The Murders in Amish Country - God Doesn't Forgive, Nor Should We

The Amish are a beautiful people. I have seen them many times and occasionally interacted with them in Ohio, Indiana and Pennsylvania. While they may be admired for their many good ways, this does not mean giving a blanket endorsement to all their traditions.

For one thing, the Amish (like other Anabaptist traditions, of which our denomination's history represents one) are pacifist. Christians can live as pacifist only if others, Christian and non-Christian, are willing to fight and die to defend them. They are also quietistic in the face of wrongdoing.

The latter can be helpful or harmful, depending on circumstances.

On Sunday, October 8, a few days after the murders in the Amish schoolhouse, a minister at Georgetown United Methodist Church, in whose cemetery the killer was buried, called for "less violence, less hatred, less evil in the world" and asked God to "let the world learn the lesson of forgiveness that came from our friends, the Amish."

The biblical instruction, we know, is that our forgiveness should be modeled after God's. God doesn't "always forgive." He forgives when satisfaction is rendered to his sense of justice and when repentance (change of life) occurs in the heart of the evil-doer.

Better ethical guidance comes from Jeff Jacoby, an Orthodox Jew and columnist at The Boston Globe:

"Hatred is not always wrong, and forgiveness is not always deserved. I admire the Amish villagers' resolve to live up to their Christian ideals even amid heartbreak, but how many of us would really want to live in a society in which no one gets angry when children are slaughtered? In which even the most horrific acts of cruelty were always and instantly forgiven?
There is a time to love and a time to hate, Ecclesiastes teaches. If anything deserves to be hated, surely it is the pitiless murder of innocents.

"To voluntarily forgive those who have hurt you is beautiful and praiseworthy. That is what Jesus did on the cross, what Christians do when they say the Lord's Prayer, what observant Jews do when they recite the bedtime Kriat Sh'ma. But to forgive those who have hurt -- who have murdered
-- someone else? I cannot see how the world is made a better place by assuring someone who would do terrible things to others that he will be readily forgiven afterward, even if he shows no remorse.

"There are indications that the killer in this case may have been in the grip of depression or delusion. Perhaps it was madness more than evil that drove him to commit this horror, in which case forgiveness might be more understandable.

"But the Amish make it clear that their reaction would be the same either way. I wish them well, but I would not want to be like them, reacting to terrible crimes with dispassion and absolution. 'Let those who love the Lord hate evil,' the Psalmist writes. The murder of the Amish girls was a deeply hateful evil. There is nothing godly about pretending it wasn't."

(From "Undeserved Forgiveness" by Jeff Jacoby, The Boston Globe, October 8, 2006. Used by courtesy of The Boston Globe.)