The Church and the sacraments
Repentance, confession and forgiveness
How sin after baptism is dealt with, and why the Church has always had a ministry of absolution.
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Baptism washes away sin. Then we sin again. What happens next is a question the Church has had to answer from the beginning, and her answer has always involved more than private regret.
Repentance - metanoia in Greek - is not feeling bad. It means a change of mind that turns into a change of direction. Judas felt terrible and hanged himself; Peter wept and returned. Only one of them repented.
Confession is repentance put into words. Confessing to God alone is real and necessary. But the Church has always also had a ministry of absolution, in which a sinner tells the truth to another Christian in Christ's name and hears, out loud, that he is forgiven.
The authority for this is explicit. On the evening of the resurrection, Christ breathes on the apostles and says receive ye the Holy Ghost: whose soever sins ye remit, they are remitted unto them; and whose soever sins ye retain, they are retained (John 20:22-23). James tells Christians to confess their faults to one another. The early Church had a discipline of public penance for grave sins.
All four traditions retain a ministry of absolution, though they differ in how it is ordered and how obligatory it is.
Two things to hold together. Forgiveness is free - you cannot earn it, and nothing you do makes God willing, because He already is. And forgiveness is given, through means, in the Church - which is why hearing the words spoken to you is not a substitute for God's mercy but the ordinary way it reaches you.
What repentance actually is
The Greek metanoia is built from meta, change, and nous, mind. It is a turning of the whole person - what he thinks, what he wants, and where he is going.
The Hebrew behind it, shuv, is even more concrete: it simply means to turn round and walk the other way.
Notice what this excludes.
It is not remorse. Paul distinguishes them sharply: godly sorrow worketh repentance to salvation... but the sorrow of the world worketh death (2 Corinthians 7:10). Worldly sorrow is grief at consequences and at one's own diminished self-image. It curves inward and leads to despair. Godly sorrow looks at the one wronged and turns outward.
It is not a single event. Luther's first of the Ninety-Five Theses: when our Lord said repent, He willed that the entire life of believers be one of repentance. The Christian life is not a conversion followed by maintenance; it is continuous turning.
It is not self-improvement. Repentance begins by admitting you cannot fix this. A man who repents in order to earn his way back has not yet understood what he is asking for.
Pause and thinkPause: Judas and Peter both betrayed Christ within hours of each other. Both were devastated. What is the difference between what they did next?
Judas returned the money and hanged himself. Matthew uses a different word for him - metamelomai, regret or remorse - not metanoia. He saw what he had done, he could not bear it, and he turned inward until there was nothing left.
Peter went out and wept bitterly, and then he went back to the others. He was there in the upper room. He ran to the tomb. And on the shore of Galilee he was asked three times whether he loved Christ - once for each denial - and given his work back.
The difference is not the depth of the sorrow. Judas may have felt it more. The difference is direction: one man turned away from Christ in his shame, and the other turned towards Him with it. Shame that makes you hide is the enemy's counterfeit of repentance, and it is worth recognising it by name.
Why confess to another person
The objection is instinctive for anyone formed by modern Christianity: why not go straight to God?
You should. Nobody disputes it, and all four traditions teach daily private confession to God. But the Church's practice of confession to a minister rests on several things at once.
Christ gave the authority. John 20:23 is explicit, and it was said to particular men, about a function they were to exercise. To remit and to retain requires knowing what one is remitting - which implies being told.
Scripture commands confession to one another. Confess your faults one to another, and pray one for another, that ye may be healed (James 5:16). And Acts 19 describes converts at Ephesus coming and confessing and declaring their deeds openly.
Sin is not merely private. Every sin damages the body of Christ, so the body is properly involved in its healing. The early Church's discipline of public penance was severe by our standards, but its logic was sound.
