Theology in the Raw - Trauma, Justice, and The Power of Christian Forgiveness with Dr. Amy L. Orr-Ewing

Episode Date: April 13, 2026

Exiles Minneapolis is almost here! April 30-May 2! Register today at www.theologyintheraw.comDr. Amy Orr-Ewing is an international author, speaker and theologian who addresses the deep questions of our day with meaningful answers found in the Christian Faith. Travelling internationally Amy is a regular speaker across university campuses, businesses, parliaments, churches and conferences as well as on TV, radio and podcasts. She is the author of multiple books including ‘Where is God in All the Suffering?’ (runner up Michael Ramsay Prize, 2023), bestselling ‘Why Trust the Bible?’ and the forthcoming 'Forgiveness: Reclaiming Its Power in a Culture of Outrage and Fear' which you can pre-order now (releases 4/20/26)See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Only in Christ and only in the Christian faith, do you have the possibility both of forgiveness and justice? Without Jesus, you can never have both of those. You either live with this desire for vengeance, and that's what we're saying politically. So you've got all these hopeless young people marching to the beat of identity politics or being drawn into kind of extreme right-wing ideology and aggression. And the answer to what is beating in their hearts is the cross. Hey friends, welcome back to another episode of Theology and around. My guest today is Dr. Amy Or Ewing, who is a public theologian with over 25 years of experience in Christian apologetics. Amy has a doctorate from Oxford University and is spoken in more than 40 countries making

the case for the Christian faith in universities, parliaments, businesses, and public forums. Amy is founder of Advocate Collective and is the author of the recent book, which I hold in my hands right here, if you're watching on YouTube, forgiveness, reclaiming its power in a culture of outrage and fear. This was a fascinating conversation. I've wrestled with the topic of forgiveness, its relationship to reconciliation, its relationship to justice, and how do you know when you've actually forgiven somebody? Is it emotion? Is it an action? Can you forgive somebody? and still desire justice. So we talk about all those things. And as you'll see, Amy is absolutely brilliant and has thought through this, both on a practical level and also from a scholarly standpoint.

Many thanks to those of you who are supporting the podcast. This podcast would not exist, were it not for the many people who are part of the theology and raw community. If you would like to join the theology and raw community, head over to patreon.com forward slash theology in the raw become a member of Thealjean Raw for as little as five bucks a month. Okay, please welcome to the show for the first time. The one and only Dr. Amy or Ewey. Amy, it's so good to meet you. Really been enjoying your latest book on forgiveness, which I want to get into.

I told you offline. I wasn't excited to read it. I'm like, I'm just going to feel guilty and like, you know, I need to do better at this, you know. But I, it's, it's absolutely stunning. Before we get into it, what, tell us something about yourself. It seems like you do a lot of different things. Tell us about your track in education and in how you ended up doing what you do now. Oh, that's amazing. Well, thank you so much for having me on. It's awesome to meet you online and be part of the podcast. Thank you. Yeah. So I'm a public

Loden, I've been involved in sort of public ministry, I guess, for 26, 27 years, and that's taken me to 40 countries. And I use that phrase rather than apologetics, just because often people think apologetics is either apologising for something or defending the indefensible, or it's, it just has this quite angry, aggressive sense around it. But really for, you know, the last few decades, That's what my life has been about trying to share the gospel with people in a way that connects with them and with their questions and with the wider culture. So I had the opportunity to study at Oxford University as an undergrad and do my doctoral work there as well. And I also helped sort of start and lead a centre there called the Oxford Centre for Christian Apologetics. And I have wonderful husband, three sons.

My twins are 20 now and my youngest is 17. So I live a life surrounded by A-type athletic personalities. And yeah, love life and love Jesus. And I love seekers, people who are kind of wrestling with deep truths and deep questions. Yeah. What are, I mean, so, okay, for lack of our terms, you do engage in apologetic type stuff. What are some of the, do you see the same kinds of questions coming up a lot in the different spaces? you speak in?

Yeah, so I love speaking across different kinds of audiences. I'm often on campus, on secular campuses, you know, whether that's like Ivy League or European campuses in political settings. So working with leaders and often businesses as well, like going into people's workplaces and doing a kind of public event, which would allow for Q&A people to ask any question. And I think, you know, generally there's a whole sort of load of questions that most people, whether you're rich or poor, whether, you know, you have a particular cultural background or, you know, just basic kind of secular person. There's a suite of questions around suffering and how God could be good and this world be as it is.

