研究追踪基督徒犯错后16天：悔改感先升，被赦免感随后跟上

研究问了什么

这项研究关注的是一个日常宗教经验里的时间问题：基督徒在意识到自己做错事之后，从“仍在悔改”走到“感到被神赦免”，通常要经历怎样的过程。作者是哈佛大学人类繁荣项目的Richard G. Cowden与戈登学院的Kaye V. Cook，论文发表在《宗教与灵性心理学》。他们把“与神和好”拆成两个可测量的部分：悔改是主动转向神、承认过错的接近性反应；被赦免感则是被动领受的内在确信，觉得自己被怜悯、罪疚被抹去。

研究设计的一个特点是“锚定同一件事”。研究者从2481名美国实践中的基督徒中筛选，要求对方在过去24小时内犯下具体的个人过错、能写下来描述，并且当时几乎不觉得神已赦免自己。最终175人进入主研究，在事发后第1、2、4、8、16天各填一次问卷，每次都先被提醒自己写下的那件事。这样比较的是同一个人随时间的变化，而不是不同人在某一时点的差异。

主要发现

两种体验都呈对数式增长：头几天上升最快，第二周增速逐渐变小。但起点和速度不同。第1天悔改感平均已达2.52分（满分4分），赦免感只有1.90分；16天里赦免感的增长幅度更大（0.28对0.19）。个体差异相当大，第1天的起点高低几乎不决定之后变化多快。

在时间先后上，某一轮悔改感高于个人平常水平，下一轮赦免感往往也更高；反过来，赦免感的突增并不能预测之后的悔改感变化。赦免感升高对下一轮“与神的亲近感”有微弱预测，但两种过程一起分析时，这一联系刚好未达统计显著。作者据此描述了一个倾向性的顺序：悔改在前，感到被赦免在后，再往后是关系亲近感的恢复，但第二步证据更弱。

研究者还比较了哪些因素与恢复速度相关。对神是否仁慈的总体看法、平时是否容易感到被赦免，都没有明显改变变化速度；真正相关的是第1天与神的关系状态：报告更少“神圣挣扎”（冲突、愤怒、害怕惩罚）的人，悔改感和赦免感上升都更快；第1天与神亲近感更强的人，赦免感上升更陡。作者认为，活出来的关系质量比抽象信念更能说明恢复节奏。

作者如何限定结论

Cowden与Cook在访谈中反复强调研究边界。他们研究的是“与神和好的心理体验”，无法判断神是否赦免了某人、何时赦免、神学上什么算赦免。悔改在前也不意味着人必须靠悔改赚取赦免，作者提到在某些基督教理解中，赦免是白白可得的，悔改只是让人更能领受它。由于是观察性研究，时间顺序只是提示性的，不能当作因果证明。

样本也有具体限制。研究未预注册；筛选刻意选了事发24小时内仍感到未被赦免的人，因此结果未必适用于一犯错就感到平安的信徒，也可能更偏向认为赦免以悔改为条件的人。约一半参与者在筛查前12至24小时才犯错，第1天悔改感已较高，说明部分修复可能发生在首次测量之前。完成全部五次问卷的人去教堂更频繁、平时更感到被神赦免，存在流失偏差的可能。

作者还提到，他们开发了一份免费的自助材料RECEIVE Forgiveness workbook，并称已在印尼成年基督徒样本中完成随机对照试验、显示初步效果，正寻求在其他文化中继续试验。这属于作者自述的后续工作，与本研究的观察性发现是两件事。

这项研究的位置

过去关于宽恕的心理学研究多集中在人与人之间，比如2010年一项纵向研究显示，被冒犯后原谅他人也呈先快后慢的曲线。对“神的赦免”的实证研究少得多，且常采用信仰中立的框架。作者认为，这种框架能找出跨宗教传统共有的过程，却可能漏掉特定传统内部的意义，比如基督徒可能把过错同时理解为道德失败与破坏与神相交的罪。

