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Abstract
Table
of Contents
Part I
Part II
Part III
Part IV
Part V
Part VI
Part VII
Part VIII
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Part VI: The Subconscious
and Forgiveness of Sins
Chapter 5
Biblical Forgiveness and Divine
Forgetting
WE HAVE THUS
established certain facts, emerging from recent research into
the faculty of memory, which have a direct bearing upon the nature
of the kind of forgiveness which God offers to sinful man through
Jesus Christ. Before attempting to show the close relationship
between divine forgiveness and the erasure of offensive memory,
it may be helpful to summarize very briefly the points which
have been made in the Introduction and the chapters which followed.
The fundamental issue underscored
in the Introduction is that there is a critical difference between
human and divine forgiveness: human forgiveness can never guarantee
that an offensive act will not again be recalled at some future
time and made the basis of a fresh break in fellowship between
the offender and the offended. It is quite impossible for human
beings to so expunge from memory the hurt felt by another man's
personal affront that it can never again come to mind and cause
a breach in relationship. Not only is this true in man-to-man
relationships, it is also true within man as an individual. Every
one of us carries to his grave indelibly fixed in the memory
the recollection of some offenses for which we can never quite
forgive ourselves, even when others have forgiven us. The basic
problem here is not how we can improve the power of recall, but
how we can expunge from memory what we wish to forget. Every
technique that man has ever tried in order to assist the process
of forgetting has only tended to aggravate the burden of memory.
In the first chapter, evidence
was explored which tends to show that locked away somewhere in
the mind of every individual is a total record of his whole conscious
life, and that the records in this "filing cabinet,"
are accessible. It is true that Penfield's technique has only
been applied to those areas of the cortex which recover past
sensory experience: visual impressions, things heard, even things
detected by odour. This limitation was to be expected because
the cortical areas stimulated
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were only relevant to
these impressions. But it is highly probable that all memories
stored in the subconscious -- memories of all kinds of experience
including those inward responses, loves and hates, hopes and
fears, kind thoughts and wicked ones -- these, too, may still
be recoverable. Moreover, this kind of recall, as has been demonstrated
by Penfield, is not as in a dream, but with a crystal clearness
that makes it more a re-living than a recollection. Yet this
re-living somehow leaves the individual strangely detached and
free to view the experience objectively. The point is an important
one, because it means we may pass judgment on re-lived experience
in a way we cannot do in either dreams or reminiscences. It means,
in fact, that in the Judgment to come it is quite conceivable
that a man may be called upon to pass judgment upon his own life,
re-lived under some kind of divine stimulus. This is perhaps
the "opening of the books" given in Revelation 20:12.
In Chapter 2 the evidence was examined
which seems to indicate, rather unexpectedly, that this "filing
cabinet" is virtually indestructible. The most extraordinary
attempts to destroy the record, at least in animals, have been
made without success. In the light of present understanding,
there does not seem to be any way in which an individual can
with absolute certainty place beyond recall anything which has
once been part of his conscious experience during life. To this
extent he cannot escape the real possibility that he may one
day be faced with the record of every idle word, and faced with
it in such a way that he will find himself able to judge it objectively
in a manner which would have been quite impossible at the time
of the experience. Moreover, we noticed that it is not merely
a question of how to erase a memory; there is not even
any certainty as to where to apply the eraser.
In Chapter 3 the problem of the
locale of memory was pursued one step further, and it was noted
that it has become increasingly difficult, if not almost impossible,
to identify bits and pieces of memory with specific areas or
parts of the animal. From some studies of low forms of life it
appears that memory is not destroyed even in animals which have
been chopped up and fed to others of the same species. One must
suppose, if these experiments are valid, that, in principle,
memory inheres in some way in every fragment of the individual,
as though the generating organ was specific and localized, but
the essence generated was widely diffused. We have no way of
knowing whether this is true of man, but by implication we might
suppose it to be so, since the divine agent of cleansing is the
blood of Jesus Christ, which is to be compared with blood in
natural life, which visits and carries away wastes from every
cell in the body.
In Chapter 4 we explored some of
the consequences of the scientific
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conception of man as
a physico-chemical mechanism, the behaviour of which is to be
explained entirely in terms of purely natural forces. This is
the reductionist argument, the materialistic philosophy of nothing-but-ism,
carried to its logical conclusion. Man is simply a machine, subject
to failure like any other machine and perhaps socially, but not
really, morally accountable. Admittedly the machine has gone
wrong, but it cannot be held responsible. If anyone is to blame,
the designer must be. This philosophy tends to undermine the
sense of personal responsibility and renders meaningless any
concept of sin as a moral offense against God. And yet, deep
within, a feeling of guilt still remains to plague the individual,
a feeling which is irrational if there is no such thing as sin
and all the harder to deal with for its very irrationality. One
is more likely to find a kind of "peace" when the cause
of the problem is clearly identified with unforgiven sin, for
it then needs only that some guarantee of forgiveness be obtained.
Almost all religions have aimed to provide this guarantee by
one means or another. And up to a point they have been successful
to the extent that their devotees have believed in the guarantees
they provide. Yet, without exception, they entirely fail to do
what the Gospel succeeds in doing. For they can never "purge
the conscience," since they never reach down into the recesses
of the forgotten past. They can never so completely blot out
the record of offenses which have accumulated there that the
individual goes away genuinely and lastingly unburdened from
the disquieting sense of guilt and in full and conscious fellowship
with God. Yet this was the end for which man was made,
and he never finds fulfillment until he has achieved this kind
of fellowship.
