Documenti di Didattica
Documenti di Professioni
Documenti di Cultura
RUSHDOONY
The Cure of
SOULS
Recovering
of Confession
Chalcedon
PO Box 158 * Vallecito, CA 95251
www.ChalcedonStore.com
This volume is dedicated to
Dr. Ellsworth McIntyre
and the staff members of
Grace Community Schools, Naples, Florida
in great appreciation
for their generous support
of the work of my father.
I
II THE CURE OF SOULS
confession, both Protestantism and Roman Catholicism have dis-
tanced themselves from Biblical teaching concerning confession.
For Protestantism, however, the term confession is so inti-
mately bound up with its views of the Catholic confessional that
the term has become a virtual shibboleth. As the phrase goes, Prot-
estants see nothing but bathwater when they look at anything
related to the idea of confession: there is no Biblical baby in the
Roman Catholic bathwater, so all must be thrown out. Rushdoony
himself comments on the hazards of even touching on this topic:
Another related example of the dereliction of many churches can
be cited. Because portions of this work on confession appeared in
The Chalcedon Report in 1991, I learned second-hand of a pastor’s
opinion that “Rushdoony is on the road to Rome!” If to believe
that sin must be confessed is “Romanism,” then these people are
not reading their Bibles. (p. 201)
Because both Protestant and Roman Catholic branches of Chris-
tendom claim to possess the God-sanctioned perspective on confes-
sion, this book will offend readers in both camps who have
canonized those perspectives so far as to insulate them against Bib-
lical teaching. This is the danger of turning a Biblical issue into an
ecclesiastical one: it can then only be read in ecclesiastical terms,
which is to prejudge the Biblical issue in advance. A wholesale re-
construction of the matter of confession is ruled out a priori: as
we’ve been warned, our traditions make void the law of God.
It takes a very bold writer to take on the sacred cows on both
sides of the aisle. Rushdoony didn’t go forward with this book out
of any interest to stir the pot, but rather to recover the foundations
of the Biblical doctrine that got lost in the tumult of church fisti-
cuffs. This isn’t merely an academic or abstract matter, as the author
fully documents: the repercussions of this loss of the Biblical per-
spective have cut a wide swath of destruction and misery across all
the societies affected by it. Why? Because, first, we’ve lost the ben-
efits of the Biblical perspective and thus suffered the consequent
harm that this loss invariably entails at the individual, church, and
cultural level. Second, we’ve distributed a multitude of false forms of
confession across our individual and corporate mental landscapes,
which have wrought incalculable harm to humanity. Denying the
FOREWORD III
— Martin G. Selbrede
Preface
The Meaning
of Confession
A Sermon on Romans 10:1–11
1. Brethren, my heart’s desire and prayer to God for Israel is, that
they might be saved.
2. For I bear them record that they have a zeal of God, but not ac-
cording to knowledge.
3. For they being ignorant of God’s righteousness, and going about
to establish their own righteousness, have not submitted them-
selves unto the righteousness of God.
4. For Christ is the end of the law for righteousness to every one
that believeth.
5. For Moses describeth the righteousness which is of the law, That
the man which doeth those things shall live by them.
6. But the righteousness which is of faith speaketh on this wise, Say
not in thine heart, Who shall ascend into heaven? (that is, to bring
Christ down from above:)
7. Or, Who shall descend into the deep? (that is, to bring up Christ
again from the dead.)
8. But what saith it? The word is nigh thee, even in thy mouth, and
in thy heart: that is, the word of faith, which we preach;
9. That if thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and
shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised him from the dead,
thou shalt be saved.
10. For with the heart man believeth unto righteousness; and with
the mouth confession is made unto salvation.
11. For the scripture saith, Whosoever believeth on him shall not
be ashamed.
1
2 THE CURE OF SOULS
the sin (either to the elders of the church, or to the group or indi-
vidual affected by the offense).
Second, confession of sins is a very minor, incidental meaning
of the word confession in Scripture. The word confession is not pri-
marily associated with the confession of sins but with confessing
Christ.
Paul clearly says, “If thou shalt confess with thy mouth the
Lord Jesus, and shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised
him from the dead, thou shalt be saved.” Our Lord also spoke of
confession in the same manner when He said to His disciples that
all they who confessed Him, He would confess before His Father
in heaven, and all who would deny Him, He would deny before
His Father in heaven. The basic scriptural meaning of confession
then is not confession of sins, but confession of Jesus Christ as our
Lord and Savior.
Confession of sins was introduced into the church because of
a false faith. It was an attempt whereby men sought to atone for
their sins. It was a substitute means of salvation. The mindset that
led to the early church’s confession systems was the very thing Paul
spoke of in the tenth chapter of Romans when he stated that Israel’s
zeal, though undoubted, was not a zeal according to knowledge.
Theirs was a zeal, said Paul, operating in behalf of their own righ-
teousness: they sought to establish their own righteousness before
God.
When men seek to establish their own righteousness before
God, they seek to do it by justifying themselves. One step in justi-
fying themselves is to make atonement for their sins. Therefore, the
Judaizing, legalistic influences working in the church led inexo-
rably to each subsequent system of public confession of sins. The
sinner, in order to put himself in a right relationship with God,
submitted himself to certain acts of penance, and performed cer-
tain ritual duties, in order to make atonement for his sins.
All the rules and regulations concerning the confession of sins
that marked the early church from the second century forward led
inevitably to the Roman Catholic Church, to a system whereby
man worked out his salvation, offering atonement for his sins
THE MEANING OF CONFESSION 7
with their own nature to gain victory over sin. Paul declared they
indeed had a zeal, but not after knowledge, because those who
would seek to be righteous under the law must become perfect
under the law, and this is impossible. Rather, we have the Word,
which is near to us, nigh to our own hearts, that “if thou shalt con-
fess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and shalt believe in thine heart
that God hath raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved. For
with the heart man believeth unto righteousness; and with the
mouth confession is made unto salvation. For the scripture saith,
Whosoever believeth on him shall not be ashamed.”
By this simple act of confession of faith in Jesus Christ, the
whole burden of sin is forever removed. By this simple act of con-
fession of faith in Jesus Christ, we step from the realm of sin into
the realm of God’s righteousness in Jesus Christ. This is the glory
of our faith. We do not need to deal with our sins. Christ deals with
them for us, and having once and for all dealt with them for us, His
victory is a permanent one. Therefore, let us gladly confess Jesus
Christ as Lord and Savior.
1
11
12 THE CURE OF SOULS
This latter practice was by the 1930s at the very least uncommon
in English-speaking countries, but it was no less an aspect of the
doctrine.
In the 1970s and the 1980s, many seemingly new develop-
ments have occurred, i.e., public confessions, public announce-
ments of offenses, and so on. However, none of these practices are
new, however much some find them so because of their renewed
prominence. In the 1930s, the Oxford Movement, or Buchman-
ites, strongly stressed public confessions before the entire group.
The roots of such practices go deeper.
The early church adopted the form of government and the
practices of the synagogue, the “office” of elders, the conduct of
worship, oversight of members, and much, much more. In the
Greek text of James 2:2, the word “assembly” is synagogue. The
word church translates ecclesia, which in the Greek version of the
Old Testament is used for assembly, synagogue, and so on. The
church saw itself as the true synagogue.
According to the Jewish view, “In the Bible the confession of
sin committed either individually or collectively is an essential pre-
requisite for expiation and atonement.”2 In the medieval era, con-
fession of sins as a preface to the Day of Atonement became a
requirement, in part due to the influence of Maimonides. Within
the Church, confession had also begun to precede communion. In
the synagogue, confession was made directly to God, although
some sixteenth-century cabbalistic ascetics confessed one to
another. However, religious leaders could and did exhort the dying
to confess their sins, and rabbis did prompt criminals about to be
executed to say, “May my death be an expiation for all my sins.”3
Confession is linked closely to excommunication in both
Judaism and Christianity. St. Paul in 1 Corinthians 5:1-8 calls for
the excommunication of a sinning member who does not see his
offense as a sin.
4. Uriel Acosta, A Specimen of Human Life (New York, NY: Bergman, 1967), 14n.
5. Ibid., 74.
6. Ibid., 73.
THE CONFESSION OF SINS 15
False Confession
19
20 THE CURE OF SOULS
act. This moral confusion has infiltrated the churches, clergy and
laity, and is emphatically heretical. Words have become more
important than acts, and can cancel acts. The confusion of words
with acts is dealt with by Jesus in Matthew 21:28-32:
28. But what think ye? A certain man had two sons; and he came
to the first, and said, Son, go work today in my vineyard.
29. He answered and said, I will not: but afterward he repented
and went.
30. And he came to the second, and said likewise. And he answered
and said, I go, sir: and went not.
31. Whether of them twain did the will of his father? They say unto
him, the first. Jesus saith unto them, Verily I say unto you, That
the publicans and the harlots go into the kingdom of God before
you.
32. For John came unto you in the way of righteousness, and ye
believed him not: but the publicans and the harlots believed him:
and ye, when ye had seen it, repented not afterward, that ye might
believe him.
The coming of John, and then Jesus, had been a challenge to the
faith of all. The chief priests and elders, who regarded themselves
as God’s elect, refused to heed the call to repentance and obedience.
Many harlots and publicans, who had been wayward and disobedi-
ent, believed and became obedient to the Lord. The chief priests
and elders regarded position and public profession as equivalent to
true faith, whereas the repentance of the harlots and publicans re-
sulted in new lives.
Confession without repentance is no confession at all.
Repentance means literally a reversal of direction, of life; it is a
modern heresy to equate repentance with a verbal statement. This
heresy is so prevalent that many demand a verbal confession long
after a change of conduct is apparent. This is not to say that the
verbal statement is unimportant, but rather that the contemporary
emphasis is wrong.
The most important form of false confession in the twentieth
century has been psychotherapy. Especially as a result of the work
of Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), the confessional has been trans-
ferred from the church to the psychiatrist, the psychoanalyst, and
the psychologist. Freud recognized guilt as man’s basic problem,
although he did not believe that the cause of the guilt is sin. For
FALSE CONFESSION 21
1. See R.J. Rushdoony, Freud (Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian and Reformed Pub-
lishing Company, [1965] 1973).
22 THE CURE OF SOULS
From Ordeal
to Autobiography
25
26 THE CURE OF SOULS
only death but finally Christ’s Last Judgment will render perfect
justice for all and to all.
But men have commonly been discontented unless full and
perfect justice is obtainable here and now, and in their time.
Various means have been used in the vain attempt to gain it. A
prominent instrument was the ordeal. In Western history, it first
appeared among the Franks, and it is first mentioned in a recension
of the Salic Law, c. A.D. 510. Despite the protests of some
churchmen, and, later, popes, it passed into general use in
Christendom. Rulers were not much troubled by its non-Biblical
character; it met their need. The ordeal was a last resort. If neither
witnesses nor circumstantial evidence provided the solution to a
crime, the court’s resort (at first essentially a king’s resort) was to
the ordeal. The ordeal was seen as a means of involuntary
confession.
In 1935, Gordon Sinclair wrote of an instance of the ordeal
in central Africa. A minor chief became ill after eating and sus-
pected poison. “The juju man” brewed a special poison which was
then administered to each of the wives. Each drank the poison,
soon became ill, and vomited it, and were well, but an older woman
did not vomit it, confessed the poisoning, and died. 3 Those wives
who knew they were innocent were relaxed and their stomachs
readily rejected the poison; the guilty person’s stomach did not.
However, in the same place, Sinclair and a Dutchman saw another
form of the ordeal, and Sinclair submitted to it, a heated iron
pressed on his tongue, with the steam hissing but no burning.4
In medieval Europe, “The ordeal existed in that narrow place
where suspicion was considerable but guilt was unquestionable.”5
The right to order an ordeal was essentially a royal right, although
in time the presence of a priest, willing or unwilling, was required.
Churchmen like Peter the Chanter attacked the ordeal as contrary
to Scripture and thus tempting God.6
3. Gordon Sinclair, Loose Among Devils (New York, NY: Farrar & Rinehart, 1935),
191-95.
4. Ibid., 194-95.
5. Robert Bartlett, Trial by Fire and Water: The Medieval Judicial Ordeal (Oxford,
England: Clarendon Press, [1986] 1988), 64.
6. Ibid., 86.
28 THE CURE OF SOULS
7. Ibid., 30-31.
8. Ibid., 140.
FROM ORDEAL TO AUTOBIOGRAPHY 29
9. John Bossy, Christianity in the West, 1400-1700 (Oxford, England: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 1985), 49.
10. Ibid., 132.
11. Ibid., 134.
30 THE CURE OF SOULS
Humanistic Confession
31
32 THE CURE OF SOULS
born; until then, he was the sole claimant to his mother’s love, was
“spoiled and cherished,” and had a position of centrality. He was
the grandson of Thomas H. Huxley, and of Matthew Arnold.
Although the boys were soon “the best of friends,” Julian saw
Trevenen’s birth as the beginning of a burden.2 This “daimon” tor-
mented Julian all his life with a sense of guilt. A few months before
he died, his wife Juliette said to him that this “demon within” was
destroying both of them. He answered, “quite casually,” “Of course
I have a demon, had it since I was four.”3
This idea fits nicely with the modern myth of an inescapable
sibling rivalry. When occasionally such a rivalry or jealousy may
occur, it is neither normal nor common. Even when it does occur,
it is absurd to see it as the cause of guilt. Such reasoning is pleading
guilty to the lesser offense.
