the forgiveness of sins

The Text

The clause that names what the Christian receives. The previous clauses confessed the persons of the Trinity, the work of Christ, the church, and the communion of saints. This clause names the gift that the work of Christ gives to the people of the church. To confess the forgiveness of sins is to confess that the ledger has been wiped. The debt has been remitted. The sentence has been lifted. The judgment that the world’s economy and the believer’s own conscience expected has been, by the act of God, set aside. The whole of the second article — the conception, the suffering, the cross, the descent, the resurrection — converges on this single accusative noun: remissionem, release. The third article therefore opens with the Spirit and the church and lands here, on the present possession of a release the believer did not earn.

Translation Notes

Remissio / aphesis. Both Latin and Greek use the standard ancient legal-economic vocabulary of debt cancellation. Remissio in classical Latin is the technical term for the discharge of an obligation: the lender remits the debt; the obligation is sent back (re- + mittere); the borrower’s debt-slate is cleared. Aphesis in koine Greek is exactly parallel: from aphiēmi, to send away, to let go, to release. The Septuagint uses aphesis for the Jubilee year of Israel — the year of release in which debts were forgiven, slaves were freed, and land returned to its original family (Lev. 25:10). Isaiah 61:1 names the messianic mission with the same word: to proclaim aphesis to the captives. Jesus reads this Isaiah text at the opening of his ministry in Luke 4:18, and the church has read the connection ever since: the forgiveness the creed confesses is the Jubilee release the prophets foretold, now extended to every believer in every generation.

Peccatum / hamartia. Sin. Hamartia in Greek is an archery term — the missing of the mark; the arrow has gone wide of the target. Peccatum in Latin is from peccare, to stumble, to fall short. Both words name something less moralistic than the modern English word sin tends to suggest: not first a list of forbidden acts but a failure to hit, a falling short, a missing. The most useful biblical conceptual parallel — drawn out by Jesus himself in the Lord’s Prayer and the Matthew 18 parable — is the language of debt. In Aramaic, the language Jesus spoke, the standard word for sin (ḥôbâ) means both sin and debt; the two are the same word. To owe a debt is to have sinned; to have sinned is to owe a debt; to forgive sin is to release a debt. The Aramaic substrate of the Lord’s Prayer makes the connection unmistakable: Forgive us our debts, as we forgive those who are indebted to us (Matt. 6:12).

Peccatorum — plural. The creed says sins, not sin. The plural matters. The release confessed here is not only the release from sin as an abstract condition but the release of specific sins — the things you did, the things you failed to do, the words you said, the words you should have said. The accusative plural names the concrete texture of what is forgiven. Whatever ledger you have built up, that ledger is what is being wiped.

The clause has a slight ambiguity that is theologically productive. Remissionem peccatorum — does the clause confess the fact that sins are forgiven (a divine act), the means by which sins are forgiven (baptism, absolution, the cross), or the experience of being forgiven (the believer’s reception)? The honest answer is all three. The clause confesses, in three words, the entire economy of divine pardon in which the believer participates.

Historical Context

The proclamation of the forgiveness of sins is the most stable element of all early Christian preaching. Peter’s Pentecost sermon ends with the call to repent and be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of sins (Acts 2:38). The Petrine speech to Cornelius (Acts 10:43) names the gift of forgiveness as the universal apostolic witness. Paul’s preaching in Antioch of Pisidia (Acts 13:38) makes the same proclamation. The earliest baptismal formula — for the forgiveness of sins — is older than the developed creeds and is what the creedal clause has preserved.

The clause has always been associated with two principal means of forgiveness: baptism and the church’s ongoing ministry of absolution. The Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed makes the association explicit: “I acknowledge one baptism for the forgiveness of sins.” Baptism, in the apostolic and patristic settlement, is the primal site of the Christian’s reception of forgiveness — the entry into the body of Christ in which sins are washed away. The post-baptismal forgiveness of sins committed by the baptized was, in the patristic period, handled through the church’s gradual elaboration of penitential practices: public penance, then private penance, then (by the medieval period in the West) the developed sacrament of penance and reconciliation.

