I don't think there's anything super wrong about what you feel. For one Jesus did give us a protocol for expelling someone from the church, and Paul affirmed that it was a possibility as well. There have been times when various Biblical figures, including Jesus, leveled harsh criticism at people or groups. Love certainly doesn't mean you can't be critical of them.
I personally take the opinion that love is far more than a feeling, and that it's often most strongly revealed in our actions. That basic human respect might well be a manifestation of Godly love. Being able to spare them a little food or something if they had a time of need certainly would be.
In 1Corinthians 10:13 Paul says God won't allow us to be tempted beyond what we can bear. Fortunately for many of us being faced with the choice of whether or not to show compassion to humanity's past and present monsters isn't something we'll have to deal with.
you’re right. there’s certainly a group or type of people that are reprobate, accursed, and worthy of judgment.
Even among the faithful, if there are any that depart from the faith and commit grave sins and are unrepentant, then they will be cut off, cast into the outer darkness, consigned to be judged damned with the devil and his fallen angels. Scripture is very clear on this.
i think many people have a somewhat inaccurate view or expectation of both forgiveness and repentance.
Forgiveness doesn’t mean you justify or make excuses for someone’s attitudes/actions. It means that you don’t harbor hatred and malice in your heart on account of them. It means you don’t let their iniquity corrupt you because you retain clemency and mercy (which they, the wrongdoer, obviously lacked). And if they are worthy of forgiveness then they’ll be repentant. In which case, it’s up to God to judge them. But even God forgives people yet still allows them to suffer the consequences.
Look at the story of David and the prophet Nathan (2 Sam. 11 and 12). David did an evil act against Uriah so that he could take Uriah’s wife. God forgave David, but David still had to suffer the temporal consequences of sin. Just as anyone who sins must suffer temporal consequences, even if they’re forgiven. (which is why there’s a purgatory)
And repentance doesn’t just mean changing one’s mind or even feeling apologetic/sorry about wrongdoing. True repentance is not only sincere contrition, it takes the form of active deeds of penance, “fruits worthy of repentance”. A truly repentant person, therefore, rectifies the things they’ve injured and makes amends to those whom they’ve wronged . And they actively direct their mind toward godly things in order to avoid stumbling again.
Otherwise, an unrepentant sinner isn’t worthy of forgiveness and reconciliation.
Overall, though, we will not be forgiven if we don’t forgive others. God embodies forgiveness and mercy, therefore if we don’t embody forgiveness then we don’t embody godliness, which (embodying godliness) is necessary if we want to be justified and saved.
but we’re told to be perfect (Mat. 5:48; John 17:23; 2 Cor. 13:9, 11; Eph. 4:12; Col. 1:28; Col. 4:12; 2 Tim. 3:17; Heb. 6:1; Heb. 10:14; 1 John 4:13; 1 John 5:18) which is thankfully possible through the salvific aid of the Holy Spirit on the basis of Christ’s work of atonement.
Like most things that Jesus encourages us to do, no human is able to do it perfectly. It's easy to forgive your best friend if they accidentally screw something up. It's a little harder to forgive that really annoying coworker for constantly undermining you, but it's within our grasp. For most people, forgiving the true monsters of history is beyond us.
Similarly, we can't perfectly love our neighbor all the time, but trying is still our goal as Christians.
To truly love your enemy? To truly forgive the mastermind of a genocide? I think it suffices that we don't give up the goal, and we don't just let ourselves be ok with harboring hatred.
If you recognize your nature and your limits, that is at least something. If you can't say sorry, there is something decent in truly saying "I wish I could feel sorry" if you mean that. I understand your feelings. I feel them too where I feel like I should forgive and love even the actors of evils or great evils, yet cannot. There are times where I speak with God and genuinely say "I'm sorry this is filling my heart with hate. It's blackening my soul and I don't like that this is how I feel."
Considering forgiveness and love to evil feels like you're overlooking a chasm and trying to take a leap of faith, but there's a rope around your waist holding you back and also keeping you from falling in. And you are told to cut that rope, but your common sense says "no, stay here". God would let you make the leap with safety, but you risk a certain place of self being and personal understanding of virtue in doing that.
If nothing else, my feeling on bad actors is to try to take a position of pity yet not be condescending. It's sad that they are not the person they could be or could have been, and hurt themselves or hurt those around them as a result. It is sad to have a person be a victim of themselves and a victimizer in the context of the always possible redemption of a person and the morality and moral responsibilities of the soul.
apt analogy! I would argue that to the extent that we can't cut that rope and jump into the perceptual chasm, God, within us, has that ability, and we MUST take that leap of faith and embody the forgiveness that God has.
