In Review
Reframing Forgiveness
An Interview with Matthew Ichihashi Potts
Matthew Ichihashi Potts is the Plummer Professor of Christian Morals at Harvard Divinity School and the Pusey Minister in the Memorial Church of Harvard University. His research focuses on sacramental and moral theology, ministry and pastoral theology, religion and literature, and preaching. HDS student Suzie Greco met with Potts to discuss his latest book, Forgiveness: An Alternative Account.
Bulletin: What led you to explore the limitations of the understandings of forgiveness dominant in Christian communities?
Potts: One of the reasons I wrote the book was that I felt that unless a theology of forgiveness is legible to victims, it isn’t reliable. And it seemed to me that the ways forgiveness is conceptualized and practiced, especially in Christian communities where it is a highly valued virtue, is not accountable to victims and causes more harm. I was hearing from two directions that forgiveness does not work. The first was from personal pastoral encounters with people who had experienced individual abuse or trauma. The second was from within social activism, where there has been a growing critique of forgiveness practices, especially around issues of social justice, racial justice, and gender equality—a recognition that the form of forgiveness that we have presumed to be the only form of forgiveness in the Christian West is one that is highly gendered and racialized.
Bulletin: Can you give an overview of your new framework for forgiveness?
Potts: There are two primary problems with the way forgiveness is usually practiced or understood. First, forgiveness is often collapsed into anger abatement or anger management. This stigmatizes the often quite justified anger of people who have been victims of harm, who still feel angry because they have been traumatized, and yet they believe it is their religious responsibility to stifle and process that anger. Anger can be a source of stress and can be managed therapeutically, but, if you dive back hundreds of years into Christian tradition, you find discussions of the moral usefulness of anger. Anger is a sign that we have been harmed, and it informs us that we need a moral response to harm. Of course, we shouldn’t abuse our anger, and we have to think about how we deal with that anger, but anger in itself is not a moral problem. So it is actually important for us to listen to our own anger and the anger of others. We are in a culture where there are certain categories of people who are less allowed to be angry. Men are allowed to be angry. Women and people of color are not. I think that maybe this is the problem with our conceptions of forgiveness.
The other problem is that forgiveness is often collapsed into reconciliation, both strategically and rhetorically. I think if there is something like reconciliation on the horizon, forgiveness is probably a step toward that, but what I really worry about is the idea that when we forgive, we also necessarily initiate a process of reconciliation. Reconciliation is often dangerous for victims unless the person who has caused harm is trustworthy enough not to cause harm again. Even by implying that forgiveness is a first step toward reconciliation, we are telling a victim to take a step toward the person who harmed them and who might still threaten them harm. So if there’s going to be something like forgiveness, it must not require any step toward restoring relationships.
In the New Testament you don’t find much evidence that Jesus is talking about anger management or anger abatement when he speaks about forgiveness. And while reconciliation is lauded, Jesus doesn’t command us to reconcile with our enemies, he commands us to forgive them. Paul says “God will reconcile all things” (Colossians 1:20). Reconciliation is God’s work, not necessarily human work. I’m not sure we as humans even have the capacity to accomplish reconciliation with people who are our enemies and who still threaten us harm. Within many versions of the Christian tradition, where something like forgiveness is a command, why would we pressure victims to suppress their anger and reconcile themselves to those who have harmed them, using moral categories that are obligatory? What I wanted to do with my studies was imagine a form of forgiveness that can exist independently of anger and reconciliation. But it was tricky because those two things substantially constitute what we think of as forgiveness. What is left for forgiveness?
Bulletin: So how do you envision shifting individual and communal thinking about forgiveness?