The major doctrinal disputes around the clause have therefore been about the means of forgiveness rather than the fact. The 4th-century Donatist controversy concerned the validity of baptisms administered by ministers who had compromised under persecution; Augustine’s answer (the validity of the sacrament does not depend on the minister’s worthiness) became the Western settlement. The medieval expansion of the penitential system — confession to a priest, satisfaction by works, indulgences — provoked the Reformation. Luther’s protest began with the indulgence controversy of 1517 and was, from the beginning, a protest about the means and grounds of the forgiveness of sins. The Reformers contested the medieval superstructure while insisting, more strongly than the medieval church itself, on the unchallenged center of the doctrine: Christ has won the forgiveness of our sins by his death on the cross, and this forgiveness is received by faith.

The clause therefore stands at the intersection of nearly every major Christian doctrinal controversy. The patristic disputes about baptism, the medieval disputes about penance, the Reformation disputes about justification, the modern disputes about atonement theory — all converge on this small accusative noun in the third article of the creed.

Lines of Interpretation

Patristic

Tradition: Tertullian, On Baptism; Cyprian, On the Lapsed; Augustine, On Baptism, On the Spirit and the Letter; Chrysostom, Homilies on Romans

The patristic settlement on the forgiveness of sins held three convictions in tension. First, baptism is the great sacrament of remission — the moment at which the believer is washed and the entire prior ledger is wiped. Second, post-baptismal sin is a real problem requiring real address; the church developed penitential practice (initially severe and public, later more pastoral and private) to handle it. Third, the forgiveness itself is the act of God in Christ, not the work of the human penitent; the church’s penitential discipline is the medium through which the divine act is received, not the cause of the act.

Augustine’s anti-Pelagian writings made the third point with particular force. The forgiveness of sins is not a reward for human merit; it is the unmerited gift of grace. Without me you can do nothing (John 15:5) — the church’s whole penitential life depends on grace, not the other way around. The patristic settlement therefore rejected, in advance, every form of pelagianism that would make forgiveness a transaction the believer earns by acts of contrition.

Strengths

• Held the objective sacramental ground and the subjective experiential reception together
• The Augustinian anti-Pelagian framing is permanent doctrinal protection against works-righteousness

Weaknesses

• The development of penitential practice in the early medieval West was not always carefully tethered to the Augustinian substance
• Some patristic discussions of the severity of post-baptismal penance ran into pastoral problems the later church had to address

Scholastic

Tradition: Anselm, Cur Deus Homo (c. 1098); Peter Lombard, Sentences IV, dd. 14–22; Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae III, qq. 84–90 (on the sacrament of penance)

Anselm’s Cur Deus Homo is the medieval treatise most concerned with the ground of the forgiveness of sins. Anselm asks how it is possible that God can forgive sins consistently with the demands of divine justice. The answer is satisfaction: the God-man, by his obedient death, renders to God the honor that human disobedience had withheld; the satisfaction is more than the offense required; the surplus is the merit applied to the forgiveness of sins. The Anselmian satisfaction theory shaped the medieval and Catholic understanding of the atonement for centuries and remains the substrate of much Reformation and post-Reformation soteriology.

Aquinas treats the forgiveness of sins both christologically (under the atonement, Summa III, qq. 46–49) and sacramentally (under the sacrament of penance, Summa III, qq. 84–90). The fully developed sacramental account distinguishes contrition (sorrow for sin), confession (auricular acknowledgment to a priest), and satisfaction (penitential works); the priest’s absolution is the instrumental cause of the forgiveness, the death of Christ is the principal cause.

