forgiven others. It's simply an act of forgiveness.
So we have what appear to be conditional and unconditional forgiveness in the Gospels. How do we make sense of that?
I also finally get to ask my practical question: How do we live this out?
Miroslav Volf: I don't personally have a very good solution to this problem. Some solutions I've read seem to stretch the biblical text in ways that are difficult to justify.
My own sense of it is that even when Jesus begins his ministry, the first act in Mark's Gospel is to proclaim repentance.
Where is forgiveness in that?
I'm inclined to say that forgiveness is already present in an anticipatory way. Jesus stands before people, announces the good news, and calls them to repentance. Repentance comes out of that offer of forgiveness.
I would read the post-resurrection Christ in the same way. The foundation is God's act on our behalf, which is unconditional.
Forgiveness has been unconditionally given, and it needs to be received.
If forgiveness is genuine, I think it will be received, even if that happens at the gate of the world to come rather than in this life.
Matthew Ichihashi Potts: I think everything Miroslav said is right.
But I would also say there's no consistency in the New Testament on this question. It's very hard to find consistency across these passages.
There are several verses that seem to require something like repentance before an offer of forgiveness is made.
There are others that suggest that a person's patience with repentance can be infinite.
For example, if someone repents but doesn't really mean it or doesn't act on it, is that actually repentance? Does it matter if they do this seventy times seven times?
Is that conditional or unconditional? It's not even clear.
Then there are other examples that look unconditional.
I think one problem is that we project our understanding of forgiveness onto the Gospels and then try to see whether it makes sense in those verses.
It's indisputable that the Gospels use the same Greek word in some of these passages. But if you look at what's happening in the situations, you can see something more complicated.
For example, the teaching about seventy times seven is often about something like reconciliation, as we would call it today.
Jesus says that when you bring your gift to the altar and remember that your brother has something against you, you should go and try to reconcile with him.
These teachings point toward an integrated relationship between forgiveness and reconciliation.
I think Jesus is saying that when people come to you repentant, that places a demand on you.
You may have to work through what that demand means in the complicated circumstances of your ethical life. It doesn't necessarily mean restoring the relationship. It doesn't mean that you can't ask for restitution.
But it does mean that you cannot simply hold on to your grudge or your desire for vengeance without limit.
The way I try to understand what Jesus is saying about forgiveness and repentance is through the ethic of non-retaliation.
Jesus is trying to find a way forward without returning harm for harm.
I do think that ethic is unconditional. Jesus never wants us to return harm for harm.
There may be complicated human situations in which we find that we cannot avoid using some kind of force for protection. That's a different Christian ethical question.
But is God's command that we not return harm for harm unconditional? I think it is.
Insofar as forgiveness is part of that ethic, that's what I understand to be unconditional.
Scott: Can you make that practical?
What does that look like when there's a risk of repeated harm? What if the person is someone in a relationship with you who continues to threaten violence? How do you understand non-retaliation in those circumstances?
Matthew Ichihashi Potts: I think the issue of repentance and forgiveness goes all the way down, including to us as we try to discern what's right in individual situations.
The example I turn to in my book is Dietrich Bonhoeffer.
Bonhoeffer wrote emphatically about the need for Christian pacifism and nonviolence in the 1930s, even as he spoke out against the rise of fascism and antisemitism in Germany.
Some contemporary interpreters, and even recent movies about Bonhoeffer, portray his decision to participate in violence as giving up on his ethic of nonviolence. They suggest he decided that God wanted people to become heroes in the moment and use violence for the sake of protection.
I think Bonhoeffer's argument was more subtle.
He understood that the world as we have it means our actions do not justify themselves.
We don't take an action because we think it will make us good.
In many situations, perhaps in all situations where genuine moral dilemmas arise, there is no entirely good option.
We have a complicated situation in which several commands of God—love God, love your neighbor, love yourself, love your enemy—cannot all be fulfilled at the same time.
So we make a decision. We take responsibility.
But in taking responsibility, we don't say, "Therefore, this decision I've made was pure and right, and God loves me because I did the right thing."
Instead, we say, "I did the necessary thing, and I will repent of it. I will trust that God will forgive me."
When Bonhoeffer agreed to participate in the assassination attempt against Hitler, I don't think he was saying, "Now this is a good and virtuous thing God has commanded me to do."
I think he was saying, in his very Lutheran way, "Here I stand. I can do no other."
But because he trusted in God's forgiveness, he would repent of this necessary action rather than lift it up as a virtue or a heroic thing.
So, to answer your question about what this looks like practically, I don't know.
That's what Bonhoeffer is saying about Christian responsibility.
When we find ourselves in a moment of crisis and see that the many commands of God cannot all be fulfilled at once in our fallen world, we have to take responsibility.
We make our decision as best we can.
