Volf on echoing God's forgiveness

      For any single wrongdoing between two people to be forgiven rightly, all wrongdoings between them would have to come to light, and all forgiven. But that's clearly impossible in the here and now.
      All our forgiving is inescapably incomplete. That's why it's so crucial to see our forgiving not simply as our own act, but as participating in God's forgiving. Our forgiving is faulty; God's is faultless. Our forgiving is provisional; God's is final. We forgive tenuously and tentatively; God forgives unhesitatingly and definitively. As we forgive, we always wrong the offender by inadequate judgment and pride; God forgives with justice and genuine love. The only way we dare forgive is by making our forgiving transparent to God's and always open to revision. After all, our forgiveness is only possible as an echo of God's.

-Miroslav Volf, Free of Charge: Giving and Forgiving in a Culture Stripped of Grace, 219-220.

I mentioned and highly recommended this book earlier. One of the real highlights is the careful and insightful way Volf explores the similarities and differences between how God gives and forgives, and how we do so. We are to imitate God, but we are not God.

      We should forgive as God forgives, but we can't forgive as God forgives! Earlier, in discussing giving, I suggested that the adverb "as" in the phrase "as God gives" doesn't designate identity but similarity. Because we are human, we cannot give exactly as God does. But because we are created to be like the God who gives, we should give similarly to how God gives. The same applies to forgiveness. We cannot and should not forgive exactly as God does. But we were created to be like the God who forgives, we should forgive similarly to how God forgives. We don't replicate what God does. We imitate it in our way, mindful that, as the great church father Augustine said, the dissimilarity between us and God is greater than the similarity.
      Important as it is, however, imitation is not the primary way in which we relate to God. We don't just watch and learn from God, as a toddler watches and learns from his mother. A toddler and his mother are two separate people, acting independently of each other. They have two distinct bodies that occupy different spaces, and they have two intellects and wills operating independently from each other. But as we have seen throughout this book, we are not independent of God in that way. God is not absent from the space we inhabit, and our intellects and wills are carried on the wings of God's presence and activity. When we give, it is God's gifts that we pass on and it is God who gives through us. By giving, we are instruments of God's giving. The same is true of forgiveness.

-Volf, Free of Charge, 164-65.

As I said before: highly recommended and worth pondering (and giving away!). An excellent example of mixing theological rigour with stylistic accessibility.
I received no free publisher's copy for these comments. I just liked the book.