I see on here a split of opinion with Christians on Austin Metcalf's dad, here and elsewhere.
I think both are incorrect in their own way.
One side says you don't forgive the unrepentant. Wrong, extremely wrong. Were the ones stoning Stephen to death repentant when he cried out for God to forgive them? No. The Bible puts no qualifications on who to forgive, only that you do.
The other side says he's being a Christian by forgiving the killer, and didn't do anything wrong and what I'd say is it's not wrong to forgive the killer, but I'd say that going on national TV and trying to make sure everyone complies with the cultures values on race has little or nothing to do with forgiveness, and so this side misses the mark.
You see, here's the biggest problem with what Austin Metcalf's dad did.
The black ghetto community needs to repent. They are like, in a way, a seperate nation like Ninevah who is told by all parties, including the church that they're not destined to hell.
Calling to repentance is an act of mercy in the Bible. Jonah didn't want to tell the Ninevites to repent because he didn't want them to experience God's mercy. When John the baptist comes on the scene preaching a message of repentance, it's repeated over and over that God's mercy has come. You want to love black people? Call the violence glorifying culture to repentance and warn them that huge swaths of their culture is akin to something like the Ninevites.
Essentially the dad is saying without realizing it "make sure you don't have any conversations that could be difficult for the inner city to hear, lest they realize their sins and turn and be saved".
Many black people will be going to hell unfortunately because even the church tickles their ear and never calls out their behavior even though the church is more than happy to call out their mostly white congregants behavior (which the church should).
Anyone who objectively looks at the black community can see that they fit the definition of a fool found in proverbs and yet no one wants to touch that subject, including Christians.
So, the dad should forgive the killer, even if it takes time to do, and it's odd that he would be so lacking in paternal instinct that he'd unemotionally virtue signal, which seems less like Biblical forgiveness and more like this modern day utter capitulation and celebration of black culture, and the next thing the father could do, which would be the loving thing and also an extremely dangerous and scary thing, which would be to absolutely address the racial issue. Look, it's not about race. Jesus said go preach to all the nations. By all accounts, the black culture is a foreign nation. They share no values, and their values that are taught from birth are completely leading people to hell. They qualify as a nation that needs repentance.
And as we see in the Bible, in order for people to accept Jesus, they first need to be told what they're violating, where they're astray, and what the consequences of sin are.
I don't see the church doing this with the black community. The exact opposite.
So the "don't forgive the unrepentant" Christians are wrong, as are the Christians who are failing to realize that the black, inner city, thug culture needs to face some extremely harsh facts for their eternal good.
forgiveness is what you do on your end. It's internally forgiving them instead of holding on to bitterness, hatred, unforgiveness.
You can forgive someone and want them to face legal justice. They're not mutually exclusive.
You can and should forgive people who have been dead for 20 years. You can forgive people who are in hell right now and you should. The forgiveness we do is a separate thing from the forgiveness that Jesus offers because we don't have the spiritual merit to wipe away anyone's sins including our own unlike Jesus. Christians' forgiving is about us having a heart that recognizes our own spiritual depravity and the mercy we've received, and so we let go of the unforgiveness we have towards others.
Your forgiveness is not the same as God's forgiveness. You're forgiving their trespasses, as Jesus forgave you, but it doesn't mean their sins are forgiven to God unless they put their trust and faith in Jesus.
If Jeff Metcalf said "you are forgiven" in that prescriptive way, that would be blasphemous, but he didn't say that. He said, I forgive the killer. It's a different meaning.
As an example, I had to forgive people who were cruel to me in high school, as I was holding on to that bitterness.
I haven't seen them in nearly 20 years. I don't know if they're repentant. I know nothing about them. Most of them I can barely recall anything specific, but I had to come to a point where I forgave them and let it go.
It has nothing to do with them. Christian forgiveness is about your heart towards them.
Whether anyone is actually forgiven of their sins in the eyes of God is 100% down to what they do with Jesus, and is separate from the forgiveness that Christians give.
Forgiveness means absolution. Save for personal affronts, no mere human being can absolve a damn thing. Furthermore, it is exclusively a two way street.
It's why confession exists. I know Protestants don't have that and all, but the theological basis for it is there nonetheless.
The animal who killed Austin Metcalf is not sorry. How can you be forgiven and absolved, for something you are proud of doing?
Your argument is foolish. You cannot forgive the dead either by the way, that's why the Last Rites exist in the first place.
No it doesn't. If it did, there'd be no point in people forgiving others at all, since the final absolution comes from God.
Forgiveness is about letting go of your own personal anger, or overcoming it, and being willing to hope for salvation, even for those that wronged you. And Christians do want everyone to find peace.
It has no impact on the absolution of the person you're forgiving, because that's in God's hands, as well as whether or not the other person truly repents. But anyone can forgive anyone else. And anyone can ask for God to forgive someone. Doesn't mean He will, but you can ask.
