A Question Reframed

Is everything ultimately forgivable? Why, or why not?

SIMON: Yes. Because forgiveness is freedom and freedom is infinite.

MIKIAH: It’s already forgiven.

MARC: By whom?

MIKIAH: By nature.

When I wrote that question for our game, I was pondering whether there could possibly be a warrant to forgive absolutely anything. 

Like, for example … “people do terribly cruel things only if they are wounded inside” … that sort of thing. A justification. A reason why anything could arguably be forgiven, from some ultimate godly perspective.

So the question, as I had conceived it, pertained to the deeds themselves—the most horrendous deeds we can possibly think of. Do they contain, somehow, the quality of being forgivable or not? As if “forgivable-ness” is a quality that a deed has, or hasn’t.

Simon’s answer reframed the question for me. It implicitly points out something I hadn’t thought of:

There are no “forgivable-ness” criteria that exist outside the human heart. 

So the question of whether or not all things are forgivable is not a question about the nature of terrible deeds or terrible people and whether or not they “deserve” to be forgiven. It’s a question about the capacity of the human heart. 

I liked Simon’s answer.

  –Marc