How the modern world gets Christian forgiveness wrong

For millennia, we have all more or less understood one thing about forgiveness: You cannot demand it.

You can ask for it. You can plead for it. You can try to earn it. But the moment you insist that someone owes it to you, you have misunderstood the thing itself.

You can command a Christian to forgive because he has been given a new heart. You cannot litigate him into loving his enemy.

Sam Ridge, a philosopher at the University of California San Diego, thinks that conventional wisdom is wrong. In a recent paper, he argues that there are cases in which a wrongdoer has “a right to be forgiven by their victim.”

In other words, forgiveness can be understood as a claimable moral asset — not just something one hopes for, but something one may, under certain conditions, press for. That may sound tidy in a philosophy seminar. It sounds far less plausible beside a bloodstained cross and wounds that still bear a name.

Promise ring

Ridge’s argument begins with promises. “Promises generate rights,” he writes. And since “we can promise to forgive,” it follows that “we can have a right to be forgiven.”

He then pushes beyond explicit promises. Long habits of forbearance, he argues, can create expectations and implicit commitments inside relationships. Over time, those too may harden into something like a right. Philosophers, he says, have been wrong to treat forgiveness as if it were always the victim’s exclusive property.

From a Christian standpoint, there is something here to appreciate. Ridge is at least pushing back against the modern cult of grievance, where outrage becomes a vocation and to forgive is to cede power. He is right to insist that resentment cannot simply be nursed forever. He is also right to note that relationships impose real obligations and that promises are not decorative sounds. In a culture that treats every vow as provisional, the suggestion that words bind has the ring of sanity.

But having glimpsed the truth that forgiveness cannot be purely discretionary, Ridge reaches for the bluntest tool in the secular toolbox: rights language.

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Forgiveness fix

The move also fits a broader cultural drift. In recent years, forgiveness has steadily been reframed in therapeutic terms. Harvard researchers now explain that “forgiveness is good for us,” meaning it lowers stress, improves mental health, and stabilizes relationships.

In popular self-help language, the advice is even simpler: Forgive so you can heal; forgive so you can move on.

Once forgiveness is treated primarily as a psychological good, it becomes easy to assume that people ought to supply that good to one another. Ridge’s argument may simply be the next step in that progression: If forgiveness benefits everyone, why shouldn’t the offender have some claim to it?

The result is philosophically clever and spiritually tone-deaf.

Debt relief

The trouble with Ridge’s proposal appears in at least three places.

The New Testament does not picture forgiveness as a debtor’s legal claim against the heart of his neighbor. It presents forgiveness as an act flowing from divine mercy: “Forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors.” Christian forgiveness is commanded, yes, but it is not coerced. It grows out of a heart that knows it has been forgiven more than it will ever be asked to forgive.

That is the first problem with Ridge’s view. He treats forgiveness as a morally chargeable transaction. I promised; therefore you can bill me. We have a pattern; therefore you can invoice me again. But Scripture treats forgiveness not as a payable debt but as the fruit of regeneration. You can command a Christian to forgive because he has been given a new heart. You cannot litigate him into loving his enemy. You can wring out an apology. You cannot compel the release of a grudge.

Your word and God’s word

The second problem is more basic. Ridge blurs the line between keeping one’s word and performing a spiritual act. If a father tells his daughter, “I promise to forgive you,” then yes, he has taken on a real obligation. He ought to master his anger, repent of bitterness, and restore goodwill where he can.

But it does not follow that the daughter acquires a standing right to demand what only grace can genuinely produce. Ridge’s own formula — “We can promise to forgive. Therefore, we can have a right to be forgiven” — slides too quickly past that distinction. The pressure falls first on the father’s conscience before God, not on the daughter’s ability to cash a promissory note.

His friendship examples make the same mistake in softer form. Old friends do owe one another patience, mercy, and readiness to reconcile. If a man refuses forgiveness after decades of mutual forbearance, then yes, something real has broken down. But what has broken down is not best described as a hidden contract. It is a failure of charity, of character, of fidelity to the shape of friendship itself. Friendship is sustained by habits of mercy, not by enforceable claims.

Crucifying pride

The third problem is where Ridge’s framework leads, once applied to what he calls “moderate wrongdoing,” the ordinary failures “we have all committed and, regrettably, will commit again.” Those are precisely the daily arenas in which Christ calls people to crucify pride and extend mercy before they feel like it. Once those moments are reframed in the language of rights, forgiveness begins to sound less like grace and more like entitlement: I repented; I made amends — now you owe me.

That posture may satisfy a theorist. It corrodes the virtue itself.

The philosophers Ridge is pushing against — figures like Lucy Allais, Cheshire Calhoun, and Charles Griswold — were right to sense the danger. Many of them describe forgiveness as supererogatory: admirable, fitting, sometimes morally beautiful, but not something the offender may demand as a matter of right. As Ridge himself notes, there is “near universal agreement” on this point. They understood something Ridge does not fully reckon with: Forgiveness can be morally urgent without becoming something the offender may properly claim. The instant it hardens into entitlement, something essential has already been lost.

More demanding, more humane

To be fair, Ridge does try to hedge the claim. He confines it to a certain band of offenses. He concedes that some acts may be unforgivable in practice. He also insists that victims retain “leeway” and cannot be pushed into immediate or shallow reconciliation. Those are sensible guardrails. But his own framework undermines them. Once forgiveness is grounded in rights talk, the victim’s conscience becomes one more obstacle to be managed, pressured, and eventually treated as suspect for failing to deliver on schedule.

The Christian alternative is both more demanding and more humane.

It says to the wrongdoer: You are not entitled to your neighbor’s forgiveness; you are entitled only to throw yourself on the mercy of Christ.

It says to the victim: You are not entitled to nurse hatred forever; you are commanded to forgive as you have been forgiven.

But that command comes from God, not from the person who hurt you.

And it reminds both parties that a wounded relationship is not a contract to be litigated, but a place where grace, repentance, truth, and sometimes hard boundaries must coexist — not a ledger of claims and entitlements.