Strengths

• Anselm’s satisfaction account, however controverted, is the most serious medieval attempt to think the how of forgiveness rather than merely confess the that
• The scholastic sacramental theology gave the church a developed pastoral instrument for the post-baptismal handling of sin

Weaknesses

• The detailed scholastic apparatus on satisfaction, contrition, and penitential works became the indulgence system that the Reformation rightly contested
• Anselm’s strongly feudal framing (honor, satisfaction) requires translation for cultures with different legal-political backgrounds

Lutheran

Tradition: Luther, Ninety-Five Theses (1517); The Smalcald Articles III.iii (on repentance); Augsburg Confession, Articles XI–XII; Small Catechism on the keys and confession

The Lutheran reform began with the doctrine of the forgiveness of sins. The 1517 indulgence controversy was, in its substance, a protest against a medieval system that had displaced the gospel’s free forgiveness with a commercial transaction. Luther’s mature doctrine: the forgiveness of sins is freely given on account of Christ, received by faith alone; the means of grace by which the forgiveness is conferred are the Word, baptism, and the Lord’s Supper; the church retains the power of the keys (Matt. 16:19; John 20:23) to declare forgiveness in the name of Christ, but the absolution declares the forgiveness Christ has won, not a forgiveness the priest produces.

The Lutheran tradition preserved private confession and absolution as a practice but rejected the medieval requirement of enumerative confession of every sin. The Smalcald Articles III.iii distinguish two parts of repentance: contrition (heartfelt sorrow for sin) and faith (the trust in Christ’s forgiveness offered in the gospel). The forgiveness is appropriated, in classical Lutheran formulation, by faith.

Strengths

• Recovered the gospel center: forgiveness is gift, not transaction
• Preserved the church’s ministry of absolution while clarifying its evangelical foundation

Weaknesses

• The reform’s vigor sometimes left the practice of confession underdeveloped in subsequent Lutheran piety
• The forensic-juridical framework, when taken in isolation, can underplay the transformative dimension

Reformed

Tradition: Calvin, Institutes III.3–4 (on repentance and confession), III.11–14 (on justification); Heidelberg Catechism Q. 56; Westminster Confession Ch. 11

Calvin’s treatment in Institutes III.11 is the locus classicus of Reformed thinking on the forgiveness of sins under the doctrine of justification. The believer’s sins are forgiven, and the believer is reckoned righteous, on account of Christ’s righteousness imputed by faith. The forgiveness is forensic — God declares the believer not guilty — but the declaration carries with it the gift of the Spirit, who renews the believer in actual righteousness over time. The Reformed framework holds the imputation and the renewal together as two inseparable aspects of one work of grace.

The Heidelberg Catechism (Q. 56) puts the pastoral application memorably: “What do you believe concerning the forgiveness of sins?” A. “That God, because of Christ’s satisfaction, will no more remember my sins, neither my sinful nature, against which I have to struggle all my life long, but will graciously impute to me the righteousness of Christ, that I may never come into condemnation.”

The Reformed tradition rejected the medieval sacrament of penance and the requirement of auricular confession, while retaining a doctrine of repentance and church discipline. Calvin’s Institutes III.4 is a sustained critique of the medieval system; III.4.13 affirms the value of private confession as pastoral counsel.

Strengths

• The Heidelberg’s framing — forgiveness as God’s choice not to remember — is among the most pastorally rich Reformation statements
• The integration of forensic and transformative aspects keeps the doctrine from flattening to mere bookkeeping

Weaknesses

• The Reformed reduction of confession to general repentance has sometimes left believers without the regular pastoral instrument of absolution that the older tradition provided
• The strong forensic framing, in some popular Reformed reception, has overshadowed the relational and transformative dimensions

Roman Catholic (post-Reformation)

Tradition: Council of Trent, Sessions 6 (justification, 1547) and 14 (penance, 1551); Catechism of the Catholic Church §§976–987, §§1422–1498

The post-Tridentine Roman Catholic settlement preserved the medieval sacramental framework with substantial clarification. Trent (Session 6) defined justification as both an event (the forgiveness of sins and the infusion of the gift of righteousness at baptism or its reception) and a process (the growth in actual righteousness throughout the Christian life). Trent (Session 14) defined the sacrament of penance as the ordinary means of forgiveness for post-baptismal sin, with the four elements of contrition, confession, satisfaction, and absolution. The Lutheran-Catholic Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification (1999) substantially clarified the long-disputed convergences and remaining differences between the two traditions.

