Further on forgiveness

Just because we struggle with forgiveness, a former pastor reminded me recently, doesn’t mean we’ll appreciate a book on the topic. Some resources can actually be annoying, perhaps because they’re so challenging!

Annoyance notwithstanding, however, here are a few good resources to help us understand the concept as well as live it out.

David Augsburger, a minister of the Mennonite Church and professor of pastoral care and counselling at Fuller Theological Seminary, has written extensively on forgiveness, including Caring Enough to Forgive – Caring Enough Not to Forgive (1981), which defines differences between genuine and false forgiveness, and Helping People Forgive (1996), a resource for pastors and those in the helping professions.

In The New Freedom of Forgiveness (2000), Augsburger expands on his previous work to provide an even more comprehensive message on the subject. He emphasizes that when we forgive, we are set free from bondage. An excerpt, describing “an Anabaptist theology of forgiveness,” can be found at the online site, Third Way Café.

Also at Third Way Café is a short, helpful article called “Forgiving Yourself” by Melodie Davis. She says that forgiving yourself is different than forgiving others, but just as important.

Another author of Christian bestsellers on forgiveness is the late Lewis Smedes. (He also taught at Fuller – for 25 years). His books include Forgive and Forget (1996) and The Art of Forgiving (1997). On a radio program aired in 1997, Smedes shared five things everyone should know about forgiving: it’s the only way to be fair to yourself; forgivers are not doormats; forgivers are not fools; you don’t have to wait until he says he’s sorry; and, forgiving is a journey.

When Wilma Derksen’s daughter Candace was murdered in 1984, she and her husband Cliff “chose the word forgiveness” as their response. But learning how to forgive is long, difficult work, she says, and the pressure to do so may add to the violation victims of crimes have already experienced. Forgiveness takes “sacrifice, work, time, and more sacrifice.”

Derksen has shared her learning on forgiveness in various formats. She recounts events around Candace’s murder in Have You Seen Candace? (1991, 2002). The Derksens’ story, as well as others’ journeys towards forgiveness, are told on video (see Mennonite Media). The book Confronting the Horror: The Aftermath of Violence (2002) is primarily for victims of violent crime, with application to other traumatic situations.

Unsettled Weather: How do I forgive? (Herald Press, 2005) is a 7-lesson group study on forgiveness by Derksen (together with Tym Elias and Brenda Suderman) that probes topics such as where forgiveness may be needed, how one starts, why it’s so difficult, and what to do if stuck. The lessons use a storytelling approach, involving the authors’ or group members’ stories and the biblical account of Joseph.

In The Sunflower, Simon Wiesenthal tells the story of being a prisoner in a concentration camp. One day he was pulled out of his work detail and taken to the bedside of a dying Nazi soldier who wished to confess – to a Jew – the killings of Jews in which he had participated. Wiesenthal listened, and even allowed the dying man to hold his hand, but remained silent to the request for forgiveness. Twenty-five years later, he told the story and posed the question to leading intellectuals: what would they have done? The responses were gathered into a book. The revised edition (1997) contains 10 of the originals and adds 36.

Responses reflect diverse religious and non-religious beliefs. They may not be satisfying from a Christian perspective, but the book’s value is the profound dilemmas around forgiveness that it highlights, and the sense of the larger environment of evil in which individual agony may unfold. It’s into this environment that God speaks his message of forgiveness.

—DD