Should Christians "Be That Forgiving"?

In an old Sunday School book I ran across this allegedly true story: A Norwegian farmer's dog killed and ate his neighbor's baby. Next year his neighbor sowed his fields for him, saying, "I did it so that God might be here."The Sunday School writer asked readers, "Could you be that forgiving?" 

"Be that forgiving" is bad grammar, because words mean things. "Forgiving" is not a permanent, settled state of being. It is a specific act. "Forgiving" is a transitive verb and, as such, not only should it not be use in a phrase suggesting comparison, but it wants its object. One forgives a specific person for a specific debt or offense. The nature of the debts or offenses might make a person seem magnanimous if the person forgave a debtor for one debt, but continued to collect payment on another. 

What would happen, in the real world, in the rare case that a dog ate a baby? The owner of the dog would be appalled. The dog would be shot, probably by the owner, minutes after its behavior was discovered. The owner would probably know better than to attempt any ego defenses. An apology for one's dog having eaten a baby is, like a marriage proposal, properly done on one's knees; it would probably be incoherent, choked by tears. 

Even if the bereaved parent was in an emotional state that precluded any intelligent response to the dog owner's first apologies, at some level the parent would know that this was not something the dog owner had planned to cause to happen or was likely to cause to happen again. Letting a dog eat a baby is something humans genuinely don't intend to do; when it happens, it happens because nobody anticipated a need to prevent it, because most dogs seem to love and protect babies. The parent probably never thought the dog owner was really to be blamed, and certainly thinks the dog owner can be trusted not to let the same thing happen again. 

This makes forgiving the owner of a dog who ate a baby considerably easier than forgiving a storekeeper who gave you short change or an acquaintance who "carelessly" calls you by someone else's name. I want to pick on the "mistakes" people make with names today; it's to be understood that the same principles apply to other displays of hostility, conceitedness, dishonesty, unchastity, and obnoxious social behavior in general. 

Very likely the dog owner failed to control his dog for the same reason he needed help sowing the field. He had some sort of injury. A leg or arm no longer does what he wants it to do without pain. And if you and he and perhaps some other neighbors have a crop rotation plan where you don't have to plant what you planted last year, because you've agreed to buy it from him this year, helping sow his field might even be considered selfish. You agreed that potatoes were going to be his crop, your field is already full of beans, and you want to eat a few potatoes with your beans next winter. In that case your work on his behalf is prudent, and prudence is a virtue, but it's not unselfish. 

So, if this happened in your neighborhood, it would be easy to make a case that you should forgive the dog owner...even if the dog had transgressed in a more predictable way and eaten one of your hens. 

But does that mean that, if you're trying to "be that forgiving," you should encourage the person who calls you by the wrong name?

Is this person, in fact, senile, as shown by his calling random acquaintances by the names of members of his long-dead family? In that case the kindest thing to do may be to humor him. Not only might you choose to answer when he calls you "Florence," the name of his sister who died in 1953; he's likely to say things like "I need to go and milk the cow, Florence," and you might say, "I already milked her, Henry." 

Is the person recovering from brain trauma, as shown by her confusing words and names, generally? In that case the kindest thing to do may be to correct her. Patiently. "I'm not Jack, I'm Joe." 

Is the person honestly mistaking you for someone else? Did his eyes light up when he greeted you, "Jane Smith! Where've you been so long?" Was he disappointed, but willing to take the correction, when you said patiently, "I'm not Jane Smith, I'm her daughter Jennifer"? 

In that kind of situation most of us don't even notice a need to "forgive" these people. We feel sorry for them; any forgiveness that takes place is unconscious, automatic. But what about the person who unapologetically calls everybody, or everybody toward whom he dares to behave like this, by the wrong name because that's one of the ways she expresses deep hostility? "You told me before, but I'd rather call you Sharon because I think Susan is an ugly name." Not only are you not required to forgive this person; you can't forgive her. She's not repenting. 

There are those who think we should cheerfully ignore this kind of behavior and continue to talk to this kind of person. I have not observed good results from that policy. This person does not have good intentions toward you. Nor, probably, does she have good intentions for the mutual acquaintance who thinks she's nice. She is a hater. "Sharon" is a nice name for people whose parents gave it to them, but, coming out of her, it's a term of hate. Cutting off the conversation is probably the best plan. 

I used to know some people who claimed to be shocked when I recognized calling people by wrong names, along with unnecessary touching, ignoring questions, abruptly changing subjects, arriving at wrong times, etc., as being the hostile dominance displays they are. Oh of course, their grandfather couldn't be hostile. He only loses track of time, forgets names, and throws small harmless objects at people's heads. And, er um, threw a bedpan in a nurse's face once. And deliberately ran a car over a neighbor's dog. 

Some people may have been told, and never questioned, that denying the hostility in this kind of situation is "nice." They may honestly believe they're being nice when they enable a hostile person to do them harm, too. If he grows bolder before his next stroke their grandfather may shoot at the head of a Girl Scout selling cookies. 