Questions around the Bible that do tend to come up once, you know, you start introducing the person of Jesus. So questions around the Bible's credibility. Those would be the kind of general ones. But I found in the last six to seven years that we're in the West, in particular, in a season of change. So I started in apologetics in the 1990s. Clearly I was 11 when I started. Yeah, no. So I would say like in the late 90s, early 2000s, it was all kind of postmodernism.

and truth is relative and everything's fluid and what about other religions and, you know, no one wants to be a sort of bigot who says other people are wrong. So there's lots of questions around that. And then around the 2010s, you have the new atheists, so all the kind of science and religion and the kind of aggressive idea, you know, God doesn't just not exist, your God is evil. So the moral questions around the Bible. But I think in the last six to seven years, we've found, well, I've experienced this shift. And I talk about it in this latest book on forgiveness where you've got a whole cultural moment massively influenced by identity politics and this kind of rage and aggression in the culture, particularly on the left, where Marxism was shaping what it meant to be human, particularly for young people.

And this driving sense of justice and that the opposite of postmodernism, which was like, I wasn't. everyone to like me and I could never be an intolerant person. Now it's like if you disagree with me, you have to die, you know? You need to die. A social death, professional death and moral death, you know, council culture is like death for transgressions. And so there's this moral crusading, but from a totally different basis than a biblical one. And so I began to ask, you know, is there hope? Because it's nihilistic, you know, that that way of living. And that, that way of because no one can ever live up to that kind of moral standard of perfection. And we've got the highest suicide, male suicide rates, you know, that we've seen for a long time in the West.

So how do we connect the gospel with that cultural moment? And I had the opportunity to speak in the UK Parliament and to make the case for the Christian faith with like 19 minutes. And I thought, I'm going to try and do it around this idea that uniquely Christian forgiveness answers the cry for justice that identity politics is calling for, but also offers us the possibility of grace in a way that doesn't minimize the harm and moral wrongdoing that people feel very deeply about. So that was a bit of the journey of how it all started. How did that go?

How did that land with people? Oh, my goodness. I mean, it was the most intimidating thing I've ever done in my life. I mean, really, honestly, it was because at that time, we had a Hindu Prime Minister in Britain called Rishi Sunak and he had all these MPs. I mean, it really was extraordinary to experience the Holy Spirit moving,

I think, and amazing questions afterwards. And then someone sent it to Jordan Peterson and he then invited me to speak at his conference called the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship and to make the case for the Christian faith through this idea of forgiveness. So it ended up opening up loads of opportunities and, you know, it was a total god thing. Yeah.

Gosh, that's exciting. I'm curious, what did you do your doctoral work in? What was your topic? So my focus was on the apologetic methodology of an amazing woman called Dorothy El Sayers, who was a contemporary of C.S. Lewis, but was sort of one of the most well-known public intellectuals for the Christian faith in the 19, 40s and 50s. So it was on her approach. Okay. Interesting. Wow. Wow.

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How do you know if you've truly forgiven? That's a really hard one. It's like, well, you don't have bitterness in your heart. I'm like, all right, but I've got bitterness that comes and goes every single day. Like, does that, or what if I don't have any bitterness for like five years? All of a sudden, you know, I see the person or somebody reminds me of somebody who wronged me and I'm like, I get a spike of bitterness. Does that mean, well, you didn't forgive. You haven't forgiven him.

Well, maybe I have for a while and I just lapsed or something, you know. Totally. And can you explain, like, what, and in one of your chapters you talk about like four different views of forgiveness. Maybe that'd be a good place to start. Like what are the different ways people approach? Yeah. Yeah. Okay.

So outside the Christian faith, obviously, there's still this idea of forgiveness. But people think forgiveness means just sort of letting it go to the universe, but like Elsa in Frozen, just let it go release it. And forgiveness is a sort of psychological trick you play on yourself where you release any bitterness you have towards someone who's harmed you. And I think that's really problematic. You know, part of my work, I work also with survivors of sexual abuse. And part of my interest in this subject also was because often misunderstandings of forgiveness

have been used to further harm those who've experienced really devastating, egregious wrong, like rape and sexual abuse. And so if you take that idea of forgiveness without Christ, without the cross, forgiveness is just let it go. And it sort of requires you to say, what happened, wasn't really that bad, you know, it didn't hurt that much, and, you know, I'm over it. So within Christianity, within the sort of scriptural framework, I guess there are four working models of forgiveness that people are generally using, you know, as Christians. And one would be quite close to that, quite close to the Elsa secular model, which is a forgiveness that focuses primarily on the feeling of the aggrieved person.

