Tim Carter | The Forgiveness of Sins

If you’ve ever been to church, you’ve probably heard the message that ‘Jesus died on the cross to forgive our sins’ coming from the pulpit. But what does that actually mean?

Jesus’ death is usually explained with reference to sacrificing animals in ancient Judaism, or to a judge forgiving someone’s debts in a court of law. Despite previously preaching these images myself, I was never fully convinced they made sense without making God look a little bit nasty, or Jesus’ death simply… unnecessary.

I previously spoke to Tim about how he navigates his roles as both a Baptist Minister and a lecturer in theology. Fortunately, Tim has also published two books on forgiveness, so I asked him about how he understands the topic, and whether there may be something the Church is missing.

---

What inspired you to write about ‘the forgiveness of sins’?

It started with a question around Luke’s gospel: Why does the gospel writer who talks about forgiveness the most not have much of a theology of the atonement? It didn’t make sense to me. That question launched me on the trajectory to asking: does Luke see sacrifice as essential to forgiveness, or is it far more relational? I was just trying to understand Luke on his own terms.

There’s a prevailing view in some quarters that Luke wasn’t much of a theologian, and the forgiveness of sins was just a stock-in-trade phrase that he used without really thinking about it. Well, what if it wasn’t? What if it’s actually a significant phrase for Luke? Trying to understand what he meant by it opened the door for me, and then I got interested in the creeds – ‘I believe in the forgiveness of sins’ – as well as its antecedents in the Old Testament and how it began to be used in the early Church. I realised that nobody had written about the phrase in any depth. So it turned into a book.

There’s a common view that ancient Judaism was a works-based religion, whilst Jesus introduced grace in the New Testament. Would you say that’s an accurate picture?

There’s been a tendency amongst Christians to downplay the grace you find in the Old Testament, as though you get legalism, condemnation and wrath in the Old Testament, but Jesus sets all that right and we suddenly have this grace that’s previously been denied. It’s actually part of distancing Christians from Jews: we’ve got it right because we’ve got Jesus.

There is far more grace and forgiveness in the Old Testament than people have been willing to recognise and accept. There’s a fair amount of anger and judgment against sin there as well – you can’t get away from that – but actually grace is woven through the Old Testament and the New built on that.

“To say that God has to punish sin because he’s just… puts anger at the centre of God rather than love.”

For me it was a light bulb moment discovering the different order of books in the Old Testament. The Hebrew Bible ends with Chronicles, which is a really positive note to end on: we’re back in the temple, the sacrificial system is working again, God’s being gracious, it’s all ok. This is how the Jews were thinking in Jesus’ day. Being under the oppression of the Romans caused problems for them, but it wasn’t that God wasn’t forgiving them as individuals; in terms of their relationship with God, they were ok. There is a lot more optimism in the Old Testament than the typical Christian allows.

What are some of the shortcomings in the way the contemporary Church teaches forgiveness?

I believe that God is sovereign, and therefore God is free to act as he chooses. To say that God has to punish sin because he’s just and therefore Jesus has to die so that sin can be punished – that doesn’t square with how forgiveness works, and it makes God subject to an arbitrary principle. It also puts anger at the centre of God rather than love: God is really, really angry with us, and he can only – just about – bear to cope with us once Jesus has absorbed all that anger and wrath against sin on the cross. It is such a damaging and harmful view of God.

I can understand why people have gone down that road; if you look at the suffering Jesus went through, that’s a sign of how serious sin is. But this is God taking upon himself our sin, our suffering, and the consequences of what we did because he loves us, not because he’s got this pent-up anger that he needs to vent and Jesus is the one who catches it on our behalf.

If God is free to forgive us, what part did Jesus’ death play within that?

That’s a tricky question, so I’m glad you’ve asked it. Jesus quite clearly punches through death for us; he dies, comes out the other side, and opens the door to eternal life through doing that. That’s very much Mark’s thing: Jesus dies and redeems us from death.

“…how can God forgive something which is unforgiveable when it’s not been done to him?”

I’m aware that sidesteps the question, because the link between death and atonement and forgiveness is what you’re really after. I think it reflects the enormity of what forgiveness entails. Isaiah talks about the sense of sin needing to be borne, and Peter talks about Christ bearing our sins in his body on the tree. When someone forgives, they’re saying: I’m going to take what you’ve done to me. So there is a sense in which God, in forgiving us, takes the destructive consequences of that sin into himself, and so releases in its place the grace and the forgiveness and the love and the mercy.

I think that Jesus died because sin is just so destructive: it is the annihilation of people. Full redemption from sin and its consequences requires the actual death of the son of God on the cross.

You write in your book that God wouldn’t have the moral right to forgive if he’d not experienced the injustice of the cross.

