This is part 8 of a series on forgiveness. See the index here.

There are many misconceptions regarding forgiveness. Let’s discuss a few of them.

This highlights the problem with describing sin in abstract moral, ethical, behavioral, or spiritualized terms. People are completely unable to understand when and how sin creates indebtedness.

This commenter is confused because she doesn’t understand what she is being asked to forgive. This should not be so. Jesus choose to explain sin in the practical and concrete terms of financial and material debt, which is very easy to understand. If someone owes you something, then you must forgive them. If they owe you nothing, then there is nothing for you to forgive.

The reality is that she isn’t supposed to forgive random people, because those people did not sin against her. It is not her place to take the offence of another. You can only forgive someone if they have sinned against you.

This is a common explanation, but scripture never says this. Surfdumb is speculating about what is not contained in scripture. Nowhere in the pages of the Old or New Testament does repentance have a one-to-one relationship with forgiveness. Were it not for Surfdumb’s theological preferences, he wouldn’t have suggested this interpretation which does not exist in the text.

In scripture, the two concepts—repentance and forgiveness—often occur simultaneously together. For example:

But despite being listed together, they are nonetheless independent of each other. To use the language of statistics, they are “confounded” by faith or belief in the name of Christ.

The view that early forgiveness is unjust and makes repentence less likely has already been addressed here in the comment section:

Scripture is rather plain that forgiveness makes repentance more likely because the person who is inclined to repentence will be more likely to repent if they are shown love. The more a person is forgiven, the more likely they are to repent.

Again, this would be obvious if we would just understand sin in practical and concrete terms of financial and material debt. Someone who has had a large monetary debt forgiven is much, much more likely to be grateful than someone who has been shown no kindness or mercy at all. Spiritualizing and abstracting sin hides this simple conclusion found in scripture.

This is just factually incorrect. As we cited in Part 4, in the Mosiaic Law restitution was only sometimes required for certain sins. Furthermore, in the New Testament, restitution has never been a core requirement, because works of the Law cannot lead to salvation.

This gets to the core of forgiveness. The reality is that we can release our sin-debt and forgive those that sin against us. In doing so, we don’t need to concern ourselves with whether they were truly repenting or not. We leave that up to God, who decides for himself whether or not a person should be ultimately forgiven. We can still work to remove sin among the brethren, but we need not hold it against them. That’s exactly what it means to forgive: to release the debt. Just like someone who holds a financial debt, you don’t need them to repent in order to vacate it.

While it is possible to release your anger and hatred while still demanding other satisfaction for the debt, this is only a sort of “reduction” of debt, not a pardon or complete forgiveness. Scripture demands that you forgive completely.

This is simply not the case. No passage clearly teaches that man’s forgiveness towards his brother for a sin-debt is conditional on repentance. While there are certainly passages that include both repentance and forgiveness, there are similarly a number of New Testament references demanding that forgiveness be applied that mention nothing about repentance at all (e.g. the Lord’s Prayer in the Sermon on the Mount). Some are quite forceful, such as this one:

You could make a better argument that God’s forgiveness towards us is conditional on repentance, but even that argument is still unclear, as every potential instance of repentance leading to God’s forgiveness is within the scope of an already existing faith and belief in Christ.

We discussed this in Part 4.

What I find most interesting about this point is that the meanings of these words are quite clear in the Greek. The “if” is unambiguously a conditional. The imperative to forgive is certainly dependent on repentance. It seems plain that this is literally saying to forgive if and only if they repent. If taken strictly literally, forgiveness is conditional.

But, did you notice what Lewis did? He only cited v3 and left out the next verse! If Jesus had stopped speaking in v3, Lewis might have a point. But Jesus kept on talking:

The problem with Lewis’ interpretation is that the Greek is simply too clear in its meaning. The word for repentance clearly and unambiguously means to actually demonstrate a change of behavior. But, the brother in the story is obviously not repentant. Not only has he not changed his ways, but he sins over-and-over again.

So is Jesus contradicting himself? No, of course not. He’s using a figure-of-speech: irony. This irony is even more starkly visible when you compare this with the parallel account in Matthew where Jesus says to forgive not just seven times, but seventy times seven times, an absurdly high number for someone who supposedly truly repented. If you can’t detect Jesus’ sense of humor, you are likely to misunderstand what he is saying.

Lewis is correct that this is the clearest statement you will find on the subject, which is why we are forced to reject the concept of conditional forgiveness.

Let’s look at those verses.

Whenever the book of Matthew talks about repentence (3:2,8,11, 4:17, 11:20-21, 12:41) it does so without mentioning forgiveness at all. When Matthew makes an explicit reference to the forgiveness of sin (9:2-6), Jesus attributes it to faith. There isn’t even a mention of repentance there! Rather than attributing forgiveness to repentance, Matthew attributes it to Jesus’ blood poured out (26:28) as payment for the sins of mankind. This theme runs throughout the New Testament.

