Posted on 09/22/2007 6:09:42 AM PDT by NYer
Americans are flocking to confess their sins as Protestant churches have joined their Catholic counterparts in modernising the sacrament of penance.
Thousands of people are attending confession at weekends and just as many are posting their repentance on videos that are played back to congregations or shared on websites such as YouTube.
New technology is fuelling the boom, but so is clever marketing by Churches that are portraying confession as a form of self-improvement — always popular with Americans — rather than some sort of punishment.
Church leaders also attribute the boom to the fashion for self-analysis peddled by daytime television programmes such as The Jerry Springer Show and to a wider theological trend in which Christians are looking for firmer moral guidance.
Some Protestant churches are trying to make confession less forbidding, allowing people to shred their sins in paper shredders, for example.
In a shopping mall in Colorado Springs, three Catholic priests are available to hear confessions six days a week in a small office equipped with a box of tissues and the Ten Commandments.
The priests say they hear 8,000 confessions a year, according to the Wall Street Journal.
The Pope ordered priests to make confession a priority in February, but the changing attitude of Protestant denominations is more surprising.
Although some theologians say that Martin Luther opposed private confession to a priest, the Missouri Synod of the Lutheran Church – which has 2.5 million members – voted this summer to revive the ritual after ignoring it for a century.
The Catholic Church opposes group confessions and those conducted on the internet but some of its US parishes have had considerable success with special confession events.
More than 5,000 people attended a "reconciliation weekend" in Orlando, Florida. A "24 Hours of Grace" penitence open house held by five parishes in Chicago drew 2,500 people. A rotating team of 70 priests listened to their confessions.
Bishop Thomas Wenski of Orlando sent out 190,000 pamphlets in March asking local Catholics to confess.
He told the Journal: "Every day on Jerry Springer we see people confessing their sins in public and, certainly, the confessional is a lot healthier than that show."
Protestant denominations are less averse to using new technology in their confession drives. More than 7,700 people have posted their sins on ivescrewedup.com, a confession website launched by the evangelical Flamingo Road Church in Florida.
The XXX Church, an anti-pornography Christian group, videotaped members confessing their use of pornography and put the video on YouTube. It has since been watched 15,000 times.
Jordy Acklin, 21, a student who appeared in the video, said: "There's a reason why they talk about confession in the Bible – you're not supposed to keep it inside you. The weight just goes off your shoulders."
No.
You've never confessed anything to Jesus Christ and asked Him for forgiveness??? No wonder you guys admit that you don't have salvation and eternal security...
Do you ever have a 'one on one' with Jesus or is it always thru a mediator between man and Jesus???
This is the first and great commandment.
And the second [is] like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.
On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets. – Matt 22:37-40
Quix, why so reserved?
Of course! This is a healthy practice in that the penitent acknowledges the error of his ways, and the injury inflicted on another. We are all members of the Body of Christ, and admitting our mistakes is the first step in healing wounds. This practice is found in monasteries where a monk states his error before the other monks of the community. Sin, however, leaves an indelible mark on the soul. While public confession is an admission of guilt, it does not remove the stain of that sin. According to Scripture - only through confession to a priest may the sin be removed.
We know He is sure and just to forgive sin Himself by our confession of sin through faith in Christ. That forgiveness, by Him also allows Him to further our sanctification by the work of the Holy Spirit. It also draws us closer to Him, rather than to another priest.
You may place your sins before God and ask for His forgiveness but how do you know which sins are forgiven and which are not. It is precisely for that reason that our Lord in John 20:21 says to the apostles, "as the Father sent me, so I send you." As Christ was sent by the Father to forgive sins, so Christ sends the apostles and their successors forgive sins. He has commissioned them for that purpose.
The is another basic problem in relying upon a third party to forgive sin. If the priest hearing a confession is not in fellowship with God through faith in Christ, at the time he claims to be forgiving sin, then the sin isn’t forgiven nor retained.
There was only one person born without sin and that was Jesus Christ. We are all sinners, even the priest. The priest does not forgive sins; God does. He acts through the sinful priest. Please scroll back up to my post where our Lord explained how it works, to St. Faustina.
This is not the case when we confess our sin directly to God through faith in Christ. Through faith in Him, we know He is worthy our trust.