That is in fact the thing to do, but calling it "forgiveness" is wrong, and an issue with the English translation during the reformation years.
Let me put it this way.
You offer a handshake to another man. He looks, turns around, and walks away.
Did you actually shake his hand just because you tried?
Not a Christian, so take this as a philosophical question.
Shouldn't forgiveness be earned?
I understand that the utility of forgiving someone is a good way at, let's call it, spiritually cleansing yourself of hate and resentment. And that's really important. But if you do that too early, you might be doing a lot of forgiving of someone who doesn't care that they've hurt you, and are prepared to keep going.
In a just world, forgiveness ought to be given by the victim, and forgiveness ought to be sought by the abuser. (Here's where I'm not a Christian) We obviously don't live in anything like a Just World. To me, the world is fully amoral. Morality is formed by men who agree to live among one another in such a way that they believe all will prosper. I can't imagine that someone who would easily offer forgiveness would not be hunted to extinction by predators.
A predator would think of such a man as easy prey, and wildly gullible. Predators see weakness as an invitation to attack. A predator kills your son, steals his things, watches you forgive him, and then chooses you for further attacks, not merely because you allow it, but because "you're stupid and you deserve to be attacked". The predator thinks that you deserve further abuse because your forgiveness makes you inferior. You're weak. You're a chump. Exploitation is all you're good for. It's right to attack you, because it's what you deserve. You're supposed to be the stepping stone for someone else because you are too weak, stupid, and gullible to take what you want. "In the land of the pigs, the butcher is king." That is the mentality of a predator, and why you must kill them. You can't live with them, one day, they'll kill you. They don't respect you unless you predate upon them. They only respect other predators.
If someone isn't willing to earn forgiveness, they may be a predator. And if they are, forgiveness is simply wasted on them. They are unrepentant and anti-moral, and so forgiveness will never mean anything to them. If forgiveness helps you, then fine, but don't think it will help them. Predators are effectively alien to you, as foreign as a force of nature. They simply are not operating under the rules you live by, they never will, they don't want, and nothing can command them. Well, except immediate violence, which is their language anyway. Display yourself as a predator with territory, and they'll respect it if and only if you hurt them badly enough.
Forgiveness isn't meant to be blind or done naively.
Jesus commands Christians to "be wise as serpents and innocent as doves" and Proverbs tells us to not even trust a neighbor or a friend.
You can forgive someone while recognizing that they're bad news and you need to get away from that person.
And when you see that the person seems to have changed, depending on the circumstance, you can reconcile with that person, but it should be done intelligently and accurately assessing things so you don't get chewed up and spit out.
People do try to take advantage of gracious natures so that's why Christians should be careful to sus that out.
But you can forgive someone while deciding unless something changes, you're never going to associate with that person.
One example could be, you used to be into drugs, and your drug dealer did a lot of screwed up stuff to you.
If a Christian forgives that drug dealer, should they then go reconcile with that drug dealer?
Probably not, because if drugs were an issue for them, the wisest thing to do is get rid of any contacts from your phone that have anything to do with drugs but still be praying for them.
Now if you've been 10 years sober and drugs aren't a temptation for you anymore, and you want to share the gospel with the person who used to be your drug dealer, now it's a different situation, but in both situations a Christian shouldn't be going in naively and assuming good about the other persons nature.
You can forgive and also recognize that people search for weakness and will chew you up and spit you out if they get the chance and you ought to be careful.
That's why Jesus said in Matthew 10:16 "Be wise as serpents, and innocent as doves".
In other words, be kind, be loving, but also be smart.
Okay, I suppose that makes sense, but I feel like it's a bit too vague. A Christian should forgive, but must do so with the wisdom to proceed appropriately given the situation that they are in. That, I gather. So I think I need a follow-up question:
Would you consider Austin's father's apology to have been wise? If so: why is it wise. If not, what would be wise?
If "it's too personal to know" (as in, we can't know what Austin's father emotionally/spiritually needs), then what would a hypothetical wise forgiveness look like for a father who's son was murdered.
I guess I'm trying to find the boundary conditions of where wisdom could be in this, and I think the drug dealer analogy is a bit too distant from the current scandal. I'm going to caveat this with the acknowledgement that I don't expect you to have all-knowing wisdom and have a 'perfect' or even 'correct' answer. I'm just trying to flesh out your reasoning because it's a bit different than mine.
I'll speak generally and say that forgiving someone doesn't need to be public and on the news, and spoken about at all, much less right at the moment when you're possibly emotional.
When he said there's no racial element, that's just incorrect. Even if there was zero racial motive in that crime or anything to talk about wtih racial background of that perpetrator, you cannot deny how the two circumstances are treated there isn't a racial element.
