How the modern world gets Christian forgiveness wrong

For millennia, we have all more or less understood one thing about forgiveness: You cannot demand it.

You can ask for it. You can plead for it. You can try to earn it. But the moment you insist that someone owes it to you, you have misunderstood the thing itself.

You can command a Christian to forgive because he has been given a new heart. You cannot litigate him into loving his enemy.

Sam Ridge, a philosopher at the University of California San Diego, thinks that conventional wisdom is wrong. In a recent paper, he argues that there are cases in which a wrongdoer has “a right to be forgiven by their victim.”

In other words, forgiveness can be understood as a claimable moral asset — not just something