Father, forgive them: when religious certainty prevents us from seeing

A Christian, theological, philosophical, and sociological reflection on faith, ignorance, judgment, and the limits of human certainty.

“Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.” — Luke 23:34

What to say about beliefs?

Perhaps one of the most uncomfortable questions a person can ask themselves is this: how much of what I believe did I actually choose to believe?

Before answering, imagine a scenario. You are born into a certain home, within a certain family, and surrounded by a certain culture. From childhood, you learn who God is, what is sacred, what is sin, what exists after death, who is right, who is wrong, and which path leads to truth.

The people you love believe this. Your parents believe it. Your grandparents believed it. Your friends believe it. The respected people in your community confirm what you have been taught.

The books you receive, the places you attend, the celebrations you take part in, and even the vocabulary through which you think about God reinforce the same structure.

And you grow up.

Not necessarily because you investigated all existing religions and rationally concluded that this one was true. You were simply born into a world where that belief was already established before you were old enough to question it.

Over the years, that belief ceases to seem merely an interpretation of reality. It becomes reality itself.

Now imagine that, as an adult, you travel to another country.

There, another religion predominates. The families in that place teach their children from a young age exactly as your family taught you. They attend their temples, know their traditions, repeat their sacred stories, have their masters, their spiritual experiences, their testimonies, and their conviction.

They also grew up hearing: "This is the true path."

You arrive at that place and announce what you believe. You say your faith is true. They reply that theirs is too. You insist. They insist. You present your reasons. They present theirs. You have experiences you consider evidence. They do too. You are convinced you serve God. They are equally convinced.

Until your preaching comes to be interpreted as an affront to the religion, the culture, or the order of that society. You are arrested. Tried. Condemned. Perhaps punished.

And here is the most unsettling point: the people who condemn you may sincerely believe they are doing what is right.

This does not turn injustice into justice. It does not turn a lie into truth. It does not make moral what is immoral. But it reveals something deeply disturbing about the human condition: we can be sincerely wrong.

We can love what we judge to be the truth and, precisely in the name of that truth, commit a terrible injustice. We can believe we are defending God when, in reality, we are fighting against what God is doing.

And perhaps it is precisely in this territory that the words spoken by Christ on the cross reveal one of their deepest dimensions: "Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing."

Did they really not know?

Jesus was crucified. His body had been wounded, humiliated, and publicly exposed. Around him were soldiers carrying out orders, authorities upholding a condemnation, spectators watching, and people who had participated, directly or indirectly, in that process.

And Jesus does not say: "Father, destroy those who did this." Nor does he say: "Father, show them that I was right." He says: "Father, forgive them." And he presents an extraordinary reason: "for they do not know what they are doing."

This does not mean they were materially unaware of their actions. The soldiers knew they were nailing someone to a cross. The authorities knew a conviction had taken place. The crowd knew a man was dying.

The "not knowing," therefore, seems to reach a deeper dimension. They knew what they were doing physically, but they did not fully understand the meaning of what they were doing.

They were nailing a man to a cross without understanding who was on that cross. They were taking part in an execution without understanding the spiritual dimension of that event. They believed they were eliminating a problem, a disturber of order, a condemned man. Within the Christian faith, however, they were crucifying the Christ.

This interpretation finds support in the New Testament itself. In Acts 3:17, Peter states that the people and their leaders had acted "in ignorance." Paul, in 1 Corinthians 2:8, goes even further, stating that if the rulers of that time had understood, they would not have crucified "the Lord of glory."

There is, therefore, a terrible paradox: human beings can act consciously and yet not truly understand what they are doing.

The Bible had already foreseen the man who kills believing he serves God

Perhaps there is a passage even closer to the problem I am proposing. Jesus said to the disciples: "The hour is coming when whoever kills you will think he is offering service to God" (John 16:2).

It is difficult to imagine a more precise description of the danger of religious conviction.

