What follows is an excerpt from a book I'm writing on apology. In trying to make sense of what we think of as an 'apology' is in the Christian scriptures, I consider what the word for forgiveness--sungnômê--could possibly have meant. What I write below is simply me thinking out loud. The book is very much 'in progress'. 

Many translations of ancient Greek texts use the English term ‘forgiveness’ for sungnômê. But it usually doesn’t mean that. In fact, we could easily argue that it never means that, precisely because there is no ancient Greek equivalent of the modern English term ‘forgiveness’.

David Konstan (Before Forgiveness) has masterfully demonstrated that our current conception of forgiveness does not come about until sometime during the Enlightenment. Thus, we are left in a linguistic bind. No ancient terms, whether in Greek or Latin or any other ancient language, are exactly equivalent to our use of the terms ‘apology’ and ‘forgiveness’ as used in the twenty-first-century in the west. At best, then, any translation of sungnômê into English is going to be approximate. If you speak more than one language, I don’t need to explain why this is the case. My mother tongue is English but living in Belgium meant that I learned Dutch and living in Germany meant that I learned German. What that has given me (besides the unique sense of humiliation for saying something in another language that sounds really stupid) is the appreciation for what can and cannot be said in a given language.

If we take the Christian Bible, there are many translations and thus many different renderings of what the original Greek text is thought by the translators to mean. That’s right: what the translators think those original words are supposed to mean. In most cases, it is reasonably clear. Yet there are other cases where the meaning is remarkably ambiguous and translators must conjecture what the meaning could possibly be. Competent translators are not merely guessing, but they don't know.

One of my former students grew up in a very conservative church in which it was assumed that the Apostle Paul had used the King James Version. When she began to study Greek, she was bowled over by the fact that so many passages in the New Testament were considerably more ambiguous than she had been taught. For her, it caused a crisis of faith that led to complete disbelief. That trajectory is one followed by Bart Ehrman, who also studied at Wheaton College. According to his own account, he began as a fundamentalist and now considers himself an atheist/agnostic, which means that he does not believe that God exists (thus atheist) but doesn’t see himself as having absolute evidence for that view (thus agnostic). In both cases, the assumption that 'what the text says is immediately clear' proved to be wrong and unhelpful.

Let me give a specific example that relates to our concern about the nature of apology and forgiveness. As a gay person who grew up in the Evangelical milieu, I was fascinated to discover that the words used by Paul to describe what everyone assumed meant homosexuals are, at best, ambiguous. He says that “neither pornoi, nor idolaters, nor adulterers nor malakoi, nor arsenokoitai, nor thieves, nor the greedy, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor robbers will inherit the kingdom of God” (I Cor. 6:9-10). That’s quite a list! If you are like me, the first question you may have is: what do all of these seemingly very different kinds of people have in common?

When Paul speaks of the first term on the list, ‘pornoi’, the word that comes readily to mind for an English-speaker is ‘pornography’. That wouldn’t be wholly off the mark, since the term could be translated as ‘immoral persons’ or ‘male prostitutes’, but it could also be translated as ‘idolaters’. While that sounds bizarre to us, since ‘prostitution’ and ‘idolatry’ are usually seen as separate vices, for Paul they are clearly connected.

But we are still left with the larger question of why these vices are grouped together in a list. While many of these terms are relatively straightforward (no pun intended), malakoi simply means ‘soft’ and the plural would mean ‘soft males’. We can use ‘soft’ in a similar sense to that of the Greek if we talk about a ‘soft’ life: caviar, servants, luxury cars. Is Paul, then, talking about wealthy people who have it easy in life? That would fit with ‘thieves’, ‘the greedy’, and ‘robbers’, who might have it soft because they’ve ‘worked’ the system to their advantage. But it could also mean ‘ill males’ or ‘soft-headed males’ or ‘weak-willed males’. However, the overall context in no sense implies that malakoi has anything to do with ‘sexuality’, unless we were to argue that robbery, greediness, reviling, and drunkenness are inherently sexual in nature. However, Paul could also be talking about men who are paid for sex: call boys or male escorts. If we assume that is the meaning, then ‘arsenokoitai’ could indicate the person paying for sex. To be sure, arsen translates as ‘men’ and koitê is a bed.

