Retention of sins

Discussion in 'Questions?' started by Traveler, Oct 9, 2021.

  1. Invictus

    Invictus Well-Known Member

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    Not really. Such utterances are considered to be declarative and non-sacramental. In no sense are they any kind of substitute for individual, auricular confession in those traditions. The notion of sacramental, general confession is a product of the Reformation.
     
  2. bwallac2335

    bwallac2335 Well-Known Member

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    Not really. https://www.saintgregory-philly.org/religious-traditions/sacraments/
    s Sacrament of Penance is performed in the Armenian Church according to a written formula, through the confessor priest. The Armenian Church is rich by supplications, songs, hymns, and prayers concerning repentance. They are very touching and inspiring and can lead the sinner to repentance when he follows them with sincerity and an open heart.
     
  3. bwallac2335

    bwallac2335 Well-Known Member

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    Aricular confession was an innovation from Ireland.
     
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  4. Invictus

    Invictus Well-Known Member

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    Your quote in no way contradicts what I wrote above. I’m not sure what point you’re trying to make at this point.
    The Orthodox were doing it at a point when contact between Ireland and the Byzantine Empire was effectively lost. Of course the Irish didn’t “invent” it. How silly. :facepalm: Absolution, prior to the Reformation, no matter how it occurred, was understood to be individual and particular, not general.
     
  5. bwallac2335

    bwallac2335 Well-Known Member

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    The link 100 percent contradicts what you wrote. If you click the link you will see that their general confession and absolution is indeed sacramental and they see it as such. My point is you are wrong and not well informed about the oriental orthodox churches and Assyrian church of the east. This just goes to show that confessional forms have varied over place and time and indeed ours is valid
     
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  6. anglican74

    anglican74 Well-Known Member Anglican

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    You are right of course I was speaking of the other side
     
  7. anglican74

    anglican74 Well-Known Member Anglican

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    In the early church all confessions and absolutions were general and there was no individual confession at all

    I remember reading one church father discouraged individual confession because of the abuses it would lead to
     
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  8. Invictus

    Invictus Well-Known Member

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    No, there was no sacramental absolution until the Middle Ages. That’s why common practice in the first centuries was to delay baptism until the last possible moment. Sacramental Confession came into being to accomplish what used to be the province of Baptism. It became necessary once they ran out of pagans to convert, and infant baptism became the norm.
     
  9. Phoenix

    Phoenix Moderator Staff Member Anglican

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    Let us be reminded that such language goes against the forum Terms of Use (which are themselves based on the historic Anglican norms).

    Other than that, please do not let me get in the way of this discussion.
     
  10. Invictus

    Invictus Well-Known Member

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    I don’t see how. The Terms of Service state:
    Since nothing I said ran afoul of the above, I don’t see how the Terms of Service were violated. The goal was (explicitly) to support and affirm traditional Anglican practice, after all.

    One can also affirm that the Bible is inspired and is the Word of God without committing oneself to endorsing modern notions like “factual inerrancy”, as though ‘truth’ were limited to the one category of ‘fact’. If the intent of the Terms of Service is to include concepts like ‘inerrancy’, then they need to say that. (Of course, if they did, I would have no interest in participating in such a discussion, for that matter.) I would think that anything C.S. Lewis said would be acceptable on an Anglican forum, and C.S. Lewis did not believe in inerrancy. If Lewis isn’t Anglican enough for this forum, then neither is most of Anglicanism.
     
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  11. Phoenix

    Phoenix Moderator Staff Member Anglican

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    These are the parts of the quote which are touched by the terms:
     
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  12. Invictus

    Invictus Well-Known Member

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    I’m sorry but that’s simply not correct. The Terms of Service say:
    I never denied (a) that the Scripture is the Word of God, or (b) that it is inspired, or (c) that it teaches anything but the truth.
    ‘Plenary verbal inspiration’ is one particular - and relatively recent - theory of inspiration, which is neither mentioned in the Terms of Service nor does it have a wide following among Anglicans. One need not endorse plenary verbal inspiration specifically to uphold inspiration. And since not all truths are either scientific or historical, but can also be theological, moral, or experiential, among other categories, to apply standard historical methods to the study of Scripture is by no means tantamount to a denial of its truth.
     
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  13. Phoenix

    Phoenix Moderator Staff Member Anglican

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    Okay let us agree that all of scripture is inspired, and is not like any other text in the world, and move on.
     
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  14. AnglicanAgnostic

    AnglicanAgnostic Well-Known Member

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    Yeah maybe Pilot was right, what is truth?
     
