One such passage:
And when he had said this, he breathed on them, and said to them, "Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.” (John 20:22-23 RSV)
It is certain that the first verse here has been quoted, preached, screamed and yelled by Pentecostals. Curiously, I have never heard them read the second verse at all and have never heard the passage explained in its context. Quite frankly, until I began to read the Fathers of the Church, I had no idea what the 23rd verse meant nor did I have any adequate explanation of it.
This passage which appeared so mysterious and inexplicable to me posed no predicament for the Early Church. In fact, they dealt with it easily and with complete confidence. Then I realized the reason they could do this and I couldn’t: they believed things that I didn’t. My tradition got in the way of interpreting this text because it was written and was to be interpreted in the context of the Apostolic/Early Church Tradition and not in the Early 20th Century/Pentecostal tradition.
The very idea of confessing to a priest/preacher/pastor is totally repugnant to the modern Pentecostal. One can almost hear him/her saying, “I don’t need to confess to some man; I confess straight to God.” But can he/she explain exactly what this verse means? What does Jesus mean about someone forgiving or retaining sins?
Let’s look to the Early Church for an explanation.
A portion of the ordination prayer for a bishop given us by St. Hippolytus in On The Apostolic Tradition gives us a solid clue as to what this verse meant to the Early Church.
You [God] who gave the rules of the Church through the word of your grace,
who predestined from the beginning the race of the righteous through Abraham,
who instituted princes and priests, and did not leave your sanctuary without a minister;
who from the beginning of the world has been pleased to be glorified by those whom you have chosen, pour out upon him the power which is from you, the princely Spirit, which you gave to your beloved Son Jesus Christ, which he gave to your holy apostles, who founded the Church in every place as your sanctuary, for the glory and endless praise of your name.
Grant, Father who knows the heart, to your servant whom you chose for the episcopate, that he will feed your holy flock, that he will wear your high priesthood without reproach, serving night and day, incessantly making your face favorable, and offering the gifts of your holy church; in the spirit of high priesthood having the power to forgive sins according to your command; to assign lots according to your command; to loose any bond according to the authority which you gave to the apostles…. [from http://www.bombaxo.com/hippolytus.html; translator Kevin P. Edgecomb; ch. 3; para. 2-5; emphasis mine]
And there was an answer that is wholly consistent and made more sense than any of the Protestant circumlocutions that I had ever encountered. God gave power to his Apostles to forgive sins but only according to his commands. In other words, they do not in themselves forgive sins (or retain them for that matter) but they are used as God’s agents to receive confession and announce to the penitent the forgiveness that God promises to those who repent.
When we turn to the Didache, one of the, if not the, oldest Christian writings outside the New Testament, we find the writer speaking of the place where confession is to be done.
In the church thou shalt acknowledge thy transgressions, and thou shalt not come near for thy prayer with an evil conscience. This is the way of life. [ANF 7: 378, ch. 4]
The word “acknowledge” is translated by the word “confess” (see for instance Lightfoot and Harmer’s The Apostolic Fathers, Second Edition).
In St. Irenaeus of Lyons’ Against Heresies we read about some of the heretical sects and how they can come back from their heresy.
Such are the words and deeds by which, in our own district of the Rhone, they have deluded many women, who have their consciences seared as with a hot iron. Some of them, indeed, make a public confession of their sins; but others of them are ashamed to do this, and in a tacit kind of way, despairing of [attaining to] the life of God, have, some of them, apostatized altogether…. [ANF 1: 335; ch. XIII, para. 7]
Tertullian wrote a whole treatise called On Repentance. The following should be noted in relation to confession as a part of the whole scheme of repentance:
Yet most men either shun this work [of confession], as being a public exposure of themselves, or else defer it from day to day. I presume (as being) more mindful of modesty than of salvation; just like men who, having contracted some malady in the more private parts of the body, avoid the privity of physicians, and so perish with their own bashfulness. It is intolerable, forsooth, to modesty to make satisfaction to the offended Lord! to be restored to its forfeited salvation! Truly you are honourable in your modesty; bearing an open forehead for sinning, but an abashed one for deprecating! I give no place to bashfulness when I am a gainer by its loss; when itself in some son exhorts the man, saying, “Respect not me; it is better that I perish through you, i.e. than you through me.” At all events, the time when (if ever) its danger is serious, is when it is a butt for jeering speech in the presence of insulters, where one man raises himself on his neighbour’s ruin, where there is upward clambering over the prostrate. But among brethren and fellow-servants, where there is common hope, fear, joy, grief, suffering, because there is a common Spirit from a common Lord and Father, why do you think these brothers to be anything other than yourself? Why flee from the partners of your own mischances, as from such as will derisively cheer them? The body cannot feel gladness at the trouble of any one member, it must necessarily join with one consent in the grief, and in labouring for the remedy. In a company of two is the church; When, then, you cast yourself at the brethren’s knees, you are handling Christ, you are entreating Christ. In like manner, when they shed tears over you, it is Christ who suffers, Christ who prays the Father for mercy. What a son asks is ever easily obtained. Grand indeed is the reward of modesty, which the concealment of our fault promises us! to wit, if we do hide somewhat from the knowledge of man, shall we equally conceal it from God? Are the judgment of men and the knowledge of God so put upon a par? Is it better to be damned in secret than absolved in public? But you say, “It is a miserable thing thus to come to exomologesis:” yes, for evil does bring to misery; but where repentance is to be made, the misery ceases, because it is turned into something salutary. [ANF 3: 664-5; ch. X]
Tertullian seems to be very much in favor of the practice of exomologesis which is the full and usually public confession of one’s sins. (Why the translators chose to leave this word untranslated and instead just transliterated it is anyone’s guess.)
In our next post, we will consider more writings from the Early Church on this subject.
