The Sacrament of Penance
The Second Plank and the Medieval Departure from the Gospel
o sacrament shaped the daily religion
of medieval Christians more than penance. Baptism was received once, in infancy. The Mass was watched
far more often than it was received. But penance was the sacrament of the Christian who had sinned
since baptism, and that included every Christian. It governed the conscience, filled the confessional,
set the price of forgiveness in prayers, fasts, pilgrimages, and alms, and at last gave birth to the
traffic in indulgences that provoked the Reformation.
Its place in the medieval church can be summarized in two lines:
Very important in the medieval church! The plank by which baptism is restored.1
R. C. Sproul observed that “the sacrament of penance was at the heart of the problem that erupted in the sixteenth century,” because its acts of satisfaction made justification depend on merit after all.2 The formation of this sacrament was one of the chief means by which the medieval church departed from the gospel. Where Scripture offers the sinner free forgiveness in Christ, received by faith, the sacrament of penance offered a process: sorrow of the right kind, the enumeration of every mortal sin to a priest, a judicial sentence of absolution, and satisfaction to be paid in this life or in purgatory. This article traces how that system arose, sets out its essential teaching, and hears the answer of the Reformers and of the Word of God.
Background: Repentance and the Keys
The New Testament calls sinners to repentance. John the Baptist and Jesus both preached, “Repent ye: for the kingdom of heaven is at hand” (Matthew 3:2; 4:17). The Greek word metanoia means a change of mind and heart, a turning from sin to God. The Latin Vulgate, however, rendered the command poenitentiam agite, a phrase that “could mean either to repent (penitence) or to do penance.”3 Over the centuries the second meaning swallowed the first. Repentance, a gift of God worked in the heart, became penance, a ritual administered by the church.
Rome grounds the sacrament in the words of the risen Christ to his disciples: “Receive ye the Holy Ghost: Whose soever sins ye remit, they are remitted unto them; and whose soever sins ye retain, they are retained” (John 20:22–23). The Council of Trent taught that “the Lord then especially instituted the sacrament of penance” and that “the power of remitting and retaining sins was communicated to the apostles and their lawful successors.” It condemned those who “falsely wrest those words to the power of preaching the word of God, and of announcing the Gospel of Christ.”4 The whole question, then, is whether the keys of the kingdom are the gospel preached, which looses every believer, or a judicial power held by priests.
History: From Public Discipline to Private Confession
The Ancient Discipline
The early church took post-baptismal sin with great seriousness. Those guilty of grave public sins such as idolatry, murder, or adultery were excluded from communion and restored only after public penance. The Catechism of the Catholic Church describes it: “penitents had to do public penance for their sins, often for years, before receiving reconciliation. To this ‘order of penitents’ (which concerned only certain grave sins), one was only rarely admitted and in certain regions only once in a lifetime” (§1447). This was church discipline aimed at the restoration of the offender and the purity of the congregation. Calvin noted that these satisfactions “had reference to the peace of the Church, and not to the throne of God.”5
Already the seeds of later trouble were present. The fathers spoke of penance as a “laborious baptism,” and Tertullian and Jerome called it “a second plank after shipwreck.”6 Martyrs and confessors could shorten a penitent’s term by issuing “peace-letters,” an early form of the later indulgence.7
The Rise of Private Penance
A decisive change came in the early Middle Ages. “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. This new practice envisioned the possibility of repetition and so opened the way to a regular frequenting of this sacrament” (§1447).
Private penance required tariffs. Confessors used “penitential books,” which assigned a set penance for each sin and which “often gave contradictory directions and lacked ecclesiastical approbation.” Then came commutation. The “penitential redemptions,” which originated in England, “contained directions for commuting canonical penances into other good works, especially prayers and alms.” The wealthy hired substitutes to perform their penances. Germanic law allowed offenders to pay money in place of punishment, and “this practice was to some extent officially countenanced by the Council of Tribur (895).”8
The crusades carried the process further. Since the Council of Clermont (1095), participation in a crusade served as “a universal substitute for all penances,” and “subsequently indulgences were granted to those who were unable or unwilling to ‘take the cross,’ but gave money for the equipment of crusaders.” By the twelfth century the revenues from penances were funding churches, hospitals, bridges, and roads; these sums “were commonly called ‘penitential pennies.’”9
With the money came a reversal in the order of the rite. In the ancient church a penitent was reconciled only after completing his penance. Now, Pohle and Preuss write, “absolution was now given immediately after confession,” and the penance followed.10 The form of absolution changed too. The ancient rituals used a prayer, asking God to forgive the penitent. Between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries the Latin church adopted the indicative formula, “Ego te absolvo,” “I absolve thee.” Rome’s own theologians concede that “the most ancient rituals, sacramentaries, pontificals, penitentials, etc., all without exception give the deprecative formula only, proves that their authors knew no other.”11 The priest no longer prayed for the sinner’s forgiveness; he pronounced it.
