Forgiveness and Reconciliation

Matthew 18:15

If your brother sins against you, go and tell him his fault, between you and him alone. If he listens to you, you have gained your brother.

Tom Wright, Matthew for Everyone (Vol. 2)

Many of us prefer to pretend there isn’t a problem. We can refuse to face the facts, swallow our anger or resentment, paper over the cracks, and carry on as it everything is normal while seething with rage inside. Or we can simply avoid and ignore the other person or group, and pretend they don’t exist (34).

Many Christians have taken the paper-over-the-cracks option, believing that this is what “forgiveness” means—pretending that everything is all right, that the other person hasn’t really done anything wrong. That simply won’t do. If someone else—another Christians in particular!—has been offensive, aggressive, bullying, dishonest, or immoral, nothing whatever is gained by trying to create “reconciliation” without confronting the real evil that’s been done. Forgiveness doesn’t mean saying “it didn’t really happen” or “it didn’t really matter.” . . . Forgiveness is when it did happen, and it did matter, and you’re going to deal with it and end up loving and accepting one another again anyway (35).

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship

My brother's burden which I must bear is not only his outward lot . . . but quite literally his sin. And the only way to bear that sin is by forgiving it in the power of the cross in which I now share. Thus the call to Christ always means a call to share the work of forgiving men their sins. Forgiveness is the Christlike suffering which is the Christian's duty to bear (90).

A. Orendorff

All sin (i.e., wrongdoing) creates a debt. This can be seen easily in sins of a financial or physical nature, but it is just as true in relational sins as well. Forgiveness, therefore, means absorbing the debt created by another person’s wrongs, whatever the nature of those wrongs might have been. Justice means taking payments on that debt; forgiveness mean making the payments ourselves.

Individualism

Robert N. Bellah, Habits of the Heart

Individualism – A word used in numerous, sometimes contradictory, senses. We use it mainly in two: (1) a belief in the inherent dignity and, indeed, sacredness of the human person…[and] (2) a belief that the individual has a primary reality whereas society is a second-order, derived or artificial construct (334).

We [as Americans] believe in the dignity, indeed the sacredness, of the individual. Anything that would violate our right to think for ourselves, judge for ourselves, make our own decision, live our lives as we see fit, is not only morally wrong, it is sacrilegious (142).

Julie A. Gorman, Community that is Christian

Self-fulfillment, autonomy, [personal] rights, freedom, self-centeredness – these are the facets of negative individualism and the factors that mitigate against community. Individualism puts self at the center of a person’s world – everything revolves around the nurturing, exalting, and gratifying of that self (46).

Randy Frazee, The Connecting Church

Individualism is a way of life that makes the individual supreme or sovereign over everything (42).

Steven Lukes, Individualism

Religious Individualism…is the view that the individual believer does not need intermediaries, that he has the primary responsibility for his own spiritual destiny, that he has the right and the duty to come to his own relationship with his God in his own way and by his own effort (94).

John Locke, The De-Voicing of Society

If small groups are thought of as a solution to desocialization, I’m afraid the news isn’t very good…Princeton’s Robert Wuthnow has found that small groups mainly “provide occasions for individuals to focus on themselves in the presence of others. The social contract binding members together assert only the weakest obligations. Come if you have time. Talk if you feel like it. Respect everyone’s opinions. Never criticize. Leave quietly if you become dissatisfied…‘Attending weekly meetings, dropping in and out as one pleases, shopping around for a more satisfactory or appealing group – all of these factors work against the growth of true community’” [quoting Olds and Schwartz].

Randy Frazee, The Connecting Church

We have brought our mind-set of individualism into our small groups and therefore made them dysfunctions effective places of true community (47).

A. Orendorff

More than a belief, individualism operates at the cultural level sociologists and philosopher have termed worldview. What this means it that individualism is not so much something thought about as it is a way of thinking. Operating under the premise of individualism, the church and its various extensions are not communities in the trues sense of th word; they are collections of individuals. This is a profound and deep-seated assertion. The radically communal nature of the church as a fundamentally corporate entity is either wholly absent from the thought life of most parishioners or it is shrugged off as patently and hopelessly idealistic – something that looks good on inspired paper but, in the real world, simply can’t pay the bills.