Last week, we looked at the dichotomy between a sin’s historic fact and its moral guilt as they relate to redemption arcs. I asserted that redemption arcs are just not quite possible, in their fullness, outside of the Christian understanding, and I demonstrated briefly, but I hope persuasively, that at least some non-Christian solutions are unworkable. Today we’ll finish that process and consider the answer God gives us.

Third, the sinner can just sit and stew. In our assassin’s case, this amounts to going about his life, doing whatever behaviorally reformed assassins do, and knowing all the while that there is an apparently irreparable break between him and his fellow man, between him and righteousness, between him and God. It’s a realistic state, but it’s not particularly fun, and it’s not reconciliation by any means. It’s just living with an unhealing wound.

Of course, it’s a fact of life that forgiveness is often incomplete, that people can refuse to forgive, can feel themselves unable to do it. Our assassin must life with that. Yet God, we know, forgives, and our goal is not to find a way to live with guilt but a way to reconcile, to heal the brokenness. As a format for a redemption arc or for forgiveness of any sort, therefore, this passes the test unsuccessfully; however realistic, it’s not a solution.

Further, the nature of man and his guilt is to seek a resolution of it. Yes, men can be induced to simply live with guilt (which often amounts to learning to ignore it or spiraling into self-destruction), but man natively wants to be rid of guilt, preferably in a way that avoids obeying God. He turns, as a result, to harming himself or others in order to atone, as we’ll see in the subtext (and statements) of the coming pagan patterns, as would be evident, I wager, in the ‘ignore it’ strategies (which victimize the sinner by keeping him forever in his guilt and the victim by refusing them justice, by demanding they ignore that guilt).

Fourth, then, the sinner can just hope that ‘time heals all wounds.’ It’s a non-answer; it counsels the assassin to avoid the topic in hopes that eventually, somehow, the guilt will scar over and before easier to touch. It’s an appeal to magic and is no redemption arc at all. Our assassin, in following this course, would simply avoid the people he’s harmed, would try to continue on as if not guilty at all. He’d be ignoring the problem, in a sense, except while also knowing it’s an ongoing problem, in hopes that something will fix it. This brings no reconciliation; this is no redemption; this is no peace with God or man or self.

Fifth, the sinner can try atonement, can try to get rid of the guilt by over-writing or making up for it, a sort of moral restitution. This doesn’t work, but it’s about the closest anti-Christian thought can get to the truth. Apply it in real life, and the result is terrible, as man struggles on the treadmill of doing what cannot be done; apply it in fiction, and it rings hollow to the one who knows true reconciliation, true redemption, true forgiveness. The problem? Man cannot actually get rid of his sin’s guilt; he can do ‘good’, but even that good is polluted (is. 64:6). Even if it were truly good, pure righteousness is what God calls him to as a matter of course (Mic. 6:8) and thus cannot make up for sin. There is no supererogatory merit. The guilt remains; one historic event’s goodness cannot overwrite another historic event’s evil, not when that evil’s guilt still lives.

This course has two categories of variance in fiction: direction and intention. For direction, it’s the question of whether the atoning deeds are directed inward or outward; for intention, it’s whether they’re deeds of doing good or of inflicting suffering. In this second category, it’s important to note that both sorts can be a form of atonement, whether the atonement of trying to ‘make up for past sin’ or of punishing that sin. Of course, making up for past sin is, as already noted, futile; indeed, it generally carries a quality of flagellating the self. As for punishing the sin to atone for it, that is not man’s right nor man’s capability, and in our hearts we know it. Even if we could atone for the guilt with respect to ourselves or each other, we could never atone for the guilt of our treachery against Him, the basic act of doing evil, without full self-destruction.¹

So our assassin works to atone. He suffers from the guilt internally; he uses his skills to do good, to protect the innocent, to foil and harm the evil. He does what men call good, what is even righteous in a sense, but it is still empty. The guilt remains on him, in him. The guilt still sits upon his heart, destroying his relationship with God, distorting and devastating his relationship with his fellow man. What is he to do? This solution too is a failure.

The sixth possibility is to have another atone in the sinner’s place, but it fails because man cannot atone for another man any more than for himself. The guilty cannot intercede for the guilty.