Potts: First what is needed is patience. To recognize the depth of a harm, we have to understand that healing is not quick or easy. Forgiveness is often seen as a magic quick fix—once you forgive, grace has been bestowed, and then everything is resolved. But I don’t think that’s how grace works in the Christian tradition. We think about the resurrection of Jesus as the pinnacle moment in the Christian story, where a hugely signal trauma that happened—the crucifixion, the death of the God-man—is repaired. Might this one way of reading Easter Sunday be what we’ve actually been wrestling with for two thousand years? Jesus still had scars, he disappeared, he went up into the heavens, and the disciples were left alone, they suffered that loss still. Moving away from a trauma is a process; it takes a long time, and ought to take a long time, and our willingness to let it do so is a signal to people who have been harmed that we take seriously how badly they have been hurt.
Bulletin: Can you say more about his process?
Potts: Peace builder John Paul Lederach, who works in post-conflict areas, talks about this process. Just after peace accords have been signed, after violence has ceased, he often finds bureaucrats and other officials very eager to move reconciliation processes along quickly. His main job is to slow everything down. He says, paradoxically, that pessimism is needed when you walk into a situation like that. If you don’t acknowledge the depth of harm and the mistrust on both sides, then they will not believe that the peace will hold. You aren’t honoring them in the reality of the situation. You have to be able to sit with people and let them express all that pain and honor their mistrust. That’s the gift of pessimism—this patience.
Matthew Ichihashi Potts. Photo by Justin Knight
That’s a large-scale example of people in conflict with each other, but it resonates with hospital chaplains. When you walk into a hospital and something terrible has happened to someone, you never say to them, “This is what God wanted,” or “They are in a better place.” You never rush a person to the happy ending, because all that says to them is that you are not willing to sit with them in their pain. The most important part of the reality in that moment is their pain. So what reconciliation practice demands is a willingness to let go of the urgency and haste to arrive at reconciliation.
Ironically and paradoxically, the way you get to reconciliation is by letting go of it and just sitting with people who tell you, “It’s impossible, I will never reconcile with that person,” because that pessimism is where that person is, and what you most need to do as a pastor or peacemaker is to honor that pain. Now, I think this is tricky for Christian communities because reconciliation is a goal in the New Testament and something we are to be aiming for, so we rush to reconciliation in situations of harm. But the only way to arrive at it is through Good Friday and Holy Saturday. Our hope is that we will arrive on Sunday, but it might not feel like that.
Bulletin: So, you see forgiveness as a process like mourning?
Potts: Yes, what forgiveness does is try to live with the unalterable fact that harm has been done and cannot be undone. The effects of it can be mitigated in some cases, but in others it cannot. The harm cannot be undone by retaliation, or by retribution, or pretending I’m not angry anymore or stifling my anger, and it can’t be undone by reconciliation. We try to build a new life in the wake of harm. This is going to feel more like mourning and grieving and not like a miracle or triumph. I tend to think about forgiveness in situations where people have been killed, where it is most obvious that forgiveness cannot bring back what has been lost. Deeply grief-stricken and full of lament, we must try to figure out a way forward.
Bulletin: How do individuals or communities move forward after inconceivable harm?
Potts: Again, I liken this movement to a kind of mourning. If someone you love dies, you wake up the next morning asking: “How can I go on? How can I live this life, because it doesn’t make sense anymore? How can the world still be the world when my world is no longer my world?” What mourning does, day by day, is it tries to start again. It’s a very slow process that seems like an impossible task at many points. A person in deep mourning will not believe that there can be a life rebuilt.
One might say, “I can fix this, I can undo the past if I lash out in retaliation”; or “I can fix this, I can undo the past if I pretend like it never happened and give up my anger and hastily reconcile.” But the willingness to let the past stand as irrevocable, the refusal of magical thinking, opens up the possibility of building a new life out of the only world we actually have, the one that has been. The refusal of a false restoration of the old world opens the possibilities for a new one. And that will spur the imagination, but this doesn’t happen quickly. As with the example of John Paul Lederach, it has to happen with a lot of patience, which is why victims of abuse need support from their community to carry them through difficult days, to be patient with them, rather than to encourage them to try to restore a past that cannot be recovered.
