Divine forgiveness holds great importance in all major religions and significantly impacts  the lives and well-being of many believers. Despite this, research on the role of divine forgiveness in human behavior has received limited attention.

The John Templeton Foundation has recently launched a funding campaign (https://www.divine-forgiveness.org/ ), coordinated by Prof. Frank Fincham (Florida State University) with the purpose of stimulating systematic research on the pursuit, perception, experience, and immediate consequences of divine forgiveness, and to illuminate how it interfaces with the two earthly forms of forgiveness, namely interpersonal forgiveness, and self-forgiveness. 

Our research project, one of the ten funded worldwide, aims to overcome one of the main obstacles to empirical research on this topic: the lack of reliable, cross-culturally validated measurement tools (see https://www.divine-forgiveness.org/subprojects).

Specifically, we aim to stimulate research on divine forgiveness and its implications in various religious and cultural contexts by developing and validating a self-report scale that measures dispositional divine forgiveness (i.e., the tendency to perceive oneself as forgiven by God for being a sinner) within and across the three main monotheistic religions (Christianity, Judaism, and Islam). Data collection involves Christian believers in Italy, Muslims in Turkey, and Jews in Israel.