Strengths

• Preserves a robust sacramental framework for the lifelong appropriation of the forgiveness of sins
• The Joint Declaration has clarified that the Tridentine teaching and the Reformation teaching, properly understood, are not the church-dividing opposites the 16th century took them to be

Weaknesses

• The popular reception of the sacrament of penance has not always kept pace with the careful theological foundations
• The lingering association with the medieval indulgence system remains a problem in popular Protestant perception, even where it has been addressed in modern Catholic doctrine

Wesleyan

(See Wesleyan Voice below.)

Eastern Orthodox

Tradition: Byzantine penitential canons; John Climacus, The Ladder of Divine Ascent; modern Orthodox sacramental theology

The Eastern tradition has held the forgiveness of sins within the framework of the sacrament of confession (called, in the East, the mystery of repentance) and within the broader framework of theōsis. The Orthodox understanding emphasizes the medicinal rather than juridical character of confession: the priest sits beside the penitent (not in a confessional, but in the body of the church beside an icon), and acts as a fellow-physician witnessing the penitent’s healing by God. The Eastern absolution formula explicitly names the priest as a witness and Christ as the one who forgives.

The Orthodox tradition has not developed a treatise theology of atonement in the Latin-scholastic mode. The forgiveness of sins is held narratively, sacramentally, and ascetically — within the church’s whole life of repentance and transformation in Christ.

Strengths

• The medicinal-pastoral framing preserves the relational and transformative dimensions of the doctrine
• The Eastern resistance to a juridical reduction of the doctrine has been a consistent witness against Western drift in that direction

Weaknesses

• The lack of a developed treatise theology has sometimes left the Eastern tradition without the resources to engage Western disputes on their own terms
• The strong ascetic framing can be hard to translate for cultures where monastic discipline is unfamiliar

Liberation

Tradition: Gustavo Gutiérrez, A Theology of Liberation; Jon Sobrino, No Salvation Outside the Poor; Latin American base-community sacramental practice

The liberation tradition has read the forgiveness of sins in close conjunction with the Jubilee texts (Lev. 25; Isa. 61; Luke 4) and the Aramaic equivalence of sin and debt. The forgiveness of sins is not, on this reading, only a private spiritual transaction; it is the announcement of the aphesis the prophets foretold — release for captives, debt cancellation, the return of stolen land, the social-economic structure that the Jubilee names. The Lord’s Prayer’s forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors is to be read with the economic register fully intact, not metaphorized into innocuousness.

Strengths

• Recovers the Jubilee inheritance of the doctrine that more spiritualized Western readings have sometimes muted
• Holds the personal and structural dimensions of forgiveness together

Weaknesses

• The strongest forms can press the structural so far that the personal-confessional dimension thins
• The Jubilee inheritance is genuinely there, but the doctrine of forgiveness is not exhausted by it

Modern Ecumenical

Tradition: Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification (1999); ARCIC (Anglican-Roman Catholic) statements on justification; Faith and Order convergence documents

The 20th-century ecumenical theology has produced unprecedented convergence on the forgiveness of sins as the gift of God in Christ, received by grace through faith. The 1999 Joint Declaration between the Lutheran World Federation and the Roman Catholic Church concluded that the doctrinal condemnations of the 16th century, properly understood, do not apply to the teaching of the two traditions today. The agreement is not without remaining differences (especially on the place of merit), but the substantial convergence is real.