Jesus does not necessarily describe people who hate God. He describes people capable of persecuting someone while believing they are serving God.

This detail changes everything. The persecutor may pray before persecuting. The inquisitor may believe he is protecting what is sacred. The judge may pronounce a sentence with an apparently clear conscience. The fanatic may imagine that his zeal is faithfulness. The religious person may wound someone and call his violence obedience.

That is why Paul gives another striking warning: "They have a zeal for God, but not according to knowledge" (Romans 10:2). There is, therefore, within Scripture itself, a distinction between religious zeal and true knowledge.

Not every passion for God proceeds from a correct understanding of God. Not every spiritual certainty means spiritual maturity. Not every defense of the truth is necessarily made in favor of the truth.

And perhaps one of the most dangerous forms of ignorance is precisely the one that believes itself enlightened. The ignorant person who knows he does not know can still learn. But the ignorant person absolutely convinced that he knows can turn his ignorance into doctrine, his doctrine into power, and his power into an instrument of violence.

Ignorance explains, but does not necessarily absolve

Here we need to make an important distinction. Saying that someone "does not know what they do" does not mean claiming that every person is automatically exonerated from responsibility.

The Christian tradition has reflected deeply on this. Thomas Aquinas, for example, distinguished different forms of ignorance. There are situations in which someone truly does not have reasonable means to know a certain reality, while there are others in which the person could seek to understand better but does not do so out of negligence, self-interest, or refusal.

Therefore, for Aquinas, not all ignorance eliminates moral responsibility. An ignorance impossible to overcome may remove culpability in certain circumstances; an ignorance voluntarily cultivated or maintained by negligence may remain morally imputable.

This distinction is fundamental for understanding Christ's words. "They do not know what they do" does not mean: "Nothing happened." Nor: "There is no guilt." Nor: "Injustice has ceased to be injustice."

The very request for forgiveness presupposes that there is something to be forgiven. If no fault had occurred, forgiveness would be unnecessary. Therefore, Christ's saying contains simultaneously mercy and judgment. There is enough guilt to require forgiveness. There is enough ignorance to awaken compassion.

This tension is deeply Christian. Christ does not call evil good in order to be able to love those who practice it. He recognizes evil and yet intercedes for the agent.

Being born into a belief

It is here that we return to our initial scenario.

We rarely begin our intellectual life before a completely empty table, analyzing all existing religious possibilities before choosing one. We receive a world. We receive a language. We receive symbols. We receive stories. We receive interpretations. We receive a particular way of understanding the sacred.

A Christian born in a certain context will likely be introduced to Christianity before deeply knowing Islam, Hinduism, or Buddhism. A person born into another society may experience the exact opposite.

This does not mean that all these religions are equally true. The social origin of a belief does not determine its truthfulness.

Discovering that we learned a truth from our parents does not make that truth false. Just as discovering that someone learned an error from their parents does not make that error true.

What this realization requires of us is not relativism. It is epistemological humility.

We need to distinguish two statements: "There is a truth." and "I perfectly understand this truth." The first can be a conviction of faith. The second can be arrogance.

Society also teaches us what seems plausible

Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann showed, in the sociology of knowledge, how what we perceive as "reality" is profoundly mediated by social life.

We do not interpret the world in isolation. Family, community, institutions, language, education, and tradition help construct the horizons within which certain ideas seem natural, while others seem absurd.

Berger would later apply this reflection also to religion, analyzing its capacity to offer meaning and a comprehensive order for human existence.

This helps us understand why changing a religious belief can be so difficult. Sometimes it is not simply a matter of abandoning an idea. It means questioning the worldview of parents, the stories of grandparents, the authority of leaders, the meaning of celebrations, the identity of the community, the way a person interpreted their own experiences, and perhaps even the hope they hold about death.

A religious belief can be connected to practically all the structures that organize a life.