But I say unto you, Gentle Readers: good things do not come from enabling hostile, hateful, hurtful behavior, even on the petty level where it usually begins. People who smile and rise above taking offense when they're called by the wrong names tend to be people who won't be so happy, but won't have prepared any effective defenses, when the offender "carelessly" slaps a sticker on their angora sweater. Or drops a bucket of paint off a ladder...on the toddler's head. Or "accidentally" burns their house down. You never know what bad things may follow if you let a relationship develop with someone who persists in, or even defends, calling you by the wrong name, but you do know that that's not going to lead to anything really good. 

At this point some churchgoers like to say, "But you don't know that for a fact! You shouldn't be prejudiced! You should 'be forgiving'!" Wrong. On the topic of human behavior, most things people say that contain any form of the verb "be" are judgmental and wrong. 

The Bible actually says, "Cast not pearls before swine." And it says, "Make no friendship with an angry man." (And no, that doesn't mean the person who expresses righteous anger toward those who provoke it, as when Jesus lashed out at the moneychangers in the Temple. It means the person who is chronically hostile, who probably denies all anger and says things like "Of course I've 'forgiven' the teacher who hit me in grade three"--and hits children.) It says, "If they will not hear you, then depart, and shake the dust off your feet as a witness against them," in the context of heathen people who refuse to be converted to Christianity, but this is a good policy for the same reasons that severing all connections with hostile people is a good policy. 

Forgiveness is not meant to be twisted into handing hostile people material to use against us. Forgiveness is a way to rebuild relationships with people of good intentions, not a way to enable people to act on bad intentions. 

I'm not saying that a person who makes little hostile dominance displays can never be forgiven. Sometimes such people learn their social behavior in a hostile environment, genuinely regret that they seem hostile to nicer people, and try to learn better manners when they have a chance. But forgiveness begins with repentance so, although most of us have better things to think about than the unpleasantness of all the hostile people we don't choose to talk to, there is absolutely no basis for blather about "forgiving" them unless, and until, they repent. 

This repentance would be not just a casual apology for letting that wrong name "just slip out" (which they'll do again, five minutes later) but a consistent process of earnest repentance for acting as if the social relationships among Christians ever had any room for any little hierarchies or, if there were some basis for setting up a social hierarchy, for not placing themselves firmly at the bottom of it. The offender might show sincere repentance for calling Susan "Sharon" by consistently, over the next year, referring to Susan as "my kind and gracious superior" and addressing her as "Your Honor." The hostility, which runs so much deeper than an incidental bit of bad manners, has to be aggressively rooted out if the hostile person is ever to be welcomed in the company of less unpleasant people. And even when a hostile person learns humble manners, the person still needs to be watched for a good long time for any tendencies to behave like Dickens' Uriah Heep. 

Hostile people need to repent of the right things. They seem to like to assume that everyone thinks enough of them that they "hurt" people. Well, they don't, noticeably, hurt very many adults. Introverts do not go through life demanding that everyone liiiike us; we go through life expecting that normal people, like us, have their own lives and don't pay a great deal of attention to strangers, especially disagreeable strangers. There may be some sensitive souls who really do need to spend time thinking about "forgiving" someone who "hurt" them by calling them Lizzie instead of Elizabeth. They are probably very young and I don't think I ever met them. The actual thoughts introverts have when we meet unpleasant people are more like "Eww ick, a nasty person," and "How fast can I end this conversation?" I don't know any introverts who sit around crying because the unpleasant person didn't liiiike their names. 

It's more like, "Well, if person can't get even that right, obviously person's emotions are of interest only to clinical psychologists." If someone clearly said his name was Ernesto and someone else called him Ernie, the default assumption is that that's like a rattlesnake rattling. Now Ernesto knows he doesn't need to waste time trying to build a relationship with that stupid jerk. Hostile people do not need to repent of having "hurt" people's feelings so much as they need to repent of having been stupid jerks. 

And, just as Jesus said it was hard for a rich man to get into Heaven...it is easier for a person to repent of having let a dog eat a neighbor's baby than it is for a person to repent of having habitually acted like a stupid jerk. 

Usually people learn obnoxious behavior in the first place because they see it as a way to defend their very sensitive egos; usually when they're told that their behavior is obnoxious, they go into ego defense mode and want to find fault with others. Which, of course, invalidates their apologies. It takes two people to have a conflict but the person recovering from a habit of making egotistical displays does not need to be allowed to think that anyone but perself has ever been wrong. 

But, until they repent, continuing to talk to them is not "forgiveness." It is enabling bad behavior. The Bible tells us not to do that. Christians should not allow ourselves to be manipulated with blather about "understanding" or "forgiving" bad social behavior. We have an ethical responsibility to stop enabling bad social behavior.