If our Lord wanted you to direct your sins to Him alone, He would not have commissioned the Apostles and given them that authority to 'bind and loose' to 'forgive and retain'. Scripture is very clear on this issue. And this has been the practice of christians since the 1st century, as evidenced by the extant writings of the Church Fathers.
There is no need to shout! Ping to post 85.
No one is without sin, not even you. Christ, who is sinless, acts through the sinful priest, not vice versa.
And since you raised the topic of pedophilia, you may want to consider the following before pointing fingers of blame on future threads.
Protestant Church Insurers Handle 260 Plus Sex Abuse Cases A Year
Jesus is my Lord and Savior, just as He is yours. He forgives my sins through the Sacrament of Confession and comes to me each week in the Holy Eucharist. How do I know this? Because Scripture is very clear about these beautiful gifts. (I have already posted the Scriptural references to Cvenger, above).
"Put on therefore, as the elect of God, holy and beloved, bowels of mercies, kindness, humbleness of mind, meekness, longsuffering;Forbearing one another, and forgiving one another, if any man have a quarrel against any: even as Christ forgave you, so also do ye." -- Colossians 3:12-13
There is no "sacrament" of forgiveness. We are to forgive each other's weaknesses and transgressions, as God forgives our own. Nothing about "another Christ" imposing himself between men and God.
"Stand fast therefore in the liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free, and be not entangled again with the yoke of bondage." -- Gal. 5:1"And that because of false brethren unawares brought in, who came in privily to spy out our liberty which we have in Christ Jesus, that they might bring us into bondage" -- Galations 2:4
Praise, God, we have been forgiven by Christ's work on the cross.
"For he hath made him to be sin for us, who knew no sin; that we might be made the righteousness of God in him." -- 2 Corinthians 5:21
Christ is not free to indwell the sinful priest until the sinful priest returns to God, confesses his sins, known and unknown, and then resides in fellowship with God the Holy Spirit, who provides the temple for the indwelling of Christ.
So the question remains regarding the ability of a sinful priest who isn’t in fellowship to forgive the sins of others.
WRT the Protestant denominations, they don’t pretend the pastor-teacher has a role as confessor, but instead recognize the royal family provided by God for each and every believer as a priest to God the Father, through the High Priest, Christ Jesus.
If I understand the Catholic position properly, based upon Matt 9:8, the Son of Man demonstrated he had the authority to forgive sins on earth. Some of the scribes witnessing this felt in their hearts that our Lord blasphemed when He said that. He further demonstrated he had the power to heal as the Son of Man, not as the Son of God.
This is an important distinction if I understand Catholic doctrine. Linking to the doctrine of the Hypostatic Union, it was in His humanity that He forgave and healed, not in His divinity. The emphasis, though, is that as a man He remained in fellowship with God the Holy Spirit throughout the Incarnation, providing us an example of the incredible authority now available to each and every believer as a priest to God the Father, through faith in the Son, as provided by God the Holy Spirit.
Everyone is without sin and no one needs a church to know it.
Especially one that would seek to justify its mistaken behavior through comparison.
I don’t follow you’re meaning.
Are you claiming God doesn’t exist and we are all born perfect? See 1stJohn 1:8
Or are you claiming all sin has been paid for on the Cross, therefore mistakenly believe postsalvation sin doesn’t require repentance and confession for further sanctification of the believer? See 1st John 1:9
If the former, then either you are so blinded as to deceive yourself, or qualify for the alternative of 1st John 1:8.
It's not suprising......try to get your head around this:
God exists and we're all perfect.
I forgive my self for believing the illusion that He would ever want anything else for me.
Excellent as usual King Friday. Thanks for the Personal ping to some possibly interested in this pontification.
I follow a different God, through faith in Christ
That’s cool
Amen.
Eventually the truth of a thing will emerge. The challenge is to keep confronting the big lie, if we don't people begin to believe it. I think you can trace all these wrong headed beliefs to the failed theory of apostolic succession.
As noted above, this refers to contrition - acknowledging repentance for injuring others. It is liberating but it does not eradicate the mark of sin on the soul. Our Lord was clear and direct in how this was to be accomplished.
There is no "sacrament" of forgiveness.
Of course there is; in fact, there are 7 Sacraments. The sacraments are Christ's own gift that provide us with his grace.