In Julian Huxley’s case, he was a cold and impersonal man;
he was anti-Christian and was contemptuous of the faith. He was
also an adulterer who told his wife to find her own solace sexually
with other men.4 He saw this not as a question of morality but of
philosophy. Of his wife, and of his work, he wrote to a young
woman, “In reality I am a pluralist in my philosophy, having given
up the quest for unity.”5 As a humanist, Huxley saw morality as a
human product.
Julian Huxley suffered all his life from a sense of guilt, which
he apparently saw in biological terms after Freud, and also in terms
of heredity. His grandfather, T.H. Huxley, was prey to “a deep-
rooted melancholy” and was consequently often seriously ill.6
Julian Huxley read his problem in terms of this. But T.H. Huxley
had much in his life and work to give him a deep sense of guilt also.
Julian Huxley at one point was given electric shock therapy.7
Believing guilt to be biological, he sought ostensibly scientific treat-
ment thereof. He would have regarded the Christian confessional
2. Juliette Huxley, Leaves of the Tulip Tree (Topsfield, MA: Salem House, [1986]
1987), 141.
3. Ibid., 141-42.
4. Ibid., 128ff., 136ff., 158ff.
5. Ibid., 166.
6. Ibid., 190.
7. Ibid., 188.
HUMANISTIC CONFESSION 33
as a magical answer. The shock therapy gave him some recovery for
a time, but his basic problem remained.
Juliette Huxley, clearly a kindly and loving person, had her
own “deep sense of sin,” which she blamed on her Calvinistic
mother.8 Her mother, however, comes through the autobiography
as the one superior person! Juliette’s lack of faith, and her reluctant
compliance with Julian’s demand that she exercise her sexual
“freedom,” are not related to this sense of guilt. Juliette at one point
perceptively described Julian as “not a physical but a moral
invalid,” and as one who “knows, or thinks he knows, himself
accursed, and finds his thoughts set upon self-destruction, as the
only way of removing the curse for himself and the accursed life
from being a burden to others.”9 It was the work of Freud to sepa-
rate the sense of sin from the sense of guilt. He recognized that as
long as men see themselves as sinners, they will turn to God for
grace, but if they see guilt as a problem of the unconscious, they
will seek scientific therapy for help.
For Julian Huxley to see sibling rivalry as his life-long
problem, and for Juliette to blame her mother for her sense of guilt,
was in both cases pleading, to use Edmund Bergler’s term, to the
lesser offense while concealing the real problem.
In other instances, confessions of the autobiographical
variety seek other justification, i.e., sinning as a means to grace, to
use Biblical language, or, in modern terms, therapeutic and
experimental living. An example of this is Rosemary Daniell’s
Sleeping with Soldiers: In Search of the Macho Man. She is a writer
who has received two National Endowment for the Arts grants in
literature, and has worked as a journalist, an advertising copywriter,
and a teacher. She has been also a college poet-in-residence. By her
own account, Rosemary Daniell has been three times married and
divorced; she had gay men friends. She passed discarded lovers on
to her daughter; she experimented with lesbianism; she had
abortions; she was promiscuous with all kinds of men, especially
lower-class, was beaten and fought physically with her men, and a
10. Rosemary Daniell, Sleeping with Soldiers: In Search of the Macho Man (New
York, NY: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1984), 16, 52, 88ff., 145-46, 77-78, 92, 229-30,
98-99, 136, 139, 247ff., 251.
11. Ibid., 3.
12. Ibid., 17.
13. Ibid., 49.
14. Ibid., 69.
15. Ibid., 71.
16. Ibid., 121.
17. Ibid., 114.
18. Cited in Huxley, Leaves of the Tulip Tree, 137.
HUMANISTIC CONFESSION 35
Confession
and the Image in Man
37
38 THE CURE OF SOULS
Neither is there any creature that is not manifest in his sight: but
all things are naked and opened unto the eyes of him with whom
we have to do.
In the late 1950s, on one occasion a white American described this
omniscience of God with hostility, calling the Almighty “a peep-
ing-Tom God.” About the same time a woman insisted that “a real
God” would have better things to do than to spy on her. While
most Americans, 90 percent or more, continued to believe in God,
they seemed to think of Him as a kindly force who had to be in-
voked to act.
At the same time, the personal security and privacy of a
person began to recede steadily in American life. “The right to pri-
vacy” was not being invoked, but it was demanded too often for an
ostensible right to sin freely. Also confession in the Christian sense
waned greatly, whereas confessions to psychotherapists increased.
Even more, confessions to anyone began to increase. When
I was still in my twenties, hanging on to a strap in a crowded public
conveyance, tightly packed at the rush hour, the woman standing
next to me apologized when a sudden slow-down threw her against
me. She then asked who I was, and, learning that I was an ordained
clergyman, promptly confessed her sexual transgressions with a
married man, and asked for counsel and absolution. This temper,
which might be called a will to confess, I found over the years to be
very common.
A police officer told me of the readiness of many criminals to
confess. Some leave identification on the premises they have
robbed, such as an envelope addressed to themselves. They confess
their crime to a friend, hence the use of police informers, or to a
cellmate. The need to confess is there, and some, having confessed,
then choose to repudiate their confession.
Granted that in some instances such non-Christian confes-
sions have an element of boasting to them, there is all the same a
relief that is sought in the act of confessing. Among other things,
ungodly confessions are, first, marked by a belief that confession
should automatically bring absolution. Without any true repen-
tance, penance, or restitution, some believe that confession auto-
matically brings all these things. They can become, in fact, very
CONFESSION AND THE IMAGE IN MAN 39
people was limited to those with criminal records; now, all have
records.
There were no secrets among Indians who lived in small,
roving bands. This was due to their closeness, and also to the prev-
alence of envy as a means of keeping one another on a common
level. Now again envy is at work, and also a hostility to individu-
ality. Former Congressman Ron Paul reported on an incident at
the University of Pennsylvania. “One young white woman stu-
dent” wrote about her “deep regard for the individual and desire to
protect the freedom of all members of society.” “A black official of
the university” returned her statement to her, circling her state-
ment, underlining the word individual, and stating,
This is a “RED FLAG” phrase today, which is considered by many
to be RACIST. Arguments that champion the individual over the
group ultimately privileges [sic.] the “individuals” belonging to the
largest or dominant group.2
The “standard” in such cases, and they are many, is the state and its
law, not God. Confession thus must be to “sins” specified by the
state.
This should not surprise us. According to Scripture, man was
created in the image of God (Gen. 1:26-28), and the essential
aspects of that image are knowledge, righteousness, holiness, and
dominion (Col. 3:10; Eph. 4:24; Gen. 1:26-28). Now another
doctrine sees man as made by the state and defined by the state. Jan
M. Broekman, professor of philosophy of law and dean of the Fac-
ulty of Law, Catholic University of Leuven (Belgium), has stated,
“it is necessary to comprehend man as an image of law.” He states
also, “The natural person is a juridical construction.” Again, “Law
and anthropology are deeply connected.” For him, law is “a social
phenomenon,” and “Law is a product. Law is man-made.”3 This is
a plain analysis of an anti-Biblical concept of man and of law.
Confession as Praise
43
44 THE CURE OF SOULS
And Joshua said unto Achan, My son, give, I pray thee, glory to the
LORD God of Israel, and make confession unto him; and tell me
now what thou hast done; hide it not from me.
This is of particular importance because Joshua identifies the con-
fession with giving “glory to the LORD God of Israel.” The He-
brew word translated as confession is towdah, literally an extension
(of the hand as in avowal or swearing, or hailing), and it means
both praising and confessing. Confession is a form of praise because
it is an acknowledgment of responsibility to God. We acknowledge
His rule, law, and authority when we confess that we have trans-
gressed His commandments. It is in this respect an aspect of glori-
fying God. The psalms are full of general and specific or private
confessions of sin, and these were a part of public worship, and are
so now, as a way of glorifying God.
For sins against God, confession was necessary; for sins
against man, confession was to be accompanied by restitution.
The prophets have an important place in the history of con-
fession. As A.E. Suffrin pointed out,
The mission of the prophets was “to declare unto Jacob his trans-
gressions and to Israel his sin” (Mic. 3:8; cf. Jer 2:1ff., Is. 58:10),
and a reciprocal acknowledgment was expected (Jer. 2:35, 3:13,
Hos. 14:1).2
This requirement was made also by God to Solomon, a national
confession being stipulated for national sins:
13. If I shut up heaven that there be no rain, or if I command the
locusts to devour the land, or if I send pestilence among my people;
14. If my people, which are called by my name, shall humble them-
selves, and pray, and seek my face, and turn from their wicked
ways; then will I hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin, and
will heal their land. (2 Chron. 7:13-14)
Confession is thus a Biblical, not an ecclesiastical, fact in its
primary character. True confession begins with our knowledge of
God as God, our awareness of His absolute knowledge of us, and
our recognition that it is His law that we have transgressed. It con-
cludes by glorifying God.
and spirit, and of the joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the
thoughts and intents of the heart.
13. Neither is there any creature that is not manifest in his sight:
but all things are naked and opened unto the eyes of him with
whom we have to do. (Heb. 4:12-13)
This means, as B.F. Westcott pointed out, that “the Word — the
revelation — of God is living, not simply as enduring for ever, but
as having in itself energies of action. It partakes in some measure of
the character of God Himself.” The moral activity of the Word lays
open the innermost depths of the heart.3 In the redeemed man, the
Word leads to confession; it is regenerating and energizing in its
power, whereas in the ungodly the reverse is true.
The confession of sins is thus not only a form of praising and
glorifying God, it is also a regenerative, revitalizing act. In contrast,
unconfessed sin is suicidal. As David says, “When I kept silence, my
bones waxed old” (Ps. 32:3).
St. Augustine rightly saw the double aspect of confession: the
confession of sin, and the confession of faith. For him, then, Psalm
100 was very important as a declaration of the meaning of worship:
1. Make a joyful noise unto the Lord, all ye lands.
2. Serve the LORD with gladness: come before his presence with
singing.
3. Know ye that the LORD he is God: it is he that hath made us,
and not we ourselves: we are his people, and the sheep of his pas-
ture.
4. Enter into his gates with thanksgiving, and into his courts with
praise: be thankful unto him, and bless his name.
5. For the LORD is good: his mercy is everlasting; and his truth
endureth to all generations.
Augustine, in his commentary on this psalm, saw the statement,
“Enter into his gates with thanksgiving,” as “enter into his gates
with confession” in this double sense. The word translated thanks-
giving is again towdah, as in Joshua 7:19. Augustine wrote:
“Enter into His gates with confession.” At the gates in the begin-
ning: begin with confession. Thence is the Psalm entitled, “A
Psalm of Confession”: there be joyful. Confess that ye were not
made by yourselves, praise Him by whom ye were made. Let thy
3. B.F. Westcott, The Epistle to the Hebrews (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans [1892]
1952), 102.
CONFESSION AS PRAISE 47
good come from Him, in departing from whom thou hast caused
thine evil. “Enter into His gates with confession.” Let the flock en-
ter into the gates: let it not remain outside, a prey for wolves. And
how is it to enter? “With confession.” Let the gate, that is, the com-
mencement for thee, be confession. Whence it is said in another
Psalm, “Begin unto the Lord with confession.” (Ps. 97:7) What he
there calleth “Begin,” here he calleth “Gates.” “Enter into His gates
in confession.” What? And when we have entered, shall we not still
confess? Always confess Him: thou hast always what to confess for.
It is hard in this life for a man to be so far changed, that no cause
for censure be discoverable in him: thou must needs blame thyself,
lest He who shall condemn blame thee. Therefore even when thou
hast entered His courts, then also confess. When will there be no
longer confession of sins? In that rest, in that likeness to the Angels.
But consider what I have said: there will be no confession of sins. I
said not, there will be no confession: for there will be confession of
praise. Thou wilt ever confess, that He is God, thou a creature: that
He is thy Protector, thyself protected. In Him thou shalt be as it
were hid. “Go into His courts with hymns, and confess unto
Him.” Confess in the gates; and when ye have entered the courts,
confess with hymns. Hymns are praises. Blame thyself, when thou
art entering; when thou has entered, praise Him. “Open me the
gates of righteousness,” he saith in another Psalm, “that I may go
into them, and confess unto the Lord.” (Ps. 98:19) Did he say,
when I have entered, I will no longer confess? Even after his en-
trance, he will confess. For what sins did our Lord Jesus Christ con-
fess, when He said, “I confess unto Thee, O Father?” (Matt. xii.25)
He confessed in praising Him, not in accusing Himself. “Speak
good of His Name.”4
These words are important. Confession in the early church was an
aspect of the sense of victory, because through confession and
God’s grace victory was possible. The double meaning of confes-
sion, of both sins and of praise, meant victory in both spheres of
life, with respect to one’s personal life, and also with respect to the
corporate life of the church.
In time, the Apostles’ Creed became a part of this joyful con-
fession. Calvin, whose Institutes are a commentary on that creed,
held that the creed should be sung because it is a joyful confession.
4. St. Augustine, “On the Psalms,” Ps. 100, sec. 12; in Nicene and Post-Nicene
Fathers, 1st ser., vol. 8 (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, [1888] 1956), 490-91.