My goal here is not to argue for a particular translation but to make clear that rendering ‘malakoi’ as ‘homosexuals’ and ‘arsenokoitai’ as ‘homosexual perverts’ (which are used in some translations) is completely problematic from an historical point of view. The OED cites the first use of ‘homosexual’ as an adjective in 1891 and as a noun in 1892. The German terms ‘homosexual’ and ‘heterosexual’ can be found in a letter from 1868. The German term homosexuell, used as an adjective, dates back to 1878; the noun form emerges in 1898. Neither the ancient Greeks nor the ancient Romans had a word for ‘homosexual’. We certainly know that, in both cultures, homosexual relations were and were not necessarily deemed wrong (though there were circumstances in which such relationships were considered inappropriate). But the ‘concept’—not merely the word of ‘homosexual’—is one that they do not seem to have. Put otherwise, male to male relationships were seen as superior to male to female relationships because the Greeks and Romans were sexist and thought women were inferior. However, the idea that you would, as a male, decide to have a male partner as you would marry a woman was utterly foreign as a concept. We have absolutely no reason to think that our conception of homosexuality maps on any equivalent ancient notions in Greek or Roman culture—at all. We classify people in terms of ‘sexual orientation’ and many other factors that appear on census forms and job application forms, but most of these classifications are of relatively recent vintage. The OED’s earliest example of the use of the term ‘white’ as a designation for race occurs in 1726; th earliest example of ‘sexual orientation’ comes from 1978. To assume that Paul was talking about ‘sexual orientation’—let alone that he was able even to have had the concept of ‘sexual orientation’—boggles the mind. Actually, the conception that we have today of ‘marriage’ is also not exactly what it would have been in Paul’s day, either in Greek or Hebrew culture. When preachers talk about ‘the biblical view of marriage’, it is clear that they have not studied the Bible very carefully, since there is no such thing. But that is a problem for another book.

We are always at risk of simply assuming that the words found in the translation of an ancient text—particularly a religious text—mean exactly the same as we mean them today. When Jesus talks about ‘forgiveness’, he certainly means something akin to what we mean by the term today. Yet there are significant differences between how contemporary Christians (and our culture at large) think about forgiveness and what Jesus very specifically says about it. Spoiler alert: if you are a Christian who thinks you already know what Jesus says about forgiveness, you are going to discover that you are likely wrong. To assume that every passage in translations of the Christian Bible that uses the term ‘forgiveness’ means the same as what Christians mean by it today would be a serious mistake. I will be arguing that this misunderstanding of forgiveness is not simply a matter for academics. Instead, it is a potentially dangerous and unhealthy misinterpretation, one that has quite demonstrably allowed for physical and psychological abuse particularly for women.

Reconciliation: Who Needs It? Or, Go Love Yourself

A Response to Amy-Jill Levine's paper: "Reconciliation and the Jewish Question,

Or is Reconciliation Good for the Jews"

Haven’t we had enough power plays disguised as bridge-building, woke folk who want to want to show how just how woke they are, and friendly overtures from people who want to cleanse your filthy little soul? As a gay man, I am tired of people who say they can’t love the sin but they do love me the sinner. My response: go love yourself.

If Amy-Jill Levine is right, reconciliation sounds way too much like a Christian version of the Borg—not Marcus Borg but the Star Trek one. Resistance is futile; you will be assimilated. Have a nice day! It’s a kind of hostile takeover that, among other things, “means figuring out what to do with the Jews.” Well, it’s that too, but it’s also about what to do with the Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, LGBTQIs, and everybody else who doesn’t fit the moral/religious paradigm that has been conveniently created in the image of people who have the power to do so. The problem, of course, is that people who are in power find it difficult to see the power and the privilege they have. Amy-Jill claims that what prevents reconciliation in North America and Europe is fragility. I think that’s right. White people do not see (and are taught not to see) their privilege just like men do not see their privilege. When these things are pointed out, people become fragile and retreat to defensiveness. Christian privilege is similar to white and male privilege, though adding the three things together only makes matters worse. Alas, I am a white man and I realize that I am privileged, but I also realize that I will never realize exactly all that entails. Being a Christian, having American citizenship, and looking vaguely Aryan only makes my problem worse.

