Love, Forgiveness, and Narrative

This dissertation defends the thesis that a person forgives an offender for an offense insofar as they respond to the offense in a way that is loving to the offender. I offer three arguments for it. First, I argue that it is the only view that explains a pair of intuitive cases. Second, I argue that it is the only view that adequately explains why some instances of forgiveness are more forgiving than others. Third, I argue that the view has resources to accommodate the normative commitment that is always morally permissible to forgive, without reducing forgiveness to a deflationary moral gesture.
The second chapter compares the responding-in-love account to its closest rival, the openness-to-reconciliation account developed by Strabbing (2020). According to Strabbing (2020), forgiveness is a certain kind of openness to reconciliation. I argue that Strabbing’s conception of openness to reconciliation is too demanding to track forgiveness in some cases, and too undemanding to track forgiveness in others. I then propose a way of adjusting her account to avoid my counterexamples.
The third chapter addresses three important theological objections to the responding-in-love account, all of which stem from the commitment of the account that God’s forgiveness is unconditional. The first is that there are prooftexts suggesting that God only forgives conditionally. The second is that it appears to commit one to universalism, which the church has at least historically tended to oppose. The third is that it seems odd for Christians to ask God for forgiveness and for priests to grant sacramental absolution if God already forgives everyone.
In the fourth chapter, I offer a Christian defense of unconditional forgiveness. I argue that the resurrection performs the same kind of moral function as an offender’s repentance and so justifies forgiveness for the same kinds of reasons that it does. I then argue that the promise of the resurrection justifies Christians in giving up resentment before the resurrection has occurred in anticipation of it. I conclude by discussing the extent to which my argument generalizes to other kinds of forgiveness besides resentment-forbearance.