48 THE CURE OF SOULS
and immoral priests. He did not do so: his concern was theological,
not historical, in its essence. His critique of the late medieval con-
fessional which he well knew is carefully and Biblically argued and
developed. It needs no rehearsing here. Two of his arguments are
of concern to our argument. First, Calvin turned to St. Bernard for
a very important conclusion:
On this subject, Bernard also gives a very useful admonition: “Sor-
row for sin is necessary, if it is not perpetual. I advise you some-
times to quit the anxious and painful recollection of your own
ways, and to arise to an agreeable and serene remembrance of the
Divine blessings. Let us mingle honey with wormwood, that its sal-
utary bitterness may restore our health, when it shall be drunk tem-
pered with a mixture of sweetness; and if you reflect on your own
meanness, reflect also on the goodness of the Lord.”1
The God of grace sees neither virtue nor merit in an endless
mournfulness and misery over one’s sins. Such an attitude indicates
an unawareness of forgiveness and grace. It knows Golgotha, but
not the empty tomb and the joy of resurrection. The endless cater-
wauling of some people about their sins is not only repulsive but
also sounds suspiciously like boasting. For a time in the 1950s, it
was popular at some religious conferences to parade once flagrant
and ostensibly saved sinners as testimonial speakers; their witness
was heavy on the side of graphic accounts of sinning and abysmally
weak in the knowledge of Scripture.
Bernard’s counsel is excellent: “Sorrow for sin is necessary, if
it is not perpetual.” Confession means praise, and it means praise
because true confession knows grace. It is God-centered, not man-
centered.
Man-centered confessions can include some made to show
how sensitive a soul the confessing person is! There is often a selec-
tivity also in the confession of sins. As one priest observed, he had
never had anyone confess to being stingy!
Second, Calvin, in citing James 5:16, “Confess your faults one
to another, and pray for one another,” said:
1. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, bk. 3, chap. 3, sec. 15; vol. 1 (Phil-
adelphia, PA: Presbyterian Board of Christian Education, 1936), 666.
CONFESSION AND THE PAST 51
53
54 THE CURE OF SOULS
Absolution
59
60 THE CURE OF SOULS
required were important in both church and state, and they freed a
man from his past.
A familiar image from fiction, film, and television is of a town
prostitute being harshly treated by the churchwomen and pastors
in nineteenth century America. History is so full of multiform
examples that it would be rash to say that such things did not
happen. However, in very many communities organizations existed
to try to save the prostitutes, and many churchwomen found their
calling in helping such women. These “good women” of a commu-
nity often indited the double standard and defended any young
woman trying to extricate herself from prostitution.
Too many ideas of the past in this respect owe their existence
to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter. But Hawthorne repre-
sented and echoed the world of early Unitarianism and its mor-
alism. Moralism had been substituted for theology, and
Emersonian transcendentalism carried this further: humanistic,
non-Biblical moralism replaced theology.
In the latter years of the twentieth century, this moralism
outdoes anything found in ancient theological controversies. This
new moralism concentrates on things like race and environmen-
talism. Eurocentrism is a new form of racism according to these
people. Sexism is another new “sin.” A brilliant student at a major
Eastern college was threatened with expulsion for referring to God
as “He”; the school was too enlightened to permit such sexism! At
this same school, at the last moment, a young historian was denied
his doctorate when it was discovered that he was a Christian, a Cal-
vinist! He was excommunicated from the academic community.
Moreover, in this humanistic faith, forgiveness is conspicuously
absent.
What the Puritans did in this area was nothing new, although
they were more systematic about it. A condemned murderer was
exhorted by the judge to repent before the time of death; pastors
visited him in prison. If he repented, his execution was attended by
dignitaries to celebrate his faith and home-going to heaven.
In the medieval era, kings and emperors were at times
compelled not only to confess their sins but also to make public
ABSOLUTION 61
3. John M’Clintock and James Strong, Cyclopaedia of Biblical, Theological, and Ec-
clesiastical Literature, vol. 3 (New York, NY: Harper & Brothers [1876] 1894), 530.
64 THE CURE OF SOULS
False Absolutions
1. Brenda Venus, Dear, Dear Brenda: The Love Letters of Henry Miller to Brenda
Venus, ed. Gerald Seth Sindell (New York, NY: Henry Holt, 1986), 25.
2. Ibid., 49.
3. Ibid., 47, 25, 158-59.
4. Ibid., 35, 37, 63.
5. Henry Miller, The World of Sex (New York, NY: Grove Press, [1959] 1965), 81.
6. Ibid., 44-45.
7. Venus, Dear, Dear Brenda, 74; cf. 62.
68 THE CURE OF SOULS
8. Ethelbert Stauffer, Christ and the Caesars (Philadelphia, PA: Westminster Press,
1955), 52.
11
Confession
and Social Order
no means perfect, nor sin-free, but, with state controls over all, state
corruption means corrupt rule over all.
The state has not only usurped power over all spheres, but it
has also radically altered the nature of offenses or crimes. As Henry
C. Lea observed:
The criminal was not responsible to the State, but to the injured
party, and all that the State professed to do was to provide some
definite process by which the latter could assert his rights. Personal
chastisement for the freeman was thus unknown, for each man was
responsible for his acts not to the law but to those whom he might
wrong. All that the law pretended to do was to provide rude courts,
before which a plaintiff might urge his case, and settled principles
of pecuniary compensation to console him for his injuries.1
In our time, a criminal case is not “John Doe vs. James Ecks,” but
the state versus the offender. The state can feel free to dismiss the
charges, or to allow a lesser plea, without consulting the offended
person or, if dead, his family. This shift was a major legal revolution
in Western history: the state replaced the offended person and the
state determined whether or not to prosecute.
According to Lea, “our barbarian ancestors” had another
system, one in which the family was central. If a crime were com-
mitted, the parties then involved were the families of the victim and
of the criminal. In this system, to cite Lea,
The kindred of the offender were obliged to contribute shares pro-
portionate to their degrees of relationship; while those of the man
who was wronged received respective percentages calculated on the
same basis.2
It would be absurd to say that this was a perfect or always effective
system, but it did have some qualities effective in controlling crime.
First, it meant that each family had a very great concern in keeping
all members, up to fifth and sixth cousins, in line; their criminal
conduct could be costly to all. This system survived into the twen-
tieth century in some areas, and it may well still exist here and
there. From conversations with those who were part of it, I know
of its general effectiveness. It provided the basic law and order
1. Henry C. Lea, Superstition and Force (New York, NY: Haskell House Publisher,
[1870] 1971), 15.
2. Ibid., 16.
CONFESSION AND SOCIAL ORDER 71
where it existed. This was because, second, the family member who
refused to comply with the system was then an outlaw in the eyes
of his family and all others. Even in large cities, a man was not em-
ployable unless a known family stood behind him to ensure his
good behaviour. This control extended not only to employment
but also to marriage. The stability of a marriage rested not only on
the man and the woman but also on the controlling power of both
families. This kind of family government existed in some pagan
cultures and was very strong in Jewish and Christian circles. Clan
and family feuds began to mark the breakdown of this system.
In such a system, the fault of one person required restitution
to the fifth or sixth generation. It may be a coincidence, but the
medieval church’s laws of consanguinity roughly paralleled the
family ties which bound men together in a form of social insurance.
All of this is related to confession and absolution. Govern-
ment in a Biblical sense means more than the state. It is first of all,
the self-government of man. Every man has a responsibility under
God to govern himself. Second, the basic governmental institution
is the family, which is man’s first school, government, economic
order, society, and more. Third, the school is a government, and a
Levitical ministry. Fourth, the church is a government. Fifth, our
vocation or work governs us. Sixth, society with its norms, its many
agencies and institutions, also governs us. Seventh, the state is a gov-
ernment, one form of government among many. All these are inter-
dependent governments, and none have a calling to dominate the
others. That right belongs to God. To equate the state with govern-
ment is totalitarian, and it leads to the obliteration of other aspects
of society.
Because confession and absolution free a man from sin and
guilt, they are important socially as well as religiously. Confession
witnesses to a norm beyond man and society. As a result, it is essen-
tial to social order.
A common stance in the twentieth century, among fathers
and mothers, and especially some mothers, is to declare, “I will
stand by my son (or daughter) no matter what happens.” Ones sees
parents defending a son who, when drunken, hit someone while
72 THE CURE OF SOULS
driving and killed that person. Bad companions, not the son, are
blamed. Or, a son is guilty of “date-rape”; the girl, the boy’s mother
will insist, is no good and egged on her son and then lied as to who
was responsible. So it goes.
As against all this, we have a text which is bitterly resented, as
much by the churchmen as by those outside the church:
18. If a man have a stubborn and rebellious son, which will not
obey the voice of his father, or the voice of his mother, and that,
when they have chastened him, will not hearken unto them:
19. Then shall his father and his mother lay hold on him, and bring
him out unto the elders of his city, and unto the gate of his place;
20. And they shall say unto the elders of his city, This our son is
stubborn and rebellious, he will not obey our voice; he is a glutton,
and a drunkard.
21. And all the men of his city shall stone him with stones, that he
die: so shalt thou put evil away from among you; and all Israel shall
hear, and fear. (Deut. 21:18-21)
This text, even churchmen will insist, is about stoning “babies”;
some will say “innocent babies!” It is about a young man, or even
an older man, who is incorrigibly delinquent. Specific crimes are not
mentioned: it is the unceasingly evil behaviour. Three attitudes are
mentioned as characteristic of his relation to the family: first, he de-
spises family authority, so that efforts on the family’s part to bring
him out of his criminality are fruitless; second, he is a glutton, and,
third, a drunkard, meaning that he is not only a criminal but is also
contemptuous of the family’s authority and a parasite on it, using
the family instead of working as a member of it.
A confession is required of the parents as to this evil in their
son. They must not identify with criminal and sinful conduct but
with God’s required order. Because there is neither confession nor
repentance on the part of the son (or, in other cases, some other
family member who has gone astray), the parents (or, if they are
dead, the nearest relative) must confess the person’s waywardness
so that the court can deal with the matter. This law was the basis of
the long-standing law in the United States requiring the death of
habitual criminals. The son here in Deuteronomy 21:18-21 is a
habitual criminal; the family attests to his unwillingness to be a
CONFESSION AND SOCIAL ORDER 73
Literary Confessions
1. Bin Ranike, The Difference Between Night and Day (New Haven, CT: York Uni-
versity Press, 1978), 10.
2. Ibid., 69.
3. Ibid., 36.
4. Ibid., 44.
75
76 THE CURE OF SOULS
5. Thomas McGrath, Passages Toward the Dark (Port Townsend, WA: Copper Can-
yon Press, 1982), 22.
6. Ibid., 43.
7. Edward Hirsch, For the Sleepwalkers (New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1981), 3.
LITERARY CONFESSIONS 77
10. Michael Hamburger, Weather and Season (New York, NY: Atheneum, 1963),
43-44.
11. Ibid.
12. Ibid., 64
13. William Meredith, The Chair (New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1980), 28.
14. Ibid., 46.
LITERARY CONFESSIONS 79
15. Richard Steele, The Religious Tradesman (Harrisonburg, PA: Sprinkle Publica-
tions, 1989 reprint), 21.
13
Graceless Confession
81
82 THE CURE OF SOULS
art. Earlier, the English court of Charles II flaunted not only its
lawless sexuality but also its physical filthiness.
Some of the lawless men on the American frontier (fewer
than is generally assumed) loved to boast of their badness, even as
American ghetto gangs of the 1980s and 1990s regarded a reputa-
tion for badness as something to be seriously cultivated. John Leo
reported, in 1990, on a telephone “confession hot line” in New
York City; Leo discovered that one could listen to both real and fic-
titious confessions for a fee “five or six times the cost of an ordinary
phone call.” Leo reported:
First came the cautionary tale of Nicki, who says she cannot recov-
er from the psychological and physical abuse she suffered while
serving as a rock groupie in the ’60s. Then a long story of awful sex-
ual abuse told by a teenage girl who says she had murdered a love
rival, shot her boyfriend in both legs and then, while on the run,
summoned her brother, who had raped her.1
Why are these people confessing on a public telephone line avail-
able to all who choose to listen? Why this desire to parade a vari-
ety of sins, imagined or real? As against the secret nature of
Christian confessional, parishioner to priest or pastor, followed
by a sometimes public repentance, penance, or restitution, these
telephone confessions are not secret, have no true repentance, and
lack all absolution.
A number of observations can be made about such “confes-
sions.” First, although the telephone form is new, public confes-
sions are not. Over the years, more than a few men, whether in
locker rooms or bars, have made public confession of various
offenses, and, in other contexts, women have done the same. Some
of these confessions are true; actual sins are confessed, but without
any attempt at changing one’s moral conduct. The fact of confes-
sion is seen as both sufficient repentance and also absolution; a
“new beginning” is then possible. Past sins no longer count: they
have been confessed.
Second, in some instances, such confessions are of imagined
and fictional sins; they are a form of boasting. Such people seek a
1. John Leo, “The Entertaining of America,” U.S. News and World Report, January
22, 1990, 65.
GRACELESS CONFESSION 83
When Confession
is not Confession
1. Susan Wloszczyna, “Jokes Reflect Society’s Insecurities,” USA Today, June 22,
1990, D2.
85
86 THE CURE OF SOULS
2. “Should Dirty Lyrics Be Against the Law?,” U.S. News & World Report, June 25,
1990, 24.
WHEN CONFESSION IS NOT CONFESSION 87
Confession
and Indulgence
1. W.H. Kent, “Indulgences,” in The Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 7 (New York, NY:
Encyclopedia Press, [1910] 1913), 783.
2. Roland Bainton, Here I Stand: A Life of Martin Luther (New York, NY: Abing-
don-Cokesbury Press, 1950), 76-79.
CONFESSION AND INDULGENCE 91
I would not say “disappeared,” but it has lost a lot of meaning since
it is not plausible in terms of today’s thinking. But catechesis has
no right to surrender the concept.3
Indulgences were a key issue between Luther and Rome to the very
end. First, Luther objected to them as a devout Catholic deeply
concerned with the integrity of the confessional. Second, he object-
ed to them as a Protestant because of his concern for the integrity
of the confessional.
