http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2015/june-web-only/stop-explaining-away-black-christian-forgiveness.html?utm_source=ctdirect-html&utm_medium=Newsletter&utm_term=9455965&utm_content=364391360&utm_campaign=2013&start=3

Forgiveness has been affirmed as mandatory for Christians by African American theologians, even during the Jim Crow era. Howard Thurman, an educator and theologian who inspired Martin Luther King Jr., wrote in his classic 1949 treatise, Jesus and the Disinherited, “It is clear that before love can operate, there is the necessity for forgiveness.”

Thurman admits that this view can never be “completely satisfying from the point of view of rational reflection,” but offers three reasons for Christian forgiveness: First, “God forgives us again and again for what we do intentionally and unintentionally.” Second, “no evil deed fully represents the full intent of the doer.” And, finally, “the evildoer does not go unpunished … our deeds track us down and doer and deed meet.” After offering these three reasons for forgiveness, he acknowledges that “when all other means have been exhausted, each in his own tongue whispers, ‘There is forgiveness with God.’ ”