You need to hear it. This is the pastoral heart of the practice, and it is what converts people who begin sceptical. A man who confesses privately never knows whether he has been forgiven or has merely talked himself into feeling better. A man who says the thing out loud, to another human being, and hears I absolve you or I declare unto you the forgiveness of all your sins has received something from outside himself, which self-persuasion cannot counterfeit. Luther understood this better than almost anyone, and he kept private confession when he abolished a great deal else.
Naming is part of the cure. Vague repentance - forgive me for everything - allows the sin to remain unexamined. Saying the specific thing aloud strips it of the power that secrecy gives it.
Where the four traditions stand
Catholic
The Catholic Church numbers Penance and Reconciliation among the seven sacraments. Its elements are contrition, confession of sins by kind and number, absolution by the priest, and satisfaction - the penance assigned. The Church requires confession of grave (mortal) sin before receiving communion, and the precept of the Church is to confess serious sins at least once a year. The formula is I absolve you from your sins, in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit - spoken in the first person, because the priest acts in persona Christi. Venial sins may be confessed and the practice is encouraged, though they are also forgiven through prayer, charity and the Eucharist. Catholic teaching distinguishes guilt from the temporal punishment due to sin: absolution removes the guilt, while the disordered attachment left behind is dealt with by penance, works of charity and, if necessary, purgatory - which is also the framework in which indulgences are understood. The seal is inviolable.
Orthodox
Orthodoxy has the mystery of repentance, in which the penitent confesses before an icon of Christ with the priest standing beside him as witness and physician - the posture itself teaches the theology, since both are facing Christ. The prayer of absolution in the Slavic tradition is declarative, in the Greek tradition more often a prayer that God may forgive; both are used. Confession is normally required before communion, and in Russian practice this is often strictly maintained, while Greek practice is generally less frequent. The governing image is medical rather than judicial: sin is disease, the priest is a physician, and the penance (epitimia) is therapy rather than punishment - a prescribed fast, a rule of prayer, an act of charity, occasionally a period away from communion. Orthodoxy does not employ the Western categories of mortal and venial sin or of temporal punishment, and has no doctrine of indulgences. The relationship with a spiritual father, which extends well beyond the act of confession, is central to Orthodox spiritual life.
Lutheran
Lutherans retained private confession and absolution and defended it vigorously. Article 11 of the Augsburg Confession states that private absolution should be retained in the churches, while adding that an enumeration of all sins is not necessary, since it is impossible - a direct rejection of the Catholic requirement to confess by kind and number. Article 12 defines repentance as having two parts: contrition and faith. Luther's Small Catechism includes a form for confession, and the Large Catechism argues at length that confession is a treasure the Church would be mad to abandon, complaining that people who had been compelled to it now refused it when it was made free. The Smalcald Articles even list absolution among the sacraments. In practice private confession fell into disuse across much of Lutheranism from the eighteenth century, replaced by general confession in the Divine Service, and its recovery has been a theme of Lutheran renewal. The key distinction is that confession is not commanded - it is offered, because the gospel is offered.
Anglican
The Prayer Book provides for general confession at Morning and Evening Prayer and at Holy Communion, followed by absolution pronounced by the priest - which means every Anglican hears a declaration of forgiveness regularly. Private confession is explicitly provided for in the Visitation of the Sick, where the sick person is moved to make a special confession if he feels his conscience troubled, and the priest shall absolve him with the words by His authority committed to me, I absolve thee from all thy sins. The Anglican rule of thumb, attributed to the Caroline divines and still quoted, is all may, none must, some should - private confession is available to everyone, obligatory for no one, and advisable for those whose consciences are not quieted otherwise. The Anglo-Catholic revival restored the practice widely from the 1830s; the evangelical wing generally relies on general confession and direct prayer. Canon law in most provinces holds the seal strictly.
Work with it
Check yourself
What is the difference between what Judas did and what Peter did after betraying Christ?
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Correct. Matthew uses metamelomai - regret - for Judas, not metanoia. The difference is direction, not intensity of feeling.
