Two millennia ago, a Jewish rabbi declared that he had the authority to forgive sins or “send away mistakes” and transferred that authority to his closest followers. An early follower, Tertullian, called the action of repentance and forgiveness a “plank” for a “shipwrecked man.” The plank included an external action, an exomologesis: a public confession aloud followed by a “discipline of prostration and humiliation,” such as wearing sackcloth and ashes and fasting.
A problem arose: What if the sinner sinned again and again? Irish followers in the seventh century, inspired by followers from the East, offered a solution: private repentance and private exomologesis in secret to an authoritative ear—“auricular confession,” as it was called. This strategy so swept the Western Church that in 1215, at the Fourth Lateran Council, it became the law of Christendom to confess all sins to a presbyter with faculties at least once a year. To those who believe that an immanent God is sacramentally at work in this practice is offered a pinpointed ray of love to break the circle of sin, shame, isolation, doubt, and despair.
Five hundred years ago, Martin Luther demurred. He didn’t think it was a sacrament, though he recommended it. More forcefully, John Calvin condemned “auricular confession” as a “pestilence” that “teems” with “monstrous abominations.” Men heap “sin upon sin” all the year, “becoming bolder in sin,” because they can make confession once a year to their priest; they “wipe their lip, and say, ‘I have not done it.’” Calvin’s God alone pardons the repentant sinner, who, unable to enumerate sufficiently his sins, must unburden the weight of his entire heart. A priest has no more authority to absolve than “a cobbler to till the field.” Calvin recognized that the burden of sin, however, must find voice, and he recommended an extraordinary remedy, the early Church exomologesis:
He who has adopted this confession from the heart and as in the presence of God, will doubtless have a tongue ready to confess whenever there is occasion among men to publish the mercy of God. He will not be satisfied to whisper the secret of his heart for once into the ear of one individual, but will often, and openly, and in the hearing of the whole world, ingenuously make mention both of his own ignominy, and of the greatness and glory of the Lord.
Arthur Dimmesdale, Dr. Phil, and Facebook’s public apologies were thereby born—or reborn from the public practice of the early Church. All must shout their guilt from the rooftops, no longer to priest or Christian brother but to anyone and everyone.
