IT IS always a pleasure to get a new book from the Dean of King’s College, Cambridge. Together with another Anglican theologian, Anthony Bash at Durham, he has done much to deepen our understanding of forgiveness. Both have found recent discussions of forgiveness in psychology and philosophy to be helpful correctives to the monochrome and naïve claims too often made by well-meaning Christian preachers. Even the saintly Desmond Tutu in post-apartheid South Africa stands corrected by Stephen Cherry for conflating “forgiveness”, which requires repentance, with “amnesty”, which does not.

For him and Bash, alike, forgiveness: is not unique to Christianity; is not a single “thing”; is contextual; is a process rather than a single verbal expression; is properly preceded by the repentance of the perpetrator; can be offered too cheaply; is sometimes highly complex; and is dubious if offered by a friend or relative of a dead victim. Both of them have made these crucial points before.

What is new in this book is an extended discussion of the harmful part that forgiveness can play in safeguarding procedures, and the possibility that some egregious acts by the unrepentant are indeed “unforgivable”. Both points are contentious for Churches, but Dr Cherry handles them with alacrity and toughness, drawing from an abundance of poignant accounts of forgiveness: some he creates, some gleaned from novels, and others gathered from real-life survivors or their relatives. This eminently pastoral and thoughtful book was an inspiration to read during Holy Week.

It opens with a series of fictitious letters that criticise his earlier book on forgiveness, Healing Agony (2012). One self-written letter states that he previously ignored clerical sexual abuse. How splendid to find a theologian who is self-critical rather than defensive! He now finds that, at the heart of many recent clerical safeguarding scandals, there has been a dangerous tendency of senior clergy to “forgive” and then to trust repentant clerical abusers. Bishop Peter Ball comes to mind. He was regarded by those in high authority as too “holy” and “humble” to disbelieve, despite clear evidence, as we now know, to the contrary. An obvious problem is that abusers can be highly manipulative, but the main problem, for Cherry, is that “The needs of the victims or survivors must be paramount,” and that, for far too long, they were not.

He is just as critical of Christian claims that everyone can be forgiven if they repent, even those who repent in the secrecy of a confessional but do nothing to help their victims beyond saying a weak “sorry”. He concludes that “God is not in a position to forgive someone who has inflicted life-changing, hope-shattering harm ‘just like that’. God does, however, have the capacity to respond to repentance.” Yet, even then, “If an abuser does the right thing by the victim, then they move away from being unforgivable. If they don’t — they don’t.”

It is deeply perplexing territory, and yet Cherry gives several examples of exemplary Christian behaviour — especially that of Michael Lapsley, Mina Smallman, and the remarkable Gordon Wilson, all of whom worked hard for healing and restitution without offering cheap forgiveness.

This is a book to ponder carefully. It offers real wisdom.

Canon Robin Gill is Emeritus Professor of Applied Theology at the University of Kent, and Editor of Theology.

Unforgivable? Exploring the limits of forgiveness
Stephen Cherry
Bloomsbury £16.99
(978-1-3994-0132-6)
Church Times Bookshop £15.29