It is interesting to note what the official curial theologian, at
the direction of Pope Leo X, had to say. He accused Luther of a
“procedural error.” If, as Luther charged, the preachers of indul-
gences were guilty, and Sylvester Prierias did not believe so, “then
Luther had violated the rule of fraternal correction by divulging
their mistakes to the public.”4 Prierias has many Protestant succes-
sors, men who believe that correct procedures are more important
than the truth.
As a monk, Luther had confessed earnestly and faithfully, but
with no sense of peace. According to Hendrix, in his important
study, “in Luther’s memory his internal struggle with confession
was very much related to papal authority.”5
Indulgences released a man from the obligation to make res-
titution. In time, certain developments occurred with this practice.
First, in time indulgences applied not simply to specific offenses
but became plenary or full. In 1095, Pope Urban granted a full or
plenary indulgence to all who for religious reasons participated in
the first crusade. This indulgence offered forgiveness of sins and
release from all temporal penalties.
Second, indulgences were added to the powers and preroga-
tives of the papacy. In 1343, Pope Clement VI made an official
dogma of the idea of the treasury of merit in the church.
Third, indulgences were granted to the deceased who were in
purgatory. Tetzel had a little rhyming slogan for this:
3. Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger with Vittorio Messori, The Ratzinger Report: An Exclu-
sive Interview on the State of the Church (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press, 1985), 147.
4. Scott H. Hendrix, Luther and the Papacy (Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press, 1981),
49.
5. Ibid., 9.
92 THE CURE OF SOULS
6. Ibid., 24-25.
7. Ibid., 108.
8. Bainton, Here I Stand, 137.
9. Heinrich Boehmer, Road to Reformation (Philadelphia, PA: Muhlenberg Press,
1946), 195.
CONFESSION AND INDULGENCE 93
10. Martin Luther, “An Argument in Defense of All the Articles of Dr. Martin
Luther Wrongly Condemned in the Roman Bull,” Works of Martin Luther, vol 3, 47,
cited in Hugh Thompson Kerr Jr., ed., A Compend of Luther’s Theology (Philadelphia, PA:
Westminster Press, 1943), 96-97.
11. Martin Luther, “The Babylonian Captivity of the Church,” in Works of Martin
Luther, vol. 2, 249-50, cited in ibid., 97.
16
1. Margaret R. Miles, Image as Insight (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1985), 164, cf.
33.
95
96 THE CURE OF SOULS
99
100 THE CURE OF SOULS
1. David Kim, ed., Dictionary of American Proverbs (New York, NY: Philosophical
Library, 1945), 53.
102 THE CURE OF SOULS
103
104 THE CURE OF SOULS
heart. This is David’s prayer in Psalm 51:10 (cf. Ezek. 36:26; Jer.
31:33). God converts people, and His Spirit uses the law to do so:
The law of the LORD is perfect, converting the soul: the testimony
of the LORD is sure, making wise the simple. (Ps. 19:7)
Repentance means a total reorientation of one’s being, a change of
heart, life, and direction. Repentance leads to a confession of sin,
not as a verbal exercise, but as a part of a process, along with activ-
ities whereby new ways replace the old. Confession thus is essentially
related to action.
It is for this reason that the creeds and standards of a church
are known as confessions: they are the premise of faith and action.
Confessions of sins and confessions of faith are verbal and active,
manifesting a change in word, thought, and deed. The Greek word,
homologeo, means to speak the same thing, or to be in accord; thus
confession, where true and faithful, means that an agreement exists
between profession and life. If we confess our sins, we turn from
them into an active obedience to God. If we confess Christ, we
believe and obey Him with all our being. True confession in this
sense means not only an agreement in us between words and life,
but also an agreement between us and Jesus Christ. Our Lord
declares:
32. Whosoever therefore shall confess me before men, him will I
confess also before my Father which is in heaven.
33. But whosoever shall deny me before men, him will I also deny
before my Father which is in heaven. (Matt. 10:32-33)
Valid confession thus means a congruity between words and life.
From the beginning of Scripture, pastoral questioning has
been used to prompt confession. A most notable example is
Joshua’s comment to Achan:
And Joshua said unto Achan, My son, give, I pray thee, glory to the
LORD God of Israel, and make confession unto him; and tell me
now what thou hast done; hide it not from me. (Josh. 7:19)
The word translated as confession can also be read as praise. Achan
had sinned against God, and to confess meant to recognize the
rightness and justice of God’s order. To do this means to give glory
to God. Thus, in the Biblical sense, to confess our sins means to
THE TWO ASPECTS OF CONFESSION 105
T he church, all too prone to aping the world, has in the twen-
tieth century gone over to the practice of counseling. Now
godly counsel can be very beneficial, and to relate the word of God
to human problems is thoroughly necessary. The therapy heresy,
however, is the adoption of humanistic premises as a means for the
cure of souls. By Freud’s deliberate design, psychological coun-
seling, psychotherapy, was to replace the work of priests and pas-
tors as the best means of eliminating religion. No attempts to
“disprove” the Bible would succeed in undermining such faith. All
men feel guilt, and they want a remedy for it. If science can take
over the remedial therapy for guilt, Freud held, religion can be
destroyed. Freud saw guilt as basic to the human problem, and
those who enabled men to cope with it would become the true
priests of the future. Out of this premise, psychotherapy was born.
Sadly, the churches have been very quick to adopt it.
Freud’s analysis was brilliant but flawed. He saw guilt as the
problem, whereas guilt is simply man’s response to his sin. If sin is
a myth arising out of man’s primordial experiences, then the
problem must be dealt with psychologically, because guilt is a state
of the psyche of man, a deeply-rooted feeling. If, however, guilt is
not the problem but rather a response to the problem, then we
107
108 THE CURE OF SOULS
111
112 THE CURE OF SOULS
question remains this: can the leopard change his spots, or the
sinner save himself? Is salvation the sinner’s choice, or is it God’s
electing grace?
An old proverb declares, “A tree is known by its fruit, and not
by its leaves.” This is also true in the realm of the moral changes
within a man.
The counseling heresy rests on Arminianism. It asserts that,
while God can assist change, the initiative belongs to man. Paul
tells us, “So then faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the word
of God” (Rom. 10:17). True change is a supernatural renewal of a
man; it is a new birth, a new creation (John 1:12-13; 2 Cor. 5:17;
Gal. 6:15).
The Puritan movement is easily criticized because men of
power stand so clearly on basic issues that they are more open
thereby to criticism and attack. The strength of Puritanism rested
in unswerving and intense interest and delight in Scripture. David
Clarkson held that the pastor should look to the Spirit and use his
reason, because “faith does not abolish but improve reason.” In the
words of Gerald R. Cragg,
So the conscientious minister gave himself to study with a kind of
maniacal zeal, and considered it a sacrifice when matrimony re-
duced his daily span of work from fourteen hours to eight or nine.
Charnock devoted almost all his time to study; his library was his
“workshop,” and his friends solemnly observed that “had he been
less in his study, he would have been less liked in the pulpit.” Even
when he walked abroad, his thoughts still ran on his studies, and
would pause to jot down ideas that might be useful in his sermons.1
This was the strength of Puritanism, its unwavering belief in the
sufficiency of Scripture. For the Puritans, the counsel of God was
man’s only valid recourse.
As has been pointed out, the perspective and orientation of
most counseling is man-centered, not God-centered. The goal is
problem solving with respect to everyday affairs. In itself, such a
goal is not wrong; if we have an infected finger, we want that finger
healed; if a tooth is decayed, we want an immediate remedy for the
agency for the regeneration of man and society. Religious fervor for
these men was transferred from God to politics. Second, in the per-
sonal sphere, psychology and counseling now provided the means
of changing the person.
In both areas, the churches were all too ready to follow the
world. Arminianism and antinomianism had prepared the way.
21
1. James G. Emerson, Jr., Divorce, the Church, and Remarriage (Philadelphia, PA:
The Westminster Press, 1961), 153.
117
118 THE CURE OF SOULS
likely decline of the mass and the confessional, and the increase of
preaching. His view was that the priest should not be given the free-
dom to share his thinking but should be strictly limited to an or-
dained structure that stressed faith, not understanding. To be
limited to a priest’s understanding instead of the historic forms of
the faith was for him a potential threat to both faith and under-
standing. It is not necessary to agree with his views to recognize that
in churches Catholic and Protestant both “worship” and counsel-
ing have become a two directional process in which God is left out.
Second, Wise held that the important thing in this two direc-
tional process “is what happens between them.” If a man has stolen,
killed, or committed adultery, “the important thing” is not what
happens between the guilty man and the pastor or priest but
whether or not the sinner is confronted by the word of God and his
duty before God. It does not require empathy to tell a man he is a
sinner. The counselor may feel pity, anger, sorrow, or more, but
this is all irrelevant to the important fact: has he borne witness to
the law, grace, and mercy of God? Wise’s view that “the important
thing” is what happens between the counselor and the counselee is
humanistic nonsense. The important thing is that God’s require-
ments be faithfully set forth, because reconciliation to God in
Christ must be the goal of counseling. For the counselor to be con-
cerned about establishing a bond with the counselee is intrusive
and arrogant. The important fact is reestablishing God’s order in a
man’s life; anything else is at best secondary.
Third, Wise spoke of the need of the pastor “to know him-
self.” This is not knowing much. Far more important is knowing
and communicating the law-word of God. In some evangelical cir-
cles, the counseling session begins and ends with prayer, but there
is no systematic application of the law-word of God. Prayer then
becomes an appeal for the ratification of something done without
reference to the law of God.
Fourth, Wise held that the counselor, besides knowing him-
self, must “understand the dynamic processes of personality as they
find expression in the counselee.” Especially after World War II, it
became common to speak of anything that abandoned God’s law-
120 THE CURE OF SOULS
4. Ibid., 14.
5. Ibid.
COUNSELING AND GOALS 121
Counseling
and Reconciliation
2. David Wenstrom, “Priest Tells How He Dealt with ‘Disease’ of Alcohol Addic-
tion,” Stockton (CA), Record, March 10, 1991, sec. B, 1.
3. Ibid.
126 THE CURE OF SOULS
Confessing Other
People’s Sins
129
130 THE CURE OF SOULS
Francisco, he described his fights with Irish and Italian boys, who,
in the verbal assaults, called him a “Christ-killer.” The truth was,
he said, getting somewhat emotional, he had nothing to do with
someone killed in a place he had never seen; the truth was, he said
earnestly, Christians were “Jew-killers,” and he cited medieval inci-
dents! I started to tell him two things: first, my people were being
killed by Turks in those medieval centuries, and, second, if today’s
Jews are not Christ-killers, neither are today’s Christians Jew-
killers! He was guilty of the same fallacy. My Italian boss told me
to keep quiet, turned the conversation into a humorous story, and
a friendly parting followed. But after the man left, my boss said
sadly, he’s a good man, but Jews will never admit they are Christ-
killers! Confessing other people’s sins, real or unreal, is a common
and an international habit.
In recent years, American Indians have learned this art of
false confession and practice it widely.
On the ecclesiastical scene, such confessions are a well-prac-
ticed art. In this century, all the churches are so deeply involved in
a variety of heresies, immoralities, offenses, and sins that they all
need to be deeply in prayer and self-confession, not in mutual
recriminations. Careful theological analyses and critiques are one
thing, when accompanied by a careful statement of God’s scrip-
tured truth, but cheap “virtue” gained by “confessing” someone
else’s sins is another matter, a sinful one.
Counseling today stresses such false confessions. For
example, a man, irritated over a minor problem at work, provoked
his boss into firing him. He wanted an excuse to feel sorry for him-
self, and this was a regular pattern with him. A very capable man,
he went from job to job, soon angry with his superiors and creating
incidents which led to his discharge. His wife, sick with shingles
from his job migrations and tantrums, went to bed, unable to take
his drunken ranting. She awoke hearing her daughter screaming
because of her father’s attempted molestation. She filed for divorce.
The pastor’s questions were motivated by his “no-divorce” policy;
he insisted that she must have done something to “provoke” her
husband into such behavior! Had she, he inquired, “delicately,” he
thought, kept her legs crossed when he needed her? She, not he,
132 THE CURE OF SOULS
was disciplined by the church. She was told that she had no
grounds for divorce.
Unusual? Unhappily, no. The pastor had not asked the hus-
band to confess his sins; he had made no attempt to examine the
facts carefully; he was “saving” a marriage. The husband had
“admitted” his offense on questioning, but he had blamed his ex-
boss for his drunkenness, and his wife for “nagging” him; he saw
himself as a victim. He had “confessed” his ex-employer’s “sin” and
his wife’s “sin” as justification for a “misstep” he said he regretted
and knew was wrong. But if we plead extenuating circumstances
for sin we have not confessed sin. The confession of the old Office
of Compline is sadly forgotten in our time:
I confess to God Almighty, the Father, the Son, and the Holy
Ghost, and before all the company of heaven, that I have sinned,
in thought, word and deed, through my fault, my own fault, my
own grievous fault: wherefore I pray Almighty God to have mercy
upon me, to forgive me all my sins, and to make clean my heart
within me.
The primary task of the pastor-counselor is not to preserve
the marriage, nor to break it up, but to ascertain what the sin is,
whose it is, whether or not there is repentance, and thereby to
enable the man and woman to see their problem more clearly. Sin
and salvation must be his primary concerns. The fact that both the
man and the woman are church members is no assurance of their
salvation.
Similarly, in counseling in nonmarital problems, there is a
certainty of further dissension unless true confession and restitu-
tion have primacy. Christians do have problems, but not all people
in churches are Christians.
Confessing other people’s sins has become the essence of too
much counseling. It is too often equated with an efficient ministry!
The results are deadly. “Good” church people have become masters
at whining and complaining, at “confessing” the sins of others.
