Rome and the Confessional
The Church of Rome arrogates to herself the power of forgiving sins, a power which God has reserved to Himself alone. While Romanists formally concede that only God can forgive sin, they hold that He does so through the priesthood. This blasphemous claim is put into effect through the institution of auricular confession (confessing in the hearing of a priest). Rome has invented a sacrament – that of “penance” – to bolster its hold over the consciences and conduct of its victims. Auricular confession is extremely dangerous to the souls of men and tends to demoralise both the one making the confession and the priest who hears it. The pronouncing of forgiveness – generally as a matter of course – tends to deaden the moral sense of guilt and personal responsibility and thus make sinners careless about their state before that God who alone can see into the hearts of men.
Little wonder that the Reformers called the confessional the “slaughterhouse of consciences”. They recognised how ruinous the teaching and practice of Rome must be to sinners with guilt on their consciences and in need of real forgiveness. Instead of directing such sinners to Christ, the doctrine of penance has the effect of hardening the heart under a false sense of peace where there is no true peace. Only through justification by faith in Christ can we have peace with God (Rom 5:1).
Rome makes pronouncing of forgiveness by the priest essential to obtaining pardon for sins committed after baptism and does so by misinterpreting the Saviour’s words in John 20:23 to the apostles, “Whose soever sins ye remit, they are remitted unto them; and whose soever sins ye retain, they are retained”. The ministers of the Church of Christ may pronounce the shutting out of the offender from the Church’s fellowship by the key of Church discipline, when a case of sin requiring censure has been brought to their attention. When they see hopeful evidence of repentance and amendment of life, they are to open the door of Church fellowship once more.
But using the key of discipline in this way does not make any absolute statement about the state of the person’s soul before the Judge of all the earth. Here is where Rome’s view fundamentally differs from the biblical, Protestant position. We are not entitled to say that sin is forgiven simply on
the basis of the outward act of confession and the accompanying priestly declaration of absolution. Without genuine, gracious repentance wrought in the heart by the Spirit of the Lord, on the foundation of Christ’s merit alone, there can be no forgiveness.
Rome holds the view that true contrition of heart would obtain forgiveness without recourse to the priest and the confessional. But they hold that very few attain this degree of grace. They then fabricate a lesser degree of sorrow for sin which they entitle “attrition”, which involves fear of hell and desire to amend. When attrition is joined with confession, the priest is to pronounce absolution and forgiveness. He may, of course, prescribe certain “penances” of varying kinds. Attrition, as William Cunningham notes, is more like the sorrow of the world which works death.
Here again we have a subtle yet deadly perversion of Scripture truth in an area most vital to the salvation of the soul and the purging of the conscience. What Rome has done by constructing her false doctrine of penance and confession is to substitute the power of the Church in place of the merit of Christ. Again, we see the spirit of antichrist at work, putting the institutional Church in the place of Christ Himself. Cunningham’s words are sobering: “Thus has the Church of Rome, in order to lay a foundation for acquiring a knowledge of all men’s actions, and gaining a tyrannical control over their consciences, made deliberate provision for sending her unhappy victims down to hell with a lie in their right hand.”1 AWM