The debate about forgiving -- is it just priests that forgive?

BobRyan said:

Not possible in the cases I gave -

For example in Matt 6 "Forgive us our debts as we forgive those who sin against us" - is a prayer not at all confined to clergy and not at all in the form "my clergy prayed that prayer for me - so I don't do it".

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Nothing is beyond God’s power to forgive. The pastor is entrusted by the congregation to, among other things, lead them in prayer, particularly the Lord’s prayer, for their forgiveness and to pronounce absolution, but it is God who forgives.

I don't know of any denomination that goes to the extreme of telling members not to pray the Lord's prayer or that the clergy pray it for them so they are not supposed to pray that prayer etc.

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No denomination has ever done that, and I would not suggest for a moment they would. The oldest liturgical text we have, the Didache, required early Christians to say the Lord’s Prayer three times daily, and the Lord’s Prayer is a part of every ancient liturgy of the early church as well as every liturgy of more recent provenance that I am aware of.

BobRyan said:

Forgiveness in the two epistles to the church of Corinth has to do with the church itself dealing with a wayward member and disfellowshiping them only to accept them back into the church when that person repents.

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Indeed, that is not the issue here.

concretecamper said:

It is not the point, it was never the point, it will never be the point. The passive voice DOES NOT mean passive in activity or function.

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It can, however, indicate that something is done by God. (You might like to google "divine passive.")

And it does, in this particular text, indicate that it is not the action of the human being which brings about forgiveness/absolution, but that their words point to forgiveness already given by God.

BobRyan said:

title says "is it just priests".

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Well you’ve had actual priests whose business card says Priest, like @Paidiske , answer that question, so I am not sure what Corinth has to do with anything.

Unqualified said:

It’s really 490 times for each offense daily. Like God will do for us, when we need it and haven’t turned away from God. We must repent each time, so as to make it such a burden that we can’t continue doing it.

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Our Lord clearly was seeking to convey to a people who lacked the conceptual understanding of infinities and very large numbers, the idea of God’s boundless mercy. The use of the phrase “not seven, but seven times seventy” is relevant here in the sense of how one might speak to a small child.

Paidiske said:

It can, however, indicate that something is done by God. (You might like to google "divine passive.")

And it does, in this particular text, indicate that it is not the action of the human being which brings about forgiveness/absolution, but that their words point to forgiveness already given by God.

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Hmm, who to believe? I'll listen to

St John Chrysostom:

“Priests have received a power which God has given neither to angels nor to archangels. It was said to them: ‘Whatsoever you shall bind on earth shall be bound in heaven; and whatsoever you shall loose, shall be loosed.’ Temporal rulers have indeed the power of binding; but they can only bind the body. Priests, in contrast, can bind with a bond which pertains to the soul itself and transcends the very heavens. Did [God] not give them all the powers of heaven? ‘Whose sins you shall forgive,’ he says, ‘they are forgiven them; whose sins you shall retain, they are retained.’ What greater power is there than this? The Father has given all judgment to the Son. And now I see the Son placing all this power in the hands of men [Matt. 10:40; John 20:21–23]” (The Priesthood 3:5 [A.D. 387]).

The Liturgist said:

Uh no, Anglicans, Eastern Orthodox, Oriental Orthodox, Assyrians, Methodists, Moravians, Baptists, Reformed Presbyterian and Congregationalists all recognize this, which is indicated by the confiteors in their liturgy, and in the case of Lutherans, not only do Lutherans recognize it, but Martin Luther considered that confession might constitute a third sacrament in addition to the usual two recognized Protestant sacraments of Baptism and the Eucharist. Lutherans and Anglicans, who both recognize that priests have an apostolic authority to bind and loose, and reflect this in their liturgy, and also offer auricular confession (private confession with a priest), are the fourth and third largest groupings of denominations, after Eastern Orthodoxy, which is the second, and Roman Catholicism, which is the largest, and Reformed Protestantism is the fifth largest grouping. There was a thread last year in which the numbers on the size of denominational groupings, communions and individual denominations was crunched and there was some controversy which I would prefer not to repeat. Suffice it to say a clear majority of Christian denominations believe that ordained clergy who have the authority to bind and loose.

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I don't think Baptists should be in your list. Maybe some, I don't know, but I do know that Southern Baptists and primitive Baptists do not believe this.

I think it's something like it is God who forgives and the Priest is the guide to how to break the habit and show repentance. But it is up to the Parishioner to repent and God is the judge of your repentance's sincerity. Something like that.

BobRyan said:

You have free will - listen to whomever you wish

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I'll listen to Christ and His Church 100% of the time!

Frankly @BobRyan I find myself a bit confused by your most recent posts.

Here is what I can say: we as Christians are commanded to forgive others, and the Lord’s Prayer has us ask God for our forgiveness. The absolution pronounced by pastors of churches is a declaration of God’s forgiveness, which they can pronounce according to Matthew 16:18. There is no conflict between these concepts.

concretecamper said:

Hmm, who to believe? I'll listen to

St John Chrysostom:

“Priests have received a power which God has given neither to angels nor to archangels. It was said to them: ‘Whatsoever you shall bind on earth shall be bound in heaven; and whatsoever you shall loose, shall be loosed.’ Temporal rulers have indeed the power of binding; but they can only bind the body. Priests, in contrast, can bind with a bond which pertains to the soul itself and transcends the very heavens. Did [God] not give them all the powers of heaven? ‘Whose sins you shall forgive,’ he says, ‘they are forgiven them; whose sins you shall retain, they are retained.’ What greater power is there than this? The Father has given all judgment to the Son. And now I see the Son placing all this power in the hands of men [Matt. 10:40; John 20:21–23]” (The Priesthood 3:5 [A.D. 387]).

