Unforgivable? Exploring the Limits of Forgiveness

Cherry (The Dark Side of the Soul), the dean of King’s College Cambridge, probes in this discerning study the “mistakes in the way Christianity has approached and promoted forgiveness.” Starting roughly in the 1980s, a “therapeutic forgiveness” industry emerged that promoted interventions for those more “debilitated” by their own emotional response (anger, desire for vengeance) to an offense than to the offense itself. Cherry traces the roots of this approach to Christianity’s uncritical view of forgiveness as a way for humans to emulate God’s mercy. Yet, he writes, that understanding rests partly on a misinterpretation of Jesus’s final pardon of his executioners, which Cherry argues was not an act of forgiveness but a prayer. Contending that when forgiveness is “simplified and over-promoted,” the “abused, the harmed and the exploited... pay the price,” Cherry cites such examples as the South African Truth and Reconciliation Committee’s attempts to “heal” the country from apartheid, which often involved soliciting “poor black women” to officially forgive their white transgressors. Cherry’s call for a contextual understanding of forgiveness and defense of such alternatives as principled, “non-vengeful unforgiveness” (in which the wronged neither seeks retaliation nor gives the transgressor a “free pass” for their actions) are reasonable and thought-provoking. It’s a worthy complement to Myisha Cherry’s Failures of Forgiveness. (May)