David Snapper has a wonderful schema of understanding hurts and forgiveness that he shared on CRC-Voices. Cathy Smith raised some very good and legitimate questions about abuse and forgiveness which I thought David answered well. This was my contribution to that conversation.

As David mentioned the first thing to remember in this discussion is what forgiveness is. When we forgive we release our demand that we become the real, emotional or imagined executioner of our enemy. We relinquish OUR PERSONAL claim of judgment against them. This doesn’t release our enemies from ALL claims of judgment or punishment against them, only our claim to be their real, emotional, or imagined executioner.

Every abusive relationship has at least two people within its web, usually more. What I am about to say will offend some, but hear me out. Every abusive relationship does harm to both the victim and the perpetrator in the relationship.

A clear illustration of this was brought home to me by Army Chaplain Herm Kaiser’s piece a while ago on moral injury done to soldiers. One might see the winning side in a war as the perpetrators in their use of power against the victim but Kaiser pointed out that the exercise of the power by the perpetrator does moral injury to the one wielding the power as well.

Another illustration of this was the Corrie Ten Boom story. She and her family suffered in a Nazi concentration camp with the Jews because her family hid Jews. The camp took the life of her beloved sister. At a religious meeting in which she spoke about forgiveness after the war a former, cruel prison guard that she remembered came up to her and talked about forgiveness in the gospel and wanted to shake her hand. This caused for her a moral crisis. Did she really believe in forgiveness? What was also evident, however, was that the situation did moral injury to the prison guard of which he too needed healing and restoration.

In a situation of abuse both the perpetrator and the victim are caught in the trap. The perpetrator uses power to abuse the victim. Ironically, however, the perpetrator is culpably also injured by that use of power.

To break the abuse two things must happen. A new power must come into the situation to break the hold of the power being exerted that is maintaining the abusive relationship, AND all parties must into a new relationship with power itself. If the second does not happen then both perpetrators and victims will go on and mis-use power again in other cycles and pairings of abuse.

Joe Carter I though illustrated this well in his piece on boycotts.

For many Christians in America, to even ask such questions is absurd. Because of their association with the era of civil rights and other laudable movements of the 1960s, boycotts tend to have an air of romance. But while the causes were just, Christians must always be mindful that nonviolence, like just war, can only be considered a necessary evil. As political philosopher Glenn Tinder has explained, the concept of nonviolent resistance never would have occurred to any of the ancient Hebrew prophets. It is worth remembering that while Martin Luther King Jr. was a Christian, he learned his principle techniques from the Hindu leader Gandhi rather than from the founder of his own religion.

The tactic affirmed by Jesus, as Tinder correctly notes, was nonresistance, a way of refusing all power, and completely different from nonviolent resistance, which is always stained by the moral impurities inherent in the use of power. Nonviolent resistance also rests on the assumption that human evil is not so deeply ingrained that it cannot be overcome by a display of profound moral courage. The way of nonviolence requires only strength, fortitude, and a naive view of humanity. By contrast, the way of Jesus requires a willingness to be weak, reliance on his redeeming power, and a realistic eschatological hope.

Power must be exerted in most cases to allow a victim to break out of the bondage of abuse. From what source do we usually find this power? In many cases victims are exhorted to find this power in themselves and base it upon notions of inherent goodness, inherent value, in personhood, etc. The appeal made is usually pride. “Don’t be a victim, rise up and shake free of your bonds!”

Because of the imagined source of the power to break free of their bonds forgiveness seems a liability because the source is themselves. Remember, forgiveness is the relinquishing the claim to that person themselves being the real, emotional, or imagined executioner of punishment in the life of the other. Emotionally, when we see ourselves as the victim of another, we long to be one who sets the record straight, sets the world right, executes judgment, restores shalom. Our stories in books and movies are filled with our retributive fantasies.

What gets less billing is the moral injury commonly done in such a narrative. The problem is that our pain incapacitates us from being just judges. Both our religious traditions (“Vengeance is mine, saith the LORD, I will repay”) and our legal tradition (impartial adjudication by impartial judge and jury) recognize that retribution in the hands of the victims seldom yields justice but more commonly fuels a cycle of retribution like we witness in domestic relationships, political feuds and international relations.

The victim needs to find the power from another source to relinquish the claim of personal vengeance on their enemy. They also need to step out of the abusive relationship, whether that mean physically, or habitually, or in any other kind of way obvious or subtle (which is very tricky indeed) out of a sort of love even for the abuser so that the abuser is no longer afforded the opportunity to use power against the victim nor to have the abuse of that power continue to injure the abuser nor to have the display of the abuse of power instruct children and others who are witnesses to the abuse of power which perpetrates the cycle manifesting itself in subsequent generations.

Hurt people hurt people and unless the hurt is stopped witnesses learn from the abuse and the cycle of perpetrators and victims continues anew.

Why must the victims learn forgiveness? Because it changes their relationship with power. Until the relationship with power is transformed, abuse will be repeated.

I recognize that forgiveness is a difficult accomplishment and for almost all of it is the result of a long process.

Victims of abuse must learn forgiveness to in fact end the ironic, cruel tail end of abuse. The last, cruelest injury of abuse is often resentment, bitterness, and the cherished fantasy to use power against the perpetrator, or the unconscious transference of punishment on other real or imagined perpetrators who come along later in life. What makes abuse so cruel is that the wounds linger and poison and destroy long after the abuse is accomplished and these wounds then infect the victim’s employ of power to switch roles and become the abuser. Almost all abusers were victims of abuse. Abuse of power is learned and we learn it even when we don’t know we are. Forgiveness is the way to freedom. There is no other way.