One might respond here that the version of reconciliation AJ puts forth is only one possible one and there may be other versions that are better in certain respects. I’m not going to take that path here. Instead, I’m interested in what AJ suggests as the Jewish counterpart to reconciliation: rapprochement, understanding, friendship, and détente. If reconciliation should be defined in these less aggressive terms (or if we simply need to get rid of the R word altogether), that’s fine with me. My own thinking on meeting and relating to the Other has been formed by both Hans-Georg Gadamer and Emmanuel Levinas. What Gadamer shows us is a way of relating to the Other that does not try to reduce the Other to simply another version of oneself. It requires an expansive movement that attempts to dialogue with the Other in which the outcome is not planned in advance. On such a view, it’s entirely possible to imagine oneself being the one converted—to the viewpoint of the Other. AJ is highly attentive to how people put relating to the Other into practice, and my experience of Gadamer as a person was that he did this enormously well—or at least as well as a white privileged male who was probably the most important living German philosopher at the time could do. 

Yet, for all my Gadamerian sympathies, I take Levinas very seriously. He thinks that even the act of understanding the Other threatens to do violence to the Other. A hard Levinasian reading would say that violence is endemic to all attempts at understanding; a soft Levinasian reading would say that it is always a threat, even for those who are well-meaning in their attempts to understand the Other. While I follow the softer reading of Levinas, it’s not hard to see that understanding, rapprochement, friendship, and détente do not simply escape the Borgian worry. I greatly share Levinas’s fear, both regarding me trying to understand others and others trying to understand me. While I might hope that getting to know the stranger would make her a little less strange, I have no desire to reduce that strangeness so she becomes an extension or mirror-image of me. If Christianity teaches that our neighbors can only be loved to the extent they are like us—whether that means Christian or some other adjective—then so much the worse for Christianity. 

And this gets me to the concern with which Amy-Jill closes her paper—the deeply anti-Semitic nature of the Christian scriptures. If AJ is correct about liberal Christians attempting to deny this anti-Semitism, then they are clearly going down the wrong hermeneutical path. When she speaks of the Bible as being sometimes dismissed as a “hopelessly patriarchal, androcentric, misogynistic, homophobic, racist colonial tool,” the only word I’d remove is “hopelessly.” Perhaps I just don’t understand enough about ancient religious texts, but are there any ones that somehow rise above these kinds of problems? If so, I’d like to see them. It is not just that our reading of these texts is selective (which it clearly is); it’s that we take what we like and draw our own conclusions. Evangelical Christians claim to read the Bible literally, but they have a Bill Clinton problem when Jesus says “this is my body”—'is' doesn’t really mean 'is', they say; it’s just metaphorical. But it gets much worse. I have seen many claims that the Bible teaches the infinite value of human life and egalitarianism, I ask: where do you think you found this? I don’t see either of these things anywhere, though I do see texts that could inspire you to think such thoughts, just as I see parts of the US Constitution that would allow one to think that all people are equal despite slaves being defined as just 3/5ths persons. The US Constitution is not nearly as ancient, but it is just as mired in patriarchy, androcentricism, homophobia, racism, and many other isms. People talk about reading the text “just as the framers intended,” but God save us from the framers’ very imperfect and conflicted intentions!

