Can God Forgive Without Demanding Payment?

Why People Ask This Question

Most of us learn what forgiveness is from ordinary life. Someone wrongs us, and when we forgive him we stop holding it against him. We do not ask a third person to pay first. So when Christians hear that God could forgive only after Jesus paid for sin, many ask the obvious question: if we can forgive freely, why can’t God?

Skeptics ask it too, sometimes sharply. A God who must collect a penalty before he pardons can sound less generous than a forgiving neighbor. Christians who are sure the cross was necessary still want to know why it was necessary, and what Jesus’ death did that a word of pardon from heaven would leave undone.

So the question has two parts. Can God forgive without payment? And if he can, why did Christ die? The Bible speaks to both.

The Payment View: Justice Must Be Satisfied

The answer most Christians have heard goes back to Anselm, archbishop of Canterbury, who finished Why God Became Man around 1098. Anselm held that sin takes from God the honor every creature owes him. He asked whether God could put sin away by compassion alone, without any repayment of that honor, and answered no. To let sin go unpunished and unrepaid would leave it undischarged, and that was not fitting in God’s kingdom. Either the honor must be repaid or punishment must follow. The repayment was more than any human being could give, so only one who was both God and man could make it. Christ, who owed God no death because he had no sin, freely gave his life, and that gift was worth more than all the sin of the world.

For Anselm, satisfaction and punishment were two different things, and he did not describe Christ’s death as God punishing Christ. The Reformers kept his principle and made the satisfaction a punishment. In penal substitution, God’s justice requires sin to be punished, Christ bore that punishment in our place, and God’s wrath against our sin was satisfied at the cross. The Heidelberg Catechism and the Westminster Confession teach it, and it is the explanation most often preached today. The page Is Penal Substitution Biblical? sets out the view and the questions raised about it, and Theories of Atonement places it among the other ways Christians have explained the cross.

The view has real strengths. It takes sin seriously, and it takes God’s justice seriously. Its defenders point to Romans 3, where God set Christ forth “to be a propitiation through faith in his blood,” so “that he might be just, and the justifier of him which believeth in Jesus” (Romans 3:25–26). They say that God forgives us freely because he paid the price himself, in his Son. The forgiveness is free to us and costly to him. Careful scholars, among them Leon Morris and Jay Sklar, have defended the view from close study of the Bible’s words for atonement.

Anselm and the Reformers differ on what was paid. They share one premise: God cannot rightly forgive sin without something being paid for it.

God Forgives in the Old Testament

Scripture shows God forgiving many times with no payment described. When the people of Nineveh turned from their evil way, God spared the city (Jonah 3:10). No sacrifice was offered there. God told Solomon how he would deal with his people’s sins:

If my people, which are called by my name, shall humble themselves, and pray, and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways; then will I hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin, and will heal their land.

2 Chronicles 7:14

Through Isaiah he called himself the one who blots out transgressions “for mine own sake” (Isaiah 43:25). Micah said that God pardons iniquity because “he delighteth in mercy” (Micah 7:18).

David’s prayer in Psalm 51 uses the same word as Isaiah. “Blot out my transgressions,” he asked, and “blot out all mine iniquities” (Psalm 51:1, 9). It is also the word for erasing a name from God’s book (Exodus 32:32–33). To blot out a record is to make it as if it had never been written. David asks God to do that with his sins, and he rests his request on God’s mercy.

The law’s own rites point the same way. A poor Israelite who could not afford a lamb or two birds brought flour as his sin offering, and the priest made atonement for him and he was forgiven (Leviticus 5:11–13). Aaron made atonement with incense and the plague stopped (Numbers 16:46–48). The half-shekel at the census was “an atonement for your souls” (Exodus 30:16). In each case God set the terms and God provided the means.

Jesus Forgave Before the Cross

Jesus forgave the paralytic who was let down through the roof, and the woman who wept at his feet in Simon’s house (Mark 2:5; Luke 7:48). He pronounced the forgiveness himself, before the cross, and no sacrifice was offered for either of them.

In Simon’s house he explained it with a short parable. A creditor had two debtors, one who owed a great deal and one who owed a little:

And when they had nothing to pay, he frankly forgave them both.

Luke 7:42

The Greek verb behind “frankly forgave” is built on the word for grace. It means to give freely, to grant as a favor. Paul uses the same verb when he says that God has forgiven us all our trespasses (Colossians 2:13), and when he tells believers to forgive one another (Colossians 3:13; Ephesians 4:32).

The Parable of the Unforgiving Servant

In Matthew 18 a servant owes his king ten thousand talents, a sum he could never repay. The king orders him sold with his family. The servant falls down and begs for time, and the king forgives the whole debt:

Then the lord of that servant was moved with compassion, and loosed him, and forgave him the debt.

Matthew 18:27

The same servant then finds a fellow servant who owes him a small sum, seizes him, and has him thrown into prison. The king calls him back:

Shouldest not thou also have had compassion on thy fellowservant, even as I had pity on thee?

Matthew 18:33

Jesus ends by saying that the heavenly Father will do the same to anyone who will not forgive his brother from the heart (Matthew 18:35). The king in the story stands for the Father. He cancels the debt out of compassion, and he collects it from no one.