It's like saying there's no racial element in the OJ Simpson trial. I don't think OJ committed murder for racial motives, but it's one of our most racial moments in US history as a significant amount of one side rooted for murder to be allowed for racial motives.
So wise, or unwise, him saying no one should bring up race is just incorrect, as those who have been paying attention notice where the disproportionate amount of violence is coming from and the attitude of that community.
But you have to grant that he could have been in an irrational and emotional state and stuck his foot in his mouth because it's his way of dealing with the trauma. His example is actually too unreliable because if your son just died, it's just about impossible to make a guess of what was going through his mind.
To answer what a wise forgiveness would look like, there's Christians who have talked about having a loved one murdererd and the years it took to forgive the person, but they were ultimately led by God to forgive the person. This wasn't a public thing, it wasn't on the news, it's just something that they wrestle with and the timing is different for everyone.
I find myself having to forgive people I've already forgiven because something will remind me of something and the wound gets opened up again and I have to remember what Jesus forgave me of, and I let it go.
Forgiveness is something you do and isn't a showy thing for the news and the community. No one even has to know you have forgiven someone or even know that someone has wronged you.
If it comes up at an appropriate time, it's not wrong to talk about it.
I think in Austin's father's case, he had the misfortune of, because of the racial dynamics of the country, get catapulted into the media with perhaps pressure, at the very least a subconcious knowing pressure of being labelled this or that and may have made a mistake.
I think the best thing Austin's father should have done is said a very short thing, just said "I'm in mourning and I don't want to speak" which not one person would fault anyone in that position for saying.
Then bring that hurt to God with the help of other loved ones. That forgiveness process doesn't have to be in any way public or for cameras. The world isn't obligated to know your wrestling with difficult topics and working out how to forgive.
No one expects someone to be able to forgive something like that immediately. There's an expectation that it will take time and healing.
So what I'd say is it wasn't the best thing for the father to go the route he did. I'm not able to judge his heart and actually Christians are commanded not to judge other people's heart. He and I have the same judge, so it's not my job to judge his heart.
I can just say there were issues that arose with what he did and how he did it. His heart may have been in the right place. Your heart can be in the right place and make the wrong decision because we're easily misled by our heart and our heart is deceitful.
But again, his son just died, so a lot of latitude should be granted to someone in that position.
I'm more irritated at the culture that promotes and continues to promote a sacred cow-ism of the ghetto culture where no one can ever say what's obvious.
But Austin's father should be given grace because he probably wasn't in his right head.
This. You said exactly what i wanted to say but i wasn't sure how to put it in words
Thanks.
You're right. it helps to have the scripture to back it up, it's all there, but well said anyway
I should have used scripture, you're right.
It can help, but many Christians (and most non-Christians discussing Christian matters) think that we (as Christians) can only make definitive statements and judgments if it's supported by a Biblical passage. The Bible isn't the sum total of all knowledge and wisdom, with a commandment on how to act perfectly in every scenario, that tells us how to do calculus, or physics, or interpret the tax code, etc. If it was, it would be infinitely long. That's not the purpose of the Bible, either.
Christians, especially since the enlightenment and the growth of "science!", have forgotten that creation is also a work of God, and it's His greatest work. When God points to His divinity and power, He doesn't point to scripture. He points to creation (Job 38).
Don't ever forget that God's will is inlaid into creation itself. All of truth, rules of logic, mathematical laws, scientific laws, they're all of God and from God. This is why, when we act in accordance with truth, with God, we're rewarded with success, abundance, safety, joy, community, justice, inward peace, health, and fecundity, the very things God promises us, in scripture, when we act in accordance with Him. When we act in discordance to God, to truth, we are "rewarded" with the opposite.
To learn, to know the rules of truth and logic via what creation tells us, is to learn of God, to learn God's will. We can use that wisdom to shape our own ideas, philosophies, judgments, actions, and behaviors, and be just as Christian when we do so, as when we quote scripture. We don't need to rely on scripture for absolutely everything, because scripture doesn't answer everything. If scripture and creation seem to contradict, it means we don't understand it fully. Some things will be a mystery to us, and will remain a mystery until we're educated by God at our time of judgment. We are finite, imperfect, and mortal, after all.
But, truth is often quite clear and easy to decipher, it's just that it's so obvious it's easy for people to miss. Most of the profound things I've learned over the years have been obvious, but overlooked, things usually taken for granted. We often get in our own way, and get lost in the minutiae and weeds, or get hung up on this or that, thinking in false dichotomies, and our ego gets in the way, when the foundations, the obvious, are unconsidered and ignored, while people foolishly build houses upon their personal stretch of sand, because of their ego.
Do not ignore or reject creation when espousing truth and God's will, or you become apostate as a Christian, as to do so is to reject God and His greatest work.