This is part 12 of a series on forgiveness. See the index here.

On Easter Sunday, Bnonn Tennant published “Happy Easter, Forgive your Enemies.” I had no idea that he was going to post this in the midst of my ongoing series On Forgiveness. Similarly, he had no idea that I had already written “On Forgiveness, Part 9” in which I responded to one of his earlier posts on forgiveness from 2017. What a strange happenstance.

I’m not sure if Tennant has been following along with my series and decided to write his own article confirming most of what I wrote or if we both simply looked at scripture and independently came to the same conclusions. Whatever the case, Tennant’s article is a lengthy “summary” of this series.

In this article, I’m going to review Tennant’s post, highlighting some of the things I especially agree with as well as examining some of the disagreements. If you don’t want to bother, here is the conclusion in a nutshell:

I agree with almost everything he wrote except some of the ways he ties in Old Testament atonement with New Testament forgiveness. Despite these relatively minor flaws, what he wrote is a far better summary of the Bible’s teachings on forgiveness than most major denominations have produced.

Keep that in mind as you read the following critiques.

The Best of the Best

Let’s look at my favorite points, with minimal commentary.

This involves the Hebrew concept of agency or covenant. We’ll discuss this some more below.

Ultimate, permanent forgiveness in the New Testament is about debt cancellation (as opposed to covering in the Old Testament). It’s about Jubilee, not atonement (which is temporary).

Although the New Testament barely mentions atonement at all, 1 Peter 4:8 says that love covers—atones for—a multitude of sins. 1 John 4:10 states that love is Jesus’ atoning sacrifice for us. This confirms what Tennant has said here.

This is why in the Parable of the Unmerciful Servant in Matthew 18, the King brings back the debt he had forgiven. To fail to forgive is unforgivable.

This also explains Bruce Charlton’s stance on repentance for those who cannot repent during this mortal life, or who die without knowing Jesus. He believes that what people truly want will matter on the Day of Judgment.

The Church and State are the hand of God, while your only responsibility is to forgive.

The Old and New Covenant

This is not precisely correct.

As noted throughout this series (especially Part 5) and in the comments, repentance and sacrifice were closely linked in the Old Covenant. As I noted in Part 11, John the Baptist taught repentance and baptism for the forgiveness of sins. But once Jesus came, what mattered most was faith. Paul explained:

Under the Old Covenant, repentance was the only option available for the forgiveness of sins. But, in the New Covenant, Jesus offered something different.

As I’ve explained in the comments, in Hebrew thought, a leader (of a family, clan, government, or divine realm) could send agents on his behalf who were, legally speaking, the leader himself. When they spoke in his name, it was as if the man himself was speaking. Consequently, the leader was fully responsible for those under his domain; for what they said and did, because when they spoke and acted, it was as if he was speaking and acting.

This is what the Manosphere calls the patriarch, what Radix Fidem calls the Feudal Lord, and what the Romans called the paterfamilias. All reflect this notion that the leader has full and complete rights over whatever was under his domain. The people are his under a covenant.

When Christ is our Lord and master, he has the legal right and ability to impute—or declare—righteousness to those within his covenantal relationship. This is often called justification (or being justified). He has the full legal authority and duty to take our sin-debt and do something about it. He can choose to take it onto himself or to ensure that the punishment falls on the individual who sins. Whether we take the punishment or he does, either way justice is done.

Consider:

What constitutes forgiveness in the Old Testament is not the same as what constitutes forgiveness in the New Testament. God only has the right to forgive sins under the terms of the covenant that he has with sinners. But which covenant are we talking about?

Under the Old Covenant, that of the Law, blood—that is, death—was required to cover over the sins of mankind. This covering—that is literally what atonement means—is temporary and does not remove the sin. It allows God’s vengeance to “pass over.” When Jesus died, he temporarily removed sin under the terms of the Old Covenant. It does not involve individual choice. For example:

Thus did Jesus’ sacrifice allow for the chance to reconcile, but it did not remove the sin, only deferred the punishment. It removed the burden of the Law in order to allow for the possibility—but not a guarantee—of reconciliation.

It is only under the New Covenant that sin is done away with permanently. This is a result of an individual placing their faith in Jesus Christ. Only by faith is one in a covenantal relationship with Jesus. Only then can the sins be permanently transferred from the sinner onto Christ and cancelled.

Under the terms of the Old Covenant, God cannot simply choose not to inpute sin to us. Justice must be served!

But under the New Covenant, there is a way. However, to impute Christ’s righteousness requires faith in Christ (i.e. the New Covenant), that is, to be bound to him by covenant.

Tennant makes this citation…

…but we need to cite more of it to get a proper sense for what is being said:

God sent forth Jesus as an atoning sacrifice to satisfy the requirements of the Law under the Old Covenant, to cover (or pass over) previously committed sin. This was efficacious for the whole world—Jews and Gentiles—just as the blood and bulls was in the OT. But it is only by faith and trust in New Covenant of Jesus that we are fully redeemed and declared righteous.

As noted throughout this series (especially Part 5) and in the comments, the Bible hardly discusses atonement at all. In fact, Bnonn mentions atonement/covering/passing over eleven times. By my count, this is more references than are found in the entire New Testament!

The passage in Romans is the only one clearly attributed to Paul. It is good to understand what Jesus’ blood did under the Old Covenant to enable us to choose Christ under the New Covenant, but it is not essential to understand this in order to actually have faith in Christ. As I noted in Part 11, atonement was mainly of interest to the Jews (i.e. in Hebrews and James).