Some prospective employers are now investigating the complaining
habits of job applicants. I have heard of several men who were
regarded as the best qualified by far for a job-opening but were
passed over when their habit of talking against present and past
CONFESSING OTHER PEOPLE’S SINS 133
Confessing Perfection
A good many years ago, a book was written titled, as I recall it,
A World I Never Made. The title appealed intensely to liberal
and radical university students, who carried it around like a Bible.
(Ernest Hemingway’s silly For Whom the Bell Tolls was similarly
used like an intellectual icon. I tried reading Hemingway’s book
but got no further than the laughable scene where the hero and her-
oine, after copulating, both swore that the earth shook! Their for-
nication was for them a cosmic act; I found it a laughable one.
Many years later, I was delighted to learn that my wife Dorothy had
tossed the book aside at the same point.)
A World I Never Made was a title with an instant and pro-
found appeal to all our Pharisees. The world was for them indeed
a sorry place, undeserving of their idealism and their high-minded
beliefs. The book was carried about as a symbol of faith, as was
Hemingway’s book. It was a public testimony to the “fact” that
they were not responsible for the evil world their fathers and fore-
fathers had ostensibly created. They were the victims of a world
they never made, and to carry the book, and to provoke discus-
sions of it, was their way of confessing themselves as too noble and
too good for so evil a generation. These were well fed, well clothed,
and, in some instances, well financed students, graduate and
135
136 THE CURE OF SOULS
1. William S. McFeely, Frederick Douglass (New York, NY: W.W. Norton, 1991),
56.
138 THE CURE OF SOULS
2. Ibid., 294.
3. Ibid., 519ff.
4. Ibid., 100, 127-28, 242.
5. Ibid., 112.
CONFESSING PERFECTION 139
Confession versus
Psychotherapy
I t has bewildered a few people who have become aware of the fact
that I am writing a study of confession as to why I am doing so.
Am I on the “road to Rome” when Rome seems to be busy
modernizing itself? Why the interest in something as “obsolete” as
confession?
The twentieth century, however, has been the great age of the
confessional. Mention has been made of the many popular tabloid
papers and magazines that stress “true” confessions of one kind or
another.
But the matter goes deeper than that. Has no one considered
the implications of the Stalin trials of the 1930s? These were later
repeated in other Marxist countries, including Red China. Men
who were guilty only of being faithful Marxists were tortured until
they were ready to stand up and “confess” to being tools or spies of
the capitalistic West. Such trials are no longer publicized, especially
in the West, but they still exist.
They are a necessity to these evil regimes. To prove them-
selves publicly to be the force for humanity’s freedom, they must
damn all opposition as hostile to man and his freedom. The
Western press publicized these trials in the 1930s; there was some
141
142 THE CURE OF SOULS
1. Martin Ingrem, Church Courts, Sex and Marriage in England, 1570-1640 (Cam-
bridge, England: Cambridge University Press, [1967] 1990), 3.
2. Ibid., 294
144 THE CURE OF SOULS
3. Ibid., 342.
CONFESSION VERSUS PSYCHOTHERAPY 145
Dangerous Confessions
(Part 1)
1. Bernard Denvir, “The Social History of Nudism,” in John Hadfield, ed., The Sat-
urday Book (Hutchinson of London, 1966), 189.
150 THE CURE OF SOULS
Dangerous Confessions
(Part II)
153
154 THE CURE OF SOULS
1. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, bk. 3, chap. 4, sec. 6; vol. 1 (Phil-
adelphia, PA: Presbyterian Board of Christian Education, 1936), 687.
156 THE CURE OF SOULS
woman who was important in the parish. It left the pastor equally
distrustful of a good elder in his congregation.
In an evil time, things are evilly used, and confession is cer-
tainly so used at times. The abuse of confession at the time of the
Reformation was the subject of attack by Catholic writers even
more perhaps than by Protestants, who concentrated on faith and
doctrine.
It is necessary to view confessions with some degree of objec-
tivity and skepticism. The psychological insight of Dr. Bergler was
great when he described a common offense by patients: pleading
innocent to the lesser wrong in order to conceal a greater one. Some
people confess to endless trifles in order to impress their pastor with
the fact that they are ostensibly very sensitive souls.
Boccaccio, in The Decameron, tells an amusing story of a
man, Ciapelletto, “perhaps the worst man ever born,” who, while
visiting Burgundy on business, fell deathly ill. In making his death-
bed confession, to avoid implicating his evil associates, he gave a
false confession which seemed to attest to a saintly and extremely
sensitive soul. He was so impressive that, after his death, he gained
a reputation as a saint, and “it is claimed that through him God had
wrought many miracles.”
Such fraudulent confessions are still with us, and in all
churches. Sin is common to many quarters. Counselors who urge
or welcome confessions are easily victimized. There is no small
pride in some people in exploiting and lying to a clergyman.
An elderly priest of about seventy, some thirty years ago
observed that he had never heard a man confess to being stingy!
That statement tells us much. It should enable us to see how dan-
gerous confessions can be in fooling the pastor and furthering sin.
Our original sin (Gen. 3:5) is to be as gods, knowing or deter-
mining for ourselves what is good and evil, right and wrong. It is
this that must be stressed. The sinner must see that his true offense
is attempting to be his own god; he may be willing to admit to
many particular sins with a show of humility and contrition, but
too often not to the heart of his sin.
28
159
160 THE CURE OF SOULS
Ananias and Sapphira (Acts 5), confession was central to the believ-
er’s relationship to the Lord, and to the Christian community.
Until after World War II, confessions were a basic aspect of
the church’s life. Because of their anti-Catholicism, Protestants did
not use terms such as “the confessional,” but it was commonplace
with many evangelicals to require a converted or repentant sinner
to repeat a confession after the pastor or a deacon while kneeling in
prayer; he would then be encouraged to go from the general con-
fession to his own specific one. This procedure of “praying
through” to victory had varying names in different churches, but it
was a vigorous confessional practice.
St. Augustine, the father of autobiography, called his work
Confessions. Autobiography as confession, a confession of one’s
unworthiness and God’s marvelous grace, became a part of Chris-
tendom. The shift away from a Christian to a humanistic confes-
sion came into its own with Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Since then,
humanistic confessions, some very boastful ones, have proliferated,
and more than a few, like that of Frank Harris, are highly suspect.
To confess one’s sins to God is an act of contrition and
humility. The confessing man places his life against the yardstick of
God’s law and recognizes how wanting he is, and how much he
needs God’s grace and mercy.
Christendom has been marked by the confession of sin. The
non-Christian world does not confess its sin on the whole so much
as confessing victimization, by the gods, or by other men.
Classical Greek tragedy, Sophocles and Euripides, gives us a
very evil picture of life. Man is the victim of the gods and fate.
Sophocles loads the deck mercilessly in “Oedipus the King” and
“Oedipus at Colonus.” These works are “great drama” to people
enmeshed in the cult of victimization and the culture of self-pity.
Laius, King of Thebes, has been told by the oracle at Delphi that a
son will be born to him, and this son will kill him. When a son is
born, he is given by the mother, Iocaste, to a Theban shepherd to
be exposed to die. In pity, the shepherd gives the baby to another
shepherd, who takes the child to Corinth, where the baby boy, his
ancestry unknown, is adopted by King Polybus and his wife,
CONFESSION AND CULTURE 161
2. Isaac A. Langnas, collector and trans., 1200 Russian Proverbs, no. 1107 (New
York, NY: Philosophical Library, 1960), 80.
3. Ibid., no. 664, 48.
29
Confession
and Communion
165
166 THE CURE OF SOULS
Trent and its decrees. Anything else was apostasy. With his
extremism, he soon lost even those who loved the Latin Mass.
One of the finest and kindliest pastors I have ever known, an
elderly Princetonian of the old school, had come in time to concen-
trate his preaching on various texts in the Gospel of John, all ably
done, with careful exegesis, but the Bible is bigger than John’s
Gospel.
The faithful and systematic preaching of the whole word of
God, from Genesis to Revelation, enables the people of God to
know God’s law and grace, His definition of sin and judgment, His
mercy and peace, and much, much more.
As we examine the great early church fathers, we find that
they went through various books of the Bible systematically. Cer-
tainly Luther and Calvin did so. The result was a confessing church
in every sense of the word. Men exposed to the whole word of God
confessed both their sins and their faith. The triune God was the
governing power in their lives and world.
We are today confronted with many false solutions to the
same problem faced in 1215 by the Lateran Council. Some Protes-
tant churches have seen as the solution the return to weekly com-
munion. (At one time, in terms of the Passover, many churches,
especially Reformed, celebrated communion once a year. In Scot-
land, and then in the United States in its first century, several
churches in an area celebrated together annually in “Holy Fairs.”)
This solution is a fallacious one. Holy communion is pre-
ceded in some form by a confession of sins, and it is celebrated and
partaken as a confession of faith. Neither can exist apart from the
faithful and systematic preaching of the word. Confession and
communion are essentially related to one another; they are together
dependant on the faithful preaching of the word of God and the
work of the Holy Spirit.
30
1. Clarence Stam, Living in the Joy of Faith: The Christian Faith as Outlined in the
Heidelberg Catechism (Neerlandia, Alberta, Canada: Inheritance Publishers, 1991), 74.
169
170 THE CURE OF SOULS
2. Ibid., 77.
CONFESSION AND GRACE 171
3. Ibid., 103.
172 THE CURE OF SOULS
thought that it would perhaps have suited her more if a hymn be-
gan, “Ah, holy Me.” Heermann’s hymn is a song about grace be-
cause it is a song of confession. The church is today impotent
because it has a false gospel of cheap grace, because it has down-
graded confession, and because it therefore worships an idol created
by its evil imagination. Success in a humanistic sense comes easily
to those who proclaim this false gospel. The 1980s saw some of the
scandals related to antinomian, cheap-grace evangelists. All the
same, others prosper, because the Scriptures are in practice denied.
How can men be “the servants of righteousness” or justice, a power
in the world for Christ and His Kingdom, if they are not truly “free
from sin” (Rom. 6:18)? At best, the confessions accompanying the
cheap-grace churches are cheap confessions, worthless too often in
their effects. I have known men who claimed to have been “saved”
many times after many major sins. It was for them a convenient
public ritual to indulge their sin and then “go forward” and make
a confession at a revival meeting or some like occasion. Just as the
Catholic confession has over the years been often abused by many,
who take both sin and confession casually, so too all too many Prot-
estants have reduced the meaning of sin and confession to trifling
matters and words.
Heermann in his hymn called sin “treason,” and rightly so.
The old negro spiritual, “Were You There When They Crucified
My Lord?,” may well be an echo of Heermann’s poem.
Sin, said Heermann, is treason. Adam’s rebellion against
God, and the sin of all men since, is rebellion, a revolution against
the sovereign God, His government, and law. We cannot grasp the
meaning of grace unless we see our every sin, however great or
small, as treason against the triune God. Knowing this, we can then
understand the magnitude of His grace and the necessity for our
confession.
We poor and miserable rebels, proud and angry sinners all,
believe that because our sins are trifles in our arrogant minds, they
are also trifles to God and to man. We choose to forget our sins,
and we assume that because we have put them out of our minds,
God has done the same also. We expect to set the character of our
relationship to the triune God, as though we were in the driver’s
CONFESSION AND GRACE 173
175
176 THE CURE OF SOULS
15. And the prayer of faith shall save the sick, and the Lord shall
raise him up; and if he have committed sins, they shall be forgiven
him.
16. Confess your faults one to another, and pray one for another,
that ye may be healed. The effectual fervent prayer of a righteous
man availeth much.
In origin, extreme unction, meaning last anointing, was not
reserved to deathbeds but was used for the sick. It was marked by
1) the visitation of the sick or dying by an elder or elders; 2) prayers
were to be said over the sick man; 3) he was to be anointed with oil;
since the word anoint is in Greek related to the word Christ, the sick
or dying man was thereby designated as belonging to God’s
anointed One, Jesus Christ, although this does not exhaust its
meaning; and 4) confession was to be made by the sick or dying
man. At the same time, 5) the hope of healing by God’s grace was
declared. Over the centuries, this rite tended to be reserved for the
dying. In my childhood and youth, this practice, although not
called extreme unction, was common to many Protestant groups. It
began to wane, however, for various reasons: 1) a theological
decline and indifference; 2) a hostility to Rome; and 3) because
Pentecostals and Charismatics began to practice anointing in some
healing services. None of these are good reasons for abandoning
James’s instructions.
The Roman Catholic service, as it developed, proved to be
most interesting. In The New Saint Andrew Bible Missal (1966),
there are some elements to this order of service that are of particular
note. First, the service invokes James 5:14-16 as its foundation. It
also cites in detail Matthew 8, in particular 8:5-13, the episode of
the centurion and his faith. There is much here in the way of a
stress on God’s sovereign grace. Second, this service is very
“Roman” in that it includes appeals for the prayers of the saints, at
some length. Third, there is both an anointing of “full pardon and
the remission of all your sins…” “by the power given to me by the
Apostolic See.”
It is clear why the reformers broke with the Roman Catholic
doctrine of extreme unction, but they obviously did not break with
the admonition of James, nor with the reliance on confession and
a trust in grace. A total trust in God’s sovereign grace was common
DEATH AND CONFESSION 177
1. Thomas Mc’Crie, Life of John Knox (Philadelphia, PA: Presbyterian Board of Pub-
lication, [1813] 1905), 324.
178 THE CURE OF SOULS
2. Ibid., 338.
3. Ilico, No More Apologies (London, England: Religious Book Club, 1941), 76-77.
DEATH AND CONFESSION 179
Congregational and
National Confessions
Only those who have been redeemed by God’s grace can grow by
means of various instruments of grace.