Development: Lateran, the Schoolmen, and Trent
Three developments completed the system. The first was legal. In 1215 the Fourth Lateran Council, under Pope Innocent III, issued the canon Omnis utriusque sexus, by which “all the faithful who have arrived at the age of discretion are commanded to confess their sins at least once a year to their parish priest under pain of exclusion from the Church.”12 Private confession to a priest, once a pastoral practice, was now the law of the whole Western church. Calvin later pointed out that “twelve hundred years elapsed after the resurrection of Christ before any such law was made.”13
The second was theological. The Schoolmen of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries fixed the number of the sacraments at seven and analyzed penance into its matter and form. The acts of the penitent, contrition, confession, and satisfaction, became the matter; the priest’s words of absolution, the form. They also developed the doctrine of the treasury of merit. “By the ‘thesaurus ecclesiae’ we understand the sum-total of the superabundant merits of Jesus Christ and His saints, which are stored up in the Church for the purpose of being applied to the faithful by means of indulgences.” The fully developed concept “seems to have originated with Alexander of Hales or Albert the Great.”14 Pope Clement VI’s bull Unigenitus (1343) made the treasury official teaching.
The third was dogmatic. When the Reformers attacked the system, the Council of Trent answered in its fourteenth session (November 25, 1551) with nine chapters and fifteen canons on penance, one of the fullest treatments it gave any sacrament. It defined penance as a sacrament distinct from baptism, a tribunal in which the priest sits as judge, and a work that requires “many tears and labours on our part, the divine justice demanding this; so that penance has with reason been styled by holy fathers a laborious kind of baptism.”15 Its second canon anathematized anyone who said that penance “is not rightly called ‘a second plank after shipwreck.’”16 The council also placed the sacrament inside its decree on justification. Anyone who said that a person who has fallen after baptism can recover justice “by faith alone, without the sacrament of penance,” was anathema.17
The Essential Teaching of Penance
The sacrament may be understood under six heads: the second plank, genuine contrition, oral confession with the priest’s examination and absolution, the satisfaction he imposes, and the indulgences that remit it. Trent counts three acts of the penitent, “contrition, confession, and satisfaction,” which “are as it were the matter of this sacrament,” and places the form in the priest’s words, “I absolve thee.”18 The Catechism links indulgences directly to this sacrament: “The doctrine and practice of indulgences in the Church are closely linked to the effects of the sacrament of Penance” (§1471).
1. The Second Plank after Shipwreck
Rome teaches that baptism removes all sin and infuses the grace of justification. That grace, however, can be lost. A mortal sin kills it, and the baptized Christian is then in the state of the shipwrecked. Penance is the plank that brings him back to shore. The Catechism of the Council of Trent explained the image:
For as after shipwreck, only one hope of saving one’s life remains, to seize perchance on some plank from the wreck, so, after the loss of baptismal innocence, unless a man cling to the plank of penance, without doubt all hope of his salvation must be abandoned.19
Trent made the necessity explicit: “this sacrament of penance is necessary unto salvation for those who have fallen after baptism; even as baptism itself is for those who have not as yet been regenerated.”20 The present Catechism repeats that the sacrament is for those who “since Baptism, have fallen into grave sin, and have thus lost their baptismal grace,” offering them “a new possibility to convert and to recover the grace of justification” (§1446). Sproul explains what this means: “There is a way by which that person’s justification can be restored. This restoration of justification also happens via a sacrament.”21 Justification is no longer a once-for-all verdict of God, but a condition that can be lost and regained through the church.
Everything depends on the line between mortal and venial sin. Mortal sins must be confessed and absolved; venial sins “may be passed over without guilt, and be expiated by many other remedies.”22 Yet the penitent cannot always tell which is which, and the burden of discerning falls on his own conscience. See Mortal and Venial Sins.
