Yes, We Forgive Our Enemies

by on October 6, 2025

It is well known that, at Charlie Kirk’s memorial, his widow, Erika, forgave the man who is charged with his murder. This has reignited a debate that I first became aware of perhaps 15 years ago. There are two sides to this discussion: 1) forgiveness is conditioned upon the penitence of the sinner, and 2) forgiveness is unconditional. Here I am arguing for the latter.

In defense of the first approach, one writer argues,

First of all, forgiveness in the Bible is only to be granted to a brother or sister in Christ after there is evidence of repentance. “Be on your guard! If your brother or sister sins, rebuke him; and if he repents, forgive him. And if he sins against you seven times a day, and returns to you seven times, saying, ‘I repent,’ forgive him (Luke 17:3-4).” If this is true of a brother or sister in Christ, how much more of an unbeliever. Without repentance, there can be no forgiveness.

When we pray in the Lord’s prayer that God forgive us as we forgive our debtors, Christ, no doubt, is assuming repentance on the part of those who have sinned against us. Even so as we repent before God of the sins we have committed against Him.

This approach seems to know a priori (i.e., before we have examined the text of Scripture) how things must come out, and it assumes things it does not prove. “Christ, no doubt is assuming repentance…” begs the question. It is true that we are to forgive those who ask for forgiveness, but it does not follow that, therefore, we only forgive those who ask for forgiveness.

Is forgiveness, biblically considered, necessarily conditional? The first passage that comes to mind when answering this question is doubtless the greatest example of forgiveness in all of Scripture:

Two others, who were criminals, were led away to be put to death with him. And when they came to the place that is called The Skull, there they crucified him, and the criminals, one on his right and one on his left. And Jesus said, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” And they cast lots to divide his garments. And the people stood by, watching, but the rulers scoffed at him, saying, “He saved others; let him save himself, if he is the Christ of God, his Chosen One!” The soldiers also mocked him, coming up and offering him sour wine and saying, “If you are the King of the Jews, save yourself!” There was also an inscription over him, “This is the King of the Jews” (Luke 12:32–38; ESV).

How should we understand this passage? One defender of the conditional approach, quoted above, explains:

Some argue that the Old Testament rules have changed. Jesus said on the cross, “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.” However, a careful reading of the text demonstrates that he was referring to those who had a part in the actual execution on Calvary on that day. “But Jesus was saying, ‘Father, forgive them, for they know not what they are doing.’ And they cast lots, dividing up His garments among themselves (Luke 23:34).” Jesus asked the Father to forgive those competing for his garments (and those who nailed him to the cross) who did not really understand who was being crucified, as did the unrepentant murderers who sentenced Him to death.

Does this explanation, however, hold up under scrutiny? I think not. First, the question is whether the “Old Testament rules have changed.” The moral law of God is immutable. The religious and judicial laws have certainly changed. They were intentionally temporary. To use the language of Westminster Confession 19.3 and 4 they have been “abrogated and they have “expired.” The moral law, however, continues to be “a perfect rule of righteousness” (WCF 19.2) and it “forever” binds all, both “justified persons” and everyone else. For those who are outside of Christ, it is a covenant of works that continues to demand “personal, entire, exact, and perpetual obedience” (WCF 19.1) but to those who are, by grace alone (sola gratia), through faith alone (sola fide), in Christ, it is not a covenant of works (WCF 19.6). This is what Paul means when says that we are no longer under law but under grace (Rom 6:14). The substance of the covenant of grace is one under the types and shadows and under the New Covenant.

When Jesus said, “Father forgive them, they know not what they do,” he was echoing the Old Testament. Consider the case of Joseph in Genesis 50:15–21. Was Joseph’s forgiveness of his brothers conditioned upon their repentance? Did he say, “Well, now that you have met the legal conditions by repenting sufficiently, I forgive you”? He did not. Scripture says: “But Joseph said to them, ‘Do not fear, for am I in the place of God? As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good, to bring it about that many people should be kept alive, as they are today.'” (Gen 50:19–20; ESV). It is evident that he had already forgiven them.

What did the Lord command Hosea regarding his unfaithful wife? “And the LORD said to me, ‘Go again, love a woman who is loved by another man and is an adulteress, even as the LORD loves the children of Israel, though they turn to other gods and love cakes of raisins’ (ESV).” Was Yahweh’s love conditioned upon Israel’s repentance? According to Scripture, the repentance of Hosea’s wife was to be the fruit or consequence of his love for her (Hos 3:3) and afterward “the children of Israel shall return and seek the LORD their God, and David their king, and they shall come in fear to the LORD and to his goodness in the latter days” (Hos 3:3; ESV).1

In the New Testament, our Lord Jesus taught Peter (and us) to forgive not seven times but “seventy-seven” times (Matt 18:22). The case that Peter brought to Jesus mentions nothing about the offender being repentant. In the parable Jesus gives to illustrate forgiveness, the sinner does plead for forgiveness (Matt 18:26), but, as it turns out, the forgiven sinner was himself ungracious (Matt 18:33–34) and refused to forgive those who had offended him, and for that he comes under judgment. Does this mean that forgiveness is conditional? It would seem difficult to square refusing to forgive someone with the language of v. 35: “So also my heavenly Father will do to every one of you, if you do not forgive your brother from your heart” (ESV).

