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| Pope Francis hearing a confession. (Image source: catholic.com.) |
The Catholic doctrines surrounding the Sacrament of
Reconciliation (aka Confession, aka Penance) present a challenge to many
Protestants, especially those of the free-church/Evangelical lineage. “Why,”
the Protestant asks, “must I go to a priest to have my sins forgiven? Why can’t
I just pray to Jesus directly? After all, my sins are between me and God!” If the
Protestant is an Evangelical of the “once saved, always saved” stripe, he may
even say, “Jesus has already taken away all of my sins, past, present, and
future! Why would I need to ask?”
Sin is not a private matter
I’ve already discussed the
assurance of salvation elsewhere; if you need to, please consult that post
first. The rest of the discussion will assume that a mere assertion of faith in
Christ is not sufficient in itself to achieve salvation, that we can lose our
salvation through our own fault.
Sins don’t occur in a vacuum or a void space. In all cases,
there is at least one person other than God who is offended by a particular sin
— namely, the sinner himself, even if he fails to recognize it. Most of the
time, there is at least one direct victim of the sin; there are often
witnesses. Many sins hurt the community, even when they’re not illegal. And
sins done in public cause scandal in
the classic sense: they testify against the Church and the Faith to
non-Christians. Moreover, we know just from watching the news that many sins
done in secret become public knowledge due to circumstances beyond the sinners’
control, becoming scandals in the common sense. How could you ever think that your
sins are “just between you and God”?
So we’ve assumed that an assertion of faith, even a “conviction
of salvation”, doesn’t of itself secure salvation, because “if we go on sinning
willfully after receiving the knowledge of the truth, there no longer remains a
sacrifice for sins, but a terrifying expectation of judgment and the fury of a fire which will consume the
adversaries.” (Hebrews
10:26-27 NASB)[*] Only those who “persevere to the end” (Matthew
24:13), who “[do] the will of My Father who is in heaven” (Matthew
7:21), will be saved. How then, does a Christian repair the damage and put
himself back on the path?
What prayer does and doesn’t do
There is the temptation to think that a simple prayer to
Jesus can take care of everything, for “[i]f you ask Me anything in My name, I
will do it.” (John
14:14) But if we take this passage too literally, we run into trouble. If
you ask Jesus in His name to be given a winning lottery ticket, you know the
odds are you won’t. If you ask Jesus in His name to kill your wife, you’ll heap
a sin on yourself. We know through experience that sometimes God answers even
reasonable prayers with a “No”, for reasons we can’t now know (but we trust
will be revealed to us in the end [cf. 1
Corinthians 13:12]).
“Well, then, what good
is prayer? What good does praying do?”
The questions betray a mechanistic, almost determinist, attitude towards
prayer. Prayer is not a magic incantation or a spell, like those thought to invoke
and control demons: we can’t and don’t “make God do” anything, whether through prayer or not.[†]
Prayer is a request
or a plea: by asking God to do
things, we subject and entrust ourselves to His Will of our own accord. “Your
will be done, On earth as it is in heaven.” (Matthew
6:10) On the one hand, prayer does God the courtesy of treating Him as a free
moral agent, rather than as a genie compelled by magic to grant our wishes; on
the other, when God does grant our
requests, He pays us the free compliment of allowing us to participate in His divine
plan, which He is not morally obligated to do.
Before we go further, I should correct a common
misconception: Catholics do not, in any
meaningful sense, “go through Mary” for forgiveness. While the
Blessed Virgin Mother holds a special place in our hearts and our doctrines,
she doesn’t absolve us of our sins except to the extent that she joins with the
rest of the Church in the ministry of reconciliation. Mary prays for us; while we hold that her influence surpasses that
of the angels and saints, in the end the action or decision still rests with
God.
As I’ve said before, sin is not a private matter, even when
committed in private. The “go straight to Jesus” argument encodes an “all men
are islands” mentality, in which we have no moral obligations, responsibilities,
or duties to other people, and in which what we do has no implications for, or
effect upon, anyone else. This is false, not simply from a Christian
perspective, but from any reasonable philosophical perspective. You can’t just
ask for forgiveness from Jesus without asking your victims or the broader
community for forgiveness as well: there’s no “cutting out the middleman”.
What does confession do?
James tells us:
Is anyone among you sick? Then he must call for the elders[‡] of the church and they are to pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord; and the prayer offered in faith will restore the one who is sick, and the Lord will raise him up, and if he has committed sins, they will be forgiven him. Therefore, confess your sins to one another, and pray for one another so that you may be healed. The effective prayer of a righteous man can accomplish much. (James 5:14-16; bold type mine)
There’s quite a bit going on in this passage. First, we note
in passing that this paragraph supports the Sacrament of the Sick (aka Holy
Oils), in which the priest anoints a sick person with oil and prays over her
for healing and comfort. Second, the word elder
translates the Greek word presbyteros,
which is the root through Middle Latin of the English word priest.[§] Third, the passage
establishes that the prayers of the elder,
or priest, offered in faith will not
only restore the sick to health but also secure forgiveness of sins. Finally,
James commands that we confess our sins that we may be healed.