2. Contrition: How Sorry Must One Be?
The first act of the penitent is sorrow for sin, and it raised the question every medieval penitent faced: “Genuine contrition (genuinely sorry for your sins): how sorry do you have to be?” The answer distinguished two kinds of sorrow: “attrition (sorry that you were caught)” and “contrition (sorry that you offended God).”23
Trent defined contrition as “a sorrow of mind, and a detestation for the sin committed, with the purpose of not sinning for the future.” Perfect contrition springs from love for God. But the council also approved the lesser sorrow, which arises “either from the consideration of the turpitude of sin, or from the fear of hell and of punishments”:
And although this [attrition] cannot of itself, without the sacrament of penance, bring the sinner unto justification, yet does it dispose him to obtain the grace of God in the sacrament of penance.24
The Catechism teaches the same: imperfect contrition “is born of the consideration of sin’s ugliness or the fear of eternal damnation,” and while it “cannot obtain the forgiveness of grave sins,” it “disposes one to obtain forgiveness in the sacrament of Penance” (§1452, §1453). The practical result is plain. A sinner whose sorrow is only fear of hell may be forgiven, provided the priest absolves him. The sacrament supplies what the heart lacks. The sinner who wants to know whether he is forgiven must look to the adequacy of his sorrow, or to the priest, but not to Christ alone.
3. Oral Confession: The Priest Examines
The second act is confession to a priest, whose first task was to “examine you.”25 Trent required that every mortal sin be told, with its circumstances, so that the priest could judge:
Hence it is gathered that all the deadly sins, of which, after a diligent examination of themselves, they have consciousness, must needs be enumerated by penitents in confession, even though those sins be most hidden, and committed only against the two last precepts of the decalogue. . . . But they who act otherwise, and knowingly keep back certain [sins], set nothing before the divine bounty to be remitted through the priest.26
The council insisted that this confession is “of divine right necessary to all who have fallen after baptism” and rejected as “vain calumny” the charge that it “took its rise from the fathers assembled in the Council of Lateran.” It also rejected, by name, the Reformers’ complaint that such confession was “a slaughterhouse of consciences.”27 The Catechism still teaches that “confession to a priest is an essential part of the sacrament of Penance,” that the faithful must confess serious sins “at least once a year,” and that “children must go to the sacrament of Penance before receiving Holy Communion for the first time” (§1456, §1457).
Rome’s own theologians admit the weakness of the scriptural case. Pohle and Preuss write that “sacramental confession is nowhere expressly mentioned in Holy Scripture, and hence none of the texts frequently quoted in this connection is strictly conclusive.”28
4. Absolution: The Priest as Judge
Having examined the penitent, the priest absolves him. Rome does not regard this as a declaration of the gospel promise but as a sentence. Trent taught that absolution is “not a bare ministry only, whether of announcing the Gospel, or of declaring that sins are remitted, but is after the manner of a judicial act, which by sentence is pronounced by the priest as by a judge.”29 Its ninth canon anathematized anyone who called it “a bare ministry of pronouncing and declaring sins to be remitted.”30 The Catechism of the Council of Trent told the penitent to see in the confessor “his legitimate judge” and to “venerate the person and power of Christ the Lord.”31
Because absolution is a judgment, it depends on jurisdiction. Bishops and the pope may reserve certain sins to themselves, so that an ordinary priest’s absolution “ought to be of no moment” in those cases.32 The Catechism still teaches that certain grave sins incur an excommunication from which absolution can be granted only “by the Pope, the bishop of the place or priests authorized by them” (§1463). Forgiveness has become a matter of ecclesiastical jurisdiction. See Holy Orders.
5. Satisfaction: Paying the Temporal Penalty
Absolution, in Rome’s system, forgives the guilt of sin and the eternal punishment, but not all the punishment. The priest would “absolve you, if you perform the satisfaction required (imposed by the priest) to demonstrate your contrition to pay for the temporal penalties for your sin.”33 Trent declared it “absolutely false, and alien from the word of God, that the guilt is never remitted by the Lord, without the whole punishment also being pardoned.”34 Its canons follow:
If any one shall say, that the whole punishment is always remitted by God, together with the guilt, and that the satisfaction of penitents is no other than the faith whereby they learn that Christ hath made satisfaction for them; let him be anathema. . . . If any one shall say, that the satisfactions, by which penitents redeem their sins through Christ Jesus, are not a worship of God, but traditions of men, obscuring the doctrine of grace, and the true worship of God, and the benefit itself of the death of Christ; let him be anathema.35
Satisfaction is made by “fastings, prayers, almsgivings, or by other works also of piety,” by penances the priest imposes, and by suffering patiently borne.36 The Catechism of the Council of Trent defined it as “that compensation by which a man makes some reparation to God for the sins that he has committed.”37 The present Catechism uses gentler language, saying the sinner “must ‘make satisfaction for’ or ‘expiate’ his sins” (§1459). What is not satisfied in this life must be purified “after death in the state called Purgatory” (§1472). See Purgatory.
