As an INFANT, what did that experience do for you ?
It caused the Holy Spirit to dwell within me, which enabled me to partake of the Eucharist discerning the Body and Blood of our Lord, to have a rich prayer life, a Guardian Angel to protect me, and the ability to escape nightmares through prayer, among many other blessings.
In fact, of all the gifts my parents gave me in my youth, the greatest gift was Holy Baptism.
What as an INFANT did you experience?
At least half of my earliest memories, formed when I was
very young involve being in church, and the rest involve the experience of pure love. I can even recall with vivid detail my first birthday. My parents bought me a rideable toy bus, and in so doing inadvertently sparked a lifelong fascination with transportation systems.
Did you feel differant?
Did you feel forgiven?
Did you feel relieved?
Did you confess your sin?
Did you know what sin was?
These are things that for the baptized Christian, since the Nicene Creed prohibits being baptized more than once, that we experience through confession and reconciliation, which takes two forms: congregational prayers for forgiveness, such as the famous Collect for Purity and Prayer of Humble Access from the
Anglican Book of Common Prayer, and auricular confession, which is private confession with a pastor or priest. Auricular confession is practiced not only by the Eastern Orthodox, Oriental Orthodox, Roman Catholics, Eastern Catholics, although interestingly enough (at least to myself and
@Pavel Mosko ) the practice has lapsed in the Assyrian Church of the East, but also by the Anglicans, Lutherans, and Methodists, and to my knowledge, the Moravians. The Anglican and Lutheran churches represent the largest and second largest Protestant churches, and when you add in the Methodists, who are also enormous, the result could be as many as 190 million Protestants, plus 260 million Orthodox and a billion Catholics who practice auricular confession.
And confession isn’t just about sin: a Russian Orthodox priest once delivered me from extremely severe bereavement I was experiencing over the death of my beloved father, memory eternal, and on another occasion, a retired Serbian Orthodox bishop delivered me from a lifelong fear of hearses.
I would also note that in Eastern Christianity, it is rare for penances to be applied during confession; it has never happened to me.
In general, I am of the believe that both forms of confession can be effective, and indeed St. John of Kronstadt introduced a kind of congregational confession into the Russian Orthodox Church: the discipline of Russian, Ukrainian, Belarussian, Latvian, Lithuanian and Estonian Orthodox Christians is to engage in auricular confession at least once a month, and frequently at All Night Vigils before every liturgy, or even more frequently than that during Lent, which is incredibly spiritually healthy, by the way. In the case of St. John of Kronstadt, he was one of several figures responsible for the spiritual revival of the Russian Orthodox Church in the 1890s after 200 years of stagnation following Czar Peter putting the church under the control of a government bureaucracy*, and the result was that hundreds of people flocked to his church every Sunday to partake of the Eucharist, far more than he could handle via auricular confession, so he simply had the people shout their sins as loud as possible so that their individual privacy would be retained, before collectively absolving them, which is a solemn duty of presbyters according to Matthew 16:18, just like the Eucharist (Matthew 26:26-28) and Baptism (Matthew 28:19).
Did you ask Christ to pay for your sin?
I don’t believe in penal substitutionary atonement.
You see, the Bible says in Romans 10:10 that.........
“With the heart man believeth unto righteousness: and with the mouth confession is made unto salvation.”
Indeed it does, and this combined with the preaching of St. John the Baptist seems a powerful endorsement of auricular confession.
What the Bible does not say is “don’t baptize infants.”
Charles Haddon Spurgeon said.............
"To make a profession, without having a possession, is to be a cloud without rain—a river-bed, choked up with dry stones, but utterly without water".
Source: July 19, 1863Scripture:
Romans 10:10 From:
Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit Volume 9
I really don’t care what Spurgeon said. I recognize many people regard him as a great preacher, and I am glad they are able to derive value from his sermons. Personally, among historic homilists, I am more of a fan of St. John Chrysostom, St. Ephrem the Syrian and St. Jacob of Sarugh, and the 18th century Congregationalist preacher Jonathan Edwards, who effectively used a fire and brimstone approach to get through to the Yankees, and more recently, Dr. James Kennedy of Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church, who I did once see in person, which was thrilling, and Archbishop Fulton Sheen. Also, there is a 19th century Anglican bishop whose name I am trying to recall whose sermons I love…
Edit: that would be J.B. Lightfoot, the Bishop of Durham, also a noted scholar of Patristics. His sermon on Pontius Pilate was a brilliant and prescient dissection of moral relativism.
Among preachers alive today, I particularly like the Coptic Orthodox, who unlike many of the other Orthodox churches, are really stressing the importance of homiletics. Alas Coptic services tend to be very long, slightly too long for me to do every Sunday (and I couldn’t go anyway as I have my own parishes to worry about), but their preaching does not disappoint. Indeed I frequently look to them for ideas on what to talk about.
*Fortunately this is no longer the case, and furthermore, in the US nearly all Russian Orthodox parishes belong to either the autonomous Russian Orthodox Church Abroad (also known as ROCOR), whose Ukrainian Canadian leader Metropolitan Hilarion Kapral sadly reposed in May, or the multiethnic Orthodox Church in America, which inherited the massive Russian Orthodox mission in Alaska, and also is responsible for half of the Romanian Orthodox, Bulgarian Orthodox and Ruthenian Orthodox parishes and nearly all of the Albanian Orthodox parishes; both churches are also extremely friendly to converts and have large numbers of American priests, and ROCOR along with the Antiochian Orthodox Church, which is also famously convert-friendly, operate Western Rite parishes whose liturgy is more familiar to Western Christians. Both OCA and ROCOR have raised millions and millions of dollars to help Ukrainians suffering from the tragic conflict, but this hasn’t stopped stupid people from vandalizing their churches because they see the word “Russian”, despite the fact that the majority of Ukrainian Americans and Ukrainian Canadians attend these churches and until May, when Metropolitan Hilarion died of a chronic illness, one of them was run by a Ukrainian, and the other is run by an American who is not ethnically Slavic.