An episode from The Brothers Karamazov has stayed with me since I read it years and years ago. One of the brothers talks about a Russian aristocrat setting the dogs on a woman’s son and tearing him to pieces. He says, ‘How can God forgive that? If that’s what God does, then I’m returning my ticket.’ It’s always stayed with me: how can God forgive something which is unforgiveable when it’s not been done to him? What right does he have to say on someone else’s behalf, ‘That’s alright, I forgive you’?

For me, that’s why it’s really important that God suffers and dies and is the victim of torture, death, betrayal… because if he didn’t do that, then I still want to say: where’s the right to forgive the unforgivable if you haven’t been through it yourself? That’s not saying God has to do that because he’s subject to it, God chooses to do that because he wants to forgive from a position of integrity.

Do you think that there can be confusion in Church around certain terms – such as forgiveness and atonement and redemption – that get lumped together?

We do tend to mash it all together, and to some extent you see mixed metaphors in the New Testament – it doesn’t really work in places. But these terms do all convey different meanings, and it’s helpful to distinguish what each image means, because what connects with one person won’t connect with another. The Gospel is multifaceted, there are all sorts of different understandings and ways into it, and the more you homogenize it all and blend it all together, it loses its potential to connect with people.

It’s like with the gospel accounts: we mash them all together and produce this Jesus who’s a composite of all four different portraits; it’s quite startling to read the different perspectives, but I think you get a richer, deeper, fuller picture if you’re able to do that. So being specific is well worthwhile, and it does justice to the author by acknowledging that they chose their words carefully. For me, grappling with things that don’t quite fit together is often a doorway to getting to a deeper level of understanding and insight; looking at why they don’t make sense and then trying to make sense of them is a step forward in learning.

You’ve also written on interpersonal forgiveness. Are there some cases where it’s in fact not healthy to forgive, such as if someone is in an abusive or toxic relationship?

There’s an excellent book on forgiveness written by a couple of secular authors – Forgiveness, by Eve Garrard and David McNaughton. They talk about the mother of one of the victims of the Moors murderers, who said, ‘I’m never forgiving Myra Hindley. I’m going to haunt her from beyond the grave.’ They talk about how the mother was consumed with cancer, and the doctors were telling her: this is the stress of the anger that you’re carrying, it’s destroying you. But who can say she’s got to forgive?

I think unforgiveness is totally destructive, both for you and for the person who’s committed the atrocity. But forgiveness needs to be given freely; you can’t make someone forgive. There are different stages to forgiveness. Part of it is being willing to let go of your own anger and desire for revenge, and part of it is not going to seek retribution against that person. Beyond that you may even try to meet them face-to-face to resolve the situation. It’s massive, but forgiveness does not mean giving someone the license to carry on abusing you.

“I think we can treat forgiveness far too glibly… you need to mean what you say, because they’re big words.”

I gave a talk on forgiveness the other week and showed a video from The Forgiveness Project, which was actually very moving. A mother whose son had been murdered had this sense of being called by God to minister to other mothers of children who had been murdered. She said: I can’t do this unless I’ve met the man who killed my son. She talked very honestly about finding it really difficult to meet him, and the sense of hatred that she had for him. She almost collapsed when she met him, and as the people there were supporting her, he reached out to her and she ended up hugging him. She said she felt all the hatred disappear out of her, and now they’ve reconciled.

For me that was an immensely powerful story about the destructiveness of the hatred and how much better she was for forgiving him, even though justice demanded that she shouldn’t; why would you forgive the person who murdered your son? It was grace that enabled her to forgive; it both set him free and did her a power of good as well. At the end of the book, the authors say: why should we forgive? Basically, because loving is better than hating. Ultimately, forgiveness is the healthier option for all concerned, if you can bring yourself to do it.

I think we can treat forgiveness far too glibly; you read of people whose child has been killed and they say they forgive the murderer, and I think: you haven’t begun to figure out what that means yet! I remember doing a course by the Mennonites on forgiveness and reconciliation, and they said you can’t forgive until you’ve weighed up every bit of the cost of forgiveness. And it’s massive. If you’re going to forgive, you need to be really aware of the magnitude of what you’re forgiving, otherwise you offer a superficial forgiveness, which isn’t really forgiveness at all. It destroys you, because you think you’ve forgiven, but you’ve still got these feelings of hatred and anger that you haven’t resolved; you’ve said the words but you haven’t meant them. If you’re going to forgive, you need to mean what you say, because they’re big words. 

---

Want to read more? Tim’s book, The Forgiveness of Sins is available to buy here, but if you find the Greek and Hebrew a bit daunting, he has also recently written a more accessible study which you can find here!