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First, it's one thing to speak of things "separately," something else again to distinguish them. In both cases, one's point in speaking, presumably, is to deny that the things in question are simply identical, or one and the same. But it's being misled and misleading to suppose – as even the philosopher David Hume once notoriously allowed himself to do --– that any things that can be distinguished can also be separated. That people in our society, sacred and secular, generally speak of life and death as distinct I, too, would take to be true. But that they thereby take them to be separate seems to me to be another, and distinct, claim for which I find no compelling evidence.

On the contrary -– and this is my second point -– anyone in our society who has been educated in the so-called life-sciences as they're conventionally taught, for the most part, in our schools, colleges, and universities will surely have learned that, although life and death are certainly distinct, they are also inseparable, since to live is to die, dying, and so death, too, being entirely of a piece with living. Consequently, wherever Christian witness and theology have critically appropriated the Christian tradition in the light of modern scientific understanding, including that of the life-sciences, there is a recognition, however consistently or inconsistently worked out, that death, for all of its difference from life, is insofar an integral part of it, all prescientific notions to the contrary notwithstanding. I have in mind, for example, the notion that we find in the stories of human origins in the Book of Genesis that death is not properly of a piece with, or a part of, life, but is rather utterly contrary to it, being a divine punishment arbitrarily called down upon the first human beings (and, curiously, all of their progeny as well!) because of their disobedience to God's command.

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Even so, my third point is that the ultimate justification for any such revisionary theological understanding as the questioner would presumably take to be "more correct" cannot be simply that it agrees with modern scientific understanding about the inseparability of life and death, or, if you will, of living and dying. No, this revisionary theological understanding is finally to be justified, if it is, only by the kind of properly religious, indeed, Christian, understanding of life and death to which Paul bears witness in at least some -– although certainly not all! -– of the things he has to say about them. I'm thinking not only of his powerful assurance in Rom 8:38 f. that "neither death, nor life," any more than "anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord"; I'm thinking, above all of what he says to the Romans in the fourteenth chapter of that same letter: "We do not live to ourselves, and we do not die to ourselves. If we live, we live to the LordI and if we die, we die to the Lord; so then, whether we live or whether we die we are the Lord's. For to this end Christ died and lived again, that he might be Lord of the dead and the living" (vss. 7 ff.).

5. So much is said about Christian forgiveness. I believe in a loving and forgiving God, but the extent and capacity ofGodof God's love is beyond human comprehension. Does God want me, a human being created in the image ofGodof God, to forgive those who have hUl't nze, continue to choose evil over good, and are unrepentant? Does God? What ifI if I won't -– or can't?

On my analysis, there are two closely related questions here. I shall take them up in order, as follows.

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But having said this, I would be the first to insist that nothing is more essential theologically than to have a right understanding of what is, and is not, meant by the "forgiveness" to which we are called as well as by the "love" of which it is an expression. On what I take to be such a right understanding, for one to love another -– whether we're talking of God's love of others or of the love to which God calls all who are created in God's image-for one to love another, always involves two things: first of all, to accept the other unconditionally, for what she, he or it actually is, thereby allowing the other to make a difference to oneself and what one is to do; and then, secondly, to act toward the other, on the basis of such acceptance, so as to realize, as far as possible, consistently with one's similar obligations to all the others affected by one's actions, the other's own true good. Forgiveness, then, is simply loving in this same twofold way any and all who have acted hurtfully and unrepentantly against one, not allowing their offenses to qualify in any way one's accepting even them unconditionally for what they are and then acting so as to bring about, so far as possible, what is good for them, too.

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