Strengths

• Has clarified that the Reformation and Catholic positions, properly understood, agree on far more than the polemics of the 16th century allowed
• Has restored the doctrine of forgiveness as a central ecumenical agreement rather than a church-dividing dispute

Weaknesses

• The doctrinal convergence has not always reached the parish level
• Some remaining differences (purgatory, indulgences, the role of merit) are still live in actual practice

Wesleyan Voice

The Wesleyan tradition has held the forgiveness of sins with both Reformation precision and revivalist energy. The Articles of Religion (1784), Article IX, on the justification of man, is a verbatim adoption of the Anglican Article XI: “We are accounted righteous before God only for the merit of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ by faith, and not for our own works or deservings. Wherefore, that we are justified by faith only is a most wholesome doctrine, and very full of comfort.” The Methodist confession of forgiveness is therefore squarely within the Reformation’s evangelical settlement: forgiveness is gift, received by faith, on the merit of Christ’s work alone.

What Wesley brought to the doctrine, beyond the Reformation precedent, was the strong experiential and transformative register. Wesley’s own conversion experience at Aldersgate Street on May 24, 1738 — “I felt my heart strangely warmed. I felt I did trust in Christ, Christ alone, for salvation, and an assurance was given me that he had taken away my sins, even mine, and saved me from the law of sin and death” — is the paradigmatic Methodist account of the appropriation of forgiveness. The witness of the Spirit (Rom. 8:16), the Spirit’s testimony in the believer’s heart that I am a child of God, has been the empirical center of Methodist assurance ever since. Forgiveness, in the Methodist account, is not only a forensic verdict but a living conviction that the Spirit inscribes in the believer’s heart.

The Methodist ordo salutis — prevenient, convicting, justifying, sanctifying, glorifying grace — is the architecture by which the forgiveness of sins becomes a life. Prevenient grace prepares the heart. Convicting grace awakens conscience to the reality of sin. Justifying grace pronounces the divine verdict of forgiven, witnessed in the soul by the Spirit. Sanctifying grace begins the actual transformation of the forgiven sinner into the likeness of Christ. Glorifying grace completes the work. Forgiveness is the hinge in this architecture: the moment at which the prevenient and convicting work issues in the new life that the sanctifying and glorifying grace will carry to completion.

Wesley’s strong doctrine of Christian perfection — that the believer can in this life be brought, by grace, to love God with all the heart and one’s neighbor as oneself — depends on this account of forgiveness. Forgiveness is not merely the cancellation of a debt; it is the opening of a life. The forgiven sinner is, in the Methodist account, also the one being made new — not yet fully, but really.

The Methodist tradition has also been particularly attentive to the as we forgive others dimension of the Lord’s Prayer. The Wesleyan understanding of the holy life requires that the forgiven sinner extend forgiveness to others; the General Rules (1743) make the works of mercy and the avoidance of harm constitutive of the Methodist way. The forgiveness one has received is not a private possession; it is the obligation and the capacity of an extended life of mercy toward others.

The practical Wesleyan posture: receive the forgiveness of sins as the gift it is, with the Spirit’s witness to the heart; live the forgiven life in actual transformation toward Christian perfection; extend forgiveness to others as one has received it; expect, by grace, to find the ledger of one’s life increasingly written in the gospel’s hand rather than the world’s.

Hymnody

The Wesleyan hymnody on the forgiveness of sins is voluminous and has shaped English-language Christian piety more than any other body of hymns on the doctrine.

Charles Wesley’s “And can it be that I should gain” (1738) was written within days of his own conversion experience and remains one of the great evangelical hymns on the appropriation of forgiveness: “No condemnation now I dread; / Jesus, and all in him, is mine; / Alive in him, my living head, / And clothed in righteousness divine, / Bold I approach the eternal throne, / And claim the crown, through Christ, my own.”

“O for a thousand tongues to sing” (Charles, 1739) — the hymn that opens every Methodist hymnal — is in significant part a hymn on the forgiveness of sins: “He breaks the power of canceled sin, / He sets the prisoner free; / His blood can make the foulest clean, / His blood availed for me.”

“Depth of mercy! can there be” (Charles, 1740) is a less-sung but theologically rich treatment of the doctrine: “Depth of mercy! Can there be / Mercy still reserved for me? / Can my God his wrath forbear, / Me, the chief of sinners, spare?”