Bulletin: You ask, “What if forgiveness uniquely reckoned with the permanence of a wound?” But we tend to shield our eyes from wounds rather than accepting them.
Potts: Yes, we are pretty bad in this area, unless we’re forced to do it. I turn again to the example of pastoral care at the end of a life. A lot of folks don’t know you’re not supposed to say, “They are in a better place” or “There’s a meaning in this.” But most pastors and chaplains are trained to know this. When they go to visit someone who is dying, they know that the task is to just sit with that person and sit with the fact of it. I think we need to use this as a model for how to think about irrevocable harm. We should be willing to sit with it and be patient. Most often, we do turn away from grave harm. Even in our ways of talking about the resurrection, we often turn from the challenges, afflictions, complexity, and trauma faced by that early Christian community, and instead we rush to read it as a happy ending. Maybe the ending is happy, but it’s more of a new beginning. In fact, in the earliest gospel accounts people were not happy at all. They were scared and frightened and confused by the resurrection.
Turning now to the politics of this country: we don’t want to remind ourselves of our culpability and our own bad history. I think of the policing of the teaching of history that we are seeing, especially in regard to racism and slavery. Some of the official rationale is that we don’t want people today to feel uncomfortable about our history. We want to spare young people with a particular identity from feeling guilt, culpability, or responsibility. I see that as an aversion to discomfort, pain, trauma, and harm. The refusal even to register it is a real problem is, in my reading, the exact opposite of what the Christian vision invites us to do—to sit in those places knowing that we cannot erase the harm, and that, if there is going to be a way forward, it will be through recovery with the wound. I think this is true on a political scale. The future will depend on the degree to which we can reckon with our history. Some people and institutions are trying to do this, but nationally, we are doing a bad job, with some actually working against it.
Bulletin: Can you say a bit more about institutional forgiveness?
Potts: I lean heavily on Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a German pastor and theologian, who died at the end of World War II. Writing against anti-Semitism, he said that the church needed not just to dress the wounds of those who were harmed under the wheel of the oppressor but to realize that the church itself was a spoke in that wheel and that it had lost all credibility. The church had been interested in its own self-preservation for so long it had forgotten that it was supposed to be an agent of transformation in the world. I think we see this in our Christian institutions today, including my own. Institutions protect power and hierarchy, and even nonhierarchical churches protect clergy for the sake of self-preservation. We are still really bad at talking about how deeply shameful our histories are with respect to anti-Semitism in all of our denominations in European Christianity. We are also not good at talking about our deep complicity with our own history of colonialism. We just don’t like to talk about this stuff.
As a minister of the Harvard Memorial Church, I think of how Jesus begins his ministry being baptized by John and then repeating what John had been preaching. Jesus’s mission is that of preaching repentance. Thinking of Jesus and Bonhoeffer, it seems the first thing that the European Christian church should be doing is engaging in acts of repentance—to be as transparent as possible about all the ways we’ve gone awry, not to be hasty about reconciling with those we’ve betrayed, but rather to recognize how deep the harm is, which means being able to sit with it for a while. There has to be this period of deep repentance, and I think we’re entering it, and I think we’ll do it or we’ll die.
Bulletin: You discuss the economic framework used for speaking about forgiveness. What are some of its limitations?
Potts: In the European West, the words that we use to translate the ancient language for forgiveness found in the New Testament are similar in English, German, and French, and relate to gift. We tend to think about morals in the economic terms of debt and repayment: when I wrong someone, I owe them a debt that I need to repay somehow. In some cases this may be a useful framework, but in grave cases of harm, where a dept cannot be repaid, it is a really bad metaphor around which to situate morals. Yet it is a very persuasive and dominant one, and also the one used in the Christian West to talk about the death of Jesus. We have an infinite debt of sin to God that only God can repay, and it can only be repaid through punishment, at least in one telling of the story. So, the God-man is punished, the payment is made, and everything is even again. I do not think that this is a necessary interpretation of the Christian New Testament. It becomes dominant in Europe in the Middle Ages and is clearly articulated in the Protestant Reformation, with differing versions of understanding the meaning of Jesus’s suffering and death. We need to shake loose from that economic metaphor and start thinking about moral harms, not as as depts that need to be repaid, but as facts that need to be lived with and loved beyond. This is what the Christian tradition asks us to do. Post-resurrection, Jesus is not walking around with his disciples, but is gone again, and they are still living with loss in this fundamental way.
