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Rites of Penance
I knew a minister who would begin every service or event – however low key or informal – with a long extempore confession. Each time it would ramble on painfully towards the same conclusion: a pause, followed by the words, ‘I’m sorry’. He sounded less like a beloved child being welcomed home, and more like an abused child standing before the abuser, in terror of some potential punishment; and yet it was only an extreme extempore version of the standard opening of virtually every protestant service in the world, including contemporary Church of England rites, recklessly or deliberately reinforcing the punitive model of sin. During my eleven years as the Church of England priest at Church Langley,76 we used the shortest permitted alternative from the 1980 service book,77 and still it had the potential to hang heavy, like a miserable dead weight, at the start of the service. At least it avoided the phrase ‘we are truly sorry’, present in all the others, and extended in one of them to ‘we are sorry and ashamed’.
I did finally learn how to relate to the text: I began to use it with the formality of a creed, a statement of fact. ‘Almighty God, our heavenly Father, we have sinned against you, through our own fault, in thought and word and deed, and in what we have left undone.’ Sin is against God in that it damages God’s perfect creation, and it wounds God’s heart of compassion to see it. This statement I can acknowledge like a creed, but there is no need to grovel. The text moves straight on to a simple prayer: ‘For your Son our Lord Jesus Christ’s sake, forgive us all that is past, and grant that we may serve you in newness of life, to the glory of your name. Amen.’ To insist week after week on the cringing emotional plea – ‘we are truly sorry’ – is not in the spirit of the gospel, and even detracts from the harshness of the more formal factual acknowledgement that begins the prayer.
The equivalent Roman Catholic text avoids the sorry plea altogether and ventures instead into another important area of acknowledgement: that we damage not only ourselves but also the community of which we are a part. The text once again takes the form of a statement – like a creed rather than a prayer – and dramatically is addressed not to God, but to the people around us. ‘I confess to almighty God, and to you, my brothers and sisters, that I have sinned through my own fault, in my thoughts and in my words, in what I have done, and in what I have failed to do.’ Rather than pleading with God for forgiveness, it asks for general prayer, from the community gathered around and from the saints who have gone before. ‘I ask blessed Mary ever virgin, all the angels and saints, and you, my brothers and sisters, to pray for me to the Lord our God.’ It is a text entirely in keeping with the model of sin as damage inflicted on ourselves and one another, with healing sought from a compassionate God, and forgiveness directly from our neighbours.
Unique to the anglican rite is the chillingly superior ‘you’ form of public absolution. After the confession, the priest prays not for ‘us’ all together, but for ‘you’ the penitent sinners. The church draws extra attention to this pretentious affectation by printing the prayer’s five occurrences of the words ‘you’ and ‘your’ in italics. This is done to remind lay people reading the prayer that they are required to say ‘us’ and ‘our’ instead: only the priest is worthy to say ‘you’ and ‘your’. The text is also a nonsense of syntax, addressed both to God and to the people. Perhaps it is giving God an order: ‘Almighty God, who forgives all who truly repent, have mercy upon you’.78 Once again the Roman Catholic text has it right. With priestly humility – and in seventeen words rather than thirtyeight – the priest simply responds to the request ‘pray for me to the Lord our God’. ‘May almighty God have mercy on us, forgive us our sins, and bring us to everlasting life.’
The problem of course is less the words we use and more what we believe. Protestantism, dominated by evangelicalism, especially in the English-speaking world, is locked into the punitive model: the board of the UK Evangelical Alliance – the main evangelical body in the UK – issued a statement in February 2006 affirming that belief in penal substitutionary atonement (the crucifixion inflicted on Christ as God’s punishment for human sin) was a condition of membership, the logical conclusion of its core belief in God’s wrath against all people on account of their sin.79 In contrast, whatever the history of the Roman Catholic church in terms of compromise with secular powers and values, its contemporary catechism presents a God of infinite compassion, uncompromised by any trace of unforgiveness or wrath, and an understanding of sin as damage done to ourselves and to others that God longs only to heal.
76 There is more about the Church Langley years in Last Rites: The End of the Church of England by Michael Hampson, (Granta Books, 2006)
77 Alternative Service Book 1980 (ASB) alternative option B on page 165
78 The only permitted form of absolution in Alternative Service Book 1980 (ASB), and the standard form in Common Worship (the year 2000 replacement for ASB), reads as follows: ‘Almighty God, who forgives all who truly repent, have mercy upon you, pardon and deliver you from all your sins, confirm and strengthen you in all goodness, and keep you in life eternal, through Jesus Christ our Lord.’
79 The controversy leading to this declaration began when Baptist minister Revd Steve Chalke MBE, one of the UK’s best-known evangelicals on account of his television work, criticised penal substitutionary atonement in his book The Lost Message of Jesus, comparing it to ‘cosmic child abuse’, and contrasting its model of a violently vengeful God to the teaching of Jesus about loving even our enemies and forgiving one another. In the course of the controversy Steve Chalke prepared a paper, Redeeming the Cross, in which he traces the origins of the theory to a single nineteenth century preacher. Many of Steve Chalke’s detractors insisted he was throwing away two thousand years of Christian teaching. ‘Initially, though not explicitly, rooted in the writings of Anselm of Canterbury (1033-1109), penal substitution was substantially formed by John Calvin’s legal mind in the reformation. The model as it is understood and taught today, however, rests largely on the work of the 19th century American scholar Charles Hodge. Almost all Christians across the world today have heard Hodge’s theory preached: a righteous God is angry with sinners and demands justice. His wrath can only be appeased through bringing about the violent death of his Son.’