They are the divine helps which God gives us to enable us to:
When God made us, he gave us free will.
He continues to respect our free will to the end. When Jesus died upon the Cross to redeem us from our sins, it did not mean that from then on everyone would have to go to Heaven whether they wanted to or not.
When Jesus died upon the Cross, he paid an infinite price for an inexhaustible flow of grace. That grace would enable each person to turn back to God and to remain united with God through this life and through eternity.
That brings us to a question: How would Jesus provide for this flow of grace to individual souls?
The grace itself would be invisible, as by its nature it must be. But the grace would come to us through the visible things that we deal with daily.
And so God took the common things from the world about us—objects which we could taste and touch and feel, words that we could hear and gestures that we could understand—and made these the carriers of His grace.
He even matched the sign to the purpose for which the grace was given:
To this combination of outward sign and inner grace, welded together by Christ, the Church gives the Latin name of sacramentum—a holy thing.
The sacraments are chosen instruments of divine power.
The exact definition of a sacrament is that it is "an outward sign instituted by Christ to give grace." We readily can see that there are three distinct ideas contained in that short definition:
The outward signs are God's way of treating us like the human beings we are. He conveys His unseen grace into our spiritual souls through material symbols which our physical bodies can perceive—things and words and gestures.
The outward signs of the sacraments have two parts: the "thing" itself which is used (water, oil, etc.), and the words or gestures which give significance to what is being done.
We know that no human power could attach an inward grace to an outward sign—not even the divinely guided but humanly applied power of the Church.
Only God can do that.
Which brings us to the second element in the definition of a sacrament: "instituted by Christ."
Between the time He began His public life and the time He ascended into heaven, Jesus fashioned the seven sacraments. When He ascended into heaven, that put an end to the making of sacraments.
The Church cannot institute new sacraments. There never can be more or less than seven, the seven Jesus has given us: Baptism, Confirmation, Holy Eucharist, Reconciliation (Confession or Penance), Anointing of the Sick, Holy Orders, and Matrimony.
Jesus did completely specify the matter and form of some of the sacraments—notably Baptism and the Holy Eucharist. But this does not mean that He necessarily fixed the matter and form of all the sacraments down to the last detail.
Coming now to the third element in the definition of a sacrament, we have its essential purpose: "to give grace."
What kind of grace do the sacraments give?
First and most important of all, they give sanctifying grace. Sanctifying grace is that marvelous supernatural life, that sharing-in-God's-own-life that is the result of God's Love, the Holy Spirit, indwelling in the soul.
The other five sacraments—Confirmation, Holy Eucharist, Anointing of the Sick, Holy Orders, and Matrimony—give an increase in sanctifying grace.
They deepen and intensify the spiritual life of sanctifying grace which already pulsates through the soul. As each additional sacrament is received (and repeated, when it can be) the level of spiritual vitality rises in the soul—somewhat as the brightness of a fire increases as you add more fuel.
(God's love does not increase—it is infinite to begin with. But the soul's capacity to absorb His love increases as a child's capacity for life increases with each meal that he eats.)
If each sacrament gives (or increases) sanctifying grace in the soul, then why did Jesus institute seven sacraments? Wouldn't just one sacrament have been enough, to be received as needed?
Yes, one sacrament would have been enough, if sanctifying grace were the only kind of grace God wanted to give us. But God did not choose simply to give us spiritual life and then let us fend for ourselves.
God gives us the spiritual life which is sanctifying grace, and then does all that He can (short of taking away our free will)...
So in addition to the sanctifying grace which is common to all the sacraments, each sacrament also gives the sacramental grace of that particular sacrament. These are other special helps which God wills to give us, helps keyed to our particular spiritual needs and our particular state in life.
2Corinthians 5:21
You need to step back two lines. In 2 Cor. 5:18, the ministry of reconciliation was given to the ambassadors of the Church. This ministry of reconciliation refers to the sacrament of reconciliation, also called the sacrament of confession or penance.
If a person is incapable of going to Confession, or is sincerely unaware of Jesus' gracious gift of sacramental Confession ("Receive the Holy Ghost; whose sins you shall forgive, they are forgiven them; and whose sins you shall retain, they are retained." John 20:22-23), such a person can till obtain mercy from Christ. God is everywhere. I think we all know that.
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