What does confession
do? By confessing a sin, one takes ownership of it. We know that often, when we
say, “Sorry,” we’re not really
contrite; we’re simply offering a socially-obligatory insincerity, like
responding “I’m fine, thanks” to the question, “How are you (doing)?” Not only
are we not really sorry, we would do it again with no hesitation. We also know
that we often fail to recognize a sin as
a sin; even now, some people are trying to rewrite 2,000 years of Christian
moral teaching to make certain behaviors at least morally neutral, if not
praiseworthy.
By confessing X,
we acknowledge that X is a sin, and
that by doing X we failed not only
God but our fellow Christians. We acknowledge the community dimension of sin,
the separation it imposes between us and our fellow man. Also, by confessing,
we offer the Church the opportunity to forgive in response to the commandment
that we forgive each other our sins (Matthew
6:14-15,18:21-35),
and to exercise the ministry of reconciliation (2
Corinthians 5:18-19) — not just the Church as an institution, but as a
community as well. In taking ownership of our sins, we also, in the same
action, release them to be taken on by Christ.
Applying the merit of Christ’s sacrifice
All fine and dandy, but does the Church really have the power to forgive sins?
Yes. First, Jesus established as part of his authority the
true forgiveness of sins when he cured the paralytic (Matthew
9:2-8). Second, when Jesus bestowed his mission upon the apostles, he also
bestowed upon them the authority to forgive and
retain sins (John
20:21-23); this contradicts the notion that absolution merely “covers over”
the sin like a blanket. Third, Jesus also gave the apostles, as representing
the Church, the power to bind and loose on earth and in heaven, as the guidance
of the Holy Spirit would direct them (Matthew
18:18; cf. John
14:26,16:13).[**]
Fourth, as we learned in the discussion of apostolic
succession, the Twelve did not consider their apostolates intrinsic to
themselves, but rather a role that would need to be transmitted through the
ages in order to fulfill the Church’s mission to “make disciples of all the
nations” (Matthew
28:19).
What the Church does, through the Sacrament of
Reconciliation, is apply the redemptive merit of Christ’s sacrifice to the sins
the penitent confesses, absolving the sin and imparting forgiveness on behalf
of God and the communion of the faithful. Strictly speaking, this application
is not her power, but Christ’s power working through her, and isn’t contingent
on the sinlessness of the priest. Because it’s Christ’s power, working through
the Church by his authority, the sin is permanently removed.
The priest confessor may impose a restitutive or atoning
element, so the penitent may work to repair the broken relationships. Nevertheless,
the conditions under which the priest may licitly withhold absolution are very
limited; the sacrament may not be used coercively. The sacrament has been
abused in the past. However, as the old Latin maxim holds, the misuse doesn’t
invalidate the proper use.
The Christian community as the Body of Christ
None of this, of course, necessarily implies a limit on
Christ’s ability/willingness to forgive or the efficacy of his saving death. Certainly,
Jesus may directly forgive a person’s sins if that person is contrite, in extremis, and has no recourse to the
Sacrament of Reconciliation for reasons beyond his control. There is also a
principle in Catholic teaching concerning invincible
ignorance; that is, ignorance which is not the person’s fault and which can’t
be remedied by any reasonable means, such as a person to whom the gospel has
never been revealed. Paul argues that those who never had the Law of Moses yet
fulfilled the moral requirements of the Law “are a law to themselves, in that
they show the work of the Law written in their hearts,” and thus may be excused
at the Last Judgment. (Romans
2:12-16) Jesus forbade us to pass judgment on each other’s souls (Matthew
7:1-5); so we can’t say with any final certainty that a particular person
is either saved or damned.
Nevertheless, the pesky question remains: If Jesus wanted us to apply directly to him for
forgiveness, why would he have given the power to retain sins to the apostles?
The answer is, because we’re not all in this alone. Jesus
never meant for Christianity to be a “do-it-yourself project”. Rather, by
founding a Church, giving it human leaders, even establishing one human whom he
called “Rock” (Matthew
16:18; cf. John
1:42) to be its visible head as his stand-in or vicarius (John
21:15-19), he gave Christianity a community element: the Body of Christ (Romans
12:4-5; 1
Corinthians 12:20-27).
And if one member suffers, all the members suffer with it.
[*] For the purposes of this
post, I’ve chosen to use the New American Standard Bible, a Protestant
translation, for all Scriptural citations; small caps and italics as given.
[†] This is also why
scientific experiments testing the efficacy of prayer are almost doomed to fail:
they treat the granting of a request by God as a material cause-effect
phenomenon.
[‡] Gr. presbyteroi, which is the root of the English word priest.
[§] Priest is used in English New Testament translations for hieros, a priest of the Temple or of
another cult; modern translations, even Catholic translations, use elder to translate presbyteros to make a linguistic distinction, even though it
obscures the origins of the Christian sacramental priesthood.
[**] The Greek future perfect
passive in Matthew 18:18 implies that what the Church declares bound and loosed
on earth will have already been decreed so in Heaven; the Holy Spirit would not
permit the Church to declare bound that which God did not Himself first bind,
or intend to have bound at the time of the declaration.
