Forgiveness of Sins

Charles Williams published The Forgiveness of Sins in 1942, in the middle of the Second World War, as one of the books that followed his earlier study of the Holy Spirit and the church, He Came Down from Heaven. Williams was a poet, novelist, and editor at Oxford University Press, a member of the Inklings and a close friend of C. S. Lewis, and he wrote theology as a layman for lay readers. The war gave the subject an edge. Bombs were falling, enemies were being named and hated, and the question of what it would mean to forgive, or to refuse to, was no longer academic.

The book is an extended meditation rather than a systematic treatise. Williams begins from a blunt observation: most people do not want to be forgiven so much as excused, and the difference matters. To be excused is to be told that the thing was not really our fault; to be forgiven is to be told that it was, and to be received anyway. He traces the long human habit of evasion, the way we blame circumstance, temperament, or other people, and argues that this habit is itself the deepest barrier to grace. Forgiveness, for Williams, requires a prior honesty about guilt, and he presses the point with some severity.

From there he moves through the pattern of Christian teaching on pardon, the Incarnation and the Cross as the place where forgiveness is made actual rather than merely announced. Characteristic of Williams is his insistence on exchange and co-inherence: we are bound to one another in ways that make both guilt and redemption shared, so that bearing another's burden is not metaphor but the ordinary shape of Christian life. Forgiveness therefore reaches outward. To receive it honestly obliges us to give it, even to those we would prefer to hate, and he does not soften how costly that is.

The book has endured because it declines the sentimental account of forgiveness as a kind of cheerful amnesty, and because it connects the individual conscience to the common life of the church. It remains a distinctive example of Williams's mind, at once playful and exacting, and it speaks to anyone who has suspected that their own repentance was really a request to be let off.

Who should read this: readers willing to sit with an uncomfortable account of their own self-justification, and those who already know some Williams or enjoy theology written with a poet's compression. It is not for anyone seeking a gentle devotional comfort or a step-by-step guide to reconciliation, and readers wanting plain, linear argument may find his associative style demanding.