But we don't then say, "My decision was right, and therefore God loves me because I did the right thing."
That's not how justification works.
Instead, we say, "I did what I had to do, and I am justified by God's love for me."
We throw ourselves on the mercy of God rather than lifting up our necessary action as a new moral standard or law.
What happens when someone threatens harm, or when their repentance is untrustworthy, or when they refuse to repent?
I don't know. I think the person in that situation has to face a moment of responsibility.
In taking that responsibility, they enter into a new relationship of repentance and forgiveness, both horizontally with other people and vertically with God, who has commanded us to do things that sometimes we cannot all accomplish at once in this world.
Miroslav Volf: Everything Matt said about Bonhoeffer seems exactly right to me. I'm very much of the same opinion.
It seems to me that forgiveness is meaningful even if the other person doesn't want to be forgiven.
Someone might even feel insulted by being forgiven because forgiveness implicitly accuses them of having done something wrong.
But forgiveness can still be meaningful when that response doesn't come.
It can pave the way for the possibility of repentance and some kind of future reconciliation.
Unless we think of forgiveness as not reaching its full purpose without repentance, we risk having something like cheap forgiveness.
And I think that's why forgiveness has a bad name in many ways. It doesn't have a real connection to the way people actually live.
One important thing is restitution. Many people don't think about the importance of restitution, but I think it's essential to properly understood forgiveness.
Matthew Ichihashi Potts: I agree entirely.
And I think it leads not only to cheap forgiveness but also to cheap reconciliation.
If I'm able to forgive you but refuse reconciliation because you're unwilling to do the things necessary to repair the relationship, then rushing toward reconciliation before that work is done isn't the kind of profound reconciliation we're promised by God.
There's a spiritual discipline in saying, "I'm not ready to reconcile with you."
The ultimate work of reconciliation, if someone isn't willing to repent, is God's job, not mine. I've done what I can.
Scott: That last section is powerful and helpful.
Matt's comments about Bonhoeffer remind us that our actions cannot always fulfill every command of God at the same time. Sometimes there are no good options, and our actions cannot justify themselves.
That's very freeing. I like to be right. I like to do things perfectly. But sometimes you can't.
Miroslav also makes the point that forgiveness opens the possibility of reconciliation, but reconciliation demands certain things, including repentance and sometimes restitution.
Without those things, forgiveness can become cheap.
Now we're going to explore why that doesn't always happen. Why isn't forgiveness always brought to its full conclusion in reconciliation? What are the necessary ingredients that help make that possible?
6. Why Is Repentance So Difficult?
Miroslav Volf: It seems to me that we talk about repentance in at least two ways.
One way is repentance in the sense of what Jesus announces when he begins his ministry: "Repent."
The Greek word is metanoia. It means changing the direction of your entire life.
That has to do with the orientation of the self. Perhaps that orientation is a condition for being able to forgive and being able to repent. At the very least, these things belong together in a particular way of life.
But we also talk about repentance and forgiveness in a narrower sense, referring to individual transgressions and individual acts.
Throughout the Gospels, you find this idea.
The way I understand the relationship between them is that forgiveness is a mode of gift-giving.
I give you the gift of not counting against you the wrongdoing you have committed against me.
That's a kind of gift.
But for a gift to be properly and fully given, it has to be received.
Imagine that my sister decides to give me a gift. She buys something, packages it, and sends it to me. Or I do the same for her.
The gift arrives and sits on the table. The recipient looks at it and says, "I don't know what he's trying to do here."
There may be suspicion about the whole endeavor.
A person being forgiven might think, "We're not ready for this. We haven't adjusted our memories to understand what actually happened. What is this person forgiving? I haven't done what they're accusing me of doing."
I may have done something, but this isn't ready to be received as forgiveness.
The gift of forgiveness has its own integrity. But it comes to its full fruition when it is actually received.
And even then, that's not yet reconciliation. It's one stage in the life of a relationship that can go in a variety of directions.
It's essential to think of these things as a unit rather than separating them completely.
Matthew Ichihashi Potts: I agree with everything Miroslav said.
One thing that really troubles me about much of contemporary American Christianity is its aversion to repentance.
Sometimes we're excited to ask other people to repent. We love it when that happens.
But Christianity as an institution, churches as institutions, and denominations often do a very poor job of naming the things we've done wrong and the harm we've caused in the name of God and Jesus.
To me, that seems like a profound lack of faith.
Repentance is a troubling moment of exposure. It means acknowledging our own finitude, imperfection, and sin.
You can only do that if you have complete faith that you'll still be lovable at the end of it. That God will still love you after you've acknowledged what you've done.
I worry that the reluctance to repent in Christianity is a failure to believe that we're lovable even when we've done wrong.