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Denying Christ three times under no real threat is not obviously lighter. The Gospels do not grade them.
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He returned the money and took his own life. The text suggests he was overwhelmed with sorrow; sorrow was not what was lacking.
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There was no such ministry to go to at that moment. He returned to Christ and to the others.
Check yourself
What does John 20:22-23 record Christ giving the apostles?
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Yes - "whose soever sins ye remit, they are remitted; and whose soever sins ye retain, they are retained." It is the scriptural basis for the ministry of absolution in all four traditions.
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A different question, not addressed in this passage.
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That is Matthew 28, spoken later.
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The Spirit is given here in a distinct act, but the subject of the verse is the remitting and retaining of sins.
Check yourself
What is the Anglican rule of thumb on private confession?
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Correct. Available to everyone, obligatory for no one, and advisable for those whose consciences are not quieted by general confession and private prayer.
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That is the Catholic precept regarding grave sin, not the Anglican position.
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The Prayer Book explicitly provides for it in the Visitation of the Sick.
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Confession is for all the faithful.
Objection drill
Confessing my sins to a man in a box is unbiblical and, frankly, insulting. There is one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus. 1 John says if we confess our sins to God, he is faithful and just to forgive. Your priests inserted themselves into a relationship that was always meant to be direct, and history shows exactly what they did with that power.
A model answer
The last clause deserves an answer first, because it is true and because dodging it will cost you the rest of the conversation. Confession has been used as an instrument of control. Priests have abused the confessional, some monstrously. Mandatory annual confession enforced by penalty produced exactly the resentment you would expect. None of that should be defended.
But notice who agreed with you about the abuse and kept the practice anyway. Luther had every incentive to abolish private confession and he refused. In the Large Catechism he complains that people who had been compelled to confess now would not do it when it was made free, and he calls confession a treasure. What he abolished was the compulsion and the requirement to enumerate every sin by kind and number. That reform is very close to what you are actually asking for.
On the one mediator. Grant 1 Timothy 2:5 entirely - no tradition covered here disputes it. The priest does not mediate and does not forgive. He declares forgiveness that Christ won and Christ gives, which is why Lutheran and many Anglican forms are worded as a declaration rather than as a personal act.
Now the return question, and it is worth asking gently. When an evangelical preacher stands in a pulpit and tells a congregation that their sins are forgiven in Christ, is he mediating? Almost everyone will say no - he is proclaiming the gospel. Absolution is that same proclamation, addressed to one person, about the specific thing that person has just named. The only difference is precision.
On 1 John 1:9. It is true and the Church teaches it. Christians confess to God daily and are forgiven. The question is not whether that works. It is what to make of the fact that Christ also gave something. On the evening of the resurrection - the first thing He does with the apostles after Easter - He breathes on them and says whose soever sins ye remit, they are remitted unto them; and whose soever sins ye retain, they are retained. That is a strange thing to say to men who were never to hear anyone's sins. And James, writing to ordinary Christians, says confess your faults one to another, not only to God.
On "in a box". The box is a nineteenth-century privacy device, not the sacrament. Orthodox confession is made standing before an icon of Christ with the priest beside the penitent, both facing the same direction - which is a better picture of what is happening than the Western grille ever was. Much Anglican and Lutheran confession happens in a chair in a study.
And the point that usually lands. Ask whether they have ever confessed something to God alone and still not felt forgiven - not because they doubted God's mercy in the abstract, but because the thing kept coming back at three in the morning. Most people have. The reason the Church puts absolution into a human voice is not that God's promise needs help. It is that we do. Something said out loud to another person, and answered out loud with your name in it, arrives from outside you in a way that private reassurance cannot, precisely because you cannot have talked yourself into it.
That is not an insertion into your relationship with God. It is God's willingness to come at you through the world He made, which is the same principle as the incarnation, the water of baptism and the bread on the table.
Memory work
Turn each card over, then say honestly whether you knew it. Cards you miss come back sooner.