Repentance, penance, and absolution

Over the last year or so I've had several difficult conversations with friends and acquaintances who had found themselves overtaken in some fault or another. For whatever reason, they seemed to want to unburden themselves on me. Now, I don't object to being their sounding board: to the extend they think that's something they think they need, it's fine by me. But it seems to me there's a danger of which we should be aware: the danger of allowing repentance to become penance.

It seems to me there's a link between repentance and faith, and another between penance and unbelief. Repentance (at least, godly repentance) hinges on seeing ourselves as we are, and God as He is. Notice how Job 42:5–6 describes getting a right view of God, and how that drives Job to repentance.

Penance on the other hand, is an attempt to earn some sort of righteousness with God. Really, it boils down to unbelief: God has already told us we have no righteousness but Christ. God has already told us that Christ has borne our sins. God has already assured us that when we confess, He forgives. Looking for some sort of assurance outside of the word of God is not faith. Looking for some sort of merit in my own works – no matter how big or how small – is not faith. These things are the opposite of faith. They are unbelief.

So I suppose I would say the difference between repentance and penance is faith. Repentance comes from believing God, penance results from unbelief. Of course that doesn't help us very much in terms of identifying when someone has gone from the one to the other. But it might help me individually know when I've done so: "is this faith? or is it doubting God's word?" That's the real question.

I'm a little less dogmatic on the whole idea of absolution. There are certainly times when we need to seek forgiveness from someone other than God: we might have sinned against someone, for example, and need to seek their forgiveness too. And unlike with God, we might find ourselves needing to make some sort of amends to that person. But that's not really what absolution is.

Absolution is more about confessing my sins to someone else, and receiving from that person assurance of God's forgiveness. Is absolution something we need? No, we have the word of God to assure us that God has forgiven. But what do we do when someone comes to us, looking for assurance from us that God forgives? The more I think this over, the more I think there is value in a true believer assuring someone of God's forgiveness, as long as he or she is pointing them to the word of God. One friend of mine says we should be quick to say, "Jesus loves you, Jesus has forgiven you." I think that's good advice, but I'll add the caveat that we shouldn't ever say that as though we have authoritative knowledge in ourselves. It's not that I know that God has forgiven you because on my spiritual state or insight; no, it's that I know God has forgiven you based on His word, and we can look at it together.

So I think there's a place for absolution, as long as it's grounded in God's word, not in some presumed authority.

And let's be clear about something here: we can't talk about this sort of thing in the abstract. It's not very useful to talk about what a Christian should do in an ideal world. When a true believer comes to us with a guilty conscience, we're not dealing in the hypothetical. We who have sinned really big – so big that our standard evangelical faith collapsed under the weight of our own guilt – know there's a desperation that hypothetical Christianity doesn't really address. But when someone comes to us with that sort of guilt, we ought to lead him or her to the Cross, to God's grace, to Christ's having borne our sins. It's not the time to lecture, it's the time to lead with compassion to the One who is gracious to both of us.

It's important for us to realize that God forgives based on the death of Christ (Romans 3:21–26). Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures (1 Corinthians 15:1–8), and it is this – and only this – that enables God to forgive us. It's easy to lose sight of this when we deal with the question of confession: we're tempted to think that confession is an act of merit, and God forgives us because we confess our sins. That's not true at all. It's true that when we confess our sins He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins (1 John 1:9), but it's not our confession that makes God forgive. In fact, even as we are sinning, Christ is advocating for us with the Father. I don't know another way to understand 1 John 2:1–2. 

Christ doesn't wait for us to confess, repent, or even acknowledge our sins before He takes action on our behalf. We all need to meditate on this. We all need to let this one sink in.

So why do we confess our sins? The simplest reason is our own peace of heart: we need to know that God has forgiven us. That assurance is as simple as confessing our sins, and then believing God. 

It's important, too, to realize that when we have sinned – when we are at our lowest – we are seeing ourselves exactly like God has always seen us. In fact, no matter how low your opinion of yourself is, God's opinion of you is worse. We have a tendency to evaluate ourselves based on our performance, usually our current or very recent past. But God knows all things: on our best days, He knows what our worst days will be, and He sees what we will do. So on our best days, we should be humble. On our worst days, we should remember God's view of us is no different than it was on our best days. God knows what we are.

And this brings us back to repentance. Repentance is a gift from God (Acts 11:18). It is the correct response to understanding that we have sinned (Acts 17:30–31). But it goes much deeper than our understanding of what we have done: it goes to our understanding of what we are (see Isaiah 6:5, Luke 18:9ff). Job repented when he saw who God really is. It's noteworthy that scripture doesn't tell us Job sinned. The closest thing we get to sin on Job's part is Job 32:1–3.

Job 32:1–3 gives a brief summary of the book up to that point. Job's friends "found no answer, and yet condemned [him]" (Job 32:3), but Job was also wrong, because "he justified himself rather than God" (Job 32:2). It seems to me this is a danger to us, particularly when we are doing something right: that we would justify ourselves rather than God.

Philippians 3:8ff tells us that to be "in Christ" is to have "no righteousness of my own."  This means we give up (or have given up) any merit we have. Even the questionable merit we might associate with confessing our sins. Any merit that comes our way from confession or repentance is something we need to give up if we want to be "in Christ."

I know I've offended people in the past by saying that there is a danger of our being no longer "in Christ." I don't mean that God ever sees us as anything other than "in Christ." We are accepted by God always and only "in Christ." I don't mean we can cease to be "in Christ" in God's eyes. I mean that our spiritual health and growth and progress are based on our seeing things the way God sees them (cf. Romans 6:1–11). That's what Philippians 3:8ff is talking about: it's not saying "I hope I can attain being in Christ," it's saying, "I want to see myself in Christ, just as God sees me in Christ." And the key there is to understand that we have no righteousness of our own.

We cease to be "in Christ" in our own minds – not in God's eyes – when we start to think we have righteousness of our own. We need to be very careful here.

One last note: it would be wrong not to mention a wonderful article by J. N. Darby here, "Cleansing by Water: and what it is to walk in the light." I can't recommend it highly enough.