Forgiveness, Emotional Replacement, and God
I have long been fascinated by the mysteries that surround forgiveness. “I forgive you” or “please forgive me” are powerful words. But what are we claiming to do? What are we asking for? “Forgive us our sins, for we ourselves forgive everyone indebted to us” (Luke 11:4) Jesus tells us to pray. Forgiveness is at the center of the Lord’s prayer, and at the center of the Christian life ... but what precisely is forgiveness?
It is a deceptively simple question. When one probes beneath the surface of the process of forgiveness, one finds a tangle of emotions, decisions, “statuses,” relational circumstances and issues.
I just finished a long research project, Table and Temple: The Jewish Roots of the Christian Eucharist, and am currently beginning work on a new one. I am interested in the place where justice, forgiveness, reconciliation, atonement theories, restorative justice, and our prison systems all collide. These questions are quite alive for me: How do we best respond to and repair the breaks, disruptions, sins, and distortions in our lives and relationships? ... in our society? How does God? I’m not quite sure what I’ll find. “Forgiveness” seems a good place to start.
Casting the net widely for some of the best scholarship on the topic of forgiveness, I discovered the work of Everett L. Worthington, Jr. He is an emeritus professor of psychology, a Christian, and has been a key player in the awarding of millions of dollars of grants related to the study of forgiveness. He’s a forgiveness guru. Learn more about him here. And here’s a wonderful video that describes his work.
Since I “discovered” him, I’ve been talking to people at Hope and Western about him, and it turns out there are multiple connections between “Ev” and my colleagues – turns out I’m quite late to the party!
His book, Forgiveness and Reconciliation: Theory and Application (Routledge, 2006), includes both a good statement of his theory of forgiveness, as well as a thorough discussion of the great amount of experimental evidence that supports it. At the center of what he calls his “stress and coping theory of forgiveness” is his “emotional replacement hypothesis.” The core of his hypothesis is this: “Emotional forgiveness occurs due to replacing negative, unforgiving stressful emotions with positive, other-oriented emotions” (17).
That’s not how I had thought about forgiveness before reading his book. It this in part what we are asking God to do when we pray the Lord’s prayer: “God, please change your negative, unforgiving stressful emotions toward us with positive, other-oriented emotions”?
Implied in his statement above and found throughout his book are several important distinctions, distinctions that are quite helpful for untangling the various aspects of forgiveness:
1. There is a distinction between forgiveness and reconciliation. That distinction is quite helpful for me. I remember reading and loving Greg Jones’s book, Embodying Forgiveness: A Theological Analysis (Eerdmans, 1995), years ago. He writes: “the purpose of forgiveness is the restoration of communion, the reconciliation of brokenness. Neither should forgiveness be confined to a word to be spoken, a feeling to be felt, or an isolated action to be done; rather it involves a way of life to be lived in fidelity to God’s Kingdom” (5). Jones’ picture of forgiveness seems to combine both “forgiveness” and “reconciliation” according to Worthington. Some people distinguish between the intrapersonal and interpersonal aspects of forgiveness, but for Worthington, “forgiveness” points to what is going on within a person, while “reconciliation” points to the repair of the relationship, the inter-personal. Whatever you call those two things, it is good to have that distinction in mind and know which one you are talking about. Worthington writes: “Forgiveness is fairly independent of whether a person decides to reconcile. Forgiveness occurs inside an individual. Reconciliation is restoring damage in a relationship, not inside an individual” (3).
2. Worthington also distinguishes between issues of justice – such as whether someone will be held accountable for or assume responsibility for their actions in some way – and forgiveness. Understanding “justice” in terms of accountability and responsibility raises its own questions, but he helpfully alerts us to at least three dynamics at play in the response to broken situations: let’s call them forgiveness, reconciliation and justice.
3. Finally, Worthington distinguishes between “decisional” and “emotional” forgiveness.
About decisional forgiveness he writes, “Decisional forgiveness is a behavioral intention statement that one will seek to behave toward the transgressor like one did prior to a transgression” (56).
