“FORGIVENESS of sins. . . As though everything were not said in that phrase!” The Swiss theologian Karl Barth wrote that as a comment on the Apostles’ Creed. He was clearly delighted to have found so much in a single line: indeed, he thought, there was the whole of the gospel.
There is certainly something wonderfully concise about this statement: “I believe in the forgiveness of sins.” That is it. No exceptions are weighed and considered. No space is given to questions of means or mechanism. This creed is simple and forthright, like the gospel itself. It tells us that forgiveness is real, available, and effective.
Perhaps Barth’s claim — that “everything is there” in this one phrase — is an exaggeration. If so, that is not because God’s grace is more limited than “forgiveness of sins” suggests, but more extensive. The gospel offers forgiveness of sins and more besides.
To think about that, consider the nature of sin. It is failure or falling short: a failure to be what we are called to be, as human beings made in the image of God. It is also a matter of turning in upon ourselves and away from God, other people, and our place in creation. Sin is a failure to receive all that God offers.
Salvation reverses all of that. If “forgiveness of sins” means that the penalty due to the sinner is removed, salvation certainly includes that. But it is more than remission: it is also restoration — the restoration of a full share in the life of God (and in the world, and human community).
Going yet further, the gospel promises something even beyond restoration — something that belongs to no creature by nature — namely, adoption as God’s children and the vision of God, face to face. That is more than forgiveness. But perhaps we should be a little more generous towards Barth and towards this creed, and see that breadth of salvation, that fullness of promise, as all hidden already in the phrase “the forgiveness of sins”.
IN WHAT I have said so far, the emphasis has been on God and the divine initiative, as it should be in thinking about the gospel. But, having begun there, we can then notice something is also asked of us. Present in this belief in the forgiveness of sins is the call to repentance, which is a further blessing of the gospel.
To explore that, it might be useful to turn to a striking claim from St Thomas Aquinas: that, while we ought to forgive one another even if someone else refuses to apologise, God will not forgive us without repentance. I do not think that Aquinas was proposing some peculiar malice on God’s part. He was drawing attention to God’s intent really to redeem the world.
God wants to heal, restore, and ennoble us. To be put right in that way requires a change of life. For our lives to be changed, we need to turn away from doing wrong. The path to restoration must begin with contrition and move on to repentance, before it can proceed to forgiveness, life, and freedom. God will not magically transport us to the end of that psychological trajectory, because every stage belongs to the gospel. Contrition, too, is part of what God offers in the good news.
THE phrase that we have been thinking about — that we believe in the forgiveness of sins — comes from the Apostles’ Creed. Forgiveness is also mentioned in the Nicene Creed: first, and obliquely, in the introduction to the incarnation (“For us and for our salvation he came down from heaven”), but then, explicitly, towards the end: that we believe in “one baptism for the forgiveness of sins”.
The faith of the Church is not simply in “baptism”, but in “one baptism”. The word “one” there serves to condemn the practice of re-baptism, but as more than simply a matter of church discipline. It, again, bears witness to the abundance of God in forgiving sins and to the permanent power of baptism. It says that after baptism there is no sin — not even apostasy, which happened regularly in the ancient world, under threat of torture and martyrdom —– that can exhaust what God gives in baptism; not if we will again repent. Nothing that you can do places you permanently beyond forgiveness.
This link between forgiveness and baptism also tells us other things about the gospel: that it comes to us, for instance, as we are — as whole people, with bodies as well as souls, as social beings. Forgiveness involves the soul, but also the body that is immersed or has water poured over it. It takes place in a community (since no one can baptise themselves). And, as surely as we got wet and the simple words of baptism were spoken over us, we can know that God forgave us and made us his children.
The “forgiveness” of the creeds is primarily God’s forgiveness of us, but from that divine initiative something else follows, which is also good news. God’s forgiveness calls us — even demands of us — a more forgiving disposition towards others. Restored and reoriented by God’s forgiveness, and copying that example, it becomes gradually easier for us to see other people as redeemable and to resist the impulse to write them off.
When we confess, therefore, that we believe in “the forgiveness of sins” we also mean that we believe in the possibility of human forgiveness — of one person forgiving another. Then, just as God’s forgiveness is creative, and re-creative, we also discover something of that in human forgiveness, which is able to restore relationships and give new cause for hope. Again, all this is part of the good news of forgiveness, part of the good news that we find in this part of the creed.