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  15. Invictus

    Invictus Well-Known Member

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    Aristotle’s definition is the most basic:
    Truth is “to say of that which is, that it is, and to say of that which is not, that it is not.”
    Likewise, falsity is “to say of that which is, that it is not, and of that which is not, that it is.”
    So, determining the “that which is” in each passage of Scripture is the key exegetical question. Consider one of my favorite passages, Psalm 91:
    One could interpret these two verses to mean a lot of different things. Is it saying that God literally has feathers and wings? Or is it using imagery to communicate something else? And how do we know this? Figuring out the “that which is” of a passage is the most important step in determining what particular truth it intends to teach.
     
  16. Traveler

    Traveler Member

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    By sufficiently penitent, I mean the same thing expressed in your excerpt from the 1662 BCP:

    I'm not following what is meant by declarative versus effective.
     
  17. Invictus

    Invictus Well-Known Member

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    Declarative is basically the priest praying for God's forgiveness for the penitents; Effective is the priest saying "I absolve you, etc." We can quibble over the terminology, but I think the point is that prior to the Reformation era, such statements made in a liturgical setting were not to be understood sacramentally; one had to make private confession to a priest to receive sacramental absolution. The churches of the Reformation wanted to retain the idea of the Church having the authority to forgive sins but wanted to get away from the system of penances and indulgences. So they took the "general confessions" and started treating them as quasi-sacramental. It was an innovation.
     
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  18. bwallac2335

    bwallac2335 Well-Known Member

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    Except I literally linked you to the Armenian Church and their sacraments about confession and they do it in the general style and they see it as a sacrament. It is a historical proven fact that in the Western Church there was no private confession until the Irish monks brought it to the continent. You can repeat what you say until you are blue in the face but historically it is wrong for the western church and it is wrong in regards to no one doing general confession as a sacrament until the reformation.
     
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  19. bwallac2335

    bwallac2335 Well-Known Member

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    https://aleteia.org/2018/08/06/enjoy-going-to-confession-in-private-thank-the-irish/


    In Ireland, monks built upon the foundations of Cassian and developed a system of confession that was entirely private, including the private recitation of sins and the private performance of penance. While it is true that private confession existed from the very beginning of the Church, it wasn’t utilized for all sins until the influence of Irish monks.

    The Irish also developed the tradition of a “soul friend,” or anamchara in Gaelic. This was essentially a private spiritual director, with whom you shared all of your struggles and sins.


    It was during the 7th century that Irish monks started to take these traditions of confession to Europe. As the Catechism narrates, “During the seventh century Irish missionaries, inspired by the Eastern monastic tradition, took to continental Europe the ‘private’ practice of penance, which does not require public and prolonged completion of penitential works before reconciliation with the Church. From that time on, the sacrament has been performed in secret between penitent and priest” (CCC 1447).

    a separate tradition began to develop in the Egyptian desert. It was there that Egyptian monks began to assemble together to build monastic communities and within those communities they developed a distinctive way of confessing sins.

    St. John Cassian in particular promoted a form of private confession that he learned from these desert monks and took it with him when founding a monastery in France. Cassian’s writings were later taken to Ireland and it is there that they found fertile soil.

    So as you can see in both East and West private confession at once was a innovation and was not part of the early practice of the church be developed basically out of monasteries.
     
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  20. bwallac2335

    bwallac2335 Well-Known Member

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    https://www.wdacna.com/sacrament
    PENANCE (ABASHKHAROOTIUN) ԱՊԱՇԽԱՐՀՈՒԹԻՒՆ
    he history of this sacrament is long and complex. It begins, of course, with Jesus Christ. Christ gave power to the holy apostles to bind and loose sins. Sin is traditionally defined as "disobedience" or alienation from God which causes us to hate ourselves and be distant from others.

    If we confess our sins, God is always ready to forgive us, just as the father did the prodigal son. Christian confession and even confession in the Old Testament was always public confession. There was no notion that confession be other than a public one. Over the years, it evolved into a "private" confession where Christians would reveal their sins to a priest. It is the practice of the Armenian Church to endorse both private and public forms of confession. The more practiced is the public one where those ready to take communion first step forward and confess their sins as a group ("megha Asdoodzoh"... I have sinned against God...).

    The present form of confession is a shortened version of St. Ephraim the Syrian's 10 confessional statements. It was originally introduced into the Armenian Church by St. Gregory the Illuminator and translated from the Syriac by Sts. Mesrob and Sahag.

    It is through this sacrament of healing that humankind is restored and reconciled with God. But of course, forgiveness can only become complete and genuine when we ourselves are forgiving.
     
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