The author of the short story, Forgiven, wants you to know that yes, indeed, it is a wonderful life out there – even if we, the readers, must navigate a tempestuous sea of typos, sentence fragments, and expository dialogue to get his uplifting message of peace and salvation.
Though some might regard Forgiven as an uplifting Christian morality tale on the subject of forgiveness and repentance, it reads as an afternoon school special on how to secure a free admission ticket to the good side of the afterlife.
It begins with the mugging murder of a nice Christian fellow on the way home to see his faithful wife and two daughters. The manslaughtering mugger – aptly named Christopher – turns out to be a nice guy at heart. Turns out he needed the money to pay the bills for his uninsured, hospitalized father. Now, he faces a lifetime in prison and – he fears – a one-way ticket down below.
But then along comes Charlotte, the faithful widow of the murder victim. She brings Christopher the good tidings that he need not repent or atone for his sins after all. Turns out that’s already been taken care of, roughly two thousand years ago. As she instructs him, Jesus has already made the pre-payment on everyone else’s sins for all time, and that all he need do is to acknowledge the gift.
This is quite a revelation to Christopher, who immediately realizes that he need not bother weighing the scales of his murder rap against all the prior good deeds he’s done for kith and kin. As he notes:
“All the work I put in to help everyone was all for nothing. It won’t get me to Heaven. Only the blood of Jesus can get me there. I must believe that he has paid for my sins.”
This, at root, is the moral of the tale. And if you still haven’t caught on by the end of it, the author, Daniel Miller, appends his own commentary:
If you do not know Christ as your Savior, no matter how good you are, you will not go to Heaven.
To be clear, this is not just the author’s personal opinion. It is a concise, accurate statement of Christian theology that applies across the organized Christian institutional spectrum – whether you’re Catholic, Protestant, or Greek Orthodox.
It is also, fundamentally, at odds with the Old Testament – specifically, the collection of biblical writings from which Christianity ultimately bases its claims to legitimacy.
Leaving aside the historical fact that the Christian mission was spread for at least its first 1,500 years on the pedestal of the graven image – a big Old Testament no-no - at a time when most of its illiterate adherents were swayed more by the seductive pageantry of its marble icons than by the words of its Greek and Latin codices; leaving aside the fact that priests and ministers alike instruct that adherents must believe in the divinely incarnated Son of a godly Trinity, though the Old Testament boldly states, “The Lord is One. Thou shalt have no other God before Me;” and leaving aside the theologically inconvenient passage from Deuteronomy that states, “Anyone who is hanged on a tree is under God’s curse;” we must ask whether even the “salvation through sacrifice” doctrine is truly in keeping with the spirit of the Old Testament’s prophetic writings through which Christianity fundamentally bases its claim as the vessel of the “new covenant.”
If this sounds less like a literary review and more like a religious counter-argument, that is due to the fact that Forgiven reads less like a short story than as a theological primer on Christianity and the concept of forgiveness. And given the considerable time devoted to absorbing Forgiven’s view of the matter, I feel at least entitled to offer my review of its arguments.
At root, Forgiven is not really about the kind of forgiveness that comes through atonement and repentance, normally understood as acts of good will and charity toward the wronged party. That’s an Old Testament, Judaic notion. It’s also a notion that implies judgment and, ultimately, fear of God and the punishments that come from sinful and lawless acts of bad will toward one’s fellow man.
The author of Forgiven, on the other hand, is quite clear that this notion of forgiveness “through works” is ultimately fruitless and therefore irrelevant to the ultimate goal of eternal salvation – leaving aside, again, the uncomfortable fact that the Old Testament is rather vague on the existence of an afterlife for all, much less what it might be composed of.
To the author of Forgiven – and, in his defense, it must again be emphasized that he correctly states the foundational theological requirements of Christianity – one’s placement in Heaven can only be secured through the acceptance of Jesus’ personal sacrifice on the cross. Why should this be so? Because paradoxically, Christian theologians have determined that there can ultimately be no eternal salvation without some kind of sacrificial offering; hence, the notion of Christ as the sacrificial lamb offered in forgiveness for all sin, by everybody, now and forevermore.
This notion is paradoxical because the Prophets of the Old Testament, and ultimately, Judaism – which derives therefrom – moved well beyond the notion of salvation through sacrifice. Just prior to the destruction of the First Temple in Jerusalem by the Babylonians – almost 600 years before Christ – the Jews were first dispersed across the ancient world, now left with no legitimate means to practice their Temple-centered religion of animal sacrifice.
By then, the Prophets of both Israel and Judah had firmly rendered their opinions on the efficacy of ritual sacrifice in the face of everyday moral debauchery.
Here, for example, is the prophet Hosea’s pronouncement on the subject:
“For I desire mercy, not sacrifice.”
And here is the prophet Isaiah’s view of the matter:
“The multitude of your sacrifices–what are they to me?” says the LORD. “I have more than enough of burnt offerings, of rams and the fat of fattened animals.”
In case Old Testament Jewry still didn’t get the message, here’s a passage from the Book of Proverbs that put it succinctly:
To do what is right and just is more acceptable to the LORD than sacrifice.