Going back to Julian of Norwich, in one of her less suffering-focused moments, she says that Christians believe God is all-powerful and can do all things. We believe God is all-knowing and knows how to do all things.
But believing that God is loving and will forgive all things is where we have trouble.
I think there's a reason Jesus begins his ministry in two or perhaps three of the Gospels with repentance.
Beginning with repentance means beginning with confidence in God's love for us.
When we begin our relationships with one another and sort through our conflicts from a place of repentance, we're expressing deep faith in God's ability to love us through our sinfulness and bring us to new life.
I don't think we get to cultures of forgiveness, whether Christian cultures or civic cultures, until we develop the spiritual habit of repentance.
We must then respond to one another's repentance with the grace we hope to receive when we ourselves repent.
Miroslav Volf: I would underscore everything Matt has said.
Perhaps God loves us in part because of our sinfulness and weakness. Julian expresses that very beautifully.
Matthew Ichihashi Potts: That is the lock of faith.
To believe that God can only love me once I'm pure is actually not to believe that God can love me at all.
That's not an infinite love.
To know that I am as I am, even in my sin, and that God's love for me is infinite—that is an infinite love.
The courageous spiritual practice of that belief is repentance.
It's saying, "This is who I am, but I trust that you will love me anyway."
7. Will We Remember Wrongdoing in Heaven?
Scott: This is our final section.
First of all, congratulations to everyone who has listened or watched this far. I think we're now at the most interesting part of the episode.
Matt and Miroslav disagree on the topic we're about to explore, and it has to do with remembering.
When we talk about the Christian hope of the eschaton, the future in which God brings the world to its rightful end, what will things be like?
Will we remember the wrongs committed against us and the wrongdoing in the world, or will those memories no longer be present?
Matt and Miroslav take slightly different approaches.
Here's the question: Do we forgive and forget? Or is it important to hold on to memory?
Does genuine forgiveness require us to keep remembering the wrong in order to honor truth and justice? Or can continuing to remember something eventually get in the way of a better relationship or the final reconciliation we hope for?
Miroslav Volf: The first thing to say is that forgetting is not part of forgiving.
I need to say that very clearly.
To the contrary, I think forgiveness is only possible against the backdrop of remembering. And not just any remembering, but careful remembering that aims at truthfulness.
Without such remembrance, forgiving is impossible.
I think forgiveness is always deficient. It is never fully complete.
There are many reasons for this, but one is that our memories are often not truthful. We hide things from ourselves and from other people. Various things happen as we remember, especially in situations of wrongdoing.
So the effort to remember truthfully is essential to forgiveness.
When it comes to reconciliation, I think a certain kind of forgetting is not the right word. I don't want to use it because forgetting can be motivated in all kinds of ways.
I prefer the terms not coming to mind or non-remembering.
To me, these are the fruits of a successful and stable process of reconciliation. They aren't steps on the way toward reconciliation. They're actually the fruit of reconciliation.
They're not intentional acts. That's why I want to use the terms not coming to mind or non-remembering.
There's a kind of passivity to it. We can let memories go because the motivation for keeping them alive is no longer there.
I also think that without some kind of non-remembering, you cannot have everlasting life of love and bliss.
I disagree with Julian on this point as well.
There are different ways to argue for this, but basically, if I remember one wrongdoing, I have to remember all of them.
Our lives are intertwined.
Let's say someone has committed a particularly egregious wrong against me, and I remember that wrong. But I don't remember all the wrongs I've committed throughout my life. And I don't remember the wrongs that this person might point out in someone else.
Why am I singling out this person simply because they were particularly nasty to me?
What kind of selfishness motivates that kind of memory?
To be truthful about the actions of a particular person, I would have to situate their actions in the context of all other actions.
I would have to keep them in balance.
That would mean living in a world in which all the evils of the past remain at the forefront of consciousness.
I find that a horrid thought.
Perhaps it's a mistake to begin there.
If I went into some dark corner of heaven and thought, "Let me now think about the evils committed against me," I could technically do that. Those memories haven't been deleted from my hard drive.
But they wouldn't be in my active memory.
And that seems to me to be the experience we have in all good relationships.
Over time, I can remember all sorts of things my friend has done to me, but the relationship is in such a state that I don't have to.
I would be worse off if I kept those memories alive.
One final point: Public memories of public events are different.
In this life, we need to nurture those memories because they serve an important purpose. They protect us. Reconciliation has not yet occurred, and evils continue to happen regularly.
So my position is an eschatological hope.
I've written about eschatological final reconciliation. I think that the transition from this world to the world to come makes something like letting go of memories possible, allowing us to give ourselves to the enjoyment of the person whom otherwise we might not be able to enjoy.
Scott: Matt, I want to give you a chance to respond.
I want to highlight one line that I think I may have first read in Miroslav's work but that you brought out in your book.
