The Forgiveness of God: An Existential Problem

Many times one will hear something like, "Why can't God just forgive humanity?" Sometimes it is posed with deep sincerity. Sometimes it is posed against penal substitutionary forms of the cross. John Stott takes a traditional (Anselmian) approach that God's majesty demands satisfaction. Because is not desiring that humanity be destroyed, he substitutes for them. I think this is a fine and biblical approach. However, I think there is another, more existential, approach.

Existentialism affirms that there is a deep angst in humanity. There is a sense in which humans are not whole; they will die. It also affirms that there is a sense in which personal experience shapes our interpretation Reality. As a result, one can never completely enter the shoes of another. Putting this in terms of forgiveness, if sin is against not only God, but also against humans, then for God to forgive would be for him to enter the shoes of another. Sometimes you might here someone say, "How can you forgive them? You don't know what they put me through!" Very true. In the suffering of Christ, however, God says, "I do know." Moreover, not only does God know from the perspective of the victim, but also of the perpetrator. God knows the result of a guilty verdict.

What I think captures the Emerging Church

What I think captures much of the feeling and flavour of the emerging church movement is that it seeks to identify deeply with the Other, and is thereby influenced by existential thought (Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, etc.), and some postmodern thinkers (i.e., Jacques Derrida, John Caputo). Part of existential philosophy emphasizes the individuality of each person and the impossibility of entering into another's shoes entirely. Existentialist philosophy emphasizes that reality must be studied not from "essences," but from existence. This is meant not to succumb to the object/subject divide and tries not to deteriorate into total relativism, but to emphasizes the necessity that Reality is interpreted and studied from the existence of the individual. I think the emerging church tries to take the Incarnation so seriously that it believes entering the shoes of another person has been done, in a sense, and so they must follow the one who has done it, to the best of their ability. This is why you'll see an emphasis on social justice, but also a concern to listen deeply to a homosexual struggling with the Bible. (You'll notice one of the Emergent Church's characteristics emphasizes friendship as a prerequisite to orthodoxy.) Therefore, the questions they are asking of the Bible are deeply morally individual, but also communally moral: how does the Bible speak against the personal existence of this person and how does it form the morality of the community, rooted in a tradition and made up of these individuals?