In any case, almost 40 years after the death of Jesus, the whole issue of sacrifice became moot to the Jews of Judea and the Diaspora: the Romans destroyed the Second Temple, leaving the Jews with little more than the study and practice of the Law (otherwise known to Christians as the Pentateuch or Five Books of Moses).
By then, a great many pagans across the ancient world were becoming familiar with the God of the Jews, along with their holy writings, by then translated into Greek, the lingua franca of the Near East. And though the Jews came to preach that all righteous Gentiles – yes, even righteous pagans – would have a shot at eternal salvation simply by living lives of good will and charity, a growing early congregation of Gentile Christians started to feel excluded by the fact that their Christian Jewish counterparts initially required them to keep the laws of Israel – circumcision, dietary laws, festivals, etc. – before they could fully enter into the congregation of Christ.
And so along came a Jew by the name of Paul, whose mission it was to preach to the Gentiles. As Paul saw it, the Law at Sinai was now a “curse,” a burden that was superceded by the “sacrifice” of Christ.
Henceforth, on the strength of a few eyewitnesses to a resurrection, and on the basis of Jesus’ one year show of miracles in the Holy Land, Paul proclaimed that the Jews need no longer be beholden to that great display of authority that took the whole nation out of Egypt at the culmination of 400 years of bondage and unveiled the Law at Sinai before all of them. Rather, on Paul’s say-so – on the strength of the visions in his head – all of world Jewry was now supposed to abandon the Law in favor of salvation from a man-god seen during his lifetime by hardly any Jews at all, but who was later seen by a great many others, at least as represented in the form of countless graven images in churches and cathedrals throughout Christendom.
From this Judaic perspective, one can at least see why Paul’s theological claims seemed scarcely credible to well-informed Jews. From this perspective, one can also appreciate how Paul opted to peddle a kind of prepacked forgiveness and eternal salvation for all as the ultimate buy-in to the new faith. And indeed, it was – and remains – the world’s best sales pitch: Forget about guilt, conscience, judgment, fear of God, good will to all, and acts of good works (nice stuff, that, but not ultimately required). Just sit back and accept Christ into your heart. Accept that you are forgiven through his sacrifice…and enjoy eternal life in Paradise!
It’s the ultimate Get Out Of Jail Free card to all death row inmates, religious death squad members, and sociopaths everywhere.
But ultimately, it’s also a denial of God, a denial of His judgment, of His anger and fury at those who misbehave. It’s a denial by those who would much rather sit back and feel loved by God than to have their conscience tormented by the fear of Him.
To be sure, religious Christians alone are not guilty of this flight from the Old Testament God’s anger and judgment. In practice, religiously observant Jews today scarcely torture themselves over the question as to whether their everyday behavior courts the judgment and punishment of God, particularly so if they keep a good kosher home and are publicly esteemed by everyone in the community.
The Muslims, of course, took a page out of the Christian playbook and simply offered the buy-in of eternal life in return for submitting to a belief in the authority of Islam and the proclamations of its Prophet. Here, too, the question of righteous conduct is mostly irrelevant if one doesn’t believe.
And it is indeed ironic that while both Christianity and Islam embrace all believing peoples of the world, it is only Judaism that conceives of eternal salvation for all righteous-acting individuals, regardless of their religious beliefs.
Moreover, it is ironic that in the United States, so many otherwise believing Christians would most likely be repulsed by the Christian notion of forgiveness and salvation as put forward by the author of Forgiven. To such Christians, there is no salvation for a bad man, whatever his beliefs. To such Christians, only righteous individuals have a shot at gaining admission to Heaven. To such Christians, only those evildoers who repent and atone to the wronged party deserve forgiveness.
It might also be that many such Christians are also under the theologically mistaken notion that Jesus, as Son of God, is merely a holy person, but someone who is decidedly not on a divine par with God Himself.
Theologically speaking, such Christians are more closely aligned with the theology of Judaism than with the theology of Christianity as officially proclaimed at the Council of Nicea in the fourth century.
When Americans speak of a common “Judeo-Christian” heritage, this is the common heritage that is meant – with Jesus as a kind of moral exemplar, in line with the prophets of Israel, who challenged individuals to merit salvation through deeds, through charity, and acts of kindness.
It’s a heritage that gives its due to guilt, to conscience, to punishment, to judgment and fear of God. It’s the heritage best exemplified by the modern-day American moral exemplar, Martin Luther King, who electrified the civil rights movement with his fervent calls for freedom and justice, through his readings of the Old Testament prophets.
It’s a heritage that offers no salvation at all for materialistic CEOs, corrupt politicians, and manipulative religious hucksters. For a theology that challenges such individuals to repent and atone for wrongs committed against their fellow man, such individuals are ultimately doomed – for there can be no forgiveness at all without righteous acts of repentance.
In the end, a salvational theology fundamentally based on good deeds and righteous conduct does not allow otherwise powerful men to smugly forgive themselves, to judge themselves saved and to hide from judgment. Ultimately, it should make them fear for their souls and to doubt themselves – and the world will be a far better place for it.
Unfortunately, that’s not the theology subscribed to by the author of Forgiven and by millions of his fellow religious cohorts.