So if I feel like I've released this, if I feel like I'm experiencing freedom from bitterness, then I've forgiven. So that would be kind of model number one, a focus on the individual who suffered the harm and the moral and psychological benefit to that person for releasing that harm. I guess the second sort of popular model of forgiveness within the church is the idea of completely unconditional forgiveness that is also equal to reconciliation. So that is forgiveness that is completely unboundaried. And, you know, probably one of the most famous proponents of that would have been R.T. Kendall, where the, you know, his teaching on the life of Joseph would, would, sort of say, you know, as a Christian, once you've been forgiven by Jesus, you know, you have to forgive everyone immediately. And, you know, in a completely unboundary way, we have reconciliation with everyone, regardless of really whether the person repents or not.

Then the third model is sort of like the opposite of that. It's saying we don't have to forgive anyone unless there is repentance. So my colleague at the Ocker, John Lennox, you know, would sort of teach this and say, you know, because in Christ, we're only forgiven when we repent. Like God doesn't just universally forgive people through the cross. Confession and repentance are required. And so in the Christian life, it's the same. You know, we don't really forgive until someone actually comes and confesses and repents.

And I think that there's a sort of fourth model, a fourth idea, which I think really better it, you know, sort of relates to the biblical texts. And that is that Jesus envisages forgiveness in the life of a believer as being a bit like you've experienced having a debt owed to you. So in the various parables, the parable of the unmerciful servant, you know, the word Jesus uses kind of has this idea of unpaid debt. And so. So as a Christian, when you've experienced hurt or harm or moral wrongdoing, there's a debt owed to you.

Now, when you're the victim of something really bad happening and you want to forgive, you want to follow the teachings of Jesus, it's a bit like in America or Britain when you buy a house. So let's imagine you've saved up the money for a deposit for that purchase of that house, but the house sale, the price is beyond your ability to pay. You can't actually cover it with your savings. And so you go to the bank and you get a mortgage and, you know, forget about all mortgage interest rates or whatever. But imagine then that money that covers that distance of that debt that is owed to you. And for the Christian, what Christ has done on the cross is he's fully paid the price for sin. And the grace that comes to us through the cross

is the power to cover that distance between what we could forgive and, you know, that gap that is left. Now, in the UK, when you buy a house, that deposit that you've saved, that decision to forgive, that mortgage payment, the death of Christ covering that debt, those two amounts of money go into the attorney's account. I think in the US it's called an escrow, isn't it? So it's beyond your reach to get that money back. You really have paid. The deposit has gone.

The mortgage has gone. But the transaction is only fully finalised when the deal with the seller goes through. And so I think that's how reconciliation of relationship is envisaged in the scriptures. So sometimes we live in the zone of kind of incomplicated. complete transactions. So it can be true that we have forgiven. We've made the decision as a Christian to forgive the debt owed to us, but only through the power and grace of the cross coming to help us. And so the money has gone into the attorney's account. That forgiveness has happened. But we're in the realm of in the, you know, not fully realized transaction when the person who's harmed us hasn't

hasn't repented. And so the relationship can't be restored without confession and repentance. I find that really freeing because it means as a Christian, you know, I can live empowered by the cross to forgive, but also with the reality that sometimes I might feel like I haven't forgiven, but the power of the cross is still true. The mortgage is still actually covered. and I can be living in this world without every relationship fully resolved because there may be on repentance this side of heaven. That's super helpful. I remember you telling that illustration about the escrow in your book and that made really,

that bit a lot of sense. So you still haven't convinced John Lennox of that quite yet? No, not yet. John is still very much in the, in the, we don't even. need to actually, you know, activate forgiveness on, on our side if the person hasn't repented. Okay. Yeah. And you see that a lot more around kind of reformed theological circles as well, I think.

Okay. Okay. Okay. That's an interesting distinction. Yeah. So, yeah, with the relationship between forgiveness and reconciliation, would you say true forgiveness would include a desire to reconcile if somebody who has harmed you also, well, let me put a different way. Yeah, on your end, you have to have a desire to reconcile. Obviously, reconciliation needs two parties.

So the other person would need to also want to reconcile. But would you say on your end, as a say, somebody who's a victim of a harm, a wrongdoing, that true forgiveness would also include a desire to reconcile or would they be spaced where I have truly forgiven you, but I don't ever want to be around you again? And I'm sure our mind's going to think of specific scenarios. Exactly. And there are so many situations, aren't there, where like criminality comes into this. So one of the things that I really wanted to address in the book is how, and just in my work

on this over the last five years and in apologetics. It's a huge question for people. How can, how can it be okay that, you know, someone who's perpetrated rape or domestic abuse just kind of gets off? Right. And the perception in the world out there is that forgiveness means that there are no consequences in this life and in this world. And I don't think we see that in the scriptures. I don't I think we see the counselling, for example, of penalty for crime in this life. So it can be possible that a person has perpetrated a crime against you and is sorry for what they've done and has confessed that sin and is even repentant about what they've done. And I think that would not negate the need for that person to pay the civil or criminal penalty for that crime.