That is why, when someone arrives from outside saying, "Everything you believe is wrong," the reaction will hardly be purely intellectual. The person may feel that their family was attacked. Their history. Their people. Their identity. Their God.

This explains part of human resistance. But again: explaining does not mean justifying. Understanding how a persecutor is born does not mean legitimizing their persecution. On the contrary. Understanding the mechanism can help us prevent ourselves from becoming the next persecutor.

The horizon through which we see

Hans-Georg Gadamer offers a particularly important philosophical contribution to this discussion. For him, no human being interprets reality from a completely neutral point.

We all possess a historical horizon. We carry previous knowledge, traditions, expectations, and what Gadamer calls "prejudices" – not necessarily in the morally negative sense of the word, but as prior understandings that make any interpretation possible.

The problem begins when these understandings can no longer be questioned.

For Gadamer, the true encounter with what is different can broaden our own horizon. Understanding requires dialogue, and this dialogue can lead to what he called a "fusion of horizons": the encounter in which our prior understanding is confronted and transformed by what we encounter.

Perhaps this is one of humanity's greatest religious difficulties: do we listen to the other in order to understand them, or do we only wait for our turn to correct them?

There is a huge difference between the two. I can remain convinced of my faith after deeply listening to someone who thinks differently. Listening does not mean converting to the other's belief. Understanding does not mean agreeing.

But those who believe in the truth should not be afraid of investigation. If my faith can only survive while all other voices remain silenced, perhaps I am not protecting the truth. Perhaps I am merely protecting my own fragility.

The danger of confusing God with our idea of God

Here begins perhaps the most uncomfortable part for the Christian. Because it is very easy to read about those who crucified Jesus and imagine: "I would never do that."

But would we really not?

If we had been born in that time, in that city, in that tradition; if we had learned from those teachers, heard those accusations, lived within that political and religious environment, on which side would we have been?

We all like to imagine that we would have recognized Christ immediately. But the Gospels are disturbing precisely because many of the people who should most have recognized him did not.

They knew the Scriptures. They knew the religion. They knew the rituals. They knew the tradition. And yet some of them could not see what was right before their eyes.

It is possible to know religion and not recognize God when He contradicts our expectations.

Kierkegaard perceived something similar centuries later when he criticized what he called "Christendom" – a society that considered itself culturally Christian but which, according to him, had made Christian identity so comfortable that it no longer perceived the radicality of New Testament Christianity. His work sought to reintroduce Christianity within Christendom itself.

The criticism remains current. We can defend the Christian tradition without necessarily possessing the character of Christ. We can know doctrines and remain cruel. We can quote verses and remain incapable of mercy. We can speak about the cross and continue crucifying people through our words. We can defend the name of Jesus in a way that Jesus himself would never defend.

This possibility should produce fear in any religious person.

The Christian faith does not require relativism; it requires humility

It is important to clarify something. Questioning the limits of our understanding does not mean affirming that no truth exists.

Christianity does not say that all religious claims are equally true. Jesus makes extraordinarily exclusive statements about himself. The Christian tradition confesses that there is truth, revelation, sin, redemption, and reconciliation in Christ.

Therefore, Christian humility does not consist of saying, "There is no truth." It consists of recognizing: "The truth does not depend on me to be true, and I am not the Truth itself."

For the Christian, Christ is the truth. We are his disciples. This difference is enormous.

Because it means we should never confuse our capacity to understand God with God himself. God is perfect. My understanding is not. Revelation may be true. My interpretation remains human. Scripture may have authority. I remain a reader limited by my time, knowledge, culture, language, experiences, and even personal interests.

That is why spiritual maturity is not the absence of conviction. It is the ability to hold deep convictions without turning one's own mind into an idol.

Perhaps one of the most mature prayers a Christian can make is: "Lord, what I believe to be true, confirm in me. What I have understood wrongly, correct. And what my pride prevents me from seeing, show me."

