Remorse

A Christian Perspective

Anthony Bash

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781725272361
• Topic: Teología y religión
• Subtopic: Teología cristiana

Though the Christian church has a well-developed theology of Godward-facing remorse about sin, it has paid little attention to the interpersonal implications of the remorse that people feel when they wrong one another. Since the nineteenth century, important work has been done by psychologists, anthropologists, philosophers, ethicists, scientists, and lawyers that has implications for the way theologians might think about remorse. This book draws on the biblical record in its ancient settings as well as on insights from contemporary scholarship to offer a new and distinctively Christian contribution to an understanding of remorse.

Chapter 1

Remorse

Why a book on remorse? Søren Kierkegaard (1813–55) wrote that being remorseful is part of what it means to be pure in heart. “So wonderful a power is remorse, so sincere its friendship,” he says, “that to escape it entirely is the most terrible thing of all.” He adds that remorse is “a concerned guide,” a “sincere and faithful friend” who protects from “delusion.”1 He describes remorse as the guide that helps people to look back and, in his florid, traditional language, says that remorse “calls man back from evil.”2 Both repentance and remorse are “eternity’s emissaries”; remorse and its “call” teach people to “know the way” and they lead to “purity of heart.”3 In contemporary language, remorse leads to the sort of virtue that is—or should be—characteristic of Christian discipleship and spirituality. It is a constituent of “moral passion,” that is, one of the “essential features of genuinely moral behavior.”4

Christian theology has a well-developed theology of remorse towards God about sin. So, when people do wrong, they may express to God their remorse about what they have done, because they believe that they have sinned against God. They may believe that if they wrong people, they also sin against God, and so should express remorse to God about the wrong they have done to such people. However, and as we shall see in this book, Christian theology has not often emphasized that it is important for wrongdoers in such situations also to express remorse to the people they have wronged. In other words, Christian theology appears to have an under­developed theology of interpersonal remorse.

Of course, many thoughtful, decent people put right the wrongs they have done to other people before or as part of the way they express remorse to God. In many traditional Christian liturgies, such a practice is implicit rather than enjoined. For example, the words of the Confessions in the Book of Common Prayer (1662) of the Church of England refer only to sin against God. True, those who come to receive Holy Communion must be “in love and charity” with their “neighbors.” In contrast, those who sin against God say the more severe words in one of the Confessions that they “acknowledge and bewail” their “manifold sins and wickedness” against God, with no words of confession about wrongs against “neighbors,” and no words commending remorse, repentance, and restitution for such wrongs. It is as if wrongs against other people are subordinated under the rubric of wrongs against God, with interpersonal wrongdoing seen as being in a subsidiary, and less grievous, category of wrongdoing. One of the aims of this book is to explore the reasons why such a theological approach to interpersonal remorse is under-developed.

Another deficiency this book attempts to address is lack of clarity about what interpersonal remorse is. The word “remorse” is often used loosely with words such as “repentance” and “regret,” as if the three words mean much the same when understood from different perspectives. As we will see, the words are related but have distinct meanings, and the differences, as well as the points of overlap, are important. In this book, we attempt to give a clear and precise description of interpersonal remorse, and we explore its nature and form as an emotion.5

Describing what interpersonal remorse is does not, of course, explain that to be remorseful and to behave appropriately as a result are virtuous. As we see in chapter 6, some think that remorse is pathological, “a product of old-time religion,”6 and something to be thrown off as psychologically unhelpful. We set out in this book cogent, compelling reasons why remorse can be virtuous.

Outside the Christian tradition, there is important work in the fields of philosophy, psychology, law, and some of the sciences (such as psychology, neurology, and evolutionary biology), for example, that directly or indirectly influences the way we can (and sometimes should) think about and understand interpersonal remorse. Much of this book is set in the context of and in critical dialogue with some of the findings in these areas of understanding. We will see that secular writers and thinkers on the whole have led and shaped contemporary work on remorse, with the church and Christian thinkers sometimes lagging behind and with the tradition of Christian thought (such as it is) on the topic being largely ignored.7 We will show that Christian theology does have a significant contribution to make to contemporary, secular discussion about interpersonal remorse.

We hope to offer in this book a carefully articulated ethic of interpersonal remorse by drawing on both secular and Christian traditions, by developing a theological rationale of interpersonal remorse, and by critically engaging with contemporary, secular discussion of remorse in the context of its scientific, philosophical, and jurisprudential settings. We show that the “logic” of the gospel commends interpersonal remorse as an appropriate ethic for those who have done wrong. It also commends particular behaviors, such as repentance and restitution, which can result from interpersonal remorse. We show that interpersonal remorse is a long-neglected virtue that is embedded in Judeo-Christian thought, though only in inchoate form. We also explore why interpersonal remorse has “come of age” only in the contemporary period.

Gordon Graham observes that “[t]he intellectual position of Christianity in the modern world . . . is largely one of retreat” because “theolo...