And that's often where the mistake of cheat grace comes in, that we just say, everything has to be fine. And, you know, we then live in a world where there aren't actual natural also consequences to things that have occurred. So a great example, I think, and I didn't use this one in the book, but a great example is Rachel Den Hollander, you know, the US gymnast who at the sentencing of Larry Nasser, who was a horrific sexual predator who'd abused so many girls and women in the US gymnastics team. And at his trial, she spoke at his sentencing hearing and she said the two things that can be true,

I forgive Larry and I also ask for the full penalty of the law. And so there can be kind of eternal forgiveness that were empowered to give, but also consequence for the actions that people have taken. And so I think there can be a sort of sliding scale of a desire and the possibility of reconciliation of what's actually safe and healthy and appropriate, particularly where women and children are involved. And so it is not to be a failure at forgiving to then have boundaries in place. where a person has, you know, committed really dangerous acts that are harmful.

Yeah, that, that's what I was hoping would be the right answer. Because, yeah, I, I, yeah, there's just, there's certain relationships that are just unhealthy, right? But even like someone could say, well, if the other party is truly repentive, I'm so sorry I did this. I'm not going to do this again. I want to be reconciled. Is there a place for the victim to still say, I still do not feel safe around you? Or is that evidence that they haven't fully accepted the person's apology?

Yeah, so again, I think there is a distinction between forgiveness and reconciliation. And the power of the cross enables both, of those things to happen. I do believe reconciliation of relationship is possible. But one of the things that I sort of discovered in the research around the book is that the literature around the kind of science of this, both the brain science and also the impact on the human body is really, really interesting.

And it really supports, you know, what the Bible seems to say as well. It shouldn't surprise us, of course, if we believe, you know, God created everything. But I think, you know, what you see in the literature, for example, is that forgiveness can actually be, end up being harmful to the well-being of the sufferer. If there's any coercion, if there's any sense that a person is being forced into a position of forgiving, and if that forgiveness is required too quickly, or if unboundaryed, you know, reconciliation is then the expectation.

So there's a distinction between forgiveness that is healthy that actually, you know, shows up as, you know, being incredibly beneficial to the human body, including heart disease and diabetes and sort of really unexpected health care benefits to being a person who forgives. But that tipping over into being harmful where it's coerced or required too quickly. I came across this fascinating phrase. I had a chapter on trauma and, you know, the impacts of trauma on the body. It's been an interest of mine for just a research interest of personal interest as well in the last five years. But in the study of trauma in relationship to forgiveness and not within a kind of Christian or religious setting at all, but what the studies showed was that what a person who'd experienced trauma needed, most for their health and healing was what the writers described as an empathetic witness,

to have someone bear empathetic witness to what you've experienced. And I realised that that is exactly what we have in Christ on the cross. You know, the person of Jesus is God made flesh. And as he dies willingly by crucifixion, carrying away the sins of the world and a penalty for sin, He bears empathetic witness to the scale of what harm means to us, you know, like how much sin actually hurts this world. And I just found that to be so beautiful and so powerful.

And it was also a bit of a rebuke, you know, I've been in circles, in Christian circles, where it was almost like we were saying harm mattered less than the world were saying. it mattered. So if you look at your kind of warrior for identity politics, your enraged left-wing activist, he's saying, you know, harm matters so much that there needs to be this punishment called cancel culture. And then, you know, it felt like in the church, we were minimizing what the image of God actually means. Like, if the image of God is true, if that is a true account of the world, then a person being harmed in any way matters at a sort of transcendent level. And that's why,

you know, forgiveness is so hard. Yeah. And that's why it costs something cosmic, the death of God in history. So it's like we try and make the problem too small so we can solve it. But actually, the gospel does the opposite. It says, you know, that feeling of woundedness in the culture around us, you know, it feels this bad because sin. is this bad. But the solution is this big in the cross. Your chapter, I mean your chapter on trauma, chapter five is excellent. Chapter six, I think is worth the price of the book.

The forgiveness is a gift to anyone for any who experience anxiety. And this is where, gosh, you get into a lot of the science, secular science, showing the health, just the physical healthiness of forgiveness for relieving all kinds of mental health challenges that are, you know, exponential. And the sort of physiological impact on the brain of the power of forgiveness, actually, on the human brain. And then how our neural pathways can be remade. And that can genuinely impact our experience of anxiety. I've found that so incredible.