When certainty turns into violence

There is a dangerous moment in every belief. It is when we stop saying, "I believe this is true" and begin to think, "Therefore, everything I do to defend this will necessarily be just."

These two statements are not equivalent. A person can defend something true through morally wrong methods.

Peter believed in Jesus when he drew his sword. His loyalty was directed at the right person. The method, however, was wrong. Christ told him to put the sword away.

This should teach us something. It is not enough to ask: "Am I defending the truth?" We also need to ask: "Am I defending it the way Christ would defend it?"

Because it is possible to possess an apparently correct orthodoxy accompanied by a profoundly unchristian spirit.

Paul went so far as to persecute Christians, imagining he was acting in religious faithfulness. Later, he would recall having been a blasphemer and a persecutor, adding that he had acted "ignorantly, in unbelief" (1 Timothy 1:13).

The persecutor became an apostle. And perhaps it was precisely for this reason that Paul knew so well the danger of zeal without knowledge.

He himself had been living proof that a person can possess religious certainty, theological education, moral discipline, and enormous zeal, and yet still be persecuting what God is doing.

What if I had been born on the other side?

This is perhaps the most introspective question of this entire argument: what if I had been born on the other side?

Another family. Another country. Another language. Another temple. Another tradition. Other books. Other teachers. Another history.

Would I have arrived at exactly the same conclusions I have reached today?

Perhaps yes. Perhaps not. We will never know completely. But this question has an important spiritual function: it destroys arrogance. Not faith. Arrogance.

It forces me to recognize that many people with whom I disagree did not wake up in the morning determined to embrace a lie. They too seek meaning. They too want to understand existence. They too fear death. They too love their families. They too have questions. They too have experiences. They too may be sincerely convinced.

And sincerity is not a sufficient criterion of truth. But perceiving the other's sincerity changes the way I treat them. My goal ceases to be defeating them. It becomes encountering them as a human being.

Perhaps this is what the forgiveness of the cross compels us to see

Let us now return to the man imprisoned in the foreign country. He preached what he believed. He was considered offensive. He was tried. Condemned. Perhaps his jailers are absolutely convinced they did the right thing.

And then the words of Jesus take on a frighteningly concrete dimension: "Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing."

At that moment, the prayer ceases to be merely a beautiful sentence written in the Gospel. It becomes a moral demand.

Because forgiving someone who knows they have erred and begs for mercy is already difficult. Forgiving someone who believes they did good by hurting you is much more difficult.

It is forgiving the one who may never ask for forgiveness because their conscience still absolves them.

Christ did this on the cross. And the Christian who contemplates the cross cannot merely admire this forgiveness. They are called to be transformed by it.

The line between the martyr and the inquisitor

Therefore, when you, in that scenario, are arrested for your belief, the word of Christ is not only present in your martyrdom.

It is also present in the astonishing and counterintuitive forgiveness you are called to offer your jailer.

Not an arrogant forgiveness. Not the kind that thinks, "I am enlightened, and you are ignorant." But a forgiveness born of a much more unsettling awareness: in other circumstances, in another culture, under another name, perhaps I could have been the judge, and he, the victim.

Perhaps we would simply have swapped places.

"Father, forgive them," because the line between the inquisitor and the martyr can sometimes be as thin as the geography of birth, the education received, the history of a people, and the certainties we were never taught to question.

We do not know who we would have been had we been born within the other's narrative.

And recognizing this does not destroy faith. Perhaps it purifies it. Because true faith does not need arrogance to stand.

When the cross becomes a mirror

It is easy to look at the cross and ask: "How could they do this to Jesus?" Much more difficult is to ask: "In what circumstances would I be capable of doing the same?"

This is the moment when the cross ceases to be merely an event we judge from the outside and becomes a mirror.

Perhaps I would never physically nail someone to a cross. But how many times have I condemned before understanding? How many times have I turned ignorance into certainty? How many times have I listened only enough to respond, never enough to understand?