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I would suggest that the quote from Chrysostom is making a rhetorical point which needs to be understood in a larger context.

Paidiske said:

which needs to be understood in a larger context

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Haha. Don't be bothered I chose his explanation over an Anglican Minister, Wikipedia, and google.

The Liturgist said:

Frankly @BobRyan I find myself a bit confused by your most recent posts.

Here is what I can say: we as Christians are commanded to forgive others, and the Lord’s Prayer has us ask God for our forgiveness. The absolution pronounced by pastors of churches is a declaration of God’s forgiveness, which they can pronounce according to Matthew 16:18. There is no conflict between these concepts.

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No conflict whatever.
But Helen White wrote quite a lot about her perceptions of Catholicism - which were very negative - and perhaps that is the reason for the posts we see from BobRyan.

The Liturgist said:

Frankly @BobRyan I find myself a bit confused by your most recent posts.

Here is what I can say: we as Christians are commanded to forgive others, and the Lord’s Prayer has us ask God for our forgiveness. The absolution pronounced by pastors of churches is a declaration of God’s forgiveness, which they can pronounce according to Matthew 16:18. There is no conflict between these concepts.

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I think the elephant in the room is this:

If God has already forgiven us our sins in the first place when we believed the gospel in 1 Corinthians 15:1-4, why do we need anyone else to pronounce absolution on us?

Paidiske said:

It can, however, indicate that something is done by God. (You might like to google "divine passive.")

And it does, in this particular text, indicate that it is not the action of the human being which brings about forgiveness/absolution, but that their words point to forgiveness already given by God.

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I think the elephant in the room is this:

If God has already forgiven us our sins in the first place when we believed the gospel in 1 Corinthians 15:1-4, why do we need anyone else to pronounce absolution on us?

Guojing said:

I think the elephant in the room is this:

If God has already forgiven us our sins in the first place when we believed the gospel in 1 Corinthians 15:1-4, why do we need anyone else to pronounce absolution on us?

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When we convert to Christianity, our sins up until that point are washed away in the waters of Baptism, but that does not mean we stop sinning. Some in the early church like Tertullian mistakenly thought that we could stop sinning, and went so far as to say that those who sinned after Baptism would not be forgiven, which is obviously erroneous, and this view, which culminated in Pelagianism, the error that we can save ourselves without the help provided by the uncreated grace of the Holy Spirit, and this heresy was refuted by St. John Cassian and also by St. Augustine.

Thus, the New Testament makes it clear that we have two means of sacramental grace available to us: the ability of pastors to pronounce absolution on us when we confess sins, either collectively with the congregation or individually, or both (which we see our Lord do many times, and we also see him grant this authority to the Apostles in Matthew 16), and consequently, as we see in all the traditional liturgies, in texts dating as far back as the Second and Third Century* whether Orthodox, Lutheran, Anglican, Methodist, etc) and in Holy Communion, where we partake of the Body of Christ, broken for us and for many for the remittance of sin (1 Corinthians 1:1-26’.

These means of grace are administered first through congregational or private confession and reconciliation, wherein a priest like @Paidiske pronounces God’s absolution over us, relying on the pastoral authority to bind and loose as described in Matthew 16:18, and then through Holy Communion, the rational and bloodless sacrifice of the Eucharist, wherein our sins are remitted, we drink the blood of the New Covenant poured out by our Lord, and become partakers of the Divine Nature (2 Peter 1:4). The reason for this order is so that we approach with reverence the Eucharist, lest we casually partake and fail to discern the Body and Blood of our Lord, which is spiritually and physically dangerous (1 Corinthians 11:27-34). However, it is imperative that we faithfully eat and drink the Body and Blood of our Lord, as He declared in John 6.

*The oldest liturgies are those of Alexandria, commonly known as the Divine Liturgy of St. Mark in the Greek Orthodox Church and the Divine Liturgy of St. Cyril in the Coptic Orthodox Church, which is attested to in the Strasbourg Papyrus and other fragments from the second century, the Liturgy of the Apostles Addai and Mari, used by the Assyrian Church of the East and the Ancient Church of East, which historically was the largest church in the world until the Muslims killed most of them, but the surviving Assyrian community is the largest remaining population that speaks Aramaic in the vernacular, and the Anaphora of the Apostolic Tradition of St. Hippolytus, which has become prominent in recent decades owing to its use as Eucharistic Prayer no. 2 in the Novus Ordo Missae and Eucharistic Prayer B in the 1979 Episcopalian Book of Common Prayer, and in many other recent Protestant liturgical texts including the United Methodist Book of Worship, the Book of Worship of the Presbyterian Church USA, and Common Worship, the excellent liturgical resource that supplements the Book of Common Prayer in the Church of England; in all of these churches, this prayer has become extremely popular because of its brevity, however, most people are unaware that in addition to being used since the third century in Antioch, and possibly Rome, it has since the fourth century been the most commonly used liturgy in the Ethiopian Orthodox and Eritrean Orthodox churches, and the Ethiopian Orthodox is the largest of the Oriental Orthodox churches, nearly twice as large as the others combined, with 40 million members, and also one of the largest churches in the world.