And then you think about how Romans 12 says, you know, be transformed by the renewing of your mind. And, you know, just how extraordinarily. the word of God is. And what a gift to our world where, you know, I have, I have, I think I mentioned earlier, 20-year-old twin sons and a 17-year-old. And obviously, I know all of their friends and you just look at their generation and the anxiety epidemic. And yet in the Christian faith, we have this powerful truth that with the power to set us

free and really minister, you know, this peace. that is beyond this world. You gave a stat about anxiety that, I mean, a lot of stats. Oh, there was a study done where it said 85% of the things we worry about never happen. And the other 15%, four out of five people say they either handled it or it taught them a valuable lesson. That's wild. Yeah, exactly. That's right.

isn't it? Anxiety is like experiencing failure in advance. You know, all the feelings that would go with it, you're experiencing it in advance, and then 85% of it never happens in the end anyway. Yeah. Do you think it's increased? I mean, we all want to blame it on social media.

I think that is kind of the right answer or just living online where now we have access to all the horrible things happen to the world day after day after day after day. We know about every single plane crash. We know about every single car accident, every single, you know, moral failing of a leader. We know about every single war, you know, whereas prior to this online world we're living

in, we just didn't hear about every single act of evil, every single second of every single day. Is that, is that a large part of the anxiety? Or is it more to it? Yeah. I mean, I think, I think that that's a large part of it. I think also we're probably measuring it more than maybe previous generations did as well. But I, I think, I think, I think, I think, I think, I mean, I'm really persuaded by Jonathan Hates research in the anxious generation where he looks at the statistics around the first 11-year-olds who got smartphones. And again, the impact on the brain, the physiological impact on the brain of both as a child having that access to everything dark on the internet, but also that feature of the like feature. So, you know, the need to experience people kind of giving you the dopamine hit of the like through what you're posting online and then becoming shaped by that addiction to, you know, needing to be affirmed. And, you know, the horror of when you don't experience that, both online and then how that translates into the real world and how that's shaped a generation.

I mean, in the UK, there's a huge campaign to get this social media band for under 16s because the studies do seem to suggest the impact has been massive, particularly with anxiety. And then, you know, how does forgiveness relate to that and to the digital self? Because we have these kind of almost constructed selves that live online and where people say and do, things that they would never dream of doing in the real world, but they are doing them and they are having a real world impact, whether that's speaking words of incredible hate that just tear down another person or engaging in online porn and, you know, all that that means, you probably, you know, the person who's doing that might think twice about taking a slave and sexually abusing them in the

flesh, but that is in effect what is happening online. And so how forgiveness so powerfully the forgiveness that Christ can offer us on the cross and the new life through the atonement, how that impacts the digital self and then the real self behind the digital self. That's another whole layer to it, I think. This episode is brought to you by Mosh, by go-to protein bar that not only tastes great, but also helps me live intentionally. Not only is Mosh a great-tasting snack. It's also packed with ingredients that support your brain and body like Ashwaganda, Lionsman, Omega 3s, and other ingredients that help support focus,

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That's 25% off your first pack and 20% off your subscription of brain boosting bars delivered straight to your door. Start building brain health into your every day with Mosh bars. Thanks to Mosh for sponsoring this episode. I'm curious, you tell some startling stories in the book and they come out of nowhere. You're just like, we'll drop a story of like, I mean, it's like, oh my word. I either go back and read it. I'm like, wait, what? I'm curious about the relationship between, and you've kind of hinted at it already, but I'd love to dive deep into it. Forgiveness and justice,

in particular, the desire for justice. You tell a story about a, I think it's a mom who her daughter was beaten to death by her boyfriend. Is that the one? And then there's another one where somebody... Yeah. And she... I don't know the time frame, but she forgave him. I think he went to...

Yeah. So I quickly... Should I quickly recap that one? So that's amazing. I mean, one of the incredible things about the privilege of doing a kind of longer piece of thinking about something and then maybe writing a book is you get to meet extraordinary people and hear amazing stories. So, and I personally just do resonate with people's stories so much more than just

concepts. But Linda Markovits is amazing woman in America. She got the call, you know, no one ever wants to get that her daughter had been murdered by her partner. And she just describes the absolute horror. And then as a Christian, this sense that God might be calling her to forgive. And she thinks absolutely, I definitely. definitely can't do it and I don't want to, you know, which I really, really connect with. Yeah. I resonated so much with that. I was like, oh, 100%. A, it's impossible and B, I do not want to. And then, you know, she sort of describes how through the power of God, which has to be supernatural because humanly, who could forgive that? Through the power of Jesus, she begins to

receive this grace from God to be able to forgive this, this man. And so he, he is arrested and everything and it's clear that he's done this crime and he's going to be sentenced. He's been found guilty, but he's going to be sentenced. And it's a death penalty state. I think it's Florida. Yeah. And so they ask her if she wants, if she wants to ask appeal for the death penalty. And she says no. And she asks for. I think it ends up being a 24-year sentence, so not even full life in prison, but a long time. So he does actually pay a criminal penalty for this crime.

