Forgiveness has an expiration date. Unlike God or love, it has both a beginning and an end. For this reason, though forgiveness lies at the heart of Christian life, it is not the heart itself. Likewise, forgiveness is integral to the good news proclaimed by the church, but it is not itself the gospel. Why is this?

There are three main reasons, and each concerns God. First, the heart of Christian life is God. Forgiveness is one of his benefits to us, and it is great. If, however, forgiveness did not flow from God and draw us back to him, it would be useless to us, worthless in the strict sense of the word.

Second, forgiveness does not belong to God’s eternal life. God is love, from everlasting to everlasting. He is not forgiveness in the same way. Apart from us, there is no one and nothing to forgive. The Father loves the Son in the unity of the Spirit in an infinite continuous act of giving and receiving and witnessing and glorifying; forgiveness is nowhere to be seen.

Third, forgiveness presumes sin, a defection from God’s will. This is why it does not belong to God’s inner life. It would be absurd to imagine God rebelling against God. Not so with us. Humanity needs forgiveness because something has gone terribly wrong.

Beginning in this way, with God and his perfections rather than us and our defections, is helpful in two respects. For one, it avoids skewing our perspective—a challenge made all the more difficult because the problem itself is that our perspective is already skewed by sin! For another, it keeps the frame from closing too narrowly on a problem (sin) and how to solve it (forgiveness). These, like us, are players in a larger drama. We lose the plot if we forget the rest of the play.

Nevertheless, the problem is all too real: You and I commit specific sins against our neighbours each and every day. Our sins pile up by the hour. Like Abel’s blood from the ground, they cry out against us. We are voiceless and powerless in reply. In his Letter to the Romans Saint Paul comes to the point:

This passage draws our attention to two crucial matters: God’s work to deliver humankind from sin and death, and the name of the one through whom deliverance comes. Both are important for understanding forgiveness.

The Work of Christ

Forgiveness of sins begins and ends with Jesus Christ. He is divine love incarnate; his coming in power is a threat to sin and death as much as it is to illness and dispossession. Healing and exorcism, forgiveness and resurrection are his deeds on earth—deeds that are inseparable in their social and spiritual effects.

The ministry of Jesus illustrates the importance of locating and defining forgiveness by the gospel. For those of us tempted to moralize forgiveness or assign it to a therapist’s office, we see in Jesus’s life and teachings the ultimate source of forgiveness: the power of God. For those of us tempted to spiritualize or delimit forgiveness within a personal relationship with the Lord, the Gospels reveal the interconnectedness of Jesus’s words and deeds as all of them bring to bear the kingdom of heaven on earth.

In Saint Mark’s Gospel, for example, we are only fifty verses in before Jesus looks on a man and declares, unprompted by any appeal, “My son, your sins are forgiven” (2:5). This scene is sandwiched between stories of teaching in the synagogue, casting out unclean spirits, relieving a woman of her fever, touching and cleansing a leper, eating with sinners, and raising a little girl from the dead. We are made to see that none of these conditions and situations are distinct from the others; each is a threat to God’s people; all require the Lord’s assistance. Sin, you might say, is only one thread in a great tapestry of disorder and unrest. There is no deliverance without forgiveness, but forgiveness does not exhaust deliverance.

For some biblical authors, “forgiveness of sins” serves as gospel shorthand for a broader reality, one derived from the Hebrew prophets, for whom forgiveness of past sins, return from the punishment of exile, and restoration to fellowship with God are synonymous. To speak of the forgiveness of sins, then, is to speak of the all-encompassing work that Christ has done. This is why Jesus’s signs and wonders are, in a sense, convertible with one another, why the crowds were as astonished at his message as they were at his miracles. Divine forgiveness never stands alone. It comes attended by all the wonderful works of God.

At Calvary these works are drawn together and find their consummation. Hebrews states that “without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness of sins” (9:22); accordingly, Jesus teaches that his blood “is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins” (Matthew 26:28). At the cross of Christ sins are forgiven. This is what theologians mean when they talk about atonement. But it entails more than this (though not less).

Earlier I said that sin is only one thread in a tapestry. But I meant sins. What threatens to unravel the tapestry of our lives is Sin in the singular, even if not every thread is a sin. Paul imagines Sin as a tyrant, akin to Pharaoh, a mighty despot who holds humanity in bondage. In this he is simply following Jesus, who taught that “every one who commits sin is a slave to sin” (John 8:34). Through the reign of Sin in our lives Death comes to rule as well, and the devil is at work in both. Apart from God, we are helpless before this three-headed monster. Christ comes to slay Cerberus once for all.

