Incident-Specific Measurement of Divine Forgiveness: Psychometric Properties of the Christian-Sensitive Reconciliation With God Scale.

Résumé

When people perceive themselves as having violated religious/spiritual principles, they may experience distress that prompts efforts to restore alignment with what they hold as sacred. While divine forgiveness is increasingly recognized as an important part of this process, much of the empirical literature tends to overlook tradition-specific considerations that may be essential to conceptualising and measuring divine forgiveness. Building on an interdisciplinary Christian-sensitive dual-process model for conceptualising and measuring incident-specific psychological experiences of reconciliation with God for personal wrongdoing, we use cross-sectional and longitudinal data to examine the psychometric properties of the Reconciliation with God Scale in seven independent adult Christian samples representing a diverse range of countries, linguistic backgrounds, and denominational affiliations (N = 1391). We present evidence for the two proposed factors-engaging in repentance with God and experiencing absolution from God-based on analyses of internal structure and internal consistency. Evidence of convergent validity was observed from associations with theoretically relevant proximal (e.g., trait divine forgiveness) and distal (e.g., personal flourishing) variables. Group comparisons based on theory-driven classifications provided support for discriminative validity, with somewhat consistent evidence that those who scored higher on both proposed factors tended to score more favourably on a number of the auxiliary variables. These findings provide initial psychometric evidence supporting the utility of the incident-anchored Reconciliation with God Scale among Christians, making processes of engaging in repentance with God and experiencing absolution from God empirically tractable as stress-regulatory mechanisms following spiritually salient moral transgressions.