All these solutions have their place in narratives. All of them have played out in reality, with horrific effect on men and their societies. For the author, the concern must be to portray these truthfully. They are not true solutions; they are failed stopgaps. They must be held up as such before the reader that he may be counselled to righteousness and in order to contrast, to hint towards, the true and Christian answer to the problem of sin, the means by which redemption is possible, by which forgiveness can be given, by which the Christian can forgive even his most inveterate foe.

The Christian basis for forgiveness is summed in this: imputation of death and of life joined to final judgement. Christ bears the punishment of His people’s sin, the death we merited, and He imputes to us His eternal life (Rom. 6:1-5). Thus His justice is satisfied for these by His own death. For the damned, though, for the reprobate for whom He did not die, only death awaits, the perfect final judgement of God upon sin (Is. 66:24). The Christian, therefore, knows that every man who has wronged him falls into one of two categories: either the sinner can be forgiven because his guilt has been born by Christ (so that to bear malice for it is senseless) or the sinner can be forgiven because his guilt will receive its full justice in the end (so that our malice is without purpose). The Christian, therefore, can set aside the hatred of being sinned against, though prudence often requires a memory of the historic fact of the sin to remain, in order to understand the person. Forgiveness is prerequisite to reestablishing trust, but it is not sufficient.

Note that God does not forgive the reprobate; God, after all, is the Judge. He damns the unrepentant sinner and that eternally. Forgiveness from God, therefore, as part of a story or in real life, exists only as a part of full reconciliation with Him.

Redemption and reconciliation are bigger than forgiveness. I can forgive the unrepentant, by God’s grace, can forgive as God has forgiven me (Matt. 18:21-35). For reconciliation, for the establishing of healthy relationship, though, more is needed. The sinner must repent. He must turn from his sin, must abhor it, and must act in righteousness. To return to our assassin, while his victims can forgive him whether he repents or not, whether he seeks redemption or not, if he does seek reconciliation, he must stop his sin, must use his skills to honor God and to love his brother (Matt. 22:35-36). This is the truth which pagan man’s last two solution fumbled and failed to grasp.

This is why Gandalf required Saruman to do more than assent and apologize, when he led the delegation to Isengard, why he required Saruman to act righteousness and not merely say it. This is the redemption which Gollum toyed around with in the pass and decided against. This is the turning-of-course (repentance) which Mark Studdock grapples with in That Hideous Strength, starting from his initial and prolonged foolishness. The lack of wholehearted repentance, of complete and self-sacrificing turn of course, is the weakpoint of Colonel le Noir’s ‘redemption’ in a book I rather like, E.D.E.N. Southworth’s The Hidden Hand of God.² Repentance which will not sacrifice the profit gained by evil is dubious (Luke 19:1-10).

The good news of Christ’s death and resurrection, rightly understood, provide the only foundation for full and true reconciliation with Him and with men, His images. His judgement, in coordination with that good news, provides the only foundation for forgiveness in full. The theology does not have to be explicit in the story- it plays a part in this story without being so- but it must be implicit, must be the frame and backbone of the thought. It should be too the wisdom we apply in our lives.

God bless.

Footnotes

1. “The pressing problem of the guilty is how to work off the burden of sin and guilt. Whatever activity [pagan sinners] embark upon, whether it be religious, political, educational, or charitable, assumes a sado-masochistic orientation. It becomes an aspect of self-atonement.” (160)/ “In an unregenerate culture, because man must seek self-atonement, there is a proneness to violence, because it satisfies the sado-masochistic urges of the unregenerate heart. There is a need to give and to receive violence, and a pleasure therein.” (164-5) – R.J. Rushdoony, Revolt Against Maturity, 1977. I recommend the book highly for its discussion of the human relationship with sin and anthropology/ psychology in general. ↩︎
2. Lamplighter Publishing offers a high quality printing of the full story, though you can get the e-book via Gutenberg.org. If you go for that second choice, be sure to get both books in the series (this and this). Be aware that if Lamplighter has an audiobook (I have not checked), it will be somewhat altered from the original, an audio-drama based on the book (and well-done, if their other work is any indication) rather than a straight reading. ↩︎