A Line Through the Human Heart - Introduction

I will forgive their evildoing, and their sins I will remember no more. - Hebrews 8:12

He took all our sins upon Himself and asked forgiveness for our offenses.
- Second Antiphon 2, Evening Prayer, Wednesday of Holy Week

The call to "repent" of one's sins is almost the first word we hear in the Gospels.  It is a call we do not really "like" to hear.  It challenges us to examine ourselves, to do something about the way we live.  In that sense, it is also a grace.  It presupposes 1) that we do or can sin, 2) that we know what we do, and 3) that we want to do something about repairing any damage to ourselves or others that our actions have caused.  We know that it is not sufficient simply to "forgive" ourselves.  We hope that some way exists for us to be forgiven that makes us aware of the seriousness of the problems sin cause us, yet something that is not impossible to accomplish.

Socrates famously said that "the unexamined life is not worth living."  If we do "examine" our lives — something highly recommended — we find that many things about them ought not to have existed, but do.  We would like to forget them all.  But our sins, even repented ones, as we will see (Chapter 14), remain part of our own history, our own character.  Our sins define us as much as our virtues and talents do.  "This is the day of fulfilment.  The reign of God is at hand.  Reform your lives [repent] and believe in the Gospel" (Mark 1:15; cf. Matthew 4:17).  This is both an announcement to us and, in its light, an admonition.  Something is now in the world that was not here before.

The New Testament begins, as we ourselves do at our birth, in a world in which sins of actual men and women already exist.  Though this reality is not the whole story, we live our lives in a sinful world, "a vale of tears."  The world itself is good.  Many lovely things are found in it.  We are to note them, love them.  The location of evil, moreover, is not in matter.  We are not Manicheans who think that matter was created by an evil god.  God looked on the world that is, the one that He created.  He saw that it was "good," indeed very good.  But He was also aware of the sin and disorder in the drama of mankind.  This disorder invited a divine response as the only way finally to deal with it.

The general context of the existing world was always that such a sinful world "need" not have happened, but it did.  God did not intend that death and evil should come into the world, though He knew man's freedom made it possible.  God took the risk, but knew He might have to deal with a freedom badly used.  Once present in the world as a fact, everyone had to work out his life, his salvation, with an awareness that sin and evil are not just possible, but present.  They are not just abstractions but touch every life in one way or another.  We either sin ourselves or suffer from the sins of others.

Sin and evil are presumed, experienced, not merely "invented" or "imagined."  They ought not to exist, but they do exist.  The alternative to a sinful world, yet one within which we are to decide what we are to be, is probably not a sinless world.  It is no world at all.  The drama of existence includes, indeed is centered on, the possibility of free beings choosing against their own good, against God.  It also includes the response, within time — within the "fullness of time," — that God gives as His response to such sins.  We call this response the Incarnation, which leads to the Cross and Resurrection, Ascension, and Pentecost.

The problem of sin, once committed, is whether anything can be done about it, not just whether or why it happened.

The problem of sin, once committed, is whether anything can be done about it, not just whether or why it happened.  If something can be done about it, what is it?  How do we know about it?  Moreover, we cannot tell someone to "repent" unless he is free not to repent.  One can only repent what needs repentance.  In spite of the witticism that "no good deed goes unpunished," no one "repents" good deeds.  He rather rejoices in them.  He is praised for them.  This freedom to repent follows from first putting into existence an identifiable personal act, a sin, for which one needed to atone.  The act that needed atonement did not "need" to happen in the first place.  That is, some deed or word came into existence through the deliberate action of an individual human being.  Though he could have chosen otherwise, he decided to put it into existence anyhow.  In this sense, he is the technical "origin" or cause of this act.  It remains with him as an aspect of what he is.  Thus, the sinner must have had some knowledge of what he was doing, along with the possibility of his not doing it.  Even when something like a hurricane or storm in nature destroys many lives, we still often look for human culprits whom we make responsible for not anticipating or providing for the emergency.  In short, we cannot easily bear to live in a purposeless world.  In lieu of finding some human agency, God is often held responsible for any evil that occurs.  Of course, God is "responsible" for the normal workings of nature, for its being what it is.  Human sin is seen against the background of natural disasters.  The former is voluntary, the latter are not.