“Just as I am, without one plea” (Charlotte Elliott, 1835; not Wesleyan in origin but central to Methodist and evangelical worship) is the great altar-call hymn: “Just as I am, without one plea, / But that thy blood was shed for me, / And that thou bidd’st me come to thee, / O Lamb of God, I come!”

“Amazing grace” (John Newton, 1779; Anglican origin, central to Methodist worship): “Amazing grace, how sweet the sound, / That saved a wretch like me. / I once was lost, but now am found, / Was blind, but now I see.”

“There is a fountain filled with blood” (William Cowper, 1771; Anglican-evangelical, central to Methodist hymnody): “There is a fountain filled with blood / Drawn from Immanuel’s veins, / And sinners plunged beneath that flood / Lose all their guilty stains.”

For the Lord’s Supper: the Wesleys’ Hymns on the Lord’s Supper (1745, 166 hymns) repeatedly returns to the eucharistic celebration of the forgiveness of sins as a present sacramental gift.

For the Watch-Night service and the Covenant Renewal: the hymns of the year-end Methodist tradition concentrate the doctrine of forgiveness in the call to renewed self-offering: “O thou who camest from above,” “Forth in thy name, O Lord, I go,” and “A charge to keep I have.”

Pastoral and Liturgical Use

The hardest thing about preaching the forgiveness of sins to a modern congregation is that the surrounding culture has so thoroughly spiritualized the doctrine that its actual content is hard to recover. The Bible’s doctrine is concrete. It is economic. It is about debt. The Aramaic word for sin is the word for debt. The Lord’s Prayer asks God to forgive us our debts in language Jesus’ first hearers heard as flatly literal. The Greek word the New Testament uses for forgiveness — aphesis — is the same word the Septuagint uses for the Jubilee year of release in which actual loans were cancelled and actual slaves were freed and actual land was returned to its original family. If the language of debt, transaction, and economics has been drained out of our preaching of forgiveness, we are no longer in the world of the Bible.

This is not a metaphor in one direction. Sin is like debt; rather, in the New Testament’s own grammar, debt is what sin is. Your ledger before God is not metaphorical. The accumulated weight of what you have done and failed to do is real, and it has been growing all your life. The forgiveness the creed confesses is the cancellation of this real ledger. Remissionem peccatorum names a divine act with the force of a debt-forgiving bank decision multiplied by the difference between the local credit union and the Triune God who created the cosmos. The 2.35-million-dollar house, paid in full, by someone else’s check.

This is where the doctrine becomes pastorally usable in a way that older preaching has sometimes missed. People struggle to feel guilt for sin in general. They feel guilt for specific debts. The lie they told. The friend they failed. The hour they wasted. The money they owed and never paid back. The sister they have not spoken to in three years. The way they spoke to their child last Tuesday. Each of these is a debt. The good news of the clause is that the whole concrete catalogue — every line item — has been remitted by an act of God in Christ. He breaks the power of canceled sin, he sets the prisoner free.

There is a question contemporary economic theory raises that the church should not avoid. The 2008 financial crisis introduced the phrase moral hazard into wide circulation: if you bail out the bank that took on reckless debt, you teach the bank to take on more reckless debt next time. Bailout creates the very behavior it was meant to address. Why does this objection not apply to God? Why does the gospel’s free forgiveness not produce, in its recipients, the most spectacular moral hazard in the history of theology — Christians forgiven so completely that they live in increasingly reckless sin, secure in the cancellation that never runs out?

Paul anticipated the question (Rom. 6:1): Are we to continue in sin that grace may abound? His answer is sharp: By no means! But the answer is not simply a moral exhortation. It is a structural claim. The forgiveness of sins, received in Christ, brings with it the gift of the Spirit and the new life that begins the actual transformation of the forgiven. The grace that forgives is the same grace that sanctifies. The Wesleyan ordo salutis names this with particular clarity. The believer who experiences the forgiveness of sins as a free transaction without any internal change has not yet experienced the forgiveness the New Testament names. The Spirit’s witness That you are a child of God (Rom. 8:16) is, in the same breath, the Spirit’s beginning the work of making you actually be one.