Rome insists that such satisfaction is “not so much ours as though it were not done through Jesus Christ” (§1460). But the effect is the one Sproul describes. These works “produce congruous merit. This is real merit, but it is dependent on previous grace. It simply makes it congruous, or fitting, for God to restore the person to a state of grace.”38 Grace and merit, Christ and the penitent, together pay the debt.
6. Indulgences: Remitting the Satisfaction
Here the sacrament reached its most notorious form. If the church could impose satisfaction, it could also remit it:
The church forgiving the satisfactions you owe in the sacrament of penance. If you obtain from the church an indulgence then you are exempted from paying the satisfaction element of penance. Most people equated the indulgence with the full sacrament of penance, but it only involved the satisfaction element. The church effectively commercialized its spirituality.39
Rome’s definition remains in force: “An indulgence is a remission before God of the temporal punishment due to sins whose guilt has already been forgiven, which the faithful Christian who is duly disposed gains under certain prescribed conditions through the action of the Church which, as the minister of redemption, dispenses and applies with authority the treasury of the satisfactions of Christ and the saints” (§1471). Indulgences may be applied to the living or to the dead, and “through indulgences the faithful can obtain the remission of temporal punishment resulting from sin for themselves and also for the souls in Purgatory” (§1498).
In theory an indulgence touched only the satisfaction, not the guilt. In practice the people heard what the preachers of indulgences proclaimed, and paid for what they took to be forgiveness. Luther’s thirty-fourth thesis drew the line exactly: “For the grace conveyed by these pardons has respect only to the penalties of sacramental satisfaction, which are of human appointment.”40 The sale of indulgences for the rebuilding of St. Peter’s in Rome was the spark of the Reformation, but the fuel was the sacrament of penance itself. See Indulgences.
The Reformers’ Response
Luther: The Whole Life of Believers Should Be Repentance
The Reformation began with a thesis on penance. On October 31, 1517, Luther posted ninety-five theses “concerning penitence and indulgences.” The first two struck at the root of the system:
1. Our Lord and Master Jesus Christ in saying: “Repent ye,” etc., intended that the whole life of believers should be penitence. 2. This word cannot be understood of sacramental penance, that is, of the confession and satisfaction which are performed under the ministry of priests.41
Two years later, in his sermon The Sacrament of Penance (1519), Luther still spoke of penance as a sacrament, but he rebuilt it on a different foundation. Forgiveness rests not on the quality of the penitent’s sorrow but on the promise of Christ received by faith:
It follows, then, in the first place, that the forgiveness of guilt, the heavenly indulgence, is granted to no one on account of the worthiness of his contrition over his sins, nor on account of his works of satisfaction, but only on account of his faith in the promise of God, “Whatever you loose . . . shall be loosed,” etc.42
From this Luther drew a conclusion that undid the judicial power of the priest: “the forgiveness of guilt is not within the province of any human office or authority, be it pope, bishop, priest, or any other. Rather it depends exclusively upon the word of Christ and your own faith.”43 The keys, he said, are not a power over the church but a service to it: “the keys or the authority of St. Peter is not an authority at all but a service; and the keys have not been given to St. Peter but to you and me.”44 And against the uncertainty the system bred, he urged the troubled to trust the word of absolution, for “you should not be debating in the first place whether or not your contrition is sufficient. Rather you should be assured of this, that after all your efforts your contrition is not sufficient.”45
In The Babylonian Captivity of the Church (1520) Luther examined each part of the sacrament. Of contrition, he wrote that Rome had made it “prior to faith in the promise, and far better as not being a work of faith, but a merit,” and that the doctrine of attrition “by the virtue of the keys . . . may become contrition” did away with true sorrow altogether.46 He did not reject private confession; he valued it as “the one great remedy for afflicted consciences,” but he protested “the conversion of this institution of confession into a means of tyranny and extortion by the bishops.”47 Of satisfaction he wrote:
These monstrous evils we owe to thee, See of Rome, and to thy homicidal laws and rites, by which thou hast brought the world to such a point of ruin, that they think they can make satisfaction to God for their sins by works, while it is only by the faith of a contrite heart that He is satisfied.48
By the end of the same treatise Luther ceased to count penance among the sacraments, for it lacked a visible sign instituted by Christ.49 Its substance, he concluded, belongs to baptism: repentance is the daily return to the promise God made to us there.