Miroslav isn't saying that there's forgetting. Rather, there will be an occasion in which bad memories won't need to arise.
It's a very elegant idea.
Matt, let me put the question to you. If you believe that there can be an ongoing memory of wrongdoing, how do you hold that idea without being a theological meanie?
Matthew Ichihashi Potts: Having heard Miroslav talk about it, I think we're going to agree more than you might expect.
I think the erasure of forgetting is what I'm particularly worried about.
When I think about people I love who have wronged me, I don't think about those things every day. They don't come up.
I think that's crucial to what it means for us to have a restored relationship. The wrongdoing is no longer the most important thing about that person. It's not even in the top ten.
I agree with that.
I think our differences probably come down to my being more of a Julian of Norwich and von Balthasar kind of Christian than Miroslav.
I think the way I would describe it is that the bliss of the eschaton is somehow related to what Julian says.
She says that our sin is actually a blessing because our sin is a sign of how much God loves us.
All of our bliss comes from God's love for us. That's what bliss is: being loved by God. There's nothing else.
That's the difficult and challenging part of Julian.
Jesus is saying that you know God's love most profoundly when you know how sinful you are.
That's the point at which you understand how much God loves you. That's the source of your bliss.
And that means I want to push this idea to its limits.
If this is the source of our bliss, what does that mean for remembering all of it? Does all of it come with us?
I think that's worth pressing.
It's also important because of public memory, which Miroslav mentioned.
In the present, in the politics of our time, we're called upon to remember and acknowledge real histories if we're going to arrive at anything like a politics of love or a politics of care.
I think these different theological imaginations of the eschaton are ultimately in service of our spiritual habits, practices, and inclinations.
That's where I find Julian so helpful.
Maybe it has more to do with my own psychology and spirituality than any firm claim I'm trying to make about the eschaton.
Miroslav Volf: I'm okay with you remembering and me not remembering.
Scott: There you go. I never thought this interview would end with that comment!
8. Final Reflections: Forgiveness, Memory, and Reconciliation
Scott: Greg, to this question of the eschatological future, when God makes all things right, will we remember wrongdoing? What do you think?
Greg: If nothing else, I will no longer say, "Forgive and forget," because clearly that's not quite right.
This final segment was meaningful.
Miroslav went to great lengths to emphasize that it isn't forgetting. It's non-remembering. That's an important distinction.
In some ways, they almost don't disagree.
Remembering is required for full reconciliation, and yet we don't want to dwell on all the wrongs of the past.
We have to hold both of those things together.
There are different shades of what that might look like, but fundamentally, we're holding them in tension.
Scott: I agree. There's so much here.
Miroslav is not saying that forgetting happens. He's saying that there's an occasion in which remembering simply won't be necessary.
I think the remaining disagreement between Miroslav and Matt is about the possibility of remembering.
For Matt, there's more of a possibility that the remembering of wrongdoing will continue, even in the context of forgiveness.
For Miroslav, I think the argument is that for there to be true bliss, the pain that comes with those memories cannot have an occasion to arise.
I find both perspectives compelling.
For Miroslav, if the future is truly a place of bliss, the pain associated with those memories can't continue to be part of that reality. Not because we've forgotten, but because there's no need for those memories to arise.
But Matt makes another important point.
There's a joy that comes with knowing we're forgiven and experiencing forgiveness from God. How could that not be part of the future hope we have?
I find myself leaning a little more toward Matt.
I just can't imagine a scenario in which I see the risen Jesus, who still has the nail marks in his hands, and don't ask him about them.
There's got to be some connection to the forgiveness we need and the forgiveness we've received.
Greg: You know what it reminds me of? My marriage.
I've been married to my wife for a long time. We had a lot of fights early in our marriage that we now look back on and laugh about.
It's not that we've forgotten those fights or the lessons we've learned. We talk about them.
But the resentment, pain, and conflict are gone.
So I think there's a way in which you can do both.
Scott: Friends, you can't make this stuff up!
Greg, do you know what you just did?
You brought together Potts and Volf and what they've said into a final reconciliation in this episode.
Here's why: You just described a kind of remembering that doesn't include pain.
I see elements of both what Volf and Potts have been asking us to consider coming together in that example.
Who knows whether they would entirely agree, but I think you've brought this conversation to a wonderful conclusion.
Greg: Absolutely.
Closing
Scott: All right, friends. Thanks so much for engaging with Theology Lab.
Don't forget to like the video and subscribe to the channel.
This was the first time we've tried offering ongoing commentary throughout an episode. If you have any thoughts about that format, let me know.
You can email Scott at theologylab.org and include Greg at theologylab.org in any messages. We'd love to hear your feedback.
Thanks so much for engaging with Theology Lab.
