Long my imprisoned spirit lay
— Charles Wesley
Fast bound in sin and nature’s night; Thine eye diffused a quick’ning ray—
I woke. The dungeon flamed with light; My chains fell off, my heart was free,
I rose, went forth, and followed thee.
Macbeth knew that his wife, famously plagued with a guilty conscience, could be delivered only by some “sweet . . . antidote” that would wipe away the “perilous stuff that weighs upon her heart.” That antidote is the forgiveness of God. You will never be able to fully forgive others for their sins against you unless you first experience God’s forgiveness of your sins against him. Our guilt must be dealt with if we are to deal rightly with others’ guilt.
The Problem of Self-Forgiveness
It is common for counselors to hear people say, “Yes, I asked for God’s forgiveness. But the problem is . . . I can’t forgive myself.”
There is a large industry of self-help books and many kinds of therapy that attempt to help people with self-forgiveness. The vertical dimension— the relationship to God—is left out completely, and guilt is seen as strictly to be dealt with on the internal and horizontal levels.
The main ideas of self-forgiveness therapy include: (a) asking for forgiveness from anyone you’ve wronged, (b) taking responsibility for what you have done wrong, but then (c) learning lessons from the event, (d) being as compassionate to yourself as you would be to others, and finally (e) then moving on with life, accepting yourself.
While individual steps mentioned can be helpful, the overall approach falls short. We struggle to know if what we did really was wrong, and secular approaches have no way to help anyone judge between true guilt and false guilt feelings. Also, many have asked forgiveness of other human beings—they have done all required of them—but still can’t rid themselves of guilt and shame.
How do we respond to someone who says, “I cannot forgive myself”? Modernity has declared that we are our own highest authorities. Gail Sheehy’s bestseller Passages spells this out as a foundational rule of life. You “find yourself” only as you free yourself from all other institutional claims and from all other people’s agendas and approval. Relationships should be tentative and engaged only as long as they support your chosen identity and interests. We alone can validate ourselves or judge whether something is good or bad. No one else has the right to tell us who we are or judge us by their standards.
But what happens then when the self is weighed down in guilt nonetheless? No outside agent has the power to overturn the sanctions that the
self inflicts upon itself. Who has the right to tell the modern self, “Your evaluation of yourself is all wrong”? The Bible reveals the core of this problem: “If our hearts condemn us, we know that God is greater than our hearts” (1 John 3:20).
Here is the essence of what Christianity gives us. Only God is the final judge of who we are and what we have done. If—and only if—he is, then God can overrule our heart’s guilt and self-condemnation. If he says we are forgiven, then we are, and we can tell our hearts to quiet themselves. The secular framework, however, has nothing to give the wounded conscience to heal it. It has nothing to say to the self who feels it is unworthy of love and forgiveness. Anyone who has seen the depths of their sin and what they are capable of will never be mollified by the bromide of “Be nice to yourself—you deserve it.”
In his book, Radical Self-Forgiveness, Colin Tipping sees the limits of a wholly secular approach and so incorporates Eastern mysticism. Tipping advises us to look at our life in a framework of reincarnation and karma. We are souls that exist in the present life to experience many things that will educate us for better practice in future lives. In this worldview, all things that happen to us and all things we do to others, even wrongdoing, are lessons we learn in order to grow through many lifetimes into perfec- tion and bliss. To achieve self-forgiveness, we tell ourselves: “While I remain accountable for what I do in the human world, in purely spiritual terms nothing wrong ever happens.”
Tipping deals with sin not by absolving it but by minimizing it. This is deeply unsatisfying because we know intuitively that the evils committed here are indeed evils. Christianity does not minimize the wrongness of sin yet still provides a powerful antidote for guilt.
The “sweet antidote” that Macbeth yearned for does exist. It is divine forgiveness.
From FORGIVE, by Timothy Keller, published by Viking, an imprint of the Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © 2022 by Timothy Keller.