I want to correct one subtle error:

The sacrifices did cover sin. That was their very purpose: to hide the sins from God’s view. What they didn’t do was remove sin. That’s why Hebrews says that the blood of animals could not take away—cancel—sin.

This error leads to another faulty conclusion:

Church Discipline

The funny thing about this is that Bnonn Tennant was excommunicated. If he believed what he wrote, he would be forced to conclude that he will be punished eternally because his church threw him out.

It is also funny that Tennant mentioned the Keys but didn’t include that reference. Here it is:

(There is an exegetical problem here. Jesus said he will give the keys, that is, in the future. But, Jesus still has the keys in Revelation 1:18, long after the church was established and (traditionally) after Peter was already dead. Tennant has failed to identify when the church will inherit the kingdom.)

What do John 20:21-23, Matthew 16:19, and Matthew 18:18 have in common? Why did he implicitly or explicitly cite them all? Because they all involve a similar grammatical structure in Greek.

In Matthew, the verb “to be” is a future passive periphrastic, not a simple future. The verb “bind” is a (past) perfect passive participle. Together these form a “future perfect indicative,” indicating a state of completion. It indicates that in the future the results of something that had been completed in the past will still be true. Another, more verbose, way to translate this is “will have already been bound” and “will have already been loosed.” It is not a future imperative.

The language of John is slightly different, but accomplishes something similar. It does not say “if you forgive another, their sins will be forgiven” it says “if you forgive another, their sins have been forgiven.” When you forgive or retain another’s sins, you are not deciding that their sins are forgiven or retained.

This is extremely important because the church is not binding and retaining sins, it is merely describing what has already been bound or retained in heaven. In other words, it is acting on behalf of God as his agent, not determining anything on its own. When the church excommunicates someone, what it “decides” is not determinative or prescriptive.

(Of course, binding and loosing probably means what it does in Isaiah 61:1-3, not what Jewish rabbis believed)

This is why Tennant could and did reject the legitimacy of his own excommunication: it failed to describe what had already been bound or loosed.

The point is that neither your nor the church get to decide whether another person is forgiven. The church gets to decide whether or not to excommunicate someone and the State gets to enact justice with the sword, but only God judges whether another person is to be forgiven on the Day of Judgment. Thus even if the Church of the State get it wrong, it all eventually gets resolved by God himself.

This should be obvious. But it isn’t:

It’s not that the church is not required to forgive—that would indeed be to overturn justice—but that it cannot forgive. The church does not hold the sin-debt, and so it is not in a position to either forgive or retain that debt. It is merely a third-party whose task it is to facilitate reconciliation or else excommunication. It has no legal right to the sin-debt or the right of retribution.

Jesus’ command to bind and loose is not about sin, it’s about the validity of witness testimony and judgments by the congregation. In particular, it was a subtle warning to maintain unity of will and purpose with Christ. The church is obligated to be Christ’s agent.

Jesus isn’t saying “you get to decide what is right or wrong” he is saying twice “If you do this, you better have the purest hearts and get both your witnesses and your judgments right!” If you don’t believe me, look up the Old Testament references to God pronouncing judgment on unjust trials before the congregation where there were false witnesses. God did not honor those judgments just because they followed the right procedure!

If the church fails in this task, it loses its legitimacy. Thus, excommunication goes both ways. In a proper excommunication, the sinner is rejected from the church. But in an improper excommuncation, the believer and Jesus are rejected by the “church.”

Indeed, immediately after this warning, we notice that Peter got the message:

Having just recognized Jesus’ twice-stated warning about not bearing false witness or coming to a conclusion that went against God, Peter immediately realized the importance of forgiveness. Peter immediately understood that church discipline should not be applied as a weapon, but only when not doing so would tarnish the church:

Only forgiveness must always be offered.

How Jesus Forgave Our Sins

God is the one sinned against. You are the one who has sinned. You owe the sin-debt to the debt-holder—to God. The price God demands for what is owed for sin is death.

During his earthly ministry, Jesus agreed to take on the sins of those relatively few who had faith in him. He forgave his followers of their sins and made them whole. But, the original sin-debt itself remained unpaid before God, for no blood had been shed. He had only transferred the sin-debt from their ledger sheet onto his own. Jesus was still obligated to repay the debt that he had taken on behalf of has vassals (as was his legal right to do so). This meant he had to die, for he had to shed blood—his blood—to pay for all that indebtedness that he had agreed to repay on behalf of his followers.

When Jesus was crucified, he acquired the rights to each and every man’s certificate of indebtedness. He paid for it with his blood. But your certificate of indebtedness was not cancelled, rather it was purchased by his blood. Jesus paid God—the debt-holder—for the rights to that debt, to cover over it for a time. He bought you as he would a slave at a market. This was not enough to free you from your slavery to sin, but it gave you a chance.

Then you, like those who came before you, chose to accept the gift of Jesus by becoming his through your faith.

Now—with you his slave and he your master and the price paid to acquire the rights to your sin-debt—suddenly something amazing had happened: Jesus had become both the debt-holder and the rightful master of the debtor. So, he simply cancelled your debt and declared you righteous. As unfair as it was, no one could gainsay his right to be generous, for the sin-debt had been purchased and it was his to do with as he saw fit. He freed you from slavery in a single act of Jubilee, taking you from slave to family member.

Thus, did Jesus let go of our debts after he purchased—paid the price for—them from God and after we became his by faith.