The .Plan

On the plane to and from my apartment-hunting trip, I had the chance to read Timothy Jackson’s book The Priority of Love: Christian Charity and Social Justice. It’s the first book of his that I have read, and I liked it enough that I will probably dig out some of his older journal articles and perhaps his new book.

He has a thorough chapter entitled, “Forgiveness as an Eternal Work of Love”, in which he takes forgiveness to mean “cessation of againstness”. Jackson writes:

My offer of forgiveness wills the good of the other by making his tawdry past no longer exist for me, save in a special (almost impersonal) form of memory. Such a redemption of time requires the inbreaking of eternity, saying to the offender, “It is with me as if you had never transgressed, even as God has forgiven my sin”. This “cessation of againstness” is a teleological suspension of the ethics of merit, an altruism that rises above justice (narrowly defined as suum cuique) without offending against it. “Mercy triumphs over judgment” (James 2:13), but it does not humiliate it. To respond to an infidelity with permanent hostility might be reciprocally fair, for example, but it is not loving. Love would ideally empower another to be self-giving, and thus forgiving, in her turn; but, again, repentance and reform follow, if they follow, only at a distance. Love is not first a technique; it is a presence that serves and suffers. It is a steadfast refusal of ill will characteristic of a sacred heart — but who is capable of this without special grace? Although love does not forget temporal offenses, it recalls them from the point of view of eternity (i.e., in light of God’s mercy and judgment). Not to re-member sin at all is to dis-member time, but to re-member eternally is to re-deem time by seeing all sin (past, present, and future) as already vanquished by Almighty God.

Next up on the reading list: On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society, by Lt. Col. Dave Grossman.