Zwingli: God Alone Remits Sin
Zwingli’s Sixty-Seven Articles (1523) addressed the subject under the heading “About Remittance of Sin.” “God alone remits sin through Jesus Christ, his Son, and alone our Lord,” and “who assigns this to created beings detracts from the honor of God and gives it to him who is not God; this is real idolatry.”50 Confession to a priest, he continued, “shall not be declared to be a remittance of sin, but only a seeking for advice,” and penitential works do not cancel sin, for “Christ has borne all our pains and labor. Therefore whoever assigns to works of penance what belongs to Christ errs and slanders God.”51
Calvin: The Honor of Christ and the Peace of the Conscience
Calvin devoted a long chapter of the Institutes (3.4) to the schoolmen’s doctrine of penance. He saw that its demand for adequate contrition and complete confession tormented the very consciences it claimed to heal. “By this ruinous procedure, the souls of those who were affected with some sense of God have been most cruelly racked.”52 The Reformed doctrine, by contrast, was “that the soul looked not to its own compunction or its own tears, but fixed both eyes on the mercy of God alone.”53 Against satisfaction Calvin set two things that must never be compromised:
Here it is necessary to keep two things in view: that the honor of Christ be preserved entire and unimpaired, and that the conscience, assured of the pardon of sin, may have peace with God. . . . Then, in regard to pacifying the conscience, what pacification will it be to be told that sins are redeemed by satisfactions? How will it be able to ascertain the measure of satisfaction? It will always doubt whether God is propitious; will always fluctuate, always tremble.54
Calvin also rejected the “second plank.” If penance is called the plank after shipwreck, it implies that baptism has been lost, when in truth baptism should be “recalled to the mind of the sinner whenever he thinks of the forgiveness of sins, that he may thereby recollect himself, regain courage, and be confirmed in the belief that he shall obtain the forgiveness of sins which was promised him in baptism.”55 His verdict on the sacrament was brief: “Their fiction of the sacrament of penance, therefore, was falsehood and imposture,” because it has no special promise of God and its ceremony is “a mere invention of man.”56
Penance and Scripture
Scripture commands repentance, not penance. “Godly sorrow worketh repentance to salvation not to be repented of” (2 Corinthians 7:10). Repentance is a turning of the whole person to God, granted by God himself (Acts 11:18; 2 Timothy 2:25). It is the lifelong posture of faith, as Luther’s first thesis said, not a sacrament to be repeated before a priest.
God alone forgives sins, and he does so freely. “Who can forgive sins but God only?” (Mark 2:7). “I, even I, am he that blotteth out thy transgressions for mine own sake, and will not remember thy sins” (Isaiah 43:25). David confessed to God and was forgiven: “I said, I will confess my transgressions unto the LORD; and thou forgavest the iniquity of my sin” (Psalm 32:5). “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness” (1 John 1:9). Believers are to “confess your faults one to another” (James 5:16), but nowhere are they commanded to enumerate every sin to a priest.
The keys are the gospel. The commission of John 20:23 is the same commission Luke records: “that repentance and remission of sins should be preached in his name among all nations” (Luke 24:47). The apostles exercised the keys by preaching. Peter declared at Pentecost, “Repent, and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the remission of sins” (Acts 2:38), and at Caesarea, “through his name whosoever believeth in him shall receive remission of sins” (Acts 10:43). Sins are remitted when the gospel is believed, and retained when it is refused.
Christ’s satisfaction is complete. “He was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities: the chastisement of our peace was upon him” (Isaiah 53:5). The punishment of our sin fell on Christ, not partly on Christ and partly on us. “By one offering he hath perfected for ever them that are sanctified. . . . Now where remission of these is, there is no more offering for sin” (Hebrews 10:14, 18). “There is therefore now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus” (Romans 8:1), neither eternal nor temporal. When God disciplines his children, he does so as a Father for their profit, not as a creditor collecting a debt (Hebrews 12:5–11).
Justification is not lost and regained. “Therefore being justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ” (Romans 5:1). The believer who sins does not need a second justification but an Advocate: “If any man sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous: And he is the propitiation for our sins” (1 John 2:1–2). Those whom God justifies, he glorifies (Romans 8:30).
The believer may draw near with full assurance. “Let us draw near with a true heart in full assurance of faith, having our hearts sprinkled from an evil conscience” (Hebrews 10:22). The sacrament of penance could never give that assurance, because it rested on the sinner’s sorrow, his memory, the priest’s judgment, and an unpaid debt of satisfaction. The gospel gives it because it rests on Christ.
B. B. Warfield summarized the Reformation in words that might stand over the ruins of the medieval confessional:
Not works, but faith; not our merit, but God’s grace in Christ; not our own penances and satisfactions, but the merit of Christ only. When we hear these cries we are hearing the very pulse-beats of the Reformation as a force among men.57
See also Roman Catholic Justification, Indulgences, Purgatory, and The Seven Sacraments.
Scripture quotations are from the King James Version.