In explaining the fifth petition of the Lord’s Prayer, our Lord says, “For if you forgive others their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you, but if you do not forgive others their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses” (Matt 6:14–15; ESV). There is a condition here, but our forgiveness of fellow sinners is not conditioned upon the repentance of the offender. Indeed, the whole burden of the explanation is that we should be forgiving, not that we should be finding reasons to be unforgiving. After all, if our forgiveness of others is conditional, then we may always find some reason why we do not have to forgive. There will always be some defect in the confession by the offender. In the argument for conditional forgiveness, the author points to the ignorance of those who crucified our Lord as a ground for our Lord’s forgiveness. Is this the Christian doctrine of forgiveness? Does our Lord forgive us because of something in us? Does he also justify us because of something in us? Where does this approach stop? How does conditional forgiveness not make Christianity a legal religion, i.e., a covenant of works?

To be sure, there are legal aspects to Christianity. Our Lord Jesus is our federal head. That is a legal relation between him and us. He actively obeyed and suffered all his life for us and all that he did is credited to us who believe. In justification we are declared righteous, even though, in ourselves, we are not actually righteous. These are legal aspects of our faith. The good news is that Jesus fulfilled the demands of the law for us. We are gracious with sinners, even impenitent sinners, because God was gracious to us while we were yet impenitent. We forgive because we are not under a covenant of works but under a covenant of grace.

Not even our faith is a condition of our justification. Faith is improperly called a condition of our justification. Properly, it is the sole instrument. Herman Witsius explained,

To speak freely, the first opinion [that faith is a condition of justification] seems to me indeed to be the introduction of a new law, whereby the most pleasant, the most gracious, and the, most glorious nature of the gospel of Christ is not a little corrupted.2

He insisted on making faith the instrument because that is the confession of the Reformed churches in Belgic Confession article 22:

However, we do not mean, properly speaking, that it is faith itself that justifies us—for faith is only the instrument by which we embrace Christ, our righteousness. But Jesus Christ is our righteousness crediting to us all his merits and all the holy works he has done for us and in our place.

By analogy, making forgiveness conditional upon the sinner’s repentance is the same sort of mistake, and this gets us back to our Lord’s words from the cross:

And Jesus said, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” And they cast lots to divide his garments. And the people stood by, watching, but the rulers scoffed at him, saying, “He saved others; let him save himself, if he is the Christ of God, his Chosen One!” The soldiers also mocked him, coming up and offering him sour wine and saying, “If you are the King of the Jews, save yourself!” There was also an inscription over him, “This is the King of the Jews” (Luke 23:34–38; ESV).

The “for” in v. 34 is not a cause but an explanation. It is a statement of fact, not a legal ground of forgiveness. The argument that Jesus’ forgiveness of those who crucified him was conditioned upon their ignorance collapses in v. 36: “the soldiers also mocked him.” Yes, they were ignorant, but they were impenitent. They were not just pawns. They hated Jesus.

Calvin explains,

By this expression Christ gave evidence that he was that mild and gentle lamb, which was to be led out to be sacrificed, as Isaiah the prophet had foretold, (53:7.) For not only does he abstain from revenge, but pleads with God the Father for the salvation of those by whom he is most cruelly tormented. It would have been a great matter not to think of rendering evil for evil, (1 Pet. 3:9;) as Peter, when he exhorts us to patience by the example of Christ, says that he did not render curses for curses, and did not revenge the injuries done to him, but was fully satisfied with having God for his avenger, (1 Pet. 2:23.) But this is a far higher and more excellent virtue, to pray that God would forgive his enemies.3

We are meant to understand that the people whom Jesus forgave were actively impenitent. They were, as Calvin said, enemies. These are the very sort of people that American Christians on the cultural right and the cultural left tell us we should not forgive, but these are the very sort of people that Jesus did, in the hours of his agony for us sinners, forgive.

Forgiveness does not mean that there are no temporal consequences for sins and crimes. The murderer of Charlie Kirk will face temporal consequences for his crimes, but Erika was right to forgive him. The two are not mutually exclusive.4

In the Christian life, people will sin against you, and many times they will never ask for forgiveness. You have a choice. To wait for them to repent or to forgive them and pray that they repent and ask forgiveness. The former course leads to bitterness. The latter is the better course and more faithful to Scripture and the example of our Savior.

notes

  1. I am grateful to correspondent Dale Hill for pointing me to this passage.
  2. Herman Witsius, Conciliatory or Irenical Animadversions on the Controversies Agitated in Britain, 10.8, trans. Thomas Bell (Glasgow: W. Lang, 1807), 112.
  3. John Calvin, Commentary on a Harmony of the Evangelists Matthew, Mark, and Luke, trans. William Pringle vol. 3 (Logos Bible Software, 2010), 300.
  4. See the discussion Paul’s forgiveness of Alexander in Zacharias Ursinus, The Commentary of Dr. Zacharias Ursinus on the Heidelberg Catechism, trans. G. W. Williard (Elm Street Printing Company, 1888), 652.

©R. Scott Clark. All Rights Reserved.

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  • R. Scott Clark
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    R.Scott Clark is the President of the Heidelberg Reformation Association, the author and editor of, and contributor to several books and the author of many articles. He has taught church history and historical theology since 1997 at Westminster Seminary California. He has also taught at Wheaton College, Reformed Theological Seminary, and Concordia University. He has hosted the Heidelblog since 2007.

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