There is also the as we forgive clause to keep in mind. The Lord’s Prayer ties the believer’s reception of forgiveness to the believer’s extension of it. The Matthew 18 parable of the unforgiving servant makes the connection explicit: the servant who has been forgiven ten thousand talents — a debt so impossibly large the number is essentially all the money — refuses to forgive a fellow-servant the trivial sum of a hundred denarii. The master takes back the forgiveness. The parable is sharp, and it should remain sharp in our preaching. Mercy is not a cudgel we hold over our neighbors; it is a gift none of us deserve. To pray the clause is to consent, in the same breath, to extend to others the very release one has received.

This is also why the clause cannot be reduced to private psychology. The cancellation of one believer’s ledger is the beginning of a chain of cancellations — debts forgiven across families, congregations, neighborhoods, generations. The Jubilee inheritance of the doctrine is not optional decoration; it is part of what the clause confesses. The forgiveness that has been worked toward you is the forgiveness you now work toward others; the bank statement you have received is the bank statement you now write. The Christian community is, on this account, a community of cancelled debts, and the political and economic implications of that ought to remain visible.

For the preacher: the temptation is to preach forgiveness so reassuringly that nothing changes, or so severely that nothing is given. The clause refuses both temptations. Forgiveness is given, freely, completely, beyond what the recipient deserves. And the gift carries with it the new life that grace itself produces in the recipient. Preach the gift. Preach the new life that follows. Preach the as we forgive clause without flinching. And let the people hear, in plain English, that whatever debt they are carrying in their soul, whatever they think is too much, it is not too much for God. Their bond rating may be junk. God is willing to bear the risk.

Further Reading

• Leviticus 25:8–55 — the Jubilee year of release
• Isaiah 40:1–11; 61:1–4 — the prophetic aphesis texts
• Matthew 6:9–15 — the Lord’s Prayer, with the debt-language unmistakable
• Matthew 18:21–35 — the parable of the unforgiving servant
• Luke 4:16–21 — Jesus reads Isaiah 61 in the Nazareth synagogue
• Luke 15 — the three parables of the lost
• Acts 2:38; 10:43; 13:38 — apostolic preaching of forgiveness as the gift of Christ
• Romans 3:21–26; 4; 5:1–11 — Paul on justification and the forgiveness of sins
• Romans 6:1–14 — grace, sin, and the new life
• Ephesians 1:7; Colossians 1:13–14 — redemption, the forgiveness of sins
• Augustine, On the Spirit and the Letter; On Baptism (Donatist controversy)
• Anselm, Cur Deus Homo (c. 1098)
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae III, qq. 46–49 (atonement) and qq. 84–90 (penance)
• Martin Luther, Ninety-Five Theses (1517); Smalcald Articles III.iii
• Augsburg Confession, Articles XI–XII; Apology of the Augsburg Confession XII
• John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion III.3–4; III.11–14
• Heidelberg Catechism, Question 56
• Council of Trent, Sessions 6 (justification, 1547) and 14 (penance, 1551)
• The Articles of Religion of the United Methodist Church (1784), Article IX
• John Wesley, Standard Sermons: Sermon 1, “Salvation by Faith” (1738); Sermon 5, “Justification by Faith” (1746); Sermon 9, “The Spirit of Bondage and of Adoption”; Sermons 10–11, “The Witness of the Spirit”
• John Wesley, Journal, entry for May 24, 1738 (Aldersgate)
• Charles Wesley, “And can it be that I should gain” (1738); “O for a thousand tongues to sing” (1739)
• John Newton, “Amazing grace” (1779)
• Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification (Lutheran World Federation and Roman Catholic Church, 1999)
• Gustavo Gutiérrez, A Theology of Liberation (Orbis, 1971)
• Anthony Bash, Forgiveness and Christian Ethics (Cambridge, 2007)
• L. Gregory Jones, Embodying Forgiveness (Eerdmans, 1995)