And: “Decisional forgiveness can be based in rational logic or will. Typically, when one says that one wills to make a decision, it is because the intent to control behavior goes against how the person would like to behave. ... People may decide to grant decisional forgiveness not because they rationally believe that forgiveness matches their motivations, but because forgiveness might be consistent with their belief systems” (56).
His statement that “making a decision” typically means one is going “against how a person would like to behave” makes me wonder how decisions and the will are related to emotions and desires. I tend to think that the will is more a function of desires than thoughts. Harry Frankfurt in The Importance of What We Care About (Cambridge, 1988) talks about first order and second order desires; a second order desire is wanting to want something. Perhaps the decision to forgive is better understood as “following a deeper desire” rather than “thoughts trumping feelings” ... but back to the distinction at hand.
In contrast to decisional forgiveness, “emotional forgiveness” means the replacement of feelings of “unforgiveness” with positive emotions toward the other. “Unforgiveness is defined as a complex of emotions experienced at some time later than a transgression ... those emotions involve resentment, bitterness, hostility, hatred, anger and fear. They arise from perceiving that one has experienced a transgression” (49). And, “only people who ruminate angrily (and perhaps anxiously and depressively) will likely develop unforgiveness” (49). In forgiveness, those negative emotions are replaced with emotions like “empathy, sympathy, compassion, romantic love, and altruistic love” (58).
Worthington focuses on emotional forgiveness more than decisional forgiveness because it more clearly leads to our flourishing as humans – in part by avoiding the toxicity of harboring unforgiveness in our hearts. That makes a lot of sense to me.
Biblical and Theological Reflections:
In response to Worthington, I should first of all say that I am a new fan of his. I find his distinctions illuminating, his research vast, and his practice exemplary. I also learned much from the way he showed how “being forgiving” is related to both the personality traits we are born with while also being something we can develop, like a virtue. But I still have some biblical and theological questions that I’ll need to work out in order to fully incorporate his insights and theories into my own working theology. Such as these:
1. What precisely is the relationship between decisional and emotional forgiveness? Worthington’s understanding of emotions draws from A. R. Damasio, The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness (Harcourt, 1999). Reading this book and connecting it into my own “theological anthropology” in which “desire” is a more important category for me than “emotion” will be important. My first steps will be comparing Damasio’s anthropology with that of the theologian David Kelsey in his Eccentric Existence: A Theological Anthropology and with Harry Frankfurt’s moral anthropology.
2. Does scripture privilege emotional or decisional forgiveness? Given there are close parallels between the way God forgives and the way that we as humans forgive, how are both divine and human forgiveness talked about in scripture? In Romans 5 we read both about God’s “wrath” (5:9) and God’s “love” (5:5,8), and yet in Romans 4, there is much more about “reckoning” than emotions. Which is the deeper or more important reality: deciding/reckoning/accounting or emotions/attitudes? How are they related in scripture? What might this mean for the way we tell the gospel? My next step will be comparing Worthington’s account of emotional replacement with the account of forgiveness we find in Nicholas Wolterstorff’s Justice in Love (Eerdmans, 2011).
3. Does God’s work of reconciliation and forgiveness involve “emotional replacement”? Given that God does not have a body, how are we to understand what God’s “emotions” might be (I take God’s “wrath” and “love” to be in part something like emotions)? If God has something like emotions (perhaps divine emotions are the archetype that our emotions are a shadow of), is Damasio correct in so tightly linking emotions to bodies?
Do not get me wrong. The main problem I see is not whether God experiences something analogous to human emotions – for God is love – but whether or not forgiveness and reconciliation involve the “replacement” of one set of emotions for another. David Bentley Hart, in “No Shadow of Turning: On Divine Impassibility” Pro Ecclesia 9/2, writes: “Of course, an understanding of divine apatheia as the absolutely inextinguishable vehemence of infinite love, what the Psuedo-Dionysius calls divine ecstasy or divine eros, which therefore—precisely as impassibility—is ceaselessly active and engaged in creatures, was unimaginable for pagan philosophy” (197). The “impassible” God Christians worship is no stoic deity. But neither do God’s “emotions” turn on a dime. The question is how best to articulate what “forgiveness” means in the unchanging heart of God.
