Book Review: Forgive by Timothy Keller
Forgive: Why Should I and How Can I? by Timothy Keller will join a stack of most impactful books on my shelf. Reading a non-fiction work begins as an imaginative exercise for me. I like to imagine myself sitting before the author in a lecture hall, church pew, or even at a coffee shop (and sometimes all three in the same book!). I imagine my hands open to receive, my mind attentive to learn, and my spirit eager to contemplate and discern. I received much from this book, and like any of Keller’s books, I will need to revisit this work over again in order to squeeze all of the intended goodness and benefit. For now, I am returning this book to my shelf with empathy for those actively against forgiveness, with understanding of the necessity of forgiveness for human flourishing, with practical application of forgiveness, and a worshipful heart for the God of the Bible who provides everything we need in His Word, His example, and His Spirit to forgive. How may God want to form your view, understanding, and practice of forgiveness?
Here are twelve of the dozens of highlighted passages in my book:
The cheap-grace model of forgiveness focuses strictly on inner emotional healing for the victim, on ‘getting past it and moving on,’ but then ends up letting the perpetrator off the hook. The little-grace and no-grace models basically seek revenge, which lead to endless cycles of retaliation and vengeance, back and forth, between victim and the wrongdoer. What all these secular models lack is the transformed motivation that the vertical dimension brings. (pg. 33)
The key to Christian forgiveness is the cross. It is the foundation of forgiveness because it not only makes it possible for God to forgive us without compromising his justice but it also provides both motivation and model for our own forgiveness to those who wrong us. To understand how we–as angry wronged persons–can forgive, we must see how God, the ultimate wronged person, can forgive. The way he does this is the cross. (pg. 71)
However, his anger is not wounded pride as ours is. God only gets angry at the evil destroying the things he loves–his creation and the human race he made for his own glory and for our happiness. God is not just a God of love or a God of wrath. He is both, and if your concept of God can’t include both, it will distort your view of reality in general and of forgiveness in particular. (pg. 74)
There are, then, two ways to pursue justice–out of vengeance or out of love. You can do it to satisfy your anger and desire to see the wrongdoer suffer, but this serves to harden your heart and make you more capable of hurting people yourself in the future. In addition, it allows the perpetrator to continue to have some control over you. But you can also pursue justice out of love. It’s your job to help perpetrators see their wrongdoing out of love for them, love for potential future victims, love for the community, and love for God. The only way this is possible is if you forgive as you are seeking justice. (pg. 91)
Rather, it means that to be unforgiving reveals that you have failed to understand and accept God’s unmerited grace yourself. Perhaps you thought that your contrition and reparations before God earned his favor. You may have made your remorse and shame into a kind of “good work” that (you thought) put God in your debt. The telltale sign that you have done something like this, rather than actually receiving God’s unmerited forgiveness and mercy, is the inability to forgive others. The humility that comes from admitting your lostness and the joy that comes from knowing your acceptance in Christ are simply absent. Without the humility that sees yourself as equally deserving of condemnation, and without the joy of knowing your standing in Christ’s love, it will be impossible to give up your desire for revenge.
Some have called one of these “attitudinal forgiveness” and the other “reconciled forgiveness.” These are not two kinds of forgiveness but two aspects or stages of it. One could say that the first must always happen, and the second may happen but is not always possible. Attitudinal forgiveness can occur without reconciliation, but reconciliation cannot happen unless attitudinal forgiveness has already occurred. If the victim in Luke 17 has not personally forgiven, why would they be open to reconciliation? For a victim to be open to reconciling, they must have already done some kind of forgiveness in their heart. An unwillingness to repent on the part of the perpetrator is no excuse for ongoing bitterness, something that the bible says will inevitably poison the soul. (pg 107)
Why should a Christian seek justice? Because injustice grieves the God we love, it mars the creation we love, it harms people we love, and it even harms the wrongdoer whom we should love and not hate. What is seeking justice? It is to speak the truth in love and to not shield people from the consequences of their actions. (Pg 108)
To love those who do not love you is not offered as a piece of pragmatic wisdom, but as a reflection of the character of God himself who gives a fruitful earth, through rain and sun, to all people regardless of the motives or character. (pg. 115)
Forgiveness is often (or perhaps usually) granted before it’s felt inside. When you forgive somebody, you’re not saying, ‘All my anger is gone.’ What you’re saying when you forgive is ‘I’m now going to treat you the way God treated me. I remember your sins no more. That doesn’t mean I can’t actually recall them. It means I’m not going to act on the basis of them. They’re not the controlling reality in my life.’ What is the controlling reality? The grace of God and the way in which, out of love, he controls history. (pg. 132)
Because he is loving, there’s free, free, free, free, free grace for us. But because he is holy, it was costly grace, infinitely costly grace. When I know that I am the recipient of this kind of costly grace, when I know Jesus Christ went to hell’s heart for me and was loving and obedient for me… There. That’s what changes me. That’s tears. That’s amazement. That’s exhilaration. That’s galvanizing. It changes me because at the very same time, on the one hand, it humbles me out of my pride and self-centeredness and it affirms me out of my inferiority and self pity. It makes me hate my sins because it led to his death. But it forbids me to hate myself because he did it for me, to make me free. There is nothing that changes you like this…and it is the great key to the work of human forgiveness and reconciliation.
Here is the essence of what Christianity gives us. Only God is the final judge of who we are and what we have done. If–and only if–he is, then God can overrule our heart’s guilt and self condemnation. If he says we are forgiven, then we are, and we can tell our hearts to quiet themselves. The secular framework, however, has nothing to give the wounded conscience to heal it. It has nothing to say to the self who feels it is unworthy of love and forgiveness. Anyone who has seen the depths of their sin and what they are capable of will never be mollified by the bromide of “Be nice to yourself–you deserve it.” (pg 139)
Self-pity looks like repentance, but it is self-absorption, and that is the essence of sin. Only if you see that you haven’t just broken God’s law but you have broken his heart, that you have dishonored and grieved him, do you begin to change. (pg. 146)