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The first step in thinking of the forgiveness of sins, then, is to consider what to do or what not to do; what can be done, what cannot be done about them.  The older legal notion of an "act of God," in referring to an earthquake or a volcano eruption, was designed not so much to "blame" God as to explain that not every destructive or happy event is the result of human choices.  Once such events happen, we then have to decide what to do about their consequences.  It is not only wrong to do something wrong, but wrong not to do something we ought to do.  Or, to say the same thing positively, we should do what we ought to do, though we "need" not.

We need next to look at the action or inaction that follows from our consideration of what is to be done.  Finally, the visible consequences of what we do follow.  We are to be observed and judged.  We need to know the effects of our actions on others and on ourselves.  Some thinkers will argue that the law itself or any prohibition is itself what causes evil to exist.  (St. Paul touched on this.) That is, if no law or norm existed, no evil would be possible.  But law is a norm that is designed to instruct us on what to do or not do.  It has appropriate sanctions for its breaking (as discussed in Chapter 8).  These are designed to indicate the seriousness of the law and the penalty for breaking it.  The breaking of a good law causes harm and inconvenience to many others.

When we read in Hebrews that our evil-doing can be forgiven by God, it adds that He will not remember it (discussed in Chapter 14).  Nothing quite so clearly illuminates God's view of our sins as this promise that they will not be "remembered."  There are certain conditions for this not-remembering, but it is the fact of forgiveness that astonishes us, and is an abiding theme in this book.

Sin does not exist in a deterministic world (Chapter 17).  In a world without freedom, we cannot really "complain" about what happens through our own instrumentality.  It would be like complaining that the sun rises in the morning or that the ocean has waves.  There is nothing we can do about it.  It does not fall under our power.  Our past sins are like this also.  Once they, or anything else, happen, it remains the same forever.

The alternative to a world in which forgiveness is possible is, as we are rapidly learning, one in which it isn't.

But there is a difference.  And this is where memory, justice, hell, mercy, compassion, punishment, repentance, forgiveness, and penance come in — if sins are not to be "remembered."  This passage from Hebrews does not mean that we need not remember the fact that we put a sin into reality.  The point is that its disorder will not be "remembered" if it is acknowledged as a disorder, not a virtue, if the sinner restores the order he has broken.

In the Book of Lamentations, we read: "For the Lord's rejection does not last forever;/Though He punishes, He takes pity, /in the abundance of His mercies;/He has no joy in afflicting/ or grieving the sons of men" (3:31–33).  The Lord rejects sin, but not forever.  He is open to repairing the damage of our evil acts.  Both punishment and pity belong to a consideration of sin.  Punishment indicates more or less how serious the fault is.  Pity shows how we feel or react to the sufferings of another, even if they are legitimately imposed for something definitely wrong.  A familiar Old Testament theme is that God takes no pleasure in affliction or death.  He does not enjoy watching anyone suffer, even justly.  But this fact does not mean that punishment and death, as such, are evil.  At their best, they are proper reactions to evil acts that we put into existence.

Punishments, as Plato said, are also signs that give us occasion to recognize the wrongness of our acts.  We show this awareness by the way we accept just punishment.  It is quite possible for God to "forget" our sins in some final sense even if we still may have legally to be punished for them.  Such punishment can be "pardoned" (clemency), but only if the pardon does not imply that nothing was wrong with the act in the first place.

This book is written with the awareness that many deeds that were once said to be sins are now considered to be "rights," "duties," or even "virtues."  Much of the natural law has been overturned to be replaced by law and punishment imposed by the positive or civil law alone.  Often in this latter sense, there is less forgiveness and little pity.  We have replaced a system of law and morals based on reason with one based on will.  We have done this in order to deny that certain sins are evil.  Ironically, compassion and mercy have been the instruments of this inversion (as discussed in Chapters 7, 13, 16).  This book is not a manual of sins, or a guide to contrition.  It is rather a consideration of the very possibility of forgiveness in a world that sees little need of it.  The alternative to a world in which forgiveness is possible is, as we are rapidly learning, one in which it isn't.