Repentance “exercised” the religious imagination of the early Lutheran movement more than any other topic. For example, the brief but essential Smalcald Articles takes up 26 pages in the Lutheran Confessions. Of those, seven pages are devoted to one topic: repentance.
Similarly, Philip Melanchthon devotes 30 pages in his Apology to the Augsburg Confession to the topic of repentance, somewhat shorter than the other very long section of the apology which is on the topic of justification (definitely a proximate keyword to repentance, with justification as God’s action in Christ and repentance our action anticipating such justification).
The first thesis of Luther’s 95 theses reads, “When our Lord and Master Jesus Christ said, "Repent" (Mt 4:17), he willed the entire life of believers to be one of repentance.”
The early Lutherans maintained robust confessional practices in order to provide ample opportunity for repentance. Private confession remained common. One could argue that the crucial focus of that era in Christianity truly was penitential, and that broad swaths of Christianity from its origin to the present have also been primarily penitential.
Think, as just one example, of the Jesus prayer in Eastern Orthodoxy: “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.” Or in the. West, the Rosary, which includes repeatedly asking that asks that the Lord Jesus Christ “ have mercy on us sinners now and at the time of our death.”
In the past century, a few aspects of Christian piety have shifted (at least in some quarters) enough to make me wonder whether much or any of this penitential Christianity makes sense to us anymore. Whether it existentially “hits home.”
For starters, much of progressive Christianity has an entirely different focus, understanding Christianity as a commitment to live like Jesus as an exemplar. Very little of progressive Christianity situates itself within a metaphysical framework where we are working out our salvation before God with fear and trembling—with repentance a core aspect of such working out.
Progressive Christianity (and here I am painting with very broad strokes) if and when it even speaks of sin or repentance at all, speaks of them in their more systemic or social dimension, and so inasmuch as it calls for “repentance,” it does so less as a call to penitential practices for individuals, and more as political or social action that enacts repentance as change/repair of such broken systems.
More generally any Christianity that labors less under the concern that we will go to hell if we inadequately repent (that is, most forms of Christian Universalism) may simply carry their practices and understanding of repentance less anxiously.
This has resulted in some liturgical innovations. For example, up until the early part of the 20th century most Lutherans still went to private confession before the Sundays when they would receive communion. They did so for fear that if they did not make confession before communion they would “eat and drink condemnation against themselves” (1 Corinthians). Mid-century, private confession declined, a rite of “corporate confession and forgiveness” was implemented in the liturgy, and the liturgical renewal movement detached private confession from communion and instead made weekly communion, with a brief order for confession opening each worship service, a core practice of the church.
It’s often the case that our liturgical rites take time to catch up with our actual beliefs. I know, for example, that although the Lutheran reformers had argued against the cult of the saints in their theological works, they were much slower to remove the prayers to the saints from the liturgy.
We’re still like this today. It’s one thing to read an essay challenging us to rethink our pronoun usage and gender assumptions about God. It’s entirely different experientially to actually print a new bulletin in which the Lord’s Prayer begins, “Our Mother, who art in heaven…”
So I ask myself, “Does the classic Christian concept of repentance still resonate today? If it doesn’t, should we drop things like confession & forgiveness from the liturgy? If it does, do we need to reframe or rephrase it to better match our modes of thought in 2023?”
I’m reminded of that (now somewhat famous) sermon of Paul Tillich, “You Are Accepted.” Tillich’s project was an attempt to restate core Christian concepts in more modern idioms. But when he came to the issue of sin and grace, of re-inscribing in our speech how we come to turn from our sin and live and experience God’s justification of us as sinners, he stated almost immediately in the sermon that sin and grace are “strange” words to us, but…
During the centuries they have received distorting connotations, and have lost so much of their genuine power that we must seriously ask ourselves whether we should use them at all, or whether we should discard them as useless tools. But there is a mysterious fact about the great words of our religious tradition: they cannot be replaced. All attempts to make substitutions, including those I have tried myself, have failed to convey the reality that was to be expressed; they have led to shallow and impotent talk. There are no substitutions for words like "sin" and "grace."But there is a way of rediscovering their meaning, the same way that leads us down into the depth of our human existence. In that depth these words were conceived; and there they gained power for all ages; there they must be found again by each generation, and by each of us for himself.