So the problem is not just that we need an “alternative hermeneutic.” Instead, it’s that we need a new alternative hermeneutic. Any philosophy, school of thought, or religion that survives for millennia could only have survived by very significant evolutionary hermeneutical adaptation. But I think AJ is right that kind of hermeneutical evolution needed here is one that is a rather big jump, not just a slight adaptation. And there really isn’t anything else to do. We have already seen that the modern move of attempting to start “all over again” without presuppositions simply imports its presuppositions under wraps. Far better to have the postmodern move of recognizing that we all start with certain assumptions that, by definition, cannot be proven but are simply adopted. As far as I can see, everyone is in this same boat. There aren’t any founding texts that come to us magically free from the kinds of human assumptions that are designed to put other people down. Let he who has the perfect text cast the first stone. I guess someone could accuse me of making a tu quoque sort of point, which is in one sense true. I don’t think anyone can claim some sort of privileged place. If that’s a tu quoque argument, then I’m guilty, but then I don’t see why there is anything fallacious about such a move.

However, I will say this. Levinas is often criticized for not emphasizing reciprocity. His point is that one should look after one’s own self. But I think that’s exactly the right approach. If other people are being unfair, narrow-minded, or whatever, that is their concern. It is not my job to 'convert' them. If I hear AJ correctly, Christians shouldn’t be concerned about problems in Jewish texts—or Muslim texts or any other kind. They should work primarily on getting the beam out of their own eye. AJ speaks of the need for repentance, but my own view of the word that usually gets translated as “repentance”—metanoia—is that it is actually about a fundamental change of one’s person. My worry is that, if repentance means something like “feeling sorry” (which it often ends up being), then one could well feel sorry for being part of a tradition that oppresses Jews—but not sorry enough to do anything about it. As AJ puts it, “acknowledgement that is not followed by action, or even deeper discussion of how White, of Christian, privilege works—is a sign of complacency.” My only disagreement with that statement is that such acknowledgement is not a sign of complacency; it is complacency. Metanoia literally means a change of mind, but it’s use in the Christian tradition means conversion. If I’m reading AJ correctly, the kind of conversion that needs to occur is not about anybody else. It’s about us, or rather about me. But reconciliation is not something I control; it is something that happens to me. The most I can do is prepare myself for it to happen. Perhaps, then, I might have the right to testify to the change that has occurred in me. Perhaps that testifying may lead to reconciliation—or understanding or rapprochement or however we want to put it. But my thinking that I can or should control such reconciliation is the very thing that makes it impossible.

Would Jesus Forgive Trump?

One of the traditional ‘seven last words’ Jesus spoke from the cross on Good Friday is: ‘Father, forgive them; for they do not know what they are doing’ (Luke 23:34). Wouldn’t someone who forgives the people crucifying him be able to forgive Trump? At first glance, the parallel seems obvious. Not knowing what he is doing is quintessentially Trumpian. America has never had a president as ignorant and hapless as Trump. 

While no one can be blamed for the origin of Covid-19, Trump has deliberately misled the American public about the risks, remained unconscionably ignorant about the truth, and displayed irrational exuberance about everything being back to normal by Easter. Lies about the size of his inauguration crowd? Pathetic but harmless. Lies about the virus? Deadly.

But look at the quotation from Jesus more closely. Jesus doesn’t forgive those who crucified him. Perhaps even Jesus thought this was too much to bear, though a better explanation is that forgiveness in such an instance goes against what he teaches. In any case, he asks God the Father to do so. We’re not told whether the Father complies. Yet there is a much greater problem. There are two kinds of ignorance. We are usually (and rightly) ‘forgiven’ for what we don’t and couldn’t know. Yet one can be willfully and culpably ignorant, unwilling to learn the truth and unwilling to speak it. Trump’s obliviousness is not accidental: it is studied and deliberate. Jesus isn’t talking about those who are malevolently uninformed.

So What Would Jesus Do? The answer is less obvious than you might think. Back in the 1980s, Evangelical theologians like Lewis Smedes began to import a ‘therapeutic’ version of forgiveness from pop psychology into Christian thought. It goes something like this: ‘You just need to let go of resentment, move on, find inner peace and healing’. People like Smedes read that therapeutic version back into what Jesus says. This ‘extravagant’ form of unconditional forgiveness started to take hold in Christian circles and has become our default conception of ‘forgiveness’. In almost all cases, the appeal is to Jesus’ saying on the cross. You should forgive everyone no matter if they’ve apologized or owned up to their mistakes. Even more, in Forgive and Forget Smedes says that we should forgive “for our own sakes.” It’s all about you and your feelings. Worse yet, South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu used this same kind of therapeutic language in his best-seller titled No Future without Forgiveness. Even victims of violence, says Tutu, should just get over it and forgive their perpetrators. You’d be forgiven for thinking that Jesus taught that you should forgive anyone and everyone no matter what.

