Forgiveness

“But there is forgiveness with you, that you may be feared.”

— Psalm 130:4

Forgiveness is God’s pardon of sin: his judicial release of the sinner from the guilt and punishment sin deserves, granted freely for the sake of Christ’s satisfaction rather than anything done by the sinner. Scripture also commands forgiveness among people, believers releasing those who have wronged them from vengeance, following the pattern of God’s own pardon toward them. Forgiveness is not the same act as justification, the reckoning of a sinner righteous, though the two happen together: one removes the guilt of sin, the other credits Christ’s righteousness in its place.

Confessional Witness

The 1689 London Baptist Confession has no chapter of its own devoted to forgiveness; it treats pardon as one clause within justification:

“Those whom God effectually calleth, he also freely justifieth, not by infusing righteousness into them, but by pardoning their sins, and by accounting and accepting their persons as righteous; not for anything wrought in them, or done by them, but for Christ’s sake alone.”¹

Justification, on this definition, has two parts: pardoning sin and imputing Christ’s righteousness. Forgiveness supplies the negative half, sin’s guilt removed, while imputation supplies the positive half, Christ’s obedience credited. The confession then distinguishes this settled, judicial pardon from an ongoing, fatherly one:

“God doth continue to forgive the sins of those that are justified, and although they can never fall from the state of justification, yet they may, by their sins, fall under God’s fatherly displeasure.”²

A believer’s standing before God as judge is fixed at justification and cannot be lost; a believer’s day-to-day communion with God as father can still be clouded by sin and needs forgiveness applied afresh.

The confession’s own chapter on repentance states the same pardon from the sinner’s side, as something sought by turning from sin rather than claimed apart from it:

“This saving repentance is an evangelical grace, whereby a person… doth, by faith in Christ, humble himself for it with godly sorrow, detestation of it, and self-abhorrency, praying for pardon and strength of grace.”³

and adds the pastoral assurance that “there is no sin so great that it shall bring damnation on them that repent.”⁴

The Westminster Larger Catechism’s own fifth Lord’s Prayer petition (“Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors”) treats forgiveness the same way, and Thomas Ridgley’s exposition of it draws out the same point at length: it is a plea for the believer to be acquitted “both from the guilt and punishment of sin” already secured in Christ, still prayed for daily because sin is committed daily.⁵ Ridgley reads “as we forgive our debtors” as a note of likeness, not a cause: believers forgive others “even as God, for Christ’s sake, has forgiven” them, and a forgiving disposition toward others is offered to God in prayer as evidence of having received his forgiveness, not the ground on which it rests.⁶

Biblical Basis

Two related claims need textual warrant here: that God forgives sin, and that his forgiveness obligates believers to forgive one another.

God’s forgiveness of sin

Ps. 130:4 states the fact: “there is forgiveness with you.” Isa. 43:25 supplies the picture Reformed writers return to most often: God “blot[s] out” transgressions “for [his] own name’s sake” and promises not to “remember” them again (Heb. 8:12), sin’s record erased rather than merely excused. Eph. 1:7 ties this pardon to a price: believers “have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of sins, according to the riches of his grace,” so forgiveness is purchased, not simply announced. 1 John 1:9 states the same purchase as a matter of justice rather than bare mercy: “if we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins,” faithful to his covenant promise and just because Christ’s blood has already satisfied what sin deserved.⁷

The duty to forgive others

Jesus ties forgiving others directly to a believer’s own experience of forgiveness: “if you forgive men when they sin against you, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. But if you do not forgive men their sins, your Father will not forgive your sins” (Matt. 6:14-15). He develops the point at length in the parable of the unforgiving servant (Matt. 18:21-35): a servant forgiven a debt of ten thousand talents refuses to forgive a fellow servant one hundred pence, and is delivered “to the tormentors” for it. John Gill reads the parable’s force onto the ordinary case, writing that “saints ought to forgive one another’s offences that arise among them; as God, for Christ’s sake, has forgiven them,” citing Ephesians 4:32.⁷ Paul commands the same duty elsewhere: “forgiving one another, even as Christ forgave you, so also do ye” (Col. 3:13).

