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First, Does God want me to forgive those who have hurt me, continue to choose evil over good, and are unrepentant? My response, unhesitatingly, is Yes, God does want you to forgive those who have hurt you, and so on, and God wants this precisely because you are, as you say, a human being created in God's

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image. I have no hesitation in giving this answer because to give any other would require me to contradict what I take to be essential elements in the normative witness of the Christian community. Ifanything If anything is dear to me from the gospels' accounts of Jesus' preaching, it is that forgiveness is always in order toward those who have sinned against us, and that the forgiveness we owe them has no limits. The love of our neighbor as ourselves to which we are called is consistently expounded to include both love of our enemies and the willingness ever to forgive any and all who have need of our forgiveness.

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This, stated all too briefly, is the understanding of "love" and "forgiveness" on the basis of which I have responded unhesitatingly, Yes, God does want you to love your neighbor as yourself and, as an essential expression or form of such love, to forgive anyone and everyone who, for whatever reason, stands in need of your forgiveness. But, given the fact that the terms "love" and "forgiveness" may be understood in other, sometimes very different senses from those I've tried to clarify, I have no trouble understanding how my response to the question might appear more problematic than I take it to be.12

But what about the second question? Granted that God does indeed want me to forgive any and all who are in need of my forgiveness, what if I won't – or can't – forgive them? On what I take to be an adequate Christian theological understanding of human existence, there is good news and bad news. The bad news is that, notwithstanding God's call to each of us, in some mode or modes, to live as God's beloved children – which very much includes God's wanting us to love our neighbors and to forgive without limits any who may have offended against us – notwithstanding our all having been thus called by God, we have each always already rejected God's call, freely choosing to live contrary to it. Consequently, it's true of everyone of us that we won't – i.e., will not – love our neighbors as ourselves, including our enemies, and hence will not forgive any of them who stands in need of our forgiveness. Moreover, as long as we persist in our disobedient choice, we not only 'llrill will not love and forgive others; we also can not love and forgive them. Because we won't love and forgive, we can't love and forgive, either. But, of course, the good news of the gospel, as Christians understand it, is that what is impossible for us is nevertheless possible for Godthat God – that because God has always already loved and forgiven all of us, each of us, despite her or his persistent disobedience, ever remains God's beloved child who, as such, ever has the possibility of trustfully accepting God's love and loyally loving in return. In other words, each of us, although a sinner, is always already a forgiven sinner, who therefore needs only to accept her or his being forgiven through obedient faith in order to be able to love and to forgive others, as God wants us to do. In this sense, God's dem.and demand is but the flip side of God's gift. And not the least of the ways in which we accept God's gift is by obeying God's demand that we forgive one another as God has forgiven us all.

6. I resent noisy fundamentalists hijacking the name "Chl'istianChristian" and wonder 7.uhether thetj whether they don't do more harm than good in communicating the Christian gospel.

The question here, I take it, is this: Is it possible that those who hijack the name "Christian" do more harm than good in communicating the Christian gospel?

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