How many times have I considered my interpretation inseparable from God's will? How many times has my pride been given the name "zeal"? How many times has my harshness been called "faithfulness"? How many times has my inability to love been presented as "defense of the truth"?

And how many times could those I condemned, looking at me, say exactly the same thing?

Perhaps the true religious danger lies not only in believing a lie. Perhaps it also lies in possessing some truth and concluding, because of it, that we no longer need humility.

"They do not know what they are doing"

There is something deeply tragic in this phrase.

Jesus does not say: "They do nothing." They do. They drive the nails. They divide the garments. They participate in the death. There is reality. There is suffering. There are consequences. But there is also unknowing.

Perhaps this is one of the deepest descriptions of humanity: we do far more than we understand.

We hurt people without understanding all the wounds we produce. We transmit beliefs without investigating their origins. We repeat inherited judgments. We defend traditions that we rarely subject to the same analysis we demand of others' traditions. We build certainties within small horizons and then call them complete vision.

We are finite creatures trying to understand an infinite God. And precisely for that reason, faith should produce less arrogance, not more.

The greater God becomes before me, the smaller my pretension of having completely enclosed him within my categories should appear.

The Christian before the different

Perhaps the true test of our faith is not how we treat those who agree with us. That is relatively easy.

The true test arises before the one whose worldview challenges us.

Can I believe he is wrong and still love him? Can I present what I believe without dehumanizing him? Can I defend Christ without forgetting the character of Christ? Can I listen without fear? Can I admit when I do not know? Can I correct and also be corrected? Can I recognize that my conviction does not make me infallible?

If the answer is no, perhaps our faith has still learned little from the cross.

Because the one who claimed to be the way, the truth, and the life was also the one who, before his executioners, prayed: "Father, forgive them."

Christ did not need to relativize the truth in order to exercise mercy. And neither do we.

Final reflections

In the end, perhaps "Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing" is not only a prayer for the soldiers around the cross. Perhaps it is also a revelation about the human condition.

About our capacity to confuse conviction with knowledge. Tradition with truth. Zeal with wisdom. Religion with God. Power with justice.

Perhaps it is also a warning to anyone who believes they possess answers. Including me. Including you. Including the Christian.

True faith does not necessarily begin when all questions disappear. Sometimes it matures when we stop fearing them.

When we are able to look at what we believe and ask not only: "Am I certain?" but: "Why am I certain?", "Does my interpretation withstand examination?", "Does my way of defending what I believe resemble Christ?", "If I am wrong about something, am I still humble enough to be corrected?"

And perhaps the most difficult question of all: "If I were on the other side of history, would I recognize Christ?"

The Christian faith does not need to answer these questions with fear. If Christ is the truth, the truth will not be threatened by our honesty. What may be threatened is our pride. And perhaps that is precisely what needs to die.

Because, in the end, true faith begins where the pretense of possessing God as if He fit entirely within the limits of our understanding ends.

It begins when we recognize that there is an infinite difference between believing in the Truth and believing that we are incapable of being mistaken about it.

And perhaps it is before this realization that the words of the cross cease to be directed only at the men who crucified Jesus two thousand years ago. Perhaps they cross the centuries and reach all of us:

"Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing."

Because, in more moments than we would like to admit, we also do not know.

References for further study

Holy Bible: Luke 23:34; John 16:2-3; Acts 3:17; 1 Corinthians 2:8; Romans 10:2; 1 Timothy 1:13.

THOMAS AQUINAS. Summa Theologica. Part I-II, especially the questions on voluntariness, ignorance, and moral responsibility.

BERGER, Peter L.; LUCKMANN, Thomas. The Social Construction of Reality.

BERGER, Peter L. The Sacred Canopy.

GADAMER, Hans-Georg. Truth and Method.

KIERKEGAARD, Søren. Writings on Christianity, the individual, and the critique of "Christendom."