But she wants him to know that she's forgiven him and her husband forgives as well. And through her kind of advocacy for him to not have the death penalty and him hearing of being forgiven, he becomes a Christian and receives the forgiveness from God. God and then he's disciples in prison. And then essentially he becomes her son.

And on the day to pick him up from prison after his 24 years, she and her husband pick him up from jail and he calls her mom. That's absolutely wild. I've got such mixed emotions about it. Yeah. My theological mind is like, it's so beautiful. And yet I'm a dad of four kids, three daughters, around the same age as your sons.

And I just, that need for forgiveness, desire for forgiveness, but also a strong desire for justice. And what you're saying is those aren't incompatible. I just wonder if, is there, can I desire,

like, okay. Yes. I think, like I wouldn't, I'm against a death penalty, so I wouldn't do, but I,

would I, does like, okay 24 years but can I say I really want you to get it 24 and I hope it's really really hard for you you know like I absolutely no absolutely and again this is where I think

without the cross forgiveness is basically letting someone off and this is what I really explored in the parliament talk and I do explore in the book that the idea that forgiveness is moral weakness that to forgive would be to require a person to say that the harm wasn't that bad to somehow minimize the pain of the wrongdoing.

And it's only in a Christian model of forgiveness that you can say that the harm is not minimized because to forgive it would cost the death of the Son of God in history. And ultimately, the harm that has occurred to, the harm that has occurred is paid for in one way or the other either. by eternal judgment in the afterlife. You know, we all stand before a holy God, and we kind of pay eternally and experience the judgment of God. Or that person's sin is covered by that cosmic event of the suffering of Jesus in history. And if we make that death too small, we cheapen the cost of sin,

and we cheapen the value of a human being. and only only in Christ and only in the Christian faith do you have the possibility both of forgiveness and justice? Without Jesus, you can never have both of those. So that you either live with this desire for vengeance and that's what we're saying politically, both on the left and on the right. You know, it's different iterations of the same thing,

grievance culture, which is this demand for pain and suffering of my opponent. And on the left, we see it, through identity, politics and council culture. On the right, we see it through kind of aggression, and, you know, the evisceration, escape, goating of the other. So it's only in Christ that you have the value of a person upheld so that harm occurring to us matters at a transcendent level

that forgiving it would cost Jesus' death. And the possibility of grace and, like, the flow of grace through the cross to us, not just to forgive us, but to empower us then to forgive others and release grace into the world. I think it's so powerful. I think we need it in the church again. We've got to recapture it, the centre of the Christian faith. So you've got all these hopeless young people, you know,

marching to the beat of identity politics or, you know, being drawn into kind of extreme right-wing ideology and aggression. And the answer to what is beating in their hearts is the cross. That's why it's apologetics, I think. That's so good. So good. You mentioned in passing earlier

about the forgiveness doesn't need to happen immediately. That, because that, can you unpack that a little more? Because from what I know from like therapy practice, like you should never push somebody to forgive too quickly. Like there might be stages to where they can get to,

where a place where they can, actually forgive, not just be forced to say I forgive. Yeah, absolutely. I think, and the other thing to say is that we actually, humanly, we can't do it. Like the Christian message is that no one could do this. Like it's a power from outside of ourselves that frees us to be able to do this through the death of Jesus. But yeah, I think we see the tenderness of Jesus in the, you know, in the disciples say, teach us to pray and, and, and, and, And he says, you know, when you pray, say, Father in heaven, hallow be your name, your kingdom come, etc.

Your will be done. And then forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us. There's this sense of this being a daily, a daily practice, like a daily prayer. This isn't something that is kind of one and done. This isn't something that necessarily happens very quickly. But it's a formation of our mind and our body as we follow Jesus and we walk with him. and we receive his grace and his power through the cross by the power of the Holy Spirit. It becomes an overflow in our lives, but it's not this horrible sort of coerced thing.