Thomas Ridgley’s exposition of the Lord’s Prayer traces the same duty through both its logic and its scriptural examples. An unforgiving, resentful spirit is dangerous in itself: “let not the sun go down upon your wrath… neither give place to the devil” (Eph. 4:26-27) describes retained anger as an opening for temptation, not a private matter between two people alone.⁸ Ridgley collects examples across both Testaments to give the duty concrete shape: Joseph’s provision for the brothers who had sold him into slavery (Gen. 50:15-21), Moses interceding for Miriam after she had spoken against him (Num. 12:13), Elisha releasing a captured raiding party with food rather than handing them to the king’s sword (2 Kings 6:22), and Stephen praying “Lord, lay not this sin to their charge” while being stoned to death (Acts 7:60).⁹

Historical Development

Patristic era: baptism, the “seal,” and post-baptismal sin

Second-century Christian writers linked forgiveness closely to baptism. The Shepherd of Hermas calls baptism’s water “the seal,” saying those who receive it “descend… into the water dead, and come up living,” but allows that a believer might repent once more for a sin committed after baptism.¹⁰ Second Clement, from roughly the same period, takes a stricter view: those who sin after baptism are compared to disqualified runners in a race, unable to “receive the prize.”¹¹ In the early third century, Tertullian of Carthage argued that Christian baptism, unlike the repeatable Jewish washings it superseded, could be received only once, since the break it marked between a convert’s past and present life was too deep to approach lightly or repeat.¹²

Medieval sacramental penance

Medieval Catholic theology built on this early concern for post-baptismal sin, developing a sacramental system that tied ongoing forgiveness to a three-part penitential act performed under priestly supervision. Writing against the developed form of this system, John Calvin summarized it as requiring “compunction of heart, confession of the mouth, and satisfaction of work” as the conditions for obtaining “the pardon of sins,” with contrition “represented as the first step in obtaining pardon” and exacted “as due, that is, full and complete.”¹³

The Reformation

Calvin’s Institutes (1559) turned this description into a pastoral and doctrinal objection: making pardon depend on a penitent’s own contrition left the conscience with no place to rest, since no one could ever be certain contrition had been performed “in due measure.”

“If forgiveness of sins depends on the conditions to which they bind it, nothing can be more wretched and deplorable than our situation… repentance cannot be the cause of the forgiveness of sins… the soul looked not to its own compunction or its own tears, but fixed both eyes on the mercy of God alone.”¹⁴

Reformed and Particular Baptist orthodoxy

Later Reformed and Particular Baptist theologians systematized forgiveness as a distinct topic within justification rather than a sacramental process administered by the church. John Gill’s Body of Doctrinal Divinity (1769) devotes a full chapter to it, framed explicitly against Rome: assuming authority to forgive sin outright, or to “dispense with sin, grant indulgences of it, and pardons for it,” is named “the height of antichristianism.”⁷

Opposing Views

Roman Catholic sacramental penance

Roman Catholicism holds that forgiveness of sins committed after baptism ordinarily comes through the sacrament of penance: contrition, confession to a priest, and an assigned act of satisfaction, with priestly absolution as the act that applies pardon. Gill objects specifically to the priestly role: “no man that goes under the name of a priest, or a minister of the word, has a power of absolution, or has authority to absolve men from their sins”; a minister may only “preach remission of sins in the name of Christ” and declare its terms, a declarative act rather than an authoritative one, citing John 20:23 for the distinction.⁷

Against the sacramental system, the Reformed confessions ground forgiveness entirely in Christ’s satisfaction, received by faith rather than earned through a graduated penitential act: justification is “not by infusing righteousness… but by pardoning their sins… for Christ’s sake alone.”¹ Calvin’s own summary of the Reformed alternative states the same point: “the soul looked not to its own compunction or its own tears, but fixed both eyes on the mercy of God alone.”¹⁴

Objections and Responses

If God’s forgiveness is complete and irrevocable at justification, why does Scripture still command believers to pray daily, “forgive us our debts”? The confession itself anticipates this by distinguishing two registers of forgiveness: a judicial pardon that, once granted, never lapses, since the justified “can never fall from the state of justification,” and a Father’s ongoing forgiveness of a child who may still “fall under God’s fatherly displeasure” through later sin.² Ridgley develops the same distinction at length: what is prayed for daily is not a repeated act of the eternal decree to justify, no more to be prayed for than election itself, but the “comfortable sense” and continued application of a pardon already secured.¹⁵