Tillich goes on to encourage his listeners to think of sin as separation and estrangement, whereas grace can be thought as reunion and acceptance. He points out these patterns of separation and reunion function not just at the individual moral level, but also at the social and national level, and in fact, in just the same way as sin is understood as something we do against one another but also toward God, so too if we would like to bring the terms closer to modern idioms, for Tillich sin is “estrangement from the Ground of Being.”
We are separated from the mystery, the depth, and the greatness of our existence.
When I read this sermon of Tillich’s, I can hear how creatively he is bringing classic Christian doctrine into conversation with some of the movements of his time, in particular existentialism and psychoanalysis.
This does make me wonder, what would it look like to rightly talk about repentance/confession/justification now, today, especially in light of some of our modern thinking about trauma, etc?
Liturgies of repentance can be troubling, intrusive, triggering. For example, I believe many who carry religious trauma may find the liturgy for corporate confession and forgiveness difficult. But also, those of us who think Christianity more in terms of principalities and powers and social justice may wonder where those are to be found in the current liturgies of confession, which tend to focus so much more on our personal complicity in sin rather than the systemic, social implications of sin.
I think there are at least four directions a congregation might go if they were to revisit the corporate confession and forgiveness in their liturgy.
Option 1: Cut it out. It’s no longer helpful
Option 2: Keep it. It ties us to a longer historic practice of the church and may also be comforting to many who pray it.
Option 3: Re-write it. Take a model like Dorothee Soelle’s re-write of the creed for Political Evensong1 as a guide, and make confession, practice repentance, in a way that makes sense to the congregation, today.
Option 4: Replace it with something else. For example, if confession and forgiveness is political or social in nature, perhaps such confession takes the shape of letter writing and advocacy, or mutual conversation within the community seeking repair of relationships for the sake of living as repentant people.
I think some crucial questions we could ask ourselves in order to (re)appraise repentance as a category in our religious thought would be at least the following:
Do you “feel” the need to repent?
Do you find practices of repentance healing or restorative in some way?
Does repentance in relationship to God make sense to you in your understanding of who God is?
Are there parts of the call to repentance in Christian liturgy that are problematic, triggering, a barrier?
Why do you think we include practices of repentance in our liturgy?
Could our penitential practices be less ritualistic and more real? Is that a false distinction?
What would it be like to embody and not just speak repentance?
What are analogies to repentance that come to mind for you?
What do you think it was about Christians in the time of the Reformation (in particular, though not exclusively) that had them thinking especially about repentance?
Do you agree with the first thesis of the 95 theses, that in a sense the whole of the Christian life is that of repentance?
CREDO
I believe in God
who created the world not ready made
like a thing that must forever stay what it is
who does not govern according to eternal laws
that have perpetual validity
nor according to natural orders
of poor and rich,
experts and ignoramuses,
people who dominate and people subjected.
I believe in God
who desires the counter-argument of the living
and the alteration of every condition
through our work
through our politics.
I believe in Jesus Christ
who was right when he
“as an individual who can’t do anything”
just like us
worked to alter every condition
and came to grief in so doing
Looking to him I discern
how our intelligence is crippled,
our imagination suffocates,
and our exertion is in vain
because we do not live as he did
Every day I am afraid
that he died for nothing
because he is buried in our churches,
because we have betrayed his revolution
in our obedience to and fear
of the authorities.
I believe in Jesus Christ
who is resurrected into our life
so that we shall be free
from prejudice and presumptuousness
from fear and hate
and push his revolution onward
and toward his reign
I believe in the Spirit
who came into the world with Jesus,
in the communion of all peoples
and our responsibility for what will become of our earth:
a valley of tears, hunger, and violence
or the city of God.
I believe in the just peace
that can be created,
in the possibility of meaningful life
for all humankind,
in the future of this world of God.
Amen
Pretty intense post again. In spite of the documented shift in values that has made many people - the liberals or progressives specifically - now tend to believe that humans are born good and need to be nurtured into their goodness, as opposed to the older value that saw humans as born evil until they were saved by a bigger force like God or the king... in spite of that, it's gotten very difficult to excuse the systems exploiting Earth and people for profit. My prayer keeps moving in this direction where I just weep and say "forgive us Mother for we have sinned. We've sinned against your body, your blood, your breath and all your beings. I'm so sorry. Bless the great work of healing and reweaving what we've torn apart."