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"God forgives. We should forgive. And we should forgive as God forgives. But is it possible for us mere humans -- wounded humans -- to forgive the way we should?" Volf is among the speakers at the 2006 Trinity Institute National Theological Conference, "The Anatomy of Reconciliation: from violence to healing."

By Miroslav Volf

To forgive means to accuse wrongdoers while at the same time freeing them of charges against them, releasing them from guilt, and eventually letting the wrongdoing slip into oblivion. The removal of guilt is a crucial element of forgiveness. If guilt remains, forgiveness hasn’t happened. But now we see that, try as we might, we cannot remove guilt on our own.

“Who can forgive sins but God alone?” murmured the scribes after seeing Jesus forgive the sins of the paralytic. Jesus didn’t disagree that God alone can forgive. Instead, he contested their assumption about who he was. In response to their objection, he healed the paralytic to show that he was unique among human beings and possessed divine power to forgive (see Matthew 9:2–8; Mark 2:1–12). Because only God can forgive, Jesus — who is divine as well as human — can forgive.

And yet we mere humans are also called to forgive. Jesus himself taught that we should. Indeed, he insisted that we should forgive as God forgives and that, if we don’t forgive others, God will not forgive us. Was he requiring the impossible? Because God has forgiven, we also have the power to forgive. We don’t forgive in our own right. We forgive by making God’s forgiveness our own. And even then, we don’t forgive the fact of someone’s guilt, the so-called objective guilt. God has already done that. We help remove the offender’s feeling of guilt in regard to us, the so-called subjective guilt. What do I do when I say to someone, “I forgive you”? In effect I tell her, “Because God in Christ doesn’t count your trespasses against you and because God has removed your guilt from you, I, too, don’t count against you the fact that you’ve wronged me, and I don’t consider you guilty. God has made you innocent, and therefore I consider you innocent.” Because God has taken away the burden of guilt, I, too, in my own way, can lift the burden of guilt the offender rightly feels toward me, even after God has forgiven her.

Let’s clarify the relationship between God’s forgiveness and ours in one important regard. It’s not that God forgives sins against God and we forgive sins against us. All sins against us are also sins against God. Every wrong committed against a creature is a sin against the creator. God has the power to forgive all sins. On our own, we have no power to remove guilt for any wrongdoing, not even a wrongdoing committed against us personally. We have the power to remove the guilty feeling on account of such a wrongdoing only to the extent that we participate in God’s forgiveness. When God forgives, offenders need to respond in faith and repentance. But what if they don’t repent? Like a package, forgiveness will then be stuck between the sender who dispatched it and the recipient who refuses to receive it. Offenders will remain unforgiven, the reality of God’s forgiveness notwithstanding. The same is true when we forgive. We make God’s sending of the “forgiveness package” our own. That’s all we can do. And that’s what we have the power to do. Whether the package will be received depends on the recipients, on whether they admit to the wrongdoing and repent.

Just as Christ grieved more over our sin than over the injury our sin caused him, so we can grieve for others if Christ lives in us. “It is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me,” wrote the apostle Paul (Galatians 2:20).

Echoing those words, we can say, “It is not I who forgive, but Christ who forgives through me.”

Of course, it is still we who do all the things that forgivers do — we desire to forgive, we say the words “I forgive you,” we give up resentment, we don’t press charges, we don’t consider the offender guilty anymore, and we are even willing to let the wrongdoing slip into oblivion. And yet “behind” our doing all of this is Christ, who lives in us. In Luther’s words, he is “the basis, the cause, the source” of our forgiving.

The idea of Christ living in us may seem strange. I’ve never seen one human being living in another, except for a brief period of gestation in mothers’ wombs at the beginning of human life. Once we are born, we live next to each other, whether in deep friendship, indifference, or enmity, and sometimes, it seems, in all three at the same time, sharing common language, culture, interests, likes, and dislikes. We may also acquire each other’s personal traits and even bodily likeness, as longtime lovers are sometimes said to look alike. But we don’t live in each other. And that’s how it should be in relationships between human beings. It’s different in our relationship with God. We are in God in a way in which we cannot be in anybody else. And God is in us in a way nobody else can be. God is the basis, the cause, and the source of all that we are, of our whole being and all our acts. The same applies to Christ, who is one with God.

Christ’s living in the depths of our souls may be beyond our imagination. But we can imagine how identification with Christ can transform us. In Nikos Kazantzakis’s The Greek Passion , the villagers of Lycovrissi enact Christ’s passion every seven years. Village leaders choose actors for the characters of the drama a year in advance, and the priest urges them to prepare themselves for the play by living out the assigned characters in their daily lives. They are John or James, Mary Magdalene or Jesus, and they should act as these characters would. The result is lives amazingly transformed, especially among those who play Christ.

A sense of freedom and desire to practice Christ — this is how Christ’s living through human beings might feel to persons involved. At the same time, those who, indwelled by Christ, practice Christ will have a sense that it’s not so much they who are acting themselves into Christ, but it’s Christ who is acting through them.

When we forgive we make God’s forgiveness our own; God forgives, and we take that divine forgiving and, in a sense, put our own signature underneath God's. When we forgive it is Christ who forgives through us.

Even that activity of making God’s forgiveness our own is God’s work. Put simply, our forgiveness is but an echo of God’s. That's why we are able to forgive, and that’s why our forgiving makes sense.

Dr. Miroslav Volf is the director of Yale Center for Faith and Culture and Henry B.Wright Professor of Theology at Yale Divinity School. A native of Croatia, he has forged a theology of forgiveness and non-violence in the face of the horrendous violence experienced in Croatia and Serbia in the 1990s. Dr.Volf is the author of nine books, including Exclusion and Embrace: Identity, Otherness, Reconciliation.This article is excerpted from Free of Charge: Giving and Forgiving in a Culture Stripped of Grace, Zondervan, due for publication February 1, 2006. www.Zondervan.com

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