Scripture describes this victory in many ways: as a martial conquest, as a penal substitution, as a juridical verdict, as a cultic sacrifice. Another is forgiveness. To forgive is to remit, to send away, to omit, to let go, to pardon. Paul writes that “in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them” (2 Corinthians 5:19). Elsewhere he glosses our “redemption” with “the forgiveness of sins” (Colossians 1:14). And later in that letter he addresses believers directly, declaring that

Forgiveness is fundamentally an act of mercy. The claims of justice rightly demand recompense, punishment, or both, yet the wronged party elects not to exercise these claims, thereby erasing whatever was owed on account of the wrong done. It is no accident that the forgiveness of sins is closely allied with the cancelling of debts; sometimes in Scripture the metaphors are so entangled that it appears sins just are debts and forgiveness just is the release of debtors from paying what they owe. This is a feature, not a bug, as shown by the fifth petition of the Lord’s Prayer.

For some, the Our Father is a stumbling block precisely because of what Jesus says there about forgiveness. By contrast, let me show why this prayer reveals the heart of forgiveness, divine and human, and why it makes for consolation, not anxiety.

Forgive Us Our Debts

Jesus teaches his disciples to pray thus:

Martin Luther comments, “So that we might know what and how to pray, our Lord Christ has himself taught us both the way and the words.” The words include multiple petitions, of which one is for forgiveness. Notably, it is tied to our forgiveness of those indebted to us.

This connection presents conundrums for interpreters, and we’ll get to them. But before the conundrums we should consider the connection. Jesus makes a cross with this petition: the line of forgiveness extending from heaven to earth intersects with the outward line of our forgiveness of others. Vertical and horizontal find their point in my soul and in yours. The apostles reiterate this teaching exactly.

In his first letter Saint John writes, “If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just, and will forgive our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness. If we say we have not sinned, we make him a liar, and his word is not in us” (1:8–10). He continues, “We love, because he first loved us. If any one says, ‘I love God,’ and hates his brother, he is a liar; for he who does not love his brother whom he has seen, cannot love God whom he has not seen” (4:19–20).

In the same way, Paul writes:

The watchword of the church’s common life is forgiveness: Forgive us as we have forgiven—forgive as you have been forgiven. They are two sides of the same coin. Forgiveness of sins is simultaneously promise, gift, and command.

As We Forgive Our Debtors

Now to the conundrums. Is it really possible, many Protestants have wondered, that Jesus is tying the forgiveness of my sins to my forgiveness of others’ sins, so that my being forgiven is contingent on my forgiving others? Is my salvation truly in jeopardy if my forgiveness of others is something less than perfect?

Jesus’s teaching in the Sermon would seem to support this conclusion: “For if you forgive men their trespasses, your heavenly Father also will forgive you; but if you do not forgive men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses” (Matthew 6:14–15). And later: “Judge not, that you be not judged. For with the judgment you pronounce you will be judged, and the measure you give will be the measure you get” (7:1–2). We might paraphrase this to say, The measure of forgiveness you give will be the measure of forgiveness you get. If so, most of us are in trouble.

As it happens, neither Luther nor Calvin took this view. Far from destabilizing our confidence, Luther interprets this passage to confirm it:

In other words, when you forgive someone, this is evidence that you are already forgiven. If, then, you ever wonder whether you are forgiven, at that moment forgive your neighbour and you will be reminded that your forgiveness by God is sure. Calvin writes, “By the use of this expression the Lord has been pleased . . . to solace the weakness of our faith, using it as a sign to assure us that our sins are as certainly forgiven as we are certainly conscious of having forgiven others.”

Two conclusions follow, one concerning godlikeness and the other concerning hypocrisy. First, we are called to “be imitators of God, as beloved children” (Ephesians 5:1). God’s love is poured out on sinners by refusing to exact what they owe. Jesus commends to us a similar mercy toward our fellow sinners: “Be merciful, even as your Father is merciful” (Luke 6:36). In the words of Saint Isaac of Nineveh, “There is nothing which brings the heart as near to God as mercy.” But note well the practical context of this command:

Godlike mercy is here one and the same as a creditor’s cancelling a debtor’s debts, which Jesus defines as love for enemies. If we want to know what type of action distinguishes Jesus’s disciples from sinners and Gentiles, this is it. Christians are never more like Christ than when they love their enemies, forgive sins, remit debts—but I repeat myself.

Second, the injunction to forgive is a prophylactic against hypocrisy. Jesus exhibits the danger in the parable of a servant who, forgiven an enormous debt by his lord, turns and throws a fellow servant into jail because he cannot repay a tiny sum. The lord calls the servant back and says to him, “You wicked servant! I forgave you all that debt because you besought me; and should not you have had mercy on your fellow servant, as I had mercy on you?” (Matthew 18:32–33). Lest we miss the moral, Jesus provides it in black and white: “And in anger his lord delivered him to the jailers, till he should pay all his debt. So also my heavenly Father will do to every one of you, if you do not forgive your brother from your heart” (vv. 34–35).