The truth is that man needs not
merely forgiveness of the sins he can recall and feel
sorry about -- though he most certainly does need this.
What he really needs, to restore peace and health to his
soul, is a washing away, a cleansing, a total removal of the
burden of the accumulated sins which he has carried with him
in the depths of his unconscious -- that cesspool of wickednesses,
great and small -- which he cannot voluntarily recall because
he has "forgotten" them, but which are filed away nevertheless
in some part of his being which, for all its "hiddenness,"
is still a vital part of his real self. It is here that God performs
His great work of cleansing and unburdening, bringing at one
and the same moment forgiveness, and the blotting out of the
record, so that we need never again be ashamed in His presence.
In some mystical but none the less real way, this kind
of cleansing is only possible through the blood of Jesus Christ
(I John 1:9). There is no other road to the level of purity which
God demands, for which man was intended, and without which he
has neither peace, health, freedom, nor a sense of fulfillment.
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True
peace, the peace of God which passeth understanding, comes not
merely because we know we are forgiven for the things which we
recall in the shallower parts of our memory, but it comes because
we have also been forgiven the things which we have forgotten
and which lie in the deeper parts of the subconscious. Clearly,
we cannot at present be aware of the fact that cleansing has
taken place in these depths, but we can and do become aware of
the liberating effect of God's forgiveness and cleansing.
What is really fundamental to my
thinking in this Paper is the fact that God also forgives all
those things which we have completely forgotten, the offensive
content of the subconscious. The man who goes to a priest in
confession, whether he is a native in Africa or a Roman Catholic
in our own neighbourhood, can only confess what he can recall
by normal processes of thought. And this is all that the priest
can claim to give him absolution for. Even if the priest in such
a case had the power to forgive, which I do not believe he has,
he can neither expunge from the memory of the penitent what he
has confessed nor do anything for all those things in the penitent's
life which he has entirely forgotten. But God can do both.
There are undoubtedly some things
which though completely covered by God's forgiveness are yet
left in our memory. They are allowed to remain, not that we might
continue under condemnation (Romans 8:1), but that we might be
chastened, warned by them, and learn from them. As for the unremembered
things, which over the years weigh down the soul with a sense
of dis-ease the cause of which is not recognized, it is these
which God utterly blots out, removing them as far as the east
is from the west. This part of the burden, unlike the fragment
of remembered things, is not even taken by the Lord to be used
to instruct or correct. They are, in short, a burden that is
as useless as it is draining. So they are simply blotted out
and the burden lifted. To the child of God it is as wonderful
to rejoice in the sense of total forgiveness per se, as
it is to know precisely what has been forgiven -- which,
in fact, we probably never shall know.
Meanwhile, the malaise of society
is but a reflection of the sickness of the individual. And a
great part of the sickness of the individual stems from unforgiven
sin, sin that poisons both the conscious and the unconscious
part of his memory. In the final analysis the ills of society
cannot be cured except through the individual.
One thing more remains to be said
about the grounds upon which God forgives man. P. Carnegie Simpson
observed very truthfully: "Forgiveness is to man the plainest
of duties, to God it is the profoundest
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of problems." (77) It is indeed. You and
I ought to forgive an offender for any personal affront to our
moral sense simply because we also are in the position of being
an offender against others in the same way. The moral fabric
of the universe is not shattered by our "connivance"
when we overlook this kind of wrongdoing, since it is not dependent
upon us to sustain this moral fabric. It rests with God, who
cannot simply say, "Never mind," when we act offensively
by disregarding His law. For in so doing, He would be violating
His own moral order. This is why the Jews felt they really had
the Lord Jesus trapped when they brought the woman taken in adultery
before Him. He could not condone it: yet He must somehow
show that He could find a way to forgive her.
So how can God be just and the
justifier of the unrighteous (Romans 3:26)? He can, only if He
Himself assumes moral responsibility for my offense and then
pays the full cost of my indebtedness Himself. And this is precisely
what He did when He made His own Son, the Lord Jesus Christ,
who knew no sin whatever, to be a sin-offering for me that I
might be accredited with His perfect righteousness instead (2
Corinthians 5:21). Because my offense has been fully compensated
for, God's forgiveness is not evidence of His moral laxity but
a proof of His great love.
After all this has been said, it
seems to me of great importance to underscore the fact that the
children of God do not enjoy the wonderful sense of forgiveness
which comes through faith in Jesus Christ because science has
provided evidence which makes such faith allowable. Scientific
evidence is not the basis of our faith and contributes
nothing to that wonderful sense of freedom we experience. But
such evidence does leave men with less excuse than they formerly
had for rejecting the divine offer of forgiveness and cleansing
as revealed in Scripture, and until the social sciences awaken
to this fact, their labours, no matter how sincere and unselfish
they may be in conception, will always be unrealistic.
77. Simpson, P, C., The Fact of Christ,
p.162, quoted by Albertus Pieters, Divine Lord and Saviour,
Revell, New York, 1949, p.117.
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Copyright © 1988 Evelyn White. All rights
reserved
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