SUCH a positive vision of human forgiveness has long held an honoured place in Christianity. We find it in the Lord’s Prayer: “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.” In contrast, it seems to me that British culture is now often marked by suspicion of forgiveness.
Part of that comes from the sort of polarisation which leaves people little interested in reconciliation. Part of it comes from legitimate concerns about the victims of wrongdoing: not wanting to place glib expectation upon them that they will forgive those who have harmed them.
This demotion of forgiveness often goes further. Even the great Aristotle had little place for it, and we seem to be sinking back into that distinctly pre-Christian spiritual and philosophical vision. In contrast, the creeds stands for something different and better, however difficult that may seem. We believe in the forgiveness of sins: that wrongdoing need never be the end of any story.
To believe in the forgiveness of sins is to believe that no life is beyond redemption. The last word need not lie with whatever has been done or left undone. This does not diminish the reality or horror of sin, but it does insist that the love and power of God are yet greater.
In a world poised oddly between Christianity and the forgetfulness of Christianity, the forgiveness of sins may appear as the most implausible part of all that the creeds affirm. It may seem just as strange as the creation of the world, the Virgin birth, or the resurrection. But that puts it in good company. And it will mean that this clause of the creed — that we believe in the forgiveness of sins — will have regained that startling quality that ought to belong to the gospel.
The Revd Dr Andrew Davison is Regius Professor of Divinity in the University of Oxford and a Canon Residentiary of Christ Church.
Quotations
“A work can be great according to how something is made. Judged that way, creation is God’s greatest work, since something is made out of nothing. Alternatively, however, we can consider what is brought about. In that way, the justification of the sinner is greater than the creation of heaven and earth, since justification brings about a share in the eternal good of the Godhead, whereas creation produces only the good of a mutable nature.” Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, I-II.113.9
“God did not abolish the fact of evil: He transformed it. He did not stop the crucifixion: He rose from the dead . . . The only way to deal with the past is to accept the whole past, and by accepting it, to change its meaning . . . Time is not denied; it is fulfilled.” Dorothy L. Sayers, The Triumph of Easter
“Let us believe the comfortable truth, that the justifying grace of God effects what it declares. ‘The Voice of the Lord is mighty in operation, the Voice of the Lord is a glorious Voice’ (Ps. 29.4) . . . It is ‘the Word which goeth forth out of His mouth’ . . . It can never ‘return unto Him void, but it accomplishes that which He pleases’ (Isaiah 55.11).” John Henry Newman, Lectures on Justification
“The remaking of our life, which takes place through regeneration, would not be a true remaking if we remain still in the same state . . . the saving birth is received for the renewal and change of our nature.” Gregory of Nyssa, Catechetical Discourse, 40
Biblical passages
Isaiah 43.25
“I, I am He who blots out your transgressions for my own sake and I will not remember your sins.”
This verse begins in a striking way. Even simply using the Hebrew word anoki is already to adopt a solemn way of saying “I”. More remarkably here, it is used not once, but twice (as the NRSV translation nicely reflects). This is a powerful way to start: “I am he — I myself, I alone — who blots out your transgressions.” What hope can the sinner have? Only one, namely God himself. And we can be secure in that hope, both because of who God is (underlined by that emphatic double “I”), and because of the sureness of his intention (since he acts “for his own sake”), which is to blot out our transgressions and not remember our sins.
Romans 6.3,7
“All of us who have been baptised into Christ Jesus were baptised into his death . . . [and] whoever has died is freed from sin.”
But does forgiveness come down only to not remembering sins? If someone behaves thoughtlessly towards me, and I’m in a magnanimous mood, I might say: “It’s nothing!” If God’s reaction to sin is also “It is nothing!”, then that conveys something altogether more ferocious, since God consigns sin and evil to the nothingness of oblivion.
Paul writes that the forgiveness that God offers is nothing short of a death and resurrection — it involves the death of sin and our death to sin, and rising to new life. Just as God’s command (“Let there be light”) called creation into existence, so is God’s attitude to sin, death, and evil nothing short of the opposite. It is to doom them to destruction, to nothingness.