A Sense of Sin
A priest in Rome has complained that what he calls the sacrament of penance is not drawing the faithful as it once did. He attributes this to a “weakening of the sense of sin”.
One is not surprised that people’s sense of sin should be seriously weakened in an intensely secular age. But it is at most an outward sense of sin that will draw people to Roman Catholic confession and penance. What they need is to recognise that sin is “any want of conformity unto, or transgression of, the law of God” in heart, speech or behaviour. Looked at properly, the law of God consists of the commandments of Scripture, but Rome has added her own tradition. This, like that of the Jews’, has, as the Saviour told them, the effect of making “the commandment of God of none effect”.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church admits that “only God forgives sins”, yet goes on to contradict itself by claiming that the Lord has imparted to His apostles “His own power to forgive sins”. And, without any authority whatever from Scripture, the Catechism goes on to claim that “Christ instituted the sacrament of penance for all sinful members of the Church”. Protestants should be very thankful to be the children of the Reformation, when such unscriptural additions were jettisoned with great spiritual benefit.
The whole system of the confessional, it should be noted, itself contributes to the weakening of a sense of sin. It is cheap forgiveness that is dispensed there – forgiveness dispensed by a fellow mortal, following confession to that fellow mortal, rather than the professed penitent going directly before God through the divinely-appointed Mediator, Jesus Christ. Apart from being in itself unscriptural, this arrangement militates against a real sense of the sinfulness of sin as what is committed against a holy God.