A theology of forgiveness. Letters from an innocent convict.
To our friends in Los Angeles
There would always be more to remember that could no longer be seen. Our history is always returning to a little patch of weeds and saplings with an old chimney sticking up by itself, and here I look ahead to the resting of my case: I love the house that belonged to the chimney, holding it bright in memory, and love the saplings and the weeds. —Wendell Berry, Hannah Coulter
Poet Christian Wiman recently wrote that the places in which we dwell are a “a house, a country, a language, a love, a longing, a grief, a god.” Indeed, Wiman is likely right that home is “a word that disperses into more definitions than one book can contain.” As people of words, words fail us now, friends, as we watch the terrible and infernal scenes in Los Angeles unfold. So many homes that took decades to build have been lost in a matter of hours. The loss is material, but it’s also much more than that.
For the recently unhoused and unsettled, the displaced and disoriented, we mourn with you. We pray for those affected by the fires that you experience new forms of love and generosity, community and care in the face of this tragedy. We also pray that as you hold what was good in pained memory, new forms of goodness will emerge in the work of rebuilding that lies ahead.
The Theological Terrain of Forgiveness
Mapping the doctrines, questions, and mysteries of a complicated topic.
For a magazine dedicated to public theology, it might come as no surprise that our issue on forgiveness draws from the deep wells of Christian social thought. In this week’s essay, Brad East, one of our contributing editors, maps out the “theological terrain of forgiveness” and provides the theological moorings for much of the entire issue.
In his opening salvo, East argues that we confuse forgiveness when we make it—rather than God—central to our theology. “God and his perfections,” East says, “rather than us and our defections” is the centre around which we move and that helps us keep our eyes on the “larger drama.” When we narrow the frame and stare at sin and the solution to it, we can “lose the plot” by forgetting “the rest of the play.” Of course, the central actor in the drama of Christian dogma is God incarnate in Christ, who brings his power to bear in a rebellious world where “sin is a tyrant, akin to Pharaoh, a mighty despot who holds humanity in bondage.” God’s power brings healing to disease, life to death, and forgiveness to trespasses against his will. All of these are various, interconnected ways we “unravel the tapestry of our lives.”
The forgiveness of God in Christ permeates the Gospel accounts and reveals how public a theology of forgiveness is. “The watchword of the church’s common life is forgiveness,” East argues, and in the Lord’s Prayer, the “promise, gift, and command” inherent in the petition “Forgive us our debts as we have forgiven our debtors” is a cruciform pattern that unites the vertical forgiveness of Creator to creature to the horizontal capacity of God’s people to practice the same self-giving love toward others. Of course, we do this imperfectly: “All human forgiveness this side of death is partial, piecemeal, a marathon measured daily in inches lost or won.” Yet on the other side of death, when our bodies are made new and our sins are forgiven, we’ll enjoy the “feast of homecoming” and the power of God’s perfect love in which forgiveness is no more because sin is no more. (20 min read)
A man wrongly convicted meditates on Christ’s call to forgive.
On March 26, 1987, Ben Spencer—twenty-two years old, newly married, with a baby on the way—was arrested for robbing and killing a wealthy white man in Dallas. Nothing connected him to the crime. He was convicted on the testimony of three witnesses who lied for a $35,000 reward and a jailhouse informant who lied for a shorter sentence. Ben was sentenced to life in prison.
Ben’s story reveals how criminal trials can go off the rails and why innocence is not enough to undo the mistake. But it is also a story of faith. For thirty-four years in a maximum-security prison, Ben absorbed God’s Word at a cellular level: He forgave the people who framed him, and he never doubted that the truth would set him free. Ben’s spiritual journey can be traced in some two thousand pages of letters to his wife, Debra. He never succumbed to bitterness—he saw it as a poison—and he trusted that God alone controlled his fate, not the Texas legal system. His miracle came in the form of a new district attorney, who reinvestigated his case. Ben Spencer was exonerated on August 29, 2024, his name cleared and his soul burnished to reflect the image of Christ.
So goes the introduction to a sacred set of love letters penned by Ben Spencer, a gift made possible by Comment reader and friend Barbara Bradley Hagerty, an award-winning journalist. Some years back, Barbara became acquainted with Ben and his case and just last year published a book called Bringing Ben Home that documents Ben’s wrongful arrest, his decades-long incarceration, and his eventual exoneration. Today we have the great privilege of sharing with you Ben’s letters to his wife written over decades in a jail cell: letters of love, hope, struggle, outcry, and a growing conviction that love for one’s enemies in a fallen and unjust world is the only way to make way for a better future for all. (17 min)
A new biography of the director Terrence Malick tells us, among other things, what he was doing in the twenty years between his second and third films.
The Hedgehog Review
The phrase “real time” has crept into our everyday vocabulary. But do we know what real time is? Does anybody?
Public theology for the common good.
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