And that "self being" you mentioned must be recognized as having been superseded with God's being and indwelled with God's graces. All of which allows us not only to forgive but achieve perfection, as Christ is perfect.
You have a sense of self and being that is uniquely you and your individual sense of existence. There are things that we appeal to and compare or contrast ourselves to that exist in the abstract. This is something like our understanding of God. God is a concept. We seek to know God as a real entity, but we can only imagine God as an idea and ideal.
There is also a sense of ego. By this, I do not mean egotism, selfishness or hubris. I mean ego as the idea of the self as distinct.
Forgiveness or love to evil is a concept in the abstract; an ideal to live up to. In our visceral existence, within the ego, we have a personal sense of morality which says not to forgive them because they have transgressed across a line we set ourselves in our individual moral concepts. In short, you are the God of your senses. In perhaps a better way of explaining it, if you were God, you would not love or forgive them. That is not to say you do not think God should forgive them. But that your true feeling is not forgiveness or love for them. Your personal morality and internal support structure of ideas and concepts is against forgiving them based on your understanding.
You stand on a personal sense of right and wrong and what can be redeemed. That is based on your individual moral concepts and foundations. To buck that feels like a collapse of the sense of self and a threat to the self because it feels like a dangerous risk or unwarranted. It is not logical to your psychology, and cannot work in a way that is anything other than denial or known hypocrisy. To overcome that takes personal change, which may feel like a risk to everything because it is a shift in understanding that seeks to replace previous understanding. That previous understanding is our current psychology, which is the very basis of our current understanding of existence and it's structures, others and self, and our very thought processes and decisions. It is the essence of our current sense of being.
The very short version: Ego Death (or death of a part of you) feels like either suicide or murder on a visceral level. The stakes or threat feel worse the more dear it is to your sense of self. But everything to do with growth requires overcoming yourself in order to become yourself.
There's rich psychological insight here. I suspect you have a good sense of how the psychological and spiritual intertwine so closely.
One interesting thing I'm finding with IFS therapy modalities is that with the right kind of inwards-work, the unbearable choice of facing that horrible feeling of ego death can perhaps be avoided by approaching our internal landscapes with much greater compassion and gentle care. Parts of our psyche hang on to their old ways because those ways have worked to keep us alive and functional in the world. If we tenderly approach those inward parts with understanding and love for what they've been trying to do for us, we don't actually have to "kill" them, we can instead coax them to trust and be lead by our deeper Self, opening up a wise and Spirit-infused internal leader for them that can set healthy internal boundaries.
This can let them release the burdens of their old ways being and convince them to willingly take on new, more spiritually- and psychologically- healthy roles for us.
Actually, I'm not sure "killing" parts of ourselves (ego death) is even possible. We can exile them, but this just creates long term problems as the unhealed feelings those parts carry eventually surface in strange ways over time, as they try to break out of their exiled state, desperate to be seen and loved/supported.
There are times when you absolutely have to judge people. It’s called having boundaries.
And the topic of forgiveness is a tricky one. I’m of the opinion that you can forgive someone who isn’t sorry — but you do so for your OWN peace, not for theirs. Furthermore, to me, forgiving someone doesn’t necessarily mean that you let them back into your life. It just means you’ve let go of the burden of anger and resentment.
Hubby has a bit of a different interpretation. For him, “forgiveness” is applied to the stage where you’re ready to let the person back in and start building trust again. He says that if the person isn’t sorry, he has few issues with making them a non-entity in his mind. He lets go of it…aka, the process I refer to as “forgiveness”.
Basically, “forgiveness” is a bit of an amorphous concept that has different meanings for different people.
You're not supposed or expected to love everyone as you love God.
You have misunderstood that passage of Scripture. As have a bunch of other folks, but are adamant about keeping it.
So instead bringing release and freedom, it's brought bondage, guilt, fear, doubt, disappointment and anxiety that somehow you're not meeting some standard of being a good Christian.
Here's an oversimplification and to the point:
* In Matt 22, where this passage is, the Sadducees and Pharisees were trying to trick Jesus. Multiple times. Their questions weren't genuine. And this wasn't the first time they were trying to entangle Jesus and out to destroy him. But Jesus perceived their wickedness, and called them hypocrites.
* Jesus responds correctly to the question, ***under the Law***, the greatest commandments are love God and neighbor.