And it's not something that we're, you know, meant to feel guilty about this. This is great long list of people I've failed to forgive because we can only do it because of Jesus anyway. So I've really wanted to, I feel like it's a, the forgiveness is a gift to the world and to our cultural moment. and all the political divides we're seeing, particularly in the West at the moment, but it's a gift to the church. There's a tenderness in this. So it's not meant to be something that we kind of feel burdened about

or coerced into. It's a beautiful kind of practice of Christians that comes through the power of the cross that we're helped with by Jesus to do on a daily basis. yeah not something that we're beaten you know over the head with it made me think as you're talking like forgiveness i always kind of thought about it as like there's a point in time when you have arrived at forgiveness you know and if if you if you still have bitter thoughts about the person you know then well you haven't quite forgiven them but there's going to be a time when you know all right

now you have forgiven, but it's almost, I don't know, I wonder, it's a genuine question. Like, is forgiveness more of a something you're striving toward and a rhythm where it's not like you are either not, you haven't forgiven? And all sudden, okay, Tuesday afternoon, you did it. Now you arrived. You have forgiven them. But is it a little more. I think there's a little bit of the both.

I think there's a bit of the both and in it, in that I, if we go back to that idea, of the escrow of the deposit and the mortgage. Yes. And you think for most people, the deposit is absolutely tiny and the mortgage is absolutely huge. So if we think about the sort of the balance of the deposit which comes from us and the mortgage, which is the death of Jesus, the deposit is really just that prayer, help me forgive,

that decision to follow Jesus and to live as a disciple of Jesus and to pray the Lord's prayer and, you know, receive the grace from him to release that debt that we are owed and to trust it to the cross. And so I think it's both an event and a process, but the event really is the death of Jesus, isn't it? That's what's actually covering this whole thing. But the reason I would want to say it's an event and that if you've taken that step, you've put that deposit in and even thought, help me forgive and even prayed I forgive. But you might still be living in that world of the unrealised transaction of reconciliation. And so you can be made to feel guilty and come under a

power of condemnation again that maybe I haven't forgiven. But forgiveness isn't a work that we can really achieve. It's through the power of the cross in the life of the believer. So we're sort of resting on, you know, what Jesus has done at the cross anyway to cover us and to cover that debt owed to us. Okay. Now that's helpful. Oh, let's see. A bunch of other questions I was writing down. Can I have forgiven somebody and still have unhappy thoughts about them? Definitely. Yeah? Oh, yeah. Don't you think? I think, I mean, absolutely. I hope so.

I mean. Yeah, I really do think so. I mean, I think that's the, that's the, where it becomes a part of the Christian life. And it's a rhythm that we're choosing to live into. And, you know, there's a humility here, isn't there, of receiving that daily bread and that daily grace to follow him. I also think it's really interesting. I don't know if you noticed in the book. kind of talk about some of the teachings of Jesus, like the turn the other cheek and they go the

extra mile. Yeah. Walter Wink stuff. That was really good. Yeah. There's a sort of like a subversive element to, you know, how Jesus positions it. So where there's been egregious harm and power imbalance, you know, often we think of that term the other cheek teaching as, you know, just get down on the floor and be a dormant,

just be like a wet blanket. that just absorbs everything. And it's kind of unrealistic. But actually, you know, because in the Roman world, people use the left hand for unclean tasks. When Jesus says, if someone hits you, turn the other cheek to them, they'd be requiring, because you would have been hit on the back of the hand with the right hand. If you turn the other cheek, you're requiring the person.

to hit you with the front of the hand, which means that they are treating you as an equal because they would never have used the left hand. And so actually, you know, Jesus' teaching is way more subversive and is acknowledging, you know, that as Christians we're also taking on the evil power of this world.

We're not lying down under it. Right. That's good. That's good. So unhappy. And you see that in the life of, I think of, you know, I mentioned in the book, one of my absolute modern day living heroes is a man called Ben Khawashi, who was the Archbishop of Joss in northern Nigeria. He and his wife, Gloria, are two of the most heroic Christians I've ever met. And they, you know, they have forgiven the unspeakable, horrific crimes of jihadi marauders

who've, you know, violated their property. and tried to kill them both. And they live with such incredible forgiveness and joy. But it's unbelievably subversive to the power of jihadi Islamism in their community as well. It completely undermines the power of those people and what they're trying to do. Do you have any other ways in which we can figure out whether we have truly forgiven somebody. I think you talk about this in the book, like the difference between forgiveness as a kind of

a concrete action versus the emotions that surround forgiveness. How do I know? How do we know, like, I have truly forgiven this person? I think this is a really important question for people who have been raised in sort of model one of forgiveness, which tends to be in more kind of emotional church. focus churches or psychological focus churches or even more kind of charismatic, where the focus is on the psychology and the feeling of the individual rather than, you know, like the transaction of what's actually happened morally