Paul draws the same line. Believers are to forgive “even as Christ forgave you” (Colossians 3:13), and “even as God for Christ’s sake hath forgiven you” (Ephesians 4:32). Anselm’s own student Boso raised this point in Why God Became Man. God commands us to forgive those who trespass against us, so it seems strange for him to require of us something he may not do himself. Anselm answered that vengeance belongs to God alone. Chris White thinks Boso’s objection deserves more weight than Anselm gave it. If God forgives only after the full penalty has been collected, these commands tell us to forgive in a way that God never does.

This question is one part of a larger account. How Atonement Works sets the payment view beside the Bible’s language of forgiveness, cleansing, and the carrying away of sin, and explains how Christ fulfilled both goats of the Day of Atonement.

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The Reply: Forgiven Because the Price Was Paid

Defenders of the payment view answer these passages in two ways. The first is that God forgave the people of the Old Testament, and the people Jesus forgave, in view of the cross that was still to come. They point to Paul’s words about “the remission of sins that are past, through the forbearance of God” (Romans 3:25). On this reading God forgave in advance, and the debt was settled at Calvary.

The second is that forgiveness is free to us because God paid the price himself. The king in the parable absorbs the loss. On this view the cross is what forgiveness cost God.

The book answers both. The passages describe God forgiving the repentant when they repented, as his settled way, and they speak of no payment to come. On the second reply, Chris White agrees that our forgiveness cost God his Son. But a debt the creditor pays to himself is still treated as a debt that had to be paid. Scripture’s words for what God does with sin are forgive, pardon, blot out, and remove.

Some defenders of the view grant a good deal here. Leon Morris held that in the Old Testament the turning away of God’s wrath comes in the end from God himself, who provides the means. Jay Sklar describes the ransom in Leviticus as something God was free to accept or refuse. On both accounts the outcome rests on God’s free choice, and nothing in the rites requires him to collect the full penalty.

Why the Cross Was Still Necessary

If God forgives freely, why did Jesus die? Chris White agrees with the teachers of penal substitution that Christ died for us and in our place, that our sins were laid on him and he bore them, that God’s wrath against sin is real, and that sin is serious enough that it cost the Son of God his life. He differs over how the cross worked. He argues that God forgives freely and that the cross is the means by which he forgave, and that the cross deals with what sin had done to us and to God’s dwelling among us.

Sin did more than run up a debt. The Day of Atonement in Leviticus 16 shows what else had to be dealt with. Two goats served as one sin offering, and they did different work:

• Sins carried away. The high priest laid both hands on the live goat and confessed over it “all the iniquities of the children of Israel,” and “the goat shall bear upon him all their iniquities unto a land not inhabited” (Leviticus 16:21–22). The book reads Christ as the sin-bearer who fulfilled this goat. “The LORD hath laid on him the iniquity of us all” (Isaiah 53:6), and he “bare our sins in his own body on the tree” (1 Peter 2:24).
• God’s dwelling cleansed. The blood of the other goat was carried behind the veil to cleanse the sanctuary, which Israel’s sins and uncleanness had defiled. Leviticus says that blood atones because “the life of the flesh is in the blood” (Leviticus 17:11). Christ entered heaven “by his own blood” (Hebrews 9:12) to appear in the presence of God for us.
• The accuser disarmed. Paul says that God forgave “all trespasses,” blotted out “the handwriting of ordinances that was against us,” nailed it to the cross, and “spoiled principalities and powers” (Colossians 2:13–15). Hebrews says Christ died “that through death he might destroy him that had the power of death, that is, the devil” (Hebrews 2:14).

Forgiveness and cleansing are two different things in this account, and the book keeps them apart. Forgiveness deals with guilt: the record of our sins is blotted out. Cleansing deals with defilement: what sin and death have made unclean is made clean by life, so that God can go on dwelling with his people. Leviticus names both in the purpose of the Day of Atonement:

For on that day shall the priest make an atonement for you, to cleanse you, that ye may be clean from all your sins before the LORD.

Leviticus 16:30

The reading of the live goat as a picture of Christ, and of the devil’s power as resting on the charge our sins gave him, is Chris White’s synthesis of these texts. The book argues for it at length, and other Christians read the passages differently. On this account the answer to the question is yes: God forgives without demanding payment. The cross was still necessary, because through it Christ carried our sins away, the record against us was blotted out, the accuser was left with nothing to bring, and the risen Christ brought his life into God’s presence so that God could dwell in his people by the Spirit. The page Why Does the Resurrection Matter for Forgiveness? explains that last step.

Where This Understanding Comes From

The payment view has a long history: Anselm in the eleventh century, the Reformers and Calvin, the Heidelberg Catechism and the Westminster Confession, and modern defenders such as Leon Morris and Jay Sklar. The book describes their arguments in their own terms. Its own reading draws on Jacob Milgrom’s study of Leviticus, which showed that the purpose of the sin offering was the cleansing of God’s house, and on David M. Moffitt’s work on sacrifice and Hebrews, which argues that the animals offered in Israel’s sacrifices were never presented as objects of God’s wrath and that Christ’s offering was completed in heaven. William Milligan argued in 1892 that the death of the victim cannot explain the whole of an offering. Early Christian writers, among them Barnabas, Justin Martyr, Tertullian, and Origen, distinguished the two goats of the Day of Atonement, and Richard Barry has studied their readings. Many early writers also spoke of Christ’s victory over death and the devil. How Atonement Works builds on this scholarship and credits it.