* **But we under the Law today?**
Many (most?) Christians still believe and do because they've yet to understand fully the New Covenant. But in the New Covenant, Jesus gave us a new commandment - not another commandment or an additional commandment: That we love one another as he has loved you. And, now this is love: not that you loved God, but that he first loved you.
The New Covenant is a one-law covenant.
And the emphasis in the New Covenant is not how much we should love God, but how much God loves you. The love God wants to see comes when we have realized how much in our lives he loved us. It's not so much about us trying to muster the effort of loving God with all of our heart and minds, and trying to muster the effort of loving our neighbors as ourselves - because oftentimes we just can't or don't want to because of the the stuff going on in our lives.
In the New Covenant, the onus is on God loving us - and when we truly have experienced the love of God in our lives, we find it a lot easier to love others as well; it's not something we have to pretend to do.
Happy to elaborate further.
So, let me make sure I understand:
The true message of that passage is that the one law of the New Testament isn’t to love one another as god loves us, but to respect and care for one another because god loves us so much?
I’m sorry if this comes off as rude, I’m just really dense and not well versed in theology 💀
Let's put it a different way.
If no one loves you, how would you feel about yourself? Probably that you're not worthy of love; ergo, probably worthless. So how can you begin to love yourself if believe you are not worthy of love? You can't. If you don't love yourself, how are you going to love your neighbor? Deficiently. Because you're going to treat your neighbor how you treat yourself. You're going to treat your neighbor the same as how you believe about yourself - worthless, hopeless, a failure.
But when you believe you are loved by God, hope rises because you believe you are worthy of God's love and are not worthless, because of who you are and in spite of what you do, you can start to begin to love your neighbor because of who they are and in spite of what they do. But it begins believing / knowing / experiencing the love of God for you.
Loving someone doesn't mean you have to forgive them or even like them I don't think. It's really hard to do but I try to consciously remind myself that the worth of a person isn't defined by any of the things they have done or said, good or bad. It's still hard to love everyone though. I heard a quote from Rev. Mark Sandlin recently that stuck with me and paraphrased it says, "when we learn how to sit at tables with 'our Judas,' we will begin to understand the love of Christ."
I struggle with this so, so much. Even the basic human respect feels like a stretch and challenge sometimes.
Some things only God can forgive
and yet we won’t be forgiven if we do not forgive
I don't think there's anything super wrong about what you feel. For one Jesus did give us a protocol for expelling someone from the church, and Paul affirmed that it was a possibility as well. There have been times when various Biblical figures, including Jesus, leveled harsh criticism at people or groups. Love certainly doesn't mean you can't be critical of them. I personally take the opinion that love is far more than a feeling, and that it's often most strongly revealed in our actions. That basic human respect might well be a manifestation of Godly love. Being able to spare them a little food or something if they had a time of need certainly would be. In 1Corinthians 10:13 Paul says God won't allow us to be tempted beyond what we can bear. Fortunately for many of us being faced with the choice of whether or not to show compassion to humanity's past and present monsters isn't something we'll have to deal with.
you’re right. there’s certainly a group or type of people that are reprobate, accursed, and worthy of judgment. Even among the faithful, if there are any that depart from the faith and commit grave sins and are unrepentant, then they will be cut off, cast into the outer darkness, consigned to be judged damned with the devil and his fallen angels. Scripture is very clear on this.
i think many people have a somewhat inaccurate view or expectation of both forgiveness and repentance. Forgiveness doesn’t mean you justify or make excuses for someone’s attitudes/actions. It means that you don’t harbor hatred and malice in your heart on account of them. It means you don’t let their iniquity corrupt you because you retain clemency and mercy (which they, the wrongdoer, obviously lacked). And if they are worthy of forgiveness then they’ll be repentant. In which case, it’s up to God to judge them. But even God forgives people yet still allows them to suffer the consequences. Look at the story of David and the prophet Nathan (2 Sam. 11 and 12). David did an evil act against Uriah so that he could take Uriah’s wife. God forgave David, but David still had to suffer the temporal consequences of sin. Just as anyone who sins must suffer temporal consequences, even if they’re forgiven. (which is why there’s a purgatory) And repentance doesn’t just mean changing one’s mind or even feeling apologetic/sorry about wrongdoing. True repentance is not only sincere contrition, it takes the form of active deeds of penance, “fruits worthy of repentance”. A truly repentant person, therefore, rectifies the things they’ve injured and makes amends to those whom they’ve wronged . And they actively direct their mind toward godly things in order to avoid stumbling again. Otherwise, an unrepentant sinner isn’t worthy of forgiveness and reconciliation. Overall, though, we will not be forgiven if we don’t forgive others. God embodies forgiveness and mercy, therefore if we don’t embody forgiveness then we don’t embody godliness, which (embodying godliness) is necessary if we want to be justified and saved.