对普通读者而言，这项研究提供的不是一张“多久该感到被赦免”的时间表，而是一个观察角度：承认过错与感到被宽恕可以同时存在，也可以彼此错开。作者建议的实际含义也限于此——陪伴经历此类挣扎的基督徒时，既要认真对待过错本身，也要帮助对方领受和內化宽恕。至于这一过程在其他基督教传统、其他宗教或无宗教信仰者中如何展开，仍有待研究。

After committing a moral wrongdoing, Christian adults who initially feel unforgiven by God tend to experience rapid increases in both repentance and feelings of divine forgiveness during the first few days, followed by a gradual leveling off over the next two weeks. New research published in Psychology of Religion and Spirituality suggests that actively turning back to God in repentance tends to precede the internal sense of being pardoned, which in turn was modestly linked to a renewed sense of spiritual closeness.

Reconciliation with God is the psychological and spiritual process of restoring relational harmony with the divine after a believer feels they have violated moral or religious standards. In Christian traditions, maintaining an ongoing, intimate bond with God (often referred to as communion) is a central life aim. Becoming aware of a personal sin or wrongdoing can disrupt that bond, creating inner unrest, guilt, and spiritual strain.

To repair that strain, believers often move through two connected processes: engaging in repentance and experiencing absolution. Repentance is an active, approach-oriented response where a person acknowledges their wrongdoing and turns back toward God rather than withdrawing in shame. Experiencing absolution is the receptive counterpart, characterized by an internal assurance that God is moving toward the believer with mercy and has wiped away their guilt.

While psychologists have extensively studied how people forgive one another or themselves, the psychological dynamics of divine forgiveness have received far less empirical attention. In the interpersonal realm, a 2010 longitudinal study demonstrated that forgiving another person after an offense tends to follow a curve of diminishing returns, rising rapidly in the immediate aftermath before gradually leveling off. More recently, scholars began looking at how spiritual repair unfolds over time; for instance, a 2024 two-study investigation indicated that actively seeking God’s pardon is an initial step that predicts whether a person actually feels forgiven six to twelve weeks later.

Other recent work has highlighted how everyday shifts in feeling pardoned by God can ripple outward into daily life. For example, a study covered by PsyPost in July 2026 found that on days when individuals felt more forgiven by God than usual, they were more forgiving and willing to make amends with their romantic partners.

The new study was conducted by Richard G. Cowden, a research scientist with the Human Flourishing Program at Harvard University (which coordinates the Global Forgiveness Movement) and the Department of Epidemiology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, and Kaye V. Cook, dean of the School of Psychology and Human Services at Gordon College. Building on a theoretical framework that positions repentance and absolution within a broader system of spiritual closeness and struggle, the authors designed their study to track the exact day-by-day timeline of divine reconciliation immediately after a moral misstep.

“Most studies have taken a relatively faith-neutral approach to divine forgiveness,” Cowden and Cook told PsyPost. “That can be useful for identifying processes that may be shared across religious traditions, but it may overlook beliefs, practices, and relational meanings that are especially important within a particular faith tradition. In the Christian faith, for example, personal wrongdoing may be understood not only as moral failure but also as personal sin that can disrupt one’s sense of communion with God.”

“Our earlier work showed that many Christians may affirm that God is forgiving while still struggling to personally experience God’s forgiveness following specific instances of wrongdoing,” the researchers explained. “To explore how this experience unfolds over time, we focused on two related experiences within a Christian-sensitive understanding of experiencing reconciliation with God.”

“We wanted to know how these two processes unfold in the days after Christians become aware of a particular instance of wrongdoing,” Cowden and Cook added. “Does engaging in repentance with God tend to precede experiencing absolution from God, or vice versa? Do they develop together? And how are they related to a renewed sense of communion with God?”

To capture this process as it unfolded in real time, the researchers used an online research platform to screen 2,481 practicing Christian adults across the United States. They looked for participants who had committed a specific personal sin within the past 24 hours, could describe the event in writing, and currently felt little to no assurance that God had forgiven them for it. From this screening, 175 eligible adults enrolled in the main study and completed surveys on Days 1, 2, 4, 8, and 16 following their wrongdoing.