Once again, the occasion is significant: Saint Peter had just asked how often he should forgive his brother. Seven times was the limit of his imagination. Jesus’s answer is simple: there is no limit.

The Mystery of Forgiveness

It would seem that forgiveness is infinite, both in depth (its source in God) and in breadth (its extension to others). How, then, as finite creatures, do we take hold of it? How does it reach us here on earth in our ordinary lives?

Answer: The gift of forgiveness is received in the sacraments, by which “we receive the remission of sins,” as Saint Thomas Aquinas puts it. Luther agrees: in the “Church we have forgiveness of sin, which is wrought through the holy sacraments.” Indeed, “everything in the Christian Church is ordered toward this goal: we shall daily receive in the Church nothing but the forgiveness of sin through the word and signs.” Both are building on Saint Augustine, for whom sins are forgiven in the church alone—“outside the Church they are not forgiven, for it is the Church that has received the Holy Spirit as her own as a pledge without which no sins are forgiven.”

The most famous expression of this principle comes from Saint Cyprian of Carthage, who wrote that “there is no salvation outside the Church.” In a lesser-known but equally important passage in the same letter, Cyprian gives us the principle’s premise: “There is no baptism outside the Church.” The bishop is addressing schismatics. His appeal is pastoral: “Once they recognize that the absolution of sins cannot be granted on the outside, they will pursue the Church’s one baptism more eagerly and more readily, beseeching the benefits and gifts of Mother Church.”

For some, these claims grate. They sound exclusive, proprietary, sectarian—and that’s when they don’t reek of clericalism or magic. But I want to show why these worries are misplaced.

First, when Thomas writes that “there is in the Church full power to forgive sins,” he is not speculating. He is interpreting Jesus’s own words in the Gospels. Jesus imparted to his apostles the authority to forgive sins (Matthew 16:13–20; 18:15–20; John 20:19–23). Whether one believes this authority belongs to their successors alone or to all the baptized, the authority remains.

Second, where else would we expect to find the forgiveness Christ offers? Nowhere but within his body and bride; nowhere but the assembly of faith, where the gospel is proclaimed. The very reason the Lord poured out his Spirit on a particular people and set them apart from the world was so that the nations might find forgiveness in their midst. If it were available anywhere and everywhere, the church’s mission would be redundant.

Third, the sacraments are uniquely apt to their role as channels of grace. Some picture sacraments as works we perform. They’re nothing of the sort. They are “not our work,” argues Luther, “but God’s.” A believer does not baptize herself. She is baptized. The passive voice is intentional. In baptism I am washed; in Communion I am fed. In both I am pure recipient, a newborn at the breast with nothing to offer and everything to receive.

Fourth and finally, the sacraments are objective realities, not subjective states of mind. We are tempted to make forgiveness a function of psychology—our emotional state, a therapeutic project—but the sacraments save us from this error. Being forgiven is not something I achieve; God does it. It is divine work. I may doubt my belief in heaven or trust in God or anything else, but I cannot doubt that I was baptized. Karl Barth says, “As one baptized you may see yourself as dead. The forgiveness of sins rests on the fact that this dying took place at that time on Golgotha. Baptism tells you that that death was also your death.”

With Luther and Barth, believers are encouraged to reply to all trials, temptations, and doubts with a single phrase: baptizatus sum—I am baptized. It is enough to drive the demons away.

Doctrines and Questions

“Theological,” “christological,” “ecclesial,” “sacramental”—these are terms you might use to describe the account I have offered to this point. Over all of them, you might add “general.” I have not addressed the particular challenges or predicaments forgiveness presents for Christians, much less for others. I have not attended to hard cases. I have not focused on the ethics of forgiveness. I have not considered the criticisms of its cultured despisers.

All these are worthy topics. But I have chosen a different tack for a few reasons. In part, because others have already done that work (see L. Gregory Jones and Matthew Ichihashi Potts, for example). In part, because hard cases make bad law, and the embodiment of forgiveness in ordinary lives is a task of discernment for the people involved. It is dangerous for writers to get in the business of local moral prescription.

More than these, though, I took my approach because a Christian doctrine of forgiveness is either defined by the gospel or not worth the paper it’s printed on. Either, that is, the church possesses her own teaching about forgiveness rooted in the incarnation—and we should therefore hearken to it, labouring to grasp and obey it—or the church lacks anything of the kind, in which case nobody should care a whit what Christians have to say about it. Polemics and apologetics have their place, but too often they distort the matter, reshaping it in the process of addressing concerns. It is always worth knowing a doctrine in its own right before rushing to show its relevance in application.