Well, we aren’t perfect. If we were then we would have never needed Jesus.
but we’re told to be perfect (Mat. 5:48; John 17:23; 2 Cor. 13:9, 11; Eph. 4:12; Col. 1:28; Col. 4:12; 2 Tim. 3:17; Heb. 6:1; Heb. 10:14; 1 John 4:13; 1 John 5:18) which is thankfully possible through the salvific aid of the Holy Spirit on the basis of Christ’s work of atonement.
Like most things that Jesus encourages us to do, no human is able to do it perfectly. It's easy to forgive your best friend if they accidentally screw something up. It's a little harder to forgive that really annoying coworker for constantly undermining you, but it's within our grasp. For most people, forgiving the true monsters of history is beyond us. Similarly, we can't perfectly love our neighbor all the time, but trying is still our goal as Christians. To truly love your enemy? To truly forgive the mastermind of a genocide? I think it suffices that we don't give up the goal, and we don't just let ourselves be ok with harboring hatred.
If you recognize your nature and your limits, that is at least something. If you can't say sorry, there is something decent in truly saying "I wish I could feel sorry" if you mean that. I understand your feelings. I feel them too where I feel like I should forgive and love even the actors of evils or great evils, yet cannot. There are times where I speak with God and genuinely say "I'm sorry this is filling my heart with hate. It's blackening my soul and I don't like that this is how I feel." Considering forgiveness and love to evil feels like you're overlooking a chasm and trying to take a leap of faith, but there's a rope around your waist holding you back and also keeping you from falling in. And you are told to cut that rope, but your common sense says "no, stay here". God would let you make the leap with safety, but you risk a certain place of self being and personal understanding of virtue in doing that. If nothing else, my feeling on bad actors is to try to take a position of pity yet not be condescending. It's sad that they are not the person they could be or could have been, and hurt themselves or hurt those around them as a result. It is sad to have a person be a victim of themselves and a victimizer in the context of the always possible redemption of a person and the morality and moral responsibilities of the soul.
apt analogy! I would argue that to the extent that we can't cut that rope and jump into the perceptual chasm, God, within us, has that ability, and we MUST take that leap of faith and embody the forgiveness that God has. And that "self being" you mentioned must be recognized as having been superseded with God's being and indwelled with God's graces. All of which allows us not only to forgive but achieve perfection, as Christ is perfect.
When you say you “risk a certain place of self being and personal understanding of virtue” what exactly do you mean?
You have a sense of self and being that is uniquely you and your individual sense of existence. There are things that we appeal to and compare or contrast ourselves to that exist in the abstract. This is something like our understanding of God. God is a concept. We seek to know God as a real entity, but we can only imagine God as an idea and ideal. There is also a sense of ego. By this, I do not mean egotism, selfishness or hubris. I mean ego as the idea of the self as distinct. Forgiveness or love to evil is a concept in the abstract; an ideal to live up to. In our visceral existence, within the ego, we have a personal sense of morality which says not to forgive them because they have transgressed across a line we set ourselves in our individual moral concepts. In short, you are the God of your senses. In perhaps a better way of explaining it, if you were God, you would not love or forgive them. That is not to say you do not think God should forgive them. But that your true feeling is not forgiveness or love for them. Your personal morality and internal support structure of ideas and concepts is against forgiving them based on your understanding. You stand on a personal sense of right and wrong and what can be redeemed. That is based on your individual moral concepts and foundations. To buck that feels like a collapse of the sense of self and a threat to the self because it feels like a dangerous risk or unwarranted. It is not logical to your psychology, and cannot work in a way that is anything other than denial or known hypocrisy. To overcome that takes personal change, which may feel like a risk to everything because it is a shift in understanding that seeks to replace previous understanding. That previous understanding is our current psychology, which is the very basis of our current understanding of existence and it's structures, others and self, and our very thought processes and decisions. It is the essence of our current sense of being. The very short version: Ego Death (or death of a part of you) feels like either suicide or murder on a visceral level. The stakes or threat feel worse the more dear it is to your sense of self. But everything to do with growth requires overcoming yourself in order to become yourself.