We read in Ezra 9:4 that all, who knowing their sin and the
nation’s history of sin, had assembled themselves together with
Ezra. In Ezra 9:6-15, we have Ezra’s prayer of confession for these
people and the nation. It is a citation also of certain laws against
mixed marriages, laws which the people had broken by marrying
ungodly peoples. Ezra thereby confesses a specific sin to God, as
well as an apostasy and a contempt for God’s law-word. Ezra
prayed,
6. And said, O my God, I am ashamed and blush to lift up my face
to thee, my God: for our iniquities are increased over our head, and
our trespass is grown up unto the heavens.
7. Since the days of our fathers have we been in a great trespass
unto this day; and for our iniquities have we, our kings, and our
priests, been delivered into the hand of the kings of the lands, to
the sword, to captivity, and to a spoil, and to confusion of face, as
it is this day.
8. And now for a little space grace hath been shewed from the
LORD our God, to leave us a remnant to escape, and to give us a
nail in his holy place, that our God may lighten our eyes, and give
us a little reviving in our bondage.
9. For we were bondmen; yet our God hath not forsaken us in our
bondage, but hath extended mercy unto us in the sight of the kings
of Persia, to give us a reviving, to set up the house of our God, and
to repair the desolations thereof, and to give us a wall in Judah and
in Jerusalem.
10. And now, O our God, what shall we say after this? for we have
forsaken thy commandments,
11. Which thou has commanded by thy servants the prophets, say-
ing, The land, unto which ye go to possess it, is an unclean land
with the filthiness of the people of the lands, with their abomina-
tions, which have filled it from one end to another with their un-
cleanness.
12. Now therefore give not your daughters unto their sons, neither
take their daughters unto your sons, nor seek their peace or their
wealth for ever: that ye may be strong, and eat the good of the land,
and leave it for an inheritance to your children for ever.
13. And after all that is come upon us for our evil deeds, and for
our great trespass, seeing that thou our God hast punished us less
than our iniquities deserve, and hast given us such deliverance as
this;
14. Should we again break thy commandments, and join in affinity
with the people of these abominations? wouldest not thou be angry
CONGREGATIONAL AND NATIONAL CONFESSIONS 183
and God had brought death to both Israel and Judah, but not to all
the people. Their cities had been laid waste, the walls of Jerusalem
destroyed, the temple leveled, their women and virgins ravished,
their people carried into alien lands in chains, and judgment passed
on them in a radical manner. With all this vivid in their memories,
and with the ruins around them, they were again entering into cov-
enants with the ungodly through marriages.
Fifth, God had brought them to “confusion of face,” to utter
disgrace, and they were not even aware of it! They were returning
to their ancient sins as though they were virtues. Instead of seeing
their return as the grace of God (v. 8), they saw it as their just and
lawful restoration, as a license to sin again. They were acting as
though they could sin and yet grace would naturally abound to
them as God’s people! It was as though shamelessness had become
a virtue to them. We see a like attitude today in the churches; anti-
nomianism is shamelessly paraded as a privilege of grace.
Sixth, the people over the centuries had been repeatedly
warned by God’s “servants the prophets” from the days of Moses
on. All these warnings had usually been in vain. The history of the
people was more marked by sin and apostasy than by covenant
faithfulness.
Seventh, God had been merciful in the face of all these things,
yet they had despised His mercies. Ezra confesses that God now has
every reason to abandon His people forever. This final casting off,
however, had to wait until the coming of the Messiah. The
churches should remember that there is now no similar restraint on
God’s judgment.
Eighth, there is not a single request, not a single plea for
mercy in Ezra’s prayer. It is a prayer of confession, a true prayer.
False confessions demand full restoration in return for a few words.
Ezra knew that God had every reason to write finished across Israel’s
history.
Ezra’s confession was national and congregational, and, at
the same time, intensely personal. Its public nature does not elim-
inate its private character. Normally, a national day of repentance
and confession is marked by more formal prayers.
CONGREGATIONAL AND NATIONAL CONFESSIONS 185
1. Derek Kidner, Ezra and Nehemiah (Downers Grove, IL: Inter-Varsity Press,
1979), 69.
186 THE CURE OF SOULS
bed comment, “The good God will pardon me, for that’s His
job,” was perhaps Heine’s crowning sin and very revealing of his
reprobate mind.
33
Confession
and Collection
187
188 THE CURE OF SOULS
His due when we tithe, and we confess His lordship. When we fail
to tithe, we rob Him.
St. Paul, in summoning believers to give for special collec-
tions, did so because of “his awareness that salvation comes to men
only as the free gift of the grace of God.”1 Our Lord says, “freely ye
have received, freely give” (Matt. 10:8).
Paul took up a special collection for the poor (Gal. 2:10).
He had no hesitancy in doing so, because it was for him an impor-
tant expression of the fact that “we are members one of another”
(Eph. 4:25).
The Mosaic law is full of requirements that covenant mem-
bers help fellow believers in need. The church as the new Israel of
God (Gal. 6:16) has this same obligation. To help one another, and
to tithe to the Lord, is thus a means of confession, of confessing
Christ.
In Judaism, voluntary contributions were also gathered for
scholars.2 In the medieval and Reformation eras, scholars were sup-
ported by Christians as a necessary ministry. In Ephesians 4:11,
“pastors and teachers” (or scholars) are placed together.
According to Nickle, the collection had a theological signifi-
cance for Paul. First, it expressed and put into practice Christian
charity. Paul was here thinking of gifts above and over the tithe.
Second, such gifts for diaconal mercies expressed Christian unity.
Third, it represented “the anticipation of Christian eschatology.”3
Christ is for the Christian “the blessed and only Potentate, the King
of kings, and the Lord of lords” (1 Tim. 6:15). By means of our
giving, Christians command the various spheres of life, worship,
health, education, welfare, and more. We witness thereby to
Christ’s Lordship, His dominion and sovereignty over all spheres
of life and thought. To tithe, and to give more than the tithe, is to
confess Christ as Lord; failure to tithe and give is a confession of
sin, of a disregard for God’s claim on us.
4. Ibid., 107.
190 THE CURE OF SOULS
Turning Ourselves In
1. Richard Watson, A Biblical and Theological Dictionary (New York, NY: T. Mason
and G. Lane, [1832] 1840), 256.
TURNING OURSELVES IN 195
2. H.C.G. Moule, The Epistle of Paul the Apostle to the Philippians (Cambridge,
England: Cambridge University Press, [1889] 1907), 73.
3. Thomas Wilson, Sacra Privata: Private Meditations and Prayers (New York, NY:
Thomas Whitaker, 1879), 55.
TURNING OURSELVES IN 197
4. Ibid., 84-85. (I first read Sacra Privata February 1- April 26, 1951; I have learned
much from it, and have much more to learn.)
5. Ibid., 122.
35
199
200 THE CURE OF SOULS
Confession
versus Litigation
1. David Gergen, “America’s Legal Mess,” U.S. News & World Report, August 19,
1991, 72.
203
204 THE CURE OF SOULS
The removal of guilt is also triply described. (1) Blot out (cp. v. 9):
sin is regarded as a debt recorded in God’s book which needs to be
erased and cancelled (cp. the use of the word in Ex. xxxii. 32; Num.
v. 23); and see… Ps. xxxii. 2): or the word may be used more gen-
erally (wipe out) of cleansing away defilement so that no trace of it
remains (2 Kings xxi. 13). Cp. the promise in Is. xliii. 25, xliv. 22;
and also Neh. iv. 5; Jer.xviii. 23. (2) Wash me: the word means
properly to wash clothes, as a fuller does… and is frequently used
in ceremonial purifications (Ex. xix. 10; 14, &c.): here it denotes
that inward cleansing of which external washings were the type.
Cp. Jer. ii. 22, iv. 14. He prays, “wash me throughly,” or abundant-
ly, for “the depth of his guilt demands an unwonted and special
grace.” But if transgression abound (Lam. i.5), so does mercy. (3)
Cleanse me (cp. be clean, v. 7); like wash, a common term in the
Levitical ritual, especially in the laws concerning leprosy. Cp. Lev.
xiii. 6, 34,&c.; 2 Kings v. 10,12,13,14.2
Confession is related to litigation and a court of law, God’s court.
Confession means entering a guilty plea by a full acknowledgment
of our law-breaking; we throw ourselves on God’s mercy and ask
for His forgiveness. We also pledge ourselves to make restitution
and to change our ways.
Now, in a fallen world, civil and criminal litigations are a
necessity, as are lawyers. An attorney at law pursues, if he is Godly,
a legitimate vocation. As with ministers in the church, the lawyer’s
legitimacy before God depends upon his faithfulness to Him.
We have, however, a generation whose ways are highly liti-
gious. Having forsaken the living God, and having made them-
selves their own gods (Gen. 3:5), they see every questioning of their
“majesty” as grounds for legal action. The choice has indeed been
for many one between confession and litigation.
Biblical confession rests on the fact of the atonement. We can
confess our sins unto God because we have the assurance that He
has provided His Son as our sin-bearer and Redeemer. Thus, to
confess our sins is to confess our trust in Christ and His atonement
for us. Isaiah 53:5-7 declares,
5. But he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for
our iniquities: the chastisement of our peace was upon him; and
with his stripes we are healed.
2. A. F. Kirkpatrick, The Book of Psalms (Cambridge, England: University Press,
[1902] 1906), 288-89.
CONFESSION VERSUS LITIGATION 207
6. All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to
his own way; and the LORD hath laid on him the iniquity of us all.
7. He was oppressed, and he was afflicted, yet he opened not his
mouth: he is brought as a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep be-
fore her shearers is dumb, so he openeth not his mouth.
In litigation before criminal or civil courts, someone loses, or,
sometimes both sides lose. The joy of confession is that, when our
confession is a faithful one, we are always delivered and blessed.
Although our sins merit hell, confession gives us God’s favor and
grace. Confession means deliverance from the burden of sin and
guilt.
Those who avoid confession are lovers of misery.
37
209
210 THE CURE OF SOULS
given in Jesus Christ, who is called “the Holy and Righteous One,”
Acts 3:14. He reflected in His life the perfect holiness of God. Final-
ly, the holiness of God is also revealed in the Church as the body of
Christ.1
Only insofar as the church is truly the body of Christ does it reveal
the holiness of God. Since God’s law reveals His moral holiness, to
depart from the law of God is to forsake holiness for sin. An anti-
nomian church is thus a false church.
Confession and restitution lead to restoration. This restora-
tion has more than one fact. First, it is a restoration of one’s rela-
tionship to the triune God. Without this restoration, man cannot
have peace with God. We have virtually forgotten two once impor-
tant words: shriven, and unshriven. The word shrive comes from the
Latin, scribo, to write. It has reference to a legal pardon from
Almighty God; a shriven soul is a confessed and pardoned man. To
be unshriven means that no valid pardon for sin has been secured
from Christ through His church.
Second, with true confession and restitution, there is a resto-
ration of our relationship with our fellow man, with the one
offended and also all who know of the sin. Community again pre-
vails. Confession is closely related to the sacrament of communion;
in some form, either by personal or by a general confession, we
approach Christ’s table as forgiven sinners. He who forgave our sins
by His atonement requires us to make restitution one to another.
Third, the society is restored, because unconfessed sins, and
failures to make restitution, damage the relationships between peo-
ples. Instead of community, there is hostility.
Fourth, confession and restitution correct as far as is humanly
possible past evils and liberate men and communities from the
burden of the past into the possibilities of the future. Released from
their bondage of the past, men and peoples, nations and churches,
can then be future-oriented.
1. Louis Berkhof, Systematic Theology (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, [1941] 1946),
74.
38
under the judgment of God. The state sees itself as the form of the
good in man’s life.
The church has similar delusions. It is good because it calls
itself Christ’s church. Our Lord, however, in Revelation 2:1-3:22
has some harsh things to say about some of the churches, very early
churches, and He calls one “the synagogue of Satan” (Rev. 2:9). We
would have to say that the element in the Smyrna church was prob-
ably far better than many churches today who believe that the odor
they reek of is sanctity.
To cite an example of the abomination common to many
churches, I have a letter, received yesterday, from a woman I met
about thirty years ago, when we were both younger. A Godly
daughter of very Godly parents, her husband, from a prominent
family in that city, left her to travel across the country with another
man’s wife. He left her a few months later to live with another
woman. A few months later, he married, with a Mexican divorce, a
school teacher. A friend who visited him found that a drunken sex
orgy was underway, with all naked. The school-teacher wife was
mounted by one man, with others waiting their turn, and the hus-
band and others were busy with other women. A lawyer advised the
original and Godly wife to get a divorce, since her state did not rec-
ognize Mexican divorces, and consequently she could lose her
hard-earned house.
The home church did not condemn the husband but the
wife. She was expected to sit by the window with a light on, praying
for her husband to return. The very prominent, nationally known,
and published pastor told her to leave the church; they wanted no
divorced women. Moreover, he said, she was probably guilty and
drove him into sin by “keeping her legs crossed.” This outrageous
and insulting lie came from a pastor who died later in the sickly
odor of sanctity.
All this happened thirty years ago. Since then, the ex-hus-
band has twice eluded warrants for his arrest for swindling aging
widows of large sums of money. His ex-wife is still abused by the
church for “her part,” but nothing is said about the man.
NOTHING IS GOOD OF ITSELF 215
whoso confesseth and forsaketh them shall have mercy.” This verse
is related to Psalm 32:5:
I acknowledged my sin unto thee, and mine iniquity have I not
hid. I said, I will confess my transgressions unto the LORD; and
thou forgavest the iniquity of my sin.