Doctrines, after all, are general things. They do not answer every question in advance. Nor do they preclude wicked problems. That isn’t their business. They are meant, instead, to set the table. They set the terms by which believers engage an issue. Doctrine may be the final word in one sense—Jesus is divine, no ifs or buts about it—but in another sense doctrine serves as a point of departure for a never-ending investigation. Robert Jenson calls theology “a continuing consultation.” We attend to tradition not because there is nothing new to say but because our contribution is part of a single, unbroken conversation. And “the classical dogmatic tradition,” in Rowan Williams’s words, “has served to keep the essential questions alive.”

What, then, are the essential questions remaining for forgiveness? Let me close by mentioning five.

1. How is forgiveness related to atonement? I have argued that forgiveness is inseparable from the total work of Christ to save us, and Scripture pictures this work in many ways. Could God have forgiven us without the cross? Is forgiveness possible without satisfaction? Would forgiveness be incomplete without reconciliation? Different confessions are likely to offer different replies.

2. What does God do when he forgives us? Besides showing mercy by remitting our debts, what does divine forgiveness positively effect? Karl Barth and Simone Weil offer answers on the outer edge of the Christian mainstream. Barth pictures “our life” as a sentence or record, written on the page, “and now a great stroke is drawn through the whole.” This is what forgiveness does: it strikes through my sin-soaked story, from start to finish.

Simone Weil goes further, redefining our debts not just as wrongs we have done but as “all we expect from people and things,” both the good and the bad, which amount to “the rights that we think the past has given us over the future.” It is just these rights, she says, that “we have to renounce.” Hence, for Weil, “forgiveness of debts is spiritual poverty, spiritual nakedness, death.” And our spiritual death, which is perfect pardon, remains imperfect until our actual death.

To put it mildly, neither Barth nor Weil commands universal assent. Nevertheless, our forgiveness by God begs for elaboration. What does it entail?

3. Is repentance a condition of forgiveness? In response to his sermon at Pentecost, the crowd, cut to the heart, asks Peter what they should do. He replies, “Repent, and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins; and you shall receive the gift of the Holy Spirit” (Acts 2:38). Does this mean God cannot or does not forgive us our sins unless we (first) repent of them? The precise relationship between repentance and forgiveness remains unclear.

4. What does forgiving others require of us? In his recent book, Forgiveness: An Alternative Account, Matthew Ichihashi Potts argues that forgiveness is nothing more or less than the refusal to retaliate in response to having been wronged. It is “akin to mourning” in that it “accepts that what has been lost cannot be restored, and it aims to live in and with the irrevocability of wrong.” Forgiveness is not about feelings or reconciliation. It is an action, or even the negation of action. It interrupts retributive logic by halting the cycle of tit for tat.

Potts’s is an attractive proposal, but as his subtitle suggests, it is not the mainstream view of forgiveness, whether religious or secular. Every Christian is like Peter with Jesus, utterly earnest yet hedging their bets. Must I forgive my brother even seven times? As much as the quantity we want to know the quality: What does it mean to forgive in the first place?

5. What should we expect of forgiveness? W.H. Auden once remarked that “poetry makes nothing happen.” Proponents of forgiveness often make much of it. They unfold its purported benefits: peace of mind, a well-adjusted life, reconciliation. Forgiveness has the power to change the world.

Skeptics are right to hesitate. Christians should join them. Forgiveness makes nothing happen. Our view of forgiveness, elevated as it should be with respect to God, is worth deflating with respect to other human beings.

A deflationary doctrine of forgiveness would set realistic expectations as well as clarify the scope of our action. Suppose I am estranged from a parent who abandoned me. What shape should my forgiveness take? Or suppose she is dead. How can I forgive her then? Or imagine crimes of neglect, abuse, murder. A therapeutic approach will only disappoint me. Forgiveness may bring peace. But we should never make emotional equilibrium either a criterion or a consequence of the act of forgiveness.

Even in the best circumstances—two friends, a wrong done, followed by acknowledgement, repentance, forgiveness, and restoration—the experience is never perfect, never complete. All human forgiveness this side of death is partial, piecemeal, a marathon measured daily in inches lost or won. Together with the other divine gifts of which it is but one, forgiveness is ours, in this life, as a foretaste of what we will enjoy in full on the last day. The sacraments that impart these gifts to us are manna on the journey, not the feast of our homecoming.

The kingdom of God is a kingdom of forgiveness because its subjects are sinners, one and all. Having been forgiven forever, we will never forgive again. We will be welcomed into the life of God, whose love is free of forgiveness because it is free of wrong. Only then will forgiveness reach its final term.