with the sin that was done to me or the harm that was done to me. And this is where the whole thing about self-forgiveness comes in as well, because this is so bound up with whether I know that I've forgiven and can I let myself feel like I have forgiven myself for either being unforgiving or for doing something else. And how often Jesus in his teaching envisages forgiveness as a kind of physical embodied act and not just a psychological act. So he says, you know, if you're, you know, praying and you remember, that there's something between you and someone else. Leave your gift at the altar and go,

like physically go and be reconciled. And, you know, that's like use your body to enact forgiveness. And I think that can help us to know whether we've forgiven or not. So I tell the story in the book of two women and a kind of falling out over a woman who, um, a woman who, had a friend and that friend's partner had had an affair and the woman knew about the affair and didn't tell her friend. And so her friend felt very betrayed not just by her partner, but also by her friend not having, you know, kind of warned her about what was happening. And, you know, so they had to work through in their relationship what forgiveness looked like. And, you know, the woman who'd sort of failed to warn her friend bought her a gift as a sort of

physical symbol of her confession and sorrow over her failure to warn this woman. And the gift is a rose and she plants the rose. And eventually the lady who just had found it really hard to forgive the woman is so like past what had happened that she'd forgotten the reason for the rose, you know, and was able to give her friend flowers from this plant without even remand. remembering what the whole thing had been about. So sometimes it can be a physical

action that we take. And of course when we receive the Eucharist, when we receive Holy Communion at church, that's part of what we're doing. We're taking something physical into our bodies that is a physiological reminder, both that we are forgiven and also that, you know, we've set things right with other people.

So you don't, so it doesn't require tons of positive emotions. I think it can do and that can come. I think that can come and it often does come. But sometimes I think if we make it only about that and we're not at the point where we're experiencing that, it can still be true that we've forgiven. Like the bitterness part, you know,

like I think we all know when we're when we have bitterness towards another person or other emotions that, again, I think about somebody that has really, really harmed me or harmed one of my loved ones. And, yeah, does true forgiveness? Yeah. Does it require me when I think of the person to have no negative emotions or whatever? But I mean, you've kind of addressed this. I mean, you're saying, no, like you don't need to have tons of amazing thoughts about this.

It can well be a process. But I think if we're choosing to kind of wallow in that, in that bitterness and stay there, then we're not living out forgiveness. But experiencing that temptation to go back to that doesn't mean we haven't forgiven. I think that's how I put it. One more question. Forgiveness and trust. And here I'm just going to go, like I say a,

a spouse has an affair. And the other spouse ends up probably through time and repentance from the one who had the affair, you know, to forgive. But if they don't quite, does that require that they fully trust the other, the spouse? Maybe they're checking their phone a lot more. Maybe, hey, where were you? Were you really out with your friends last? Like maybe there's lack of trust.

Like is that is lack of trust with somebody who has done something sinful against you? Is that evidence that there's not true forgiveness? Or are these two different categories? I think there's definitely two different categories. And I'd put that in a similar basket to what we were talking about, consequences that there are real world and relational consequences to action. So we can forgive, but it doesn't mean that the.

bruise isn't there or the cup isn't there. You know, there's still a consequence on the body of the person that means that there's a, you know, a tenderness there that needs to be taken care of. And a person who is repentant and has confessed and owned up to what they've done wrong needs to be the one to see that whole bigger picture and work towards a rebuilding of trust, I think. Okay. So that, so, you know, if that's the scenario. Yeah. So if somebody has done the wrong, they might have to rebuild trust that might take a long time. That would be one of the consequences. And it may not be possible.

You know, it is within the decision of the person who's been harmed, isn't it, to make a decision as to whether this is going to go the full route to reconciliation of a marriage in particular. Right, right. Well, Amy, I will be on the question of biblical grounds and all that. Right. This has been so helpful. This is a topic I've been thinking a lot about and just haven't had an expert to really help me think through this, these questions with me. So thank you so much for taking time out of your vacation. You're heading home from Switzerland.

So I appreciate. Tell you, family, thanks for you giving up an hour of your time. You said you're at the airport. It doesn't look like you're in an airport. I'm at an airport hotel. I'm at an airport hotel, yeah. I'm in Geneva in Switzerland. If anyone's wondering about this slightly weird sun on my face, sorry.

Yeah, yeah. Well, thank you so much for the conversation. Really appreciate it. Again, the book is forgiveness, reclaiming its power and a culture of outrage and fear. Dr. Amy or Ewing, thanks so much for being on The Aldjadroff.