Hi Billy, > On Nov 12, 2018, at 7:04 PM, Billy Rojas <[email protected]> > wrote: > > My point was simply that forgiveness has to be appropriate or it can backfire > on you. > > Lots of good things in life are like that, including love. Someone can love > the wrong person, after all, someone who is abusive or violent or > irresponsible. > We all know people who have loved someone who was wrong for them > and paid a terrible price for "wrong love," to put it that way.
You know, that is a fantastic point. I think you may be on to something. Modern Christianity has a deeply confused understanding of forgiveness. As Chris mentioned, the English word is overloaded with many different connotations: > The first sentence of yours, above, exemplifies the point I was trying to > make. I think the problem with the Tibbits definition of forgiveness is that > it runs counter to the common use of forgiveness. It could be better stated > as, put the evil ones in your past, as much as you can, so you don’t get > impeded by their evil. Maybe we Radical Centrists can come up with some better terminology. One possibility is to distinguish between “internal” and “external” forgiveness: how we treat ourselves versus how we treat others. Perhaps we could use a word like Transcendance for the internal aspect of forgiveness. Like Chris said, we want to put the evil ones in our past, rather than being consumed by revenge and anger. I think you once described it as being “objective” and taking the long view, rather than caught up our sense of being wronged. What a lot of people imply when they say forgiveness is more about the other person, and might be better termed Reconciliation: “hey, don’t worry about it, we’re all good.” As you rightly point out, God has a REALLY high bar for reconciliation. It requires repentance, restoration, and rebuilding of trust. It is completely conditional. On the other hand, Transcendence is an unconditional practice, very much like the Buddhist idea of Compassion. In meditation, we seek to free ourselves from the personal sense of injury in order to be able to see the bigger picture and make wise choices compatible with our long-term values and vision. We refuse to be controlled by the wrong others have done to us. This could help us better understand verses like Ephesians 4:32: > Be kind and compassionate to one another, forgiving each other, just as in > Christ God forgave you. Yes, Christ on the cross transcended his enemies by asked God to forgive them. But he also made it abundantly clear that He will come back to punish those who don’t repent. Does that clear things up? — Ernie P. -- -- Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community <[email protected]> Google Group: http://groups.google.com/group/RadicalCentrism Radical Centrism website and blog: http://RadicalCentrism.org --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