“One distinctive feature of the study is that participants answered questions about the same instance of personal wrongdoing on Days 1, 2, 4, 8, and 16 of the study,” Cowden and Cook noted. “This allowed us to examine change within each person rather than simply comparing people at one point in time.”

The sample ranged in age from 19 to 78, with an average age of about 42, and was roughly 59 percent female and 74 percent White. Participants represented a variety of Christian traditions, primarily identifying as Catholic (38 percent), nondenominational (23 percent), or Baptist (16 percent). The recent wrongdoings they described were most often rated as moderate in severity (40 percent), with the most common offenses involving sexual sin (22 percent), anger or resentment (21 percent), and dishonesty or lying (15 percent).

At each of the five survey waves, participants were reminded of the specific wrongdoing they had written about and rated their current levels of repentance and absolution on a 4-point scale. They also answered questions measuring their current sense of communion with God on a 5-point scale. On the first day, the researchers additionally measured participants’ general perception of God as benevolent versus strict, their baseline tendency to feel forgiven by God across life in general, and their divine struggles, meaning feelings of conflict, anger, or fear of punishment in their relationship with God since the incident.

When testing which factors predicted faster or slower change, the authors controlled for a wide range of background factors. These included age, sex, race, education, marital status, geographic region, frequency of prayer, Bible reading, and church attendance, as well as adverse childhood experiences, Big Five personality traits, and baseline anxiety and depression.

By comparing several mathematical growth models, the researchers found that both repentance and absolution followed a logarithmic trajectory over the 16-day window. In plain terms, both processes showed rapid increases during the first few days after the wrongdoing, followed by progressively smaller gains that tapered off over the second week. Although the two processes tended to rise in tandem across participants, they started at different levels and moved at different speeds.

On Day 1, average repentance scores were already relatively high at 2.52 out of 4, whereas feelings of absolution started lower at 1.90 out of 4. Over the 16 days, however, absolution increased at a steeper rate than repentance (growth estimates of 0.28 versus 0.19). At the same time, individual patterns varied considerably from person to person, and where a participant started on Day 1 had almost no bearing on how quickly their scores changed over the two weeks.

“Among Christians, taking appropriate responsibility for personal sin before God and experiencing God’s forgiveness are connected, but they are not the same thing,” the researchers said. “A Christian may acknowledge wrongdoing and turn toward God in repentance while still struggling to experience absolution from God.”

“On average, both engaging in repentance with God and experiencing absolution from God increased most quickly early in the study and then leveled off, but people differed quite substantially in how these experiences unfolded,” Cowden and Cook added. “The findings therefore do not establish a universal timetable for when a Christian should feel forgiven or how the process of experiencing divine forgiveness ought to unfold.”

When looking at what predicted faster spiritual recovery, the researchers found that ongoing relational experiences with God mattered more than abstract beliefs about God’s character. General perceptions of God as benevolent and a person’s general trait tendency to feel forgiven did not meaningfully alter the speed of change for either process. By contrast, participants who reported fewer divine struggles on Day 1 experienced steeper increases in both repentance (a growth rate of 0.23 for those with low struggles versus 0.15 for those with high struggles) and absolution (0.34 versus 0.22).

In addition, a stronger baseline sense of communion with God on Day 1 predicted a steeper rise in feeling absolved over the 16 days (a growth rate of 0.33 for those with high initial communion compared to 0.23 for those with low communion). This suggests that feeling close to God and free of spiritual conflict may provide a supportive foundation for internalizing forgiveness after a misstep.

“One particularly interesting finding was that the quality of participants’ lived relationship with God was more consistently associated with rates of change than their more general beliefs about God,” Cowden and Cook said. “An important contribution is showing why it helps to ask about both engaging in repentance with God and experiencing absolution from God. Simply asking, ‘Do you feel forgiven by God?’ misses whether someone is also acknowledging the wrongdoing and turning toward God, as well as how those experiences relate over time.”