Does the duty to forgive others mean an offender must be forgiven even without repentance or acknowledgment? Ridgley’s answer: an injured person may still, in justice, “demand satisfaction in proportion to the injury received,” and forgiveness does not require abandoning legitimate legal or reputational redress. But whether or not an offender repents or makes amends, “it is so far our duty to pass it by, as not to bear the least degree of malice against him.”¹⁶ The forgiveness Christ commands is freedom from private revenge and settled malice toward the offender, not an obligation to treat an unrepentant, unreformed wrongdoer as a trusted intimate; Ridgley adds that such a person still need not “be chosen by us as an intimate friend or associate,” out of ordinary self-preservation.¹⁷

Doesn’t tying divine forgiveness to Christ’s satisfaction make God’s mercy conditional on payment rather than free? Gill distinguishes the motive of pardon from its ground: “the impulsive moving cause of pardon is… the sovereign grace and mercy of God, through Christ… the procuring meritorious cause of it is the blood of Christ.”⁷ Mercy is the reason God pardons at all; Christ’s satisfaction is what makes pardoning consistent with his justice, not a payment that earns mercy from an otherwise reluctant God.

Related Doctrines

References

The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1677/1689), chap. 11, “Of Justification,” para. 1. ↩ ↩²
The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith, chap. 11, para. 5. ↩ ↩²
The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith, chap. 15, “Of Repentance Unto Life and Salvation,” para. 3. ↩
The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith, chap. 15, para. 5. ↩
Thomas Ridgley, A Body of Divinity, vol. 4, ed. James P. Wilson (Philadelphia: William W. Woodward, 1814), 415. ↩
Ridgley, 423-424: “we are to forgive others, even as God, for Christ’s sake, has forgiven us… God’s forgiving us is, indeed, a motive to us to forgive others, but one is not the measure, or standard of the other.” ↩
John Gill, A Body of Doctrinal Divinity; or, A System of Evangelical Truths, Deduced from the Sacred Scriptures, 2 vols. (London: Printed for the Author, and Sold by George Keith, 1769), book 6, chap. 7, “Of the Pardon of Sin”: “The impulsive moving cause of pardon, is not neither man’s misery nor his merits; not any works of righteousness done by him; nor even any of the graces of the Spirit in him; but the sovereign grace and mercy of God, through Christ… The procuring meritorious cause of it, is the blood of Christ, which was shed for it, has obtained it.” ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵
Ridgley, 427: “an implacable spirit, meditating revenge for injuries done against us, will render us altogether unfit for the performance of an holy duty… the apostle speaks of anger retained in our breasts, or letting the sun go down upon our wrath, as that which gives place to the Devil.” ↩
Ridgley, 427-428: “We have many bright examples for our imitation, of the best of men, who have been highly injured, and yet have expressed a forgiving spirit.” ↩
Ronald E. Heine, Classical Christian Doctrine: Introducing the Essentials of the Ancient Faith (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2013), chap. 13, “The Washing of Regeneration,” 152: “The seal, the Shepherd of Hermas says, is the water. They descend… into the water dead, and come up living.” ↩
Heine, 152-153: “people who sin after being baptized are compared to runners who cheat in a race. They are disqualified and cannot receive the prize.” ↩
Heine, 153: “The gulf that baptism cuts in life between one’s past and one’s present is so deep, he argues, that it should not be undertaken until one is fully cognizant of the responsibilities it imposes.” ↩
John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. Henry Beveridge (Edinburgh: Calvin Translation Society, 1845-1846), book 3, chap. 4, 535-536: “while they require three things in repentance, viz. compunction of heart, confession of the mouth, and satisfaction of work, they at the same time teach that these are necessary to obtain the pardon of sins.” ↩
Calvin, 536-537. ↩ ↩²
Ridgley, 419-420: “if it be considered as an immanent act in God, or the eternal purpose of his will, not to impute sin, which is what divines call decretive justification, it is to be allowed, that this is no more to be prayed for than eternal election… since forgiveness of sin is a branch of justification, it is, in this sense that we pray for the pardon of sin.” ↩
Ridgley, 425-426: “the law of God and nature, does not prohibit us from demanding satisfaction in proportion to the injury received… but whether it be given or no, it is so far our duty to pass it by, as not to bear the least degree of malice against him, that has injured us, though he refuses to give it.” ↩
Ridgley, 426: “such an one is not to be chosen by us as an intimate friend or associate, out of a principle of self-preservation.” ↩