We began by calling attention to the fact that neither church
nor state is of itself good, nor is any man. The same applies to con-
fession. In some church circles, it is assumed that confession of itself
requires forgiveness and restoration. This means reducing the Bib-
lical meaning of confession to empty words.
When Saul disobeyed God with respect to Amalek, he con-
fessed his sin when confronted by Samuel (1 Sam. 15:1-35). Saul’s
verbal confession was a “good” one:
24. And Saul said unto Samuel, I have sinned: for I have trans-
gressed the commandment of the LORD, and thy words: because
I feared the people, and obeyed their voice.
25. Now therefore, I pray thee, pardon my sin, and turn again with
me, that I may worship the LORD. (1 Sam. 15:24-25)
Saul said that he had sinned; he wanted restoration “that I may
worship the LORD.” His reason for sinning was “because I feared
the people, and obeyed their voice.” He gave an excuse for sin-
ning. David could have said that Bathsheba had inflamed him
sexually by bathing where she could be seen naked (2 Samuel
11:2). All that David said was, “I have sinned against the LORD”
(2 Sam. 12:13). He was ready to pay the price for his sins, death.
But God told David through Nathan, “The LORD also hath put
away thy sin; thou shalt not die,” although death would strike his
house (2 Sam. 12:13-14).
People are now casual about both sin and confession. An
American proverb of some wisdom says, “Commit a sin thrice and
you will think it allowable.” This easy acceptance of sin as a fact of
life, (when it is a fact of death) is very prevalent. Another American
proverb says, “A sin concealed needs two forgivings,” because the
concealing is itself a sin. In a generation given to despising God’s
law and either concealing sin or treating it as nothing, the time of
forgiveness is being replaced with the necessity for judgment.
39
217
218 THE CURE OF SOULS
was some years ago), they were not “true” blacks to her. As a
humanistic do-gooder, she befriended a black hoodlum, who raped
her. He said she asked for it; she excused his behavior as an effect
of racism. Such incidents have not been uncommon, and black
girls have also been raped by white students whom they assumed
were more moral than black men.
There is an implicit confession in such incidents. It is that
humanity is one family, and a good environment and decent treat-
ment brings out the good in people. People are unable to recognize
the very substantial moral differences among people. There is a
remarkable episode from the 1930s: a committee was investigating
the control of prostitution in a major city by a criminal syndicate
leader. In hearing the testimonies of the prostitutes who had been
controlled and exploited, the committee heard one prostitute
describe how much she was worked and exploited: on one occa-
sion, she had taken some sixty men upstairs for sex. A horrified
society matron on the civic commission exclaimed in dismay,
“That must have been terrible!” The prostitute answered, “Yeah,
those stairs really get you down after a while.” The society matron
had expected the prostitute to feel degraded, whereas it was sore
feet the prostitute complained about.
Did this episode mean that the whore and the matron were
two different kinds of being? Far from it: both were sinners, but
their sinning took different directions. A bank robber and an
embezzling bank officer are alike sinners before God, whatever
their outward differences.
People must be viewed in terms of their relationship to God,
not in terms of their social status. All must make their common
confession to God. The old saying, now forgotten or ridiculed, was,
“There but for the grace of God go I.” What we are, we are by
God’s grace. We did not choose our race, sex, aptitudes, century of
birth, or anything else. We are God’s creation, and to Him we must
confess our sins, and to Him we must render thanks. Paul says,
4. Rejoice in the Lord always: and again I say, Rejoice.
5. Let your moderation be known unto all men. The Lord is at
hand.
THE “SINNE EATER” 219
1. Richard Watson, A Biblical and Theological Dictionary (New York, NY: Mason
and Lane, [1832] 1840), 256.
2. See Oliver Lawson Dick, ed., Aubrey’s Brief Lives (Ann Arbor, MI: University of
Michigan Press, 1957), lix-lx. See also R. J. Rushdoony, Revolt Against Maturity
(Vallecito, CA: Ross House Books, [1977] 1989), 189ff.
THE “SINNE EATER” 221
B oth the police and reporters are familiar with the criminal’s
need to confess. While the “third degree” once existed, one
police detective told me that it was not necessary; many criminals
were eager to confess. According to an old proverb, “Open confes-
sion is good for the soul.” But it is not only the police and priests
to whom confession is made; it is made often to friends and to
strangers, to someone who seems receptive or kindly, often on the
belief that a sin confessed is a sin half-atoned.
Some confessions are made without any apparent shame and
even with pride, in effect saying, “No one is half as bad as I am.” I
heard of a girl, a long distance from home, working at a bar as a
nude waitress; she boasted that she received more tips than any
other girl without doing things the other girls did; at the same time,
she made her friend swear to never tell her parents what she was
doing. Here there was a mixture of pride and shame. At the same
time, her demand of her friend, “Swear you won’t tell,” was inter-
esting. Swear by what? The God she had heard about as a girl in
church, in whom she did not believe?
The whole area of confession is now a murky abyss. Because
the churches have more or less abandoned confession does not
223
224 THE CURE OF SOULS
1. Theodore Reik, Masochism in Modern Man (New York, NY: Farrar, Straus,
[1941] 1949), 10, 89, 123.
2. Ibid., 390.
3. Theodore Reik, Sex in Man and Woman: Its Emotional Variations (New York, NY:
Noonday Press, Farrar, Straus, 1960), 99-100.
4. Ibid., 120.
THE NEED TO CONFESS 225
6. Antonio Moreno, O.P., Jung, Gods, & Modern Man (Notre Dame, IN: University
of Notre Dame Press), 43-44.
THE NEED TO CONFESS 227
Turning Men
into Moral Zeroes
229
230 THE CURE OF SOULS
of all his principles. Turning a man into a moral zero would be the
supreme vengeance.1
Thus, the state retains the idea of sin to charge men with imaginary
sins, in order to destroy them and to reduce them into a moral zero.
Whereas God created man a moral being in His own image, with
knowledge, righteousness, holiness, and dominion (Gen. 1:26-28;
Col. 3:10; Eph. 4:24), man seeks to destroy God’s work and reduce
man to a moral zero.
This we would expect of the humanistic state. But why
should the churches, evangelical and reformed, work to do the
same thing? Martin and Deedre Bobgan have written extensively
on anti-Christian counseling programs within the church, most
recently in 12 Steps to Destruction: Codependency Recovery Heresies
(1991). Too often the victim is made the target of a counseling pro-
gram wherein guilt is transferred from the offender to the parents
or the community.
To make a man into a moral zero leaves society with an
impossible problem, i.e., impossible to solve in terms of the pre-
mises of the psychotherapy. After all, crime happens; husbands
and/or wives sin, abuse one another, commit adultery, and so on.
If the acting offender is not guilty, then there is no effective
restraint on sin. Then all sin and crime have a justification and a
vindication as against their accusers.
What happens then? Of late, several women have consulted
me, and have provided documentation of their victimization by
their husbands and by their churches. To illustrate (and this illus-
tration fits several situations), the husband is on drugs (or, an alco-
holic); he is flagrantly adulterous; he may have a venereal or
sexually transmitted disease, including AIDS; he has robbed his
wife of the money she has earned with her work, trying to provide
for the family (or, in some instances, sold items belonging to her,
or inherited by her); he has lied to her repeatedly; and so on and
on. The church does not contest these facts! Rather, it says to the
1. Armando Valladares, Against All Hope (New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf, [1986]
1987), 92.
TURNING MEN INTO MORAL ZEROES 231
wife, return to the family home, and we will work this out; your
husband has agreed to this. The fact that he has agreed to this more
than once, sometimes five or six times, and then continued his law-
less living once she is home does not upset the church. They are,
after all, committed to a no-divorce faith, now a common Protes-
tant error. If God could speak of divorcing Israel, and if God’s law
permits divorce on certain grounds, this means nothing to churches
determined to be holier than God, a position first held by Satan
(Gen. 3:1-6).
What happens if the wife refuses to submit to these ungodly
terms? Excommunication. What happens to the husband? Usually,
nothing. The Roman Catholic Church would once as a rule
demand some kind of penance. Our more “enlightened” Roman
Protestant Churches do not.
But what about our Lord’s word in Matthew 18:21-22?
21. Then came Peter to him, and said, Lord, how oft shall my
brother sin against me, and I forgive him? Till seven times?
22. Jesus saith unto him, I say not unto thee, Until seven times:
but, Until seventy times seven.
These words bring out a form of idiocy in churchmen: they speak
of the “necessity” for unconditional love and unconditional for-
giveness. But, as always, a text without a context is a pretext. Im-
mediately prior to this, our Lord, in Matthew 18:15-20, deals with
the man who refuses to right a wrong: his wronged brother is to go
to him first, alone; then with witnesses; then the church is notified,
not of charges, but of a verified offense, and if the offender “neglect
to hear the church, let him be unto thee as an heathen man and a
publican” (Matt. 18:17). Where is the unconditional love and un-
conditional forgiveness here? It does not exist! What then is our
Lord saying?
We must begin by recognizing that all our modern defini-
tions of forgiveness, especially since the Renaissance, are false and
heretical. The word forgive has reference in Scripture to God’s law,
to the Supreme Court of the universe. It can mean either 1) charges
dropped because satisfaction has been rendered, or 2), as in Luke
232 THE CURE OF SOULS
23:34, charges suspended for the time being. The word is a juridical
term, not an emotional one. It does not give us the right to forgive
on our terms because it is God’s law that is at stake, and restitution
or deferment rest on His law. Confession in the church is now a
formality, because forgiveness has been made emotional and
humanistic.
In writing on our Lord’s words on the cross, Dr. K. Schilder
said, with respect to “Father, forgive them; for they know not what
they do” (Luke 23:34), words spoken by our Lord concerning the
Roman soldiers,
… Suffice it to say that the word “forgive” as it is used here in our
text can mean: to release someone, not to put the charge or sen-
tence against a person into execution at once, not yet to effect the
penalty which the transgression according to reason and right
probably deserves.
Hence there are two kinds of forgiveness. There is a forgiveness
which, on the basis of law, says to someone: I shall cancel that
which you have done amiss. The legal issue has been carefully
considered, the verdict of the court has in no sense been
postponed, nor its effect mitigated; but we have found a legal basis
according to which the letter and the spirit of the law sets you free
forever from the persecution of the law. Such forgiveness has a
place, among other things, in the justification of the sinner. But
there is also a forgiveness which consists solely of a temporary
suspension of the charge or of the sentence. With or without a legal
sentence someone whose breach of law has been alleged or proved
can temporarily be freed from the persecution of law. Two
possibilities for the future arise from such a temporary dismissal of
action: later the man who has temporarily been dismissed from the
course of law can be arrested and condemned anew; or, in the
interim which ensues, a legal basis may be found by means of
which he definitively and strictly according to the requirements of
law is forever acquitted.
It was such a detention of the execution of law, preliminary and in-
cidental, which Jesus had in mind.2
The sentimental and emotional definition of forgiveness comes
more out of Boccaccio’s Decameron than out of Scripture. It is evil,
2. K. Schilder, Christ Crucified (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, [1940] 1948), 134-
35.
TURNING MEN INTO MORAL ZEROES 233
44. Then he saith, I will return into my house from whence I came
out; and when he is come, he findeth it empty, swept, and gar-
nished.
45. Then goeth he, and taketh with himself seven other spirits
more wicked than himself, and they enter in and dwell there: and
the last state of that man is worse than the first. Even so shall it be
also unto this wicked generation. (Matt. 12:43-45)
This was a parable by our Lord to an ungodly nation and church,
and it was a promise of judgment on Judea. How much more will
it not apply to our generation? The first demon is not even cast out!
Men are reduced to moral zeroes by both church and state. The rea-
son is clear: “There is no fear of God before their eyes” (Rom.
3:18ff.; Ps. 36:1).
42
Confession or Curse
235
236 THE CURE OF SOULS
Marital Counseling
239
240 THE CURE OF SOULS
1. Charles Hodge, An Exposition of the First Epistle to the Corinthians (Grand Rapids,
MI: Eerdmans, 1950 reprint), 104-5.
MARITAL COUNSELLING 241
243
244 THE CURE OF SOULS
1. James Spade, The Man Who Kept the Secrets (New York, NY: Bantam Books,
1991), 183.
CONVENANT AND CONFESSION 245
3. Ibid., 113.
CONVENANT AND CONFESSION 247
5. Ibid., 378.
6. Ibid., 608.
45
Indulgences
249
250 THE CURE OF SOULS
and becomes the greater sinner. When, for example, the church
compounds the evil by insisting on forgiveness and reconciliation
where no restitution has been made, then the church’s sin is much
greater before God.
The church radically changed societies for the better by
insisting on restitution rather than vengeance. We have no histo-
rian, to my knowledge, who has studied the social revolution
wrought by this insistence. It was a major battle against paganism,
and it made civilization and a Godly law-order possible. The basic
premise of God’s law is to substitute God’s law-word, His ven-
geance against sin, for man’s vengeance. As God’s law is bypassed,
human devices take over, and justice wanes.
When pilgrimages were imposed in the medieval era for res-
titution as the penance for sin, the results were a boon to the
economy of the pilgrimage cities, but no moral advancement for
society. Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales give us a telling account of how
superficial these trips were to most pilgrims. This is not to deny
that some pilgrims were truly contrite, but the pilgrimage could
not replace restitution to God and to man.
Pilgrimages became good business, big business. They were
in a sense precursors to the foreign travel plans of many a current
travel agency. More than a few fundamentalist and evangelical
churches sponsor trips to “The Holy Land,” and returning travelers
are ecstatic on what a “blessing” the trip was. The Godly went and
returned Godly people; the sanctimonious sinners were no dif-
ferent, despite their gush. The trips are minor semi-historical
guided tours.