In short, Jesus giving woes of doom to cities and their populations for not repenting really says nothing about offering forgiveness to those who sin against you. Part of the core theme of this series is that vengeance is the Lord’s, which is why it is good for people to forgive others and leave the punishments to God or his government agents.

This is a strange thing to cite if your argument is that repentance must take place before forgiveness can happen, because this passage does not mention forgiveness at all. It mentions repentance and belief (that is, faith), but not forgiveness.

Even more strange is that the Gospel of Mark only mentions repentance just three times (1:4, 1:15, 6:12), with Jesus only mentioning this one time. By contrast, forgiveness is mentioned nine times (1:4, 2:5,7,9,10, 3:28-29, 4:12, 11:25). The only time that repentence is mentioned alongside forgiveness is with respect to John the Baptist’s baptism “for” the forgiveness of sins in 1:4, something we will discuss in a later part of the series.

There isn’t anything in Mark 1:14-15 to suggest one way or the other that forgiveness is conditional on repentance. By contrast, four of the nine references in Mark to forgiveness occur in Mark 2:1-12. This passage is especially notable because the only explanation given by Jesus for offering the forgiveness of  sins was faith. There was no mention of repentance at all.

This seems to be a classic example of throwing a scripture passage out there and hoping that no one notices that it doesn’t support the theological claim being made.

No one is claiming that God did not command repentance. Nor is anyone arguing that one can have faith in Christ without repentance. All that is claimed is that true repentance is only enabled by faith in Christ—with its corresponding forgiveness. One cannot truly repent until one is first perfected in Christ.

First, this refers to God’s ultimate forgiveness of sin, not that of a brother forgiving his brother’s debt against him.

Second, repentance and forgiveness are declared in Christ’s name. This is the “confounding” of which I spoke above. With faith (or belief) in Christ comes both repentance and forgiveness.

First, as the one immediately above, this refers to God’s ultimate forgiveness of sin, not that of a brother forgiving his brother’s debt against him.

Second, even more stark than the one immediately above, this time baptism and repentance go together and are explicitly separated from forgiveness. That’s because faith in the name of Christ comes first, which immediately produces forgiveness of sins, which is then followed by acts of repentance and baptism as a result of that faith, for baptism is the outward sign of the inward change.

Conversion—belief or faith in Christ—is clearly implied here. Peter is telling the crowd at Pentecost that they must repent of killing Christ to (rather obviously) believe that he is the resurrected Messiah instead. Thus they will be wiped clean of sin. That’s just the gospel, not a statement saying that repentance precedes faith (let alone  forgiveness).

As before, this has nothing to do with a brother sinning against another.

Here we find an example of simultaneously repenting and asking for forgiveness from God for sin. I have no objection to this, but it doesn’t show that repentance precedes—or, more importantly, causes—forgiveness. It certainly doesn’t weigh in on the subject of forgiveness without repentance, something that even we here agree is worse than forgiveness with repentance.

It also doesn’t give us any insight into whether or not one should forgive their brother without repentance.

Yes, God has commanded that all repent of their sins. You’ll get no objection from me. Again, no one is arguing that because forgiveness is unconditional that repentance is somehow unnecessary. Nor does this imply that you should not forgive your brother for their sins against you unless they repent.

This is an extremely ironic quotation, because of what it actually says in the full context of the passage:

This is another example of the unforgivable sin: the unforgiving will not be forgiven, because they have condemned themselves.

As Jesus stated in the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew, those who do not forgive but choose judgment instead will be judged according to that same standard. In other words, they will not be forgiven. The only way to be forgiven—if you have refused to forgive but chosen judgment instead—is if you repent.

This is a warning against those do not forgive.

As before, it is important to understand the full context. To wit:

The New Testament teaches two distinct concepts. The first is that faith alone leads to forgiveness once and for all. This is called justification. The second is that repentance leads to sanctification, an ongoing process of being made holy. That is what is going on here.

To repent means that you are sanctified and so suffer no loss. How do I know? Because Paul is here referencing his teaching found in the previous letter:

This highlights the difference between justification and sanctification. What Paul is telling the church in 2 Corinthians is that their works are holy and so they suffer no loss. Through their repentance they were sanctified. But had they failed to repent, their works would have been burned up and they would have been saved, but only like escaping through a fire.

This is a passage talking about the lost unbelievers who have no understanding of the truth, those who are captive and ensnared by the Devil. I really like this passage a lot, because it reinforces the idea that Christians are not to fight evil in the world. Fixing the world is not our duty and calling. God will destroy the Devil on the Day of Judgment. We are, rather, restricted to gently making disciples and building up the church.

In any case, I’m not sure why this passage was cited as evidence of conditional forgiveness. I’m not a universalist, after all. I don’t believe that those who do not believe in Christ will be saved.

Anyway, that’s more than enough for today. If you think I missed anything important, let me know in the comments.