Understanding Christian Forgiveness, Part 1: Church and Science

Leaders – Ev Worthington, Science for the Church
This webinar seeks to deepen our understanding of forgiveness, especially for those involved ministry tasks such as pastoral care, pastoral counseling, Christian education, spiritual formation, and preaching. I examine biblical and practical theology for how to forgive and how to promote forgiveness. Biblical theology tells us to forgive unilaterally and every time but does not offer much about how to do it. Practical theology tells us how to help people forgive using five categories of helping (such as many kinds of prayer, using restraint, looking to models, drawing on the Christian community local church, and being able to look to God’s general revelation). Forgiveness science, a part of God’s general revelation, reveals a general stress-and-coping theory of forgiveness that leads to emphasizing the benefits of forgiving (to offender and forgiver), an injustice gap, and two different types of forgiveness–decisional and emotional forgiveness. We will conclude by looking at both decisional forgiveness and emotional forgiveness as through the lens of both science and Christian practice.
Everett L. Worthington, Jr. has been elder in Presbyterian Churches for nearly 5 decades, serving on session for nearly half of them.  Professionally, he taught and did research at Virginia Commonwealth University for 40 years, and now his salary is retired, but he is still active in research and speaking globally. He has published over 50 books and over 600 articles and chapters. He has taught a year at Wheaton College and spoken to Christian venues all over the world. He is a licensed Clinical Psychologist in Virginia.