Perhaps you’ve thought of another thing Jesus says about forgiveness—the well-known phrase ‘seventy times seven’ (Matthew 18:22). Most scholars agree that this means there is no quantitative limit to forgiveness. But Jesus provides some very specific qualitative requirements and makes clear that this is mutual process. Right before the ‘seventy times seven’ part, Jesus says: ‘If your brother sins, you must rebuke the offender, and if there is repentance, you must forgive’ (Luke 17: 3). The instructions couldn’t be clearer. If someone wrongs you, then you are obliged to point that out. In fact, the version in the Gospel of Matthew says that, if the person doesn’t listen to you, you should get one or two other people to go with you as witnesses. Then that person needs to respond by ‘repenting’. The word used in the Christian Bible translated as ‘repentance’ is metanoia, which literally means a ‘change of mind’ so potent that it deeply changes one’s actions. Part of that change is certainly ‘remorse’ for what one has done (as opposed to simply ‘regret’ for being caught). But metanoia is about the personal transformation of the offender. Putting this all together: Jesus only says you should forgive the person who truly shows remorse, evidences a change in action, and asks for your forgiveness. According to Jesus, everyone else is out of luck and should be treated as ‘a Gentile and tax-collector’. That’s considerably worse than unfriending them on Facebook.

Here’s the good news regarding Trump. In speaking with Jimmy Fallon on the Tonight Show, Trump says: “I fully think apologizing is a great thing, but you have to be wrong. . . . I will absolutely apologize sometime in the distant future if I'm ever wrong.” So he’s pro-apology. But that slice of dialogue was the result a previous interview with Anderson Cooper in which Trump said: ‘Why do I have to repent, why do I have to ask for forgiveness if [I’m] not making mistakes?’ Trump has at least an intellectual point there: no need to repent if you’ve done nothing wrong.

Now for the bad news. That Trump lies about virtually everything has been well documented. Although Trump claims to be enthusiastic about apologizing, it seems to be something that only other people need to do. If metanoia is about a radical change in one’s mind, heart, and action, then Trump seems very far from that. There is no repentance on the imminent horizon. It’s certainly too late for him to apologize to those who have already died of Covid-19 and there are many more who will die because of his willful ignorance and concern only for his ego.

Put bluntly: Jesus would not forgive Donald J. Trump if he were alive today. Sorry, but Jesus does not preach some kind of ‘cheap grace’, to use a phrase from Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Smedes and Tutu were lying to you about what Jesus says about forgiveness. It should be given only on the basis of genuine contrition and a significant change of behavior. At the end of The Sunflower, Simon Wiesenthal writes: “Today the world demands that we forgive and forget the heinous crimes committed against us. It urges us to draw a line, and close the account as if nothing had ever happened.” Wiesenthal is talking about a very different event, but the principle here is exactly the same. Jesus does not expect you or anyone else who has been hurt as a result of the willful cover-up of information regarding the Coronavirus to forgive. That would only compound the hurt that has already been done. Victims should hardly be further traumatized by being expected to forgive without repentance.

However, the context of the Lord’s Prayer is one of community. It opens with “Our Father” and speaks of us forgiving others in a way that is similar to how God forgives us. Forgiving is about healing and repairing relationships. But how does this happen? When Jesus says ‘love your enemies’ (Luke 6:32), the context makes it clear that ‘love’ is an action. As it turns out, rebuking someone is way of showing love. In the Hebrew Bible, failure to correct those who do wrong makes us guilty too (Leviticus 19:17). We do a disservice those in our community who get away without being admonished. 

As an act of community, then, we should collectively say: “Mr. Trump, are you ready to repent?”