Content warning: Mentions of suicide.

In Anne Tyler’s 1991 novel “Saint Maybe,” 19-year-old Ian Bedloe has become responsible for the suicides of his older brother and his brother’s new bride. When Ian thinks his brother’s wife is being unfaithful, he tells his brother and then watches in horror as his brother speeds his car into a stone wall. 

A few months later, his mother calls Ian at college and tells him his brother’s wife has overdosed on sleeping pills. She died the night before in a coma, leaving her three young children — two from a previous marriage — in the hands of Ian’s aging parents. Burdened with guilt, Ian wanders into a storefront church and surprises himself by confessing his sin to the pastor. The pastor is frustratingly silent.

“Don’t you think I’m forgiven?” Ian pleads. The pastor quickly responds, “Goodness, no.” It becomes clear that the pastor expects something more than words. When asked what this might be, Ian is told he should start by “seeing to the children.” “In what way exactly?” Ian asks. “Why, raise them, I suppose,” says the pastor.

Saint Maybe is making a case for what forgiveness demands of us. American theologian Stanley Hauerwas — writing about this demanding forgiveness — says that by coming under the burden of atonement, Ian “learns that forgiveness is the gift that these children bring to him through making him more than he otherwise could have possibly been. He learns he must forgive as well as be forgiven and by so doing he is able to claim the life he has been given as his own”. Hauerwas is saying that by working for forgiveness we become more than we otherwise would have been. 

The process of atonement is one that a community calls us to take up, and a process that a community must hold us to. This community is what Christians call the Church, and this process is the Church’s witness of renewal.

If Tyler’s account of forgiveness correctly reflects the work of the Church, and this university is an organization of the Church, then we are obliged to participate in that work. Except it doesn’t appear that we are. In the last two years there have been two prominent cases of individuals acting against the guidelines of Calvin University and subsequently being jettisoned from the community. I am referring to the denied reappointment of Joseph Kuilema and the requested and accepted resignation of President Boer. To ostracize these members from the community is to deny them the option to enter into the work of being forgiven, to right the wrongs we believe they have committed and to come under the guidance of the Church to make amends.

I am not intending to make claims about the gravity of these individuals’ misdeeds and whether they justified their ostracization. In both cases, it was the university’s prerogative as to whether or not that individual was employed. But whether or not we have the prerogative, I am wondering if we should use it at all.

 In “The Cost of Discipleship,” Dietrich Bonhoeffer contrasts ‘costly grace’ with ‘cheap grace’, saying that costly grace asks of us our lives while cheap grace preaches “forgiveness without repentance, baptism without church discipline, it is the Lord’s Supper without confession of sin, [and] absolution without personal confession.” 

If we believe that we have been elected into eternal life with Jesus Christ despite our depravity and at great cost, we should also believe that we don’t get to make decisions about who gets to participate in the life of the Church. To hold on to someone despite the ways they have wronged us is unquestionably difficult, but our ability to do so is not a reflection of our own strength of character or the capaciousness of our hearts. Our ability to forgive is made possible by a Church that knows it has been forgiven, and thus holds us to forgive one another.

This does not mean that members of this university who engage in misconduct aren’t subject to justice. Cheap forgiveness allows wrongdoers to say “I’m sorry” and move on. Costly forgiveness takes a toll on the wrongdoer; true repentance forces the repentant to reorient their life. As Hauerwas points out, the process of forgiveness binds us to one another, making us more than we are. Whichever way that practice is performed, it does not force people to leave our community in shame; rather, it binds us together in a love that makes us more than we would have been without it.