Erasmus, near the Reformation era, denounced pilgrimages
as “tourist excursions.”1 The pilgrimages became less than holy,
and a statute of Richard II in England, 1388, decreed that all per-
sons claiming to be pilgrims who could not produce “a letter of pas-
sage” were to be arrested, unless infirm.2
1. Andrew McCall, The Medieval Underworld (New York, NY: Dorset Press, 1979),
34.
2. Ibid., 35n.
INDULGENCES 251
5. Ibid., 81.
INDULGENCES 253
255
256 THE CURE OF SOULS
May our Lord Jesus Christ have mercy upon thee, and absolve thee
by the merits of his most holy passion. And I, by his authority, that
of his apostles Peter and Paul, and of the most holy pope, granted
and committed to me in these parts, do absolve thee, first, from all
ecclesiastical censures, in whatever manner they have been in-
curred; then from all thy sins, transgressions, and excesses, how
enormous soever they may be: even from such as are reserved from
the cognizance of the holy see, and as far as the keys of the holy
Church extend. I remit to thee all punishment which thou de-
servest in Purgatory on their account; and I restore thee to the holy
sacraments of the Church, to the unity of the faithful, and to that
innocence and purity which thou possessedst at baptism: so that
when thou diest the gates of punishment shall be shut, and the
gates of the Paradise of delights shall be opened; and if thou shalt
not die at present, this grace shall remain in full force when thou
art at the point of death. In the name of the Father, the Son, and
the Holy Ghost. 2
The Council of Trent affirmed the theological “validity” of indul-
gences while curbing their practice. Their sale, however, did con-
tinue in some areas at least until 1800. In our time, Cardinal
Ratzinger has affirmed the validity of the doctrine.
The fallacy in this doctrine and practice is that what should
be reserved to God and His law is usurped by the church. Instead
of repentance and restitution, a moral change, a financial transac-
tion takes its place. The subject is one of embarrassment to Catho-
lics but a delight to Protestants and humanists in criticizing the
Roman Catholic Church.
Certainly it must be criticized and condemned, but we must
be careful that we are not guilty of the same sin before we cast a
stone (John 8:7). We are commanded by our Lord to “judge righ-
teous judgment” (John 7:24), which means judging according to
God’s justice or law. There is no relationship between indulgences
and God’s law. We are, however, forbidden to judge, first, on purely
personal grounds, i.e., out of trifling reasons and dislikes, or,
second, when we ourselves are guilty of the same or worse offenses
(John 8:1-11). We are told:
1. Judge not, that ye be not judged.
2. For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with
what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again.
2. Ibid., 565
THE INDULGENCE SOCIETY 257
3. And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye,
but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?
4. Or how wilt thou say to thy brother, Let me pull out the mote
out of thine eye; and behold, a beam is in thine own eye?
5. Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye;
and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy
brother’s eye. (Matt. 7:1-5)
Now, let us consider some instances of Protestant indul-
gences. First, a young businessman, his company of a few years’ his-
tory flourishing, hired as an accountant a church member. Before
long, he found himself near bankruptcy: the accountant had stolen
approximately $450,000 to invest in schemes he felt would enrich
him greatly and had lost it all. In the process, he had given gener-
ously to the church. The church called the businessman’s demands
for restitution harsh and unforgiving. As a Christian, he should for-
give his erring brother, who had neither repented nor asked for for-
giveness. An investigation by the businessman turned up the
embarrassing fact that the thief had done the same thing in three
other cities, only to be forgiven by the church. This discovery only
enraged the church leaders all the more, and the businessman was
censured as “unchristian.” Several like instances involving sums of
money, great and small, could be cited, in fact, all too many cases.
Second, again a too common instance, a man or a woman is
guilty of adultery, in many cases habitually so. If the guilty party
cries or acts contrite, the innocent spouse is ordered to take them
back. If the innocent party objects that there is no repentance, no
evidence of abandoning also either alcoholism or drugs, and no
clean bill of health with respect to venereal diseases or AIDS, the
church authorities denounce this because it supposedly introduces
materials “extraneous” to the spirit of forgiveness in Jesus.
In these and countless other kinds of incidents that occur
daily, God’s law is despised by the Protestant doctrine of indul-
gences. Forgiveness can only be in terms of God’s law, as a satisfac-
tion of His justice.
The modern state, too, has its indulgences, fines, prison sen-
tences, and so many hours or months of community services. An
unrepentant and particularly vicious rapist, out on parole,
expressed anger at the protest of many. “I’ve paid my debt to
258 THE CURE OF SOULS
society,” was his statement. First, his debt was not to society but to
God, whose law he had broken, and he deserved to die. Second,
there was no moral change in the man, neither repentance, confes-
sion, nor restitution. He had spent time in prison; he was involved
there in homosexuality; he had practiced the routines needed to
impress a parole board (a collection of modern pardoners and
indulgence peddlers), and, within a year after his release, he was
arrested for another serious crime. How many he had committed
which remained as “unsolved crimes,” no one knows.
Our modern legal system is far worse than John Tetzel and
his associates, and yet one and all accept it as justice! Someone has
said, “When people have to worry about being protected from our
legal system, rather than being protected by it, it’s time to do some-
thing!” Well, during most of history, the state and its legal system
have been as much an enemy to the people as criminals, sometimes
more so.
Justice will escape every legal system, every church and state,
if God’s law is set aside. We will then have exactly what we do have,
a system of indulgences. When the black prize fighter, Mike Tyson,
savagely raped a young woman, a black, and a Sunday school
teacher, a number of black pastors called for mercy for Tyson, com-
munity service, and the like. White pastors too often kept silent,
lest they be accused of that great modern sin, racism!
The indulgence society of the early 1400s was seemingly very
powerful, and the peddling of indulgences highly profitable and
successful. It was, however, both evil and vulnerable. So too today,
churches and states, following their self-hallowed indulgence sys-
tems, are highly vulnerable and will either be reformed or decay.
We live in an indulgence society and are too blind to see it.
47
Confession
and Inquisition
1. Rabbi Reven Drucker, The Book of Joshua (Brooklyn, NY: Mesorah Publications,
1982), 209.
CONFESSION AND INQUISITION 261
Confession as Government
263
264 THE CURE OF SOULS
man, and between one person and another. Their talk made me
realize something I had never thought of before. A constant
problem in Protestant churches is quarreling women. Even St. Paul
had to deal with this problem and had to write to the Philippians
beseeching two women to “be of the same mind in the Lord” (Phil.
4:2). It occurred to me that a convent full of women would be a
potentially stormy place; however strict the discipline, the resent-
ments and disagreements would be there. A good confessor would
be truly a peacemaker, and to be a confessor to nuns would require
a wise and patient priest.
The nuns did not use the word, but I recognized that confes-
sion is a form of government. The responses of a good confessor
would be corrective, humbling, and governmental. Not only an
abbess governs a convent: the confessor does also.
As I write this, I recall a long life of many prayers of confes-
sion, not as many as there should have been, no doubt, but many.
A confession is of sin, and also of burdens. It is a plea for govern-
ment. In Psalm 51, we have David’s great confessional prayer. He
prays, not only for mercy and forgiveness, but also for a clean heart
and an inward renewal. He asks to be restored in the joy of salva-
tion and to be upheld by the Lord. Having been a transgressor, he
wants the blessing of God to enable him to teach other transgres-
sors. All this and more is in David’s confessional prayer. He asks for
peace with God, the government of God over him and in him, and
the power to become effectual in God’s service.
That confession to a priest or pastor has been abused and per-
verted is an obvious fact. In a fallen world, what has not been
twisted into evil? The Fourth Lateran Council, A.D. 1215,
required confession to a priest once a year by all believers under
penalty of excommunication. This step has been offensive to Prot-
estants on the ground that the prerogatives of God cannot be given
to men or to the church. To require confession is to place very great
powers of government in the hands of men and the church; for
Protestants, confession to God is a necessity, and confession to
another believer or to a pastor is an option, not a law.
CONFESSION AS GOVERNMENT 265
1. Peter Heath, Church and Realm, 1272-1461 (London, England: Fontana Press,
1988), 163.
2. James Baikie, “Confession (Egyptian),” in James Hastings, ed., Encyclopaedia of
Religion and Ethics, vol. 3 (Edinburgh, Scotland: T&T. Clark, [1900] 1932), 827.
266 THE CURE OF SOULS
267
268 THE CURE OF SOULS
11. Be glad in the LORD, and rejoice, ye righteous: and shout for
joy, all ye that are upright in heart.
This is a psalm of confession and therefore of praise. There
is a reason for this: “in Christian terms confession is also confession
of faith.”1
Psalm 32 is about the blessedness or happiness of forgiveness.
Forgiveness is in verse 1 declared to be the covering of sin. The for-
given man is he who comes honestly to God to confess and
acknowledge his sin (v. 2). The imputation of guilt is removed
from him by God. A. F. Kirkpatrick very ably described the
meaning of this:
Forgiveness is also triply described (1) as the taking away of a
burden; cp. John i. 29, and the expression “to bear iniquity”: (2)
as covering, so that the foulness of sin no longer meets the eye of
the judge and calls for punishment; (3) as the canceling of a
debt, which is no longer reckoned against the offender: cp. 2
Sam. Xix. 19.2
The temporal consequences for sin may remain, as they did
for David, but the eternal consequence was mercy and forgiveness.
The reference to guile in verse 2 is to self-deception and dissimula-
tion before God.
David confesses that for a time guile was his stance, or, at
least, silence (v. 3). As a result, he admits, his bones wasted away,
i.e., his evasion had total consequences for his being. His health was
affected: sin aged him. H. C. Leupold rendered “roaring” in verse
3 as “grieving.” By refusing to confess his sin, David found sin to
be a destructive force to his being; his body grew old. It was sin that
brought death into the world by Adam’s sin, and sin always works
towards the death of the sinner and society. David’s time of impen-
itence aged him.
In verse 4 David says that day and night the judgment of God
for his sin was upon him like a working death sentence. He felt like
a man stranded in a desert place, parched for lack of water or mois-
ture. He was withering away.
1. Stuart G. Held, Doctrine and Practice in the Early Church (Grand Rapids, MI:
Eerdmans, [1991] 1992), 192.
2. A. F. Kirkpatrick, The Book of Psalms (Cambridge, England: University Press,
[1903] 1906), 162.
THE JOY OF CONFESSION 269
4. Joseph Addison Alexander, The Psalms (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, reprint of
1850 edition), 141.
5. Ibid., 140
6. Kirkpatrick, Book of Psalms, 165
Scripture Index
Genesis Numbers
1:26-28 – 41, 230 5:23 – 206
3:1-5 – 108, 194 5:5-7 – 89
3:1-6 – 231 5:6-7 – 89
3:5 – 45, 120, 157, 162, 191, 5:5-10 – 103
206 5:21 – 237
3:9-13 – 105 35:30 – 259
3:12 – 162 Deuteronomy
3:13 – 162 14:21 – 240
4:9 – 105 17:6 – 260
4:13 – 43 19:15-16 – 260
4:23-24 – 163 21:1-9 – 73
9:6 – 210 21:18-21 – 72-73
Exodus 21:22-23 – 238
19:10 – 206 22:22-23 – 201
19:14 – 206 22:30 – 201
20:14 – 240 26:4-5 – 89
22 – 210 27:20 – 201
22:1-31 – 22 28:2 – 209
24:7 – 205 28:15 – 209
32:32 – 206 28:15-68 – 237
Leviticus Joshua
5:1-19 – 89 7:19 – 43, 46, 56, 104, 194,
5:5-6 – 89 220, 259
13:6 – 206 Judges
13:34 – 206 9:7-21 – 211
16:21 – 99
18:6-18 – 201 1 Samuel
20:10 – 240 15:1-35 – 216
20:11-12 – 201 15:24-25 – 216
20:14 – 201 2 Samuel
20:17 – 201 11:2 – 216
20:20-21 – 201 12:13 – 205, 216
26:14-43 – 237 12:13-14 – 216
271
272 THE CURE OF SOULS
39:11-24 – 237 18 – 93
Daniel 18:15-17 – 260
9:4-5 – 56 18:15-20 – 231
18:17 – 231
Hosea 18:21-22 – 231
4:12 – 110 19:3 – 240
14:1 – 44 19:9 – 240
Joel 19:17 – 105, 215
1:5 – 126 21:28-32 – 20
2:12-13 – 12 22:25 – 47
Amos Mark
3:2-3 – 56 2:5-7 – 99
9:7 – 126 2:7 – 220
2:10 – 220
Micah
7:21 – 240
3:8 – 44
Luke
Malachi
5:21 – 61, 220
2:14 – 241
5:24 – 220
3:8-12 – 187
12:8 – 194, 220
Matthew 18:19 – 215
3 – 93 19:1-10 – 236
3:6 – 194, 220 19:8-10 – 236
3:8 – 12 21:34 – 126
4:4 – 215 22:42 – 196
6:32 – 110 23:34 – 39, 231-232
6:33 – 110
7:1-5 – 257 John
1:12-13 – 113
7:15 – 196
1:29 – 268
7:15-20 – 63, 196
3:16 – 167
7:20 – 215
7:24 – 256
8:5-13 – 176
8:1-11 – 256
10:8 – 188
8:7 – 256
10:26 – 101
8:34 – 21
10:32 – 194, 220
10:32-33 – 104 Acts
12:43-45 – 234 3:14 – 212
3:21 – x
274 THE CURE OF SOULS
Chalcedon
Box 158
Vallecito, CA 95251 USA
(209) 736-4365
www.chalcedon.edu