There are other ways to interpret the New Testament words that are translated as forgiveness. And although they have their own meanings that are tied to economics—I don’t want to discount those etymologies—they also have roots in this idea of distance, freedom, letting loose, or moving on. For a reconstructive theology of forgiveness, we might want to lean to some of those possibilities in the Greek words to try to break free from the economic fetters that weigh down our moral relation.
Bulletin: While your book is oriented to Christian communities, might it also speak across multireligious communities?
Potts: That’s a good question! And honestly, I don’t know how to answer it. I was glad to see a nice review in Lion’s Roar, a Buddhist publication. But it’s difficult because a lot of what I write is a kind of Sermon on the Mount ethic of loving your enemies and asking, “What does loving your enemy look like?” To be clear, I don’t think it means to have warm feelings toward your enemy. Figuring out what loving your enemy looks like becomes very complicated, and that’s what I spend a lot of energy in the book doing. But this is a particularly Christian teaching, so it is a challenge for me to think through what this might mean to other traditions, partly because I don’t know the other traditions well enough and partly because I would not presume to tell other traditions how they ought to receive it. But having worked with comparativists here at Harvard, I think that one of the best things that comparative work can do is dig deeply into your own tradition and then let others tell you what they see resonating from their tradition. I hope that the issue of forgiveness, and all its complexities, is interesting enough that those who are not Christians will read my book and be interested in what a Christian, who is really trying to dig into the Christian tradition, might want to say about forgiveness. I would be eager to listen to others say how it reaches or fails their tradition.
For those who aren’t religious, I do see a potential in the positionality of loving your enemies. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus says that he did not come to abolish the law but to fulfill the law, and right after saying this, he teaches: “You’ve heard it said, an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, but I tell you love your enemies. Bless those who curse you.” Then he says something that almost doesn’t make sense: “This is in fulfillment of the law, not an abolishment of the law.” The teaching of like for like, tooth for tooth, comes from the Hebrew Bible. There is this idea of balancing harm, of lex talionis—the law of retaliation that we see spreading out in the ancient Near East. But there is another way to read this passage, thinking about the context under which this law was first given. Considering the vast discrepancies in power between wealthy and poor people, what the law was saying is that the eye of the poor person is of no less value than the eye of the wealthy person and that there should be a fundamental equality between them. This was the logic of the law in practical terms, but there is little evidence that anybody actually plucked out anybody’s eye in the ancient world as punishment. Instead, the text was usually interpreted as signaling the need for some sort of monetary compensation. There was this idea that all people, regardless of differences in power or status, were equal before God.
So, I see Jesus saying that his Sermon on the Mount is a fulfillment of that law rather than its abolishment. He is saying God loves your enemy even if they harmed you, and so your response to your enemy has to acknowledge God’s love for that enemy. What that looks like in practice is a very complicated moral question, but it starts from this idea that God loves my enemy. Now that’s not necessarily translatable to other religions, but the idea that people are equal before God might be legible across religious traditions or might provide opportunity for some dialogues. But, again, I am speaking from this Christian tradition, and I’m really just eager to wait for others who engage with the book to tell me where they found a place of connection in this Christian account.
Suzie Greco, MTS ’24, is the founder and director of Italian Parish Records, a nonprofit preserving Italy’s Catholic parish records, and a committee chair for the Global Collaborative, a survivor-led network of child advocacy organizations, academic and faith-based institutions, and governments committed to ending child sexual abuse.
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