The researchers also examined how fluctuations within an individual from one survey to the next predicted their responses on the very next survey. When a participant reported a higher-than-usual spike in repentance at one time point, they tended to report higher levels of absolution at the following assessment. The reverse was not true: spikes in feeling absolved did not predict subsequent changes in repentance.

Looking at downstream spiritual outcomes, experiencing a higher-than-usual increase in absolution at one wave modestly predicted a stronger sense of communion with God at the next wave. Fluctuations in repentance alone did not directly predict subsequent shifts in communion, and the link between absolution and later communion fell just short of statistical significance when both processes were analyzed together, likely because they overlap so closely. Taken together, the findings are consistent with a sequence in which repentance tends to come before feeling pardoned, and feeling pardoned tends to come before a renewed sense of closeness with God, though the evidence for that second step was weaker.

“These findings offer tentative evidence that experiencing absolution from God may precede a deeper sense of relational harmony with God, but leave unclear whether it has an association independent of engaging in repentance with God given that the two processes tended to unfold together,” the researchers explained. “One possible practical implication is that supporting Christians after personal sin may involve attending to both sides of experiencing reconciliation with God: taking wrongdoing seriously through engaging in repentance with God while also helping individuals more fully receive and internalize God’s forgiveness.”

There are a few caveats to keep in mind when interpreting these results. The study was not preregistered. Because the researchers intentionally selected Christian adults who still felt unforgiven up to 24 hours after their transgression, the findings may not apply to believers who immediately feel at peace with God after making a mistake. This screening approach may have also favored individuals who view God’s forgiveness as conditional upon human repentance rather than automatic, which could help explain why repentance preceded absolution in the timeline.

“We studied the psychological experience of reconciliation with God,” Cowden and Cook emphasized. “We could not determine whether God had forgiven someone, when God forgave them, or what theologically constitutes divine forgiveness.”

“The finding that engaging in repentance with God tended to precede experiencing absolution from God does not mean that Christians must earn God’s forgiveness through engaging in repentance with God,” the authors continued. “Rather, it describes the temporal ordering of two experiences. In some Christian understandings, forgiveness may be freely available while repentance helps a person become more able to receive or internalize it. Because this was an observational study, the temporal patterns are suggestive and should not be interpreted as demonstrating causality.”

In addition, about half of the participants committed their wrongdoing between 12 and 24 hours before the screener survey, and Day 1 repentance scores were already relatively high. Because some initial spiritual repair had likely already begun before the first measurement, future studies could track individuals even closer to the moment of a transgression. Finally, the participants who completed all five surveys attended church more frequently and had higher general perceptions of divine forgiveness than those who missed at least one survey, which raises the possibility of some attrition bias. Testing these patterns across other Christian traditions and other religions will also be important.

Looking ahead, the researchers are exploring practical ways to help believers navigate spiritual distress after moral missteps. “We have developed a freely available self-directed intervention to support Christians who are struggling to experience reconciliation with God following specific instances of personal wrongdoing, which is called the RECEIVE Forgiveness workbook,” Cowden and Cook told PsyPost. “We have completed a randomized controlled trial showing initial efficacy in a sample of adult Indonesian Christians, and we are looking to conduct further trials in other cultures and contexts.”

“More broadly, we are interested in understanding how engaging in repentance with God, experiencing absolution from God, and experiencing reconciliation with God differ across cultures and Christian traditions, particularly traditions that differ in beliefs and practices related to addressing personal wrongdoing and receiving divine forgiveness,” the researchers concluded. “We also want to understand why some Christians are able to internalize God’s forgiveness relatively readily after personal sin, whereas others remain caught in guilt, shame, divine struggle, or perceived distance from God. We are also interested in whether changes in reconciliation with God contribute over time to renewed communion with God and flourishing more broadly across different aspects of life.”

The study, “Temporal Dynamics of Experiencing Reconciliation With God After Personal Wrongdoing: An Incident-Anchored Longitudinal Study of U.S. Christian Adults,” was authored by Richard G. Cowden and Kaye V. Cook.