Rethinking Christian Forgiveness: Theological, Philosophical, and Psychological Explorations.By James K. Voiss, SJ.

Abstract

James Voiss’s study sets out to answer the question as to whether there is a distinctively Christian understanding of forgiveness. It’s a big question to which his book offers a substantial and positive answer. Voiss identifies forgiveness as a key part of Jesus’ teaching and commission to his disciples, running as a ‘unifying theme’ holding the Christian story together. However, he is also aware that events in recent history (the Holocaust, the Killing Fields, etc.) have raised profound challenges about the nature and even the possibility of forgiveness and prompted wider interest in forgiveness beyond the realms of theology. Accordingly his book sets out first to explore these new philosophical and psychological approaches (Part I), then to see what points of commonality can be found across their respective approaches (Part II), and then to outline a theological approach which can take proper account of such new insights (Part III). In Part I he explores philosophical approaches in terms of two different traditions, the ‘French-Continental’ (focusing more on the concept and possibility of forgiveness) and the ‘Anglo-American’ (focusing more on the way forgiveness operates within the context of moral philosophy), and then recent psychological studies (exploring the relationship of forgiveness to moral harm). In Part II he starts by recognizing some of the unresolved tensions or ‘faultlines’ between these different approaches and then goes on to identify in a more descriptive way the key issues which a properly reformulated Christian understanding of forgiveness will need to address.