Forgiveness of Sin in the Relation to the Community of Believers

Abstract

"A large number of casualties in our day and our eroded testimony to the world around us, allows for a lot of grieving but also calls for the reassessment of our understanding of sin, forgiveness and the context of restoration: the community of the forgiven. True, there is around us a growing concern for the problem of sin. However, it is more a face-saving concern vis-a-vis the secularized world and the Church. Unfortunately, it is less a concern compared to God and His righteous standards. How do we define sin? How are we to understand the forgiveness of sin? How do we recognize it, how do we administer it? These are some valid questions that need to be addressed. The purpose behind the present research is not to sift the Bible through our experience to accommodate our generation’s understanding of sin but the other way around: to sift experience through the Bible, expose misunderstanding and thus proceed toward restoration through a way of understanding godliness. The intend is not to fill an ontological gap, but rather address the current situation from a biblical and pastoral perspective, into a situation in which theologians and churches together have lost the ability to talk meaningfully about topics such as sin and the internal workings of the human soul and thus have rendered as irrelevant the meaning of Forgiveness that the Gospel brings. The concern in the following pages is to understand the concept of sin and the experiential dynamics of sin and that of Forgiveness and its personal and corporate experience. Even though a better understanding of Forgiveness may not rid our lives of sins nor make us the best forgivers in the world, it will alert us to what is happening around us and offer insight that can become opportunities. "