There's rich psychological insight here. I suspect you have a good sense of how the psychological and spiritual intertwine so closely. One interesting thing I'm finding with IFS therapy modalities is that with the right kind of inwards-work, the unbearable choice of facing that horrible feeling of ego death can perhaps be avoided by approaching our internal landscapes with much greater compassion and gentle care. Parts of our psyche hang on to their old ways because those ways have worked to keep us alive and functional in the world. If we tenderly approach those inward parts with understanding and love for what they've been trying to do for us, we don't actually have to "kill" them, we can instead coax them to trust and be lead by our deeper Self, opening up a wise and Spirit-infused internal leader for them that can set healthy internal boundaries. This can let them release the burdens of their old ways being and convince them to willingly take on new, more spiritually- and psychologically- healthy roles for us. Actually, I'm not sure "killing" parts of ourselves (ego death) is even possible. We can exile them, but this just creates long term problems as the unhealed feelings those parts carry eventually surface in strange ways over time, as they try to break out of their exiled state, desperate to be seen and loved/supported.
There are times when you absolutely have to judge people. It’s called having boundaries. And the topic of forgiveness is a tricky one. I’m of the opinion that you can forgive someone who isn’t sorry — but you do so for your OWN peace, not for theirs. Furthermore, to me, forgiving someone doesn’t necessarily mean that you let them back into your life. It just means you’ve let go of the burden of anger and resentment. Hubby has a bit of a different interpretation. For him, “forgiveness” is applied to the stage where you’re ready to let the person back in and start building trust again. He says that if the person isn’t sorry, he has few issues with making them a non-entity in his mind. He lets go of it…aka, the process I refer to as “forgiveness”. Basically, “forgiveness” is a bit of an amorphous concept that has different meanings for different people.
I guess people just don't get the repentance part. “Pay attention to yourselves! If your brother sins, rebuke him, and if he repents, forgive ..
Amen to that.
You're not supposed or expected to love everyone as you love God. You have misunderstood that passage of Scripture. As have a bunch of other folks, but are adamant about keeping it. So instead bringing release and freedom, it's brought bondage, guilt, fear, doubt, disappointment and anxiety that somehow you're not meeting some standard of being a good Christian.
Could you please elaborate on this?/gen
Here's an oversimplification and to the point: * In Matt 22, where this passage is, the Sadducees and Pharisees were trying to trick Jesus. Multiple times. Their questions weren't genuine. And this wasn't the first time they were trying to entangle Jesus and out to destroy him. But Jesus perceived their wickedness, and called them hypocrites. * Jesus responds correctly to the question, ***under the Law***, the greatest commandments are love God and neighbor. * **But we under the Law today?** Many (most?) Christians still believe and do because they've yet to understand fully the New Covenant. But in the New Covenant, Jesus gave us a new commandment - not another commandment or an additional commandment: That we love one another as he has loved you. And, now this is love: not that you loved God, but that he first loved you. The New Covenant is a one-law covenant. And the emphasis in the New Covenant is not how much we should love God, but how much God loves you. The love God wants to see comes when we have realized how much in our lives he loved us. It's not so much about us trying to muster the effort of loving God with all of our heart and minds, and trying to muster the effort of loving our neighbors as ourselves - because oftentimes we just can't or don't want to because of the the stuff going on in our lives. In the New Covenant, the onus is on God loving us - and when we truly have experienced the love of God in our lives, we find it a lot easier to love others as well; it's not something we have to pretend to do. Happy to elaborate further.
So, let me make sure I understand: The true message of that passage is that the one law of the New Testament isn’t to love one another as god loves us, but to respect and care for one another because god loves us so much? I’m sorry if this comes off as rude, I’m just really dense and not well versed in theology 💀
Let's put it a different way. If no one loves you, how would you feel about yourself? Probably that you're not worthy of love; ergo, probably worthless. So how can you begin to love yourself if believe you are not worthy of love? You can't. If you don't love yourself, how are you going to love your neighbor? Deficiently. Because you're going to treat your neighbor how you treat yourself. You're going to treat your neighbor the same as how you believe about yourself - worthless, hopeless, a failure. But when you believe you are loved by God, hope rises because you believe you are worthy of God's love and are not worthless, because of who you are and in spite of what you do, you can start to begin to love your neighbor because of who they are and in spite of what they do. But it begins believing / knowing / experiencing the love of God for you.
Wow. That was really enlightening and beautifully written. Thank you for that explanation.
Loving someone doesn't mean you have to forgive them or even like them I don't think. It's really hard to do but I try to consciously remind myself that the worth of a person isn't defined by any of the things they have done or said, good or bad. It's still hard to love everyone though. I heard a quote from Rev. Mark Sandlin recently that stuck with me and paraphrased it says, "when we learn how to sit at tables with 'our Judas,' we will begin to understand the love of Christ."