G.K. Chesterton said something really important: “The whole debate around ceremony in the Church is not whether some outward words and gestures are more important than others, but whether any outward words and gestures are important at all.” As someone from a Revival background, you’d say a resounding no to that. But if you look at all of the Reformers, they would all say a resounding yes to that. The main period when outward words and gestures were banished from the Protestant tradition is the 19th century, when Revivalism replaced classical Protestantism while still calling itself under the latter name. Thus most Protestants today are in reality Revivalists: the call, the anxious bench, dispensationalism, emotionalism over intellectualism, and yes a total rejection of outward words and gestures: that’s Revivalism. On the other hand in the Reformation, everyone even the lowly puritans fought hard for the correct outward words and gestures. Now I grant that the Calvinist tradition is uniquely weak in that regard (and indeed gives rise to the later Revivalism). But that is not our tradition. We have a specific understanding shared with the Lutherans, the Romans, the EO, that outward words and gestures are not optional. The outward dictates the inward. The physical is not made obsolete by the spiritual. Otherwise, that’s Gnosticism. A heresy.
Christ forgives the sin. The Priest offers the absolution during after the general confession because we confess our sins, the priest hears them, and if we have contrition, of any type, we are absolved of our sins during the absolution. We also have general recourse to Christ to confess our sin privately. Our confessions don't have to be private but they can be if you want it to be or if you want more guidance. @Shane R You are priest can you offer more guidance on this? Any lurking priests also that want to chime in?
It doesn’t matter what all Anglicans think. I couldn’t care less about that. I’m talking about what the Scriptures and the Prayer Book actually say, teach, and prescribe. Big difference. The Prayer Book says the priest absolves, and so did Christ (referring to the apostles). You are reflecting a Revivalist understanding that has nothing to do with historic Anglicanism. This is an Anglican site; all I’m doing is stating the facts.
BTW, to be clear, I am not necessarily saying that your view is wrong. I am saying that the Prayer Book and John 20:23 clearly say what the say and that the way to address the issue is not to twist their meaning into something else. The language in John 20 echoes earlier language found in the Synoptics where Jesus bestows on the apostles the power of “binding and loosing”, a rabbinic expression that referred to making authoritative rulings on matters of the Oral Law. The original usage had nothing to do with a delegated authority to forgive sins committed by others, against others. Indeed, earlier in the Gospel of John itself, forgiving sins is taken to be a divine attribute and Jesus is said to have been threatened for seeming to claim it for himself. I suspect that the early Church repurposed the “binding and loosing”, and that what we find in the Gospel of John is part of an anti-Jewish polemic, which may have little or no relation at all to the sayings of the historical Jesus. Therefore, I have no problem with more modern Prayer Books using softer language in the absolution formula. It certainly isn’t wrong to say that God forgives sins and to rely on that. But, biblical criticism aside, the Church has always taught a more expansive view and that needs to be recognized for what it is - outward authority over the inward, as Stalwart put it, and understood as legitimate, even if one’s own churchmanship veers more in the “low church” direction. That’s what I’m saying.
I can see both points of view here. Confession is to God not man. Unless it is to God that the confession is made then why expect absolution from God? God is the Authority we have offended. If we have offended against our neighbour it is a sin against God because God has concern for our neighbour even if we do not, and will therefore require it of us on behalf of our neighbour who may be seeking redress. The priest has authority from God to make a judgment on whether a confession to God is sincere, bogus or so lacking in faith as to need convincing and assurance of God's forgiveness, if sincere. That is the intermediary role of the priest. Not to hand down judgment on God's behalf or to relinquish the guilty of responsibility for their unjust deeds. .
This is right. The confession itself is made to God, not to the priest. But it is the priest who must decide if the confession was honest, sincere, etc., and without the priest’s absolution, the sin and its guilt remain.
(Ahem.) If the confession to God is insincere, then the priest's withholding of absolution is reflective of the fact that God has seen the insincerity and has not forgiven. I find it fascinating that the same people who maintain that Whose soever sins ye remit, they are remitted unto them; and whose soever sins ye retain, they are retained (John 20:23) are, in all likelihood, unwilling to maintain that whosoever shall say unto this mountain, Be thou removed, and be thou cast into the sea; and shall not doubt in his heart, but shall believe that those things which he saith shall come to pass; he shall have whatsoever he saith. Therefore I say unto you, What things soever ye desire, when ye pray, believe that ye receive them, and ye shall have them. (Mark 11:23-24) I personally can accept that I do not fully understand why neither of these scriptures are meant to be taken so literally as they sound, but how does anyone else choose to interpret the one verse (in John's Gospel) literally and not the other (in Mark's)?
Rejecting the literal sense is an option. Prohibiting it is a different matter. Because the statement occurs in the Gospel of John, it’s acceptable not only for the Prayer Book to use that language, but also for the congregation to take it and the underlying Scriptural reference literally. An individual is certainly free to overlay a figurative meaning on the literal sense and to take the former rather than latter as normative, but that doesn’t negate the Church’s right to establish rites that nonetheless rely on the literal sense, even if, as in this case, we have reason to believe that the attribution of this statement to Jesus is nonhistorical.
I’m genuinely curious here…I agree with this assessment and am wondering how much of this you would attribute to Methodism. Thoughts?
What's in a label? re•viv•al•ist rĭ-vī′və-lĭst ► n. One who promotes or leads religious revivals. n. One who revives practices or ideas of an earlier time. Hmm... seems to me, Anglicans are "revivalists," in the second sense of the word!
I wonder if this statement of Jesus does not actually mean what it appears to mean on face value. We have evidence in scripture that Jesus forgave sins but is there any evidence that Jesus ever withheld forgiveness from anyone who asked. Could it be that Jesus was trying to impress upon his apostles the heavy responsibility that he was placing upon them to forgive in the way that HE forgave, rather than intimating that they had any right at all to withhold forgiveness from those who ask it? Remember, there was no priesthood in the Christian Church until about 250 to 350 years later.
Well, given that this is in the Gospel of John, I’m not at all confident that Jesus ever said this to begin with.
I struggle to understand what you believe. You seem to pick and choose what parts of the Bible to find authentic and the same with tradition. Like after 2000 years we now understand the Bible finally. Not being mean just curioud
Not at all. I think you’ll find that I refer to medieval exegesis in particular quite often, both Jewish and Christian, and in a positive manner. I accept modern science, the Enlightenment, and modern biblical scholarship. I am also a practicing Anglican in the Episcopal Church, seeking to follow the example and the teachings of Jesus. I am a lay Benedictine. And I am loyal, socially and politically engaged member of my community and citizen of my country. Each of these commitments and convictions overlaps with and informs the others, sometimes in unpredictable ways. I don’t see myself as an Anglican who just happens to be all of those other things. To me, they’re all essential.
No, a rector is one of the possible titles of the incumbent of a paish. if anything, in the past, it would be the rector who held the benefice but who may appoint a vicar to be the actual parish priest. This could have been because the rector was a layman (no longer a possibility) or because he was non-resident in the parish. The dean is a very senior priest, indeed, the most senior in the diocese. He does reside at the cathedral, is its senior priest and chairs the chapter. So I suppose to some extent his role is analogous to a vicar in his care for the cathedral community. If the cathedral has a parish (most C of E cathedrals don't) the holder of this position is called the provost rather than the dean. In all C of E dioceses one or more bishops are appointed to assist the diocesan bishop. Like the diocesan bishop they are given an episcopal title, e.g. 'the Bishop of ...'. These bishops are called suffragan bishops. The term canon can be used in three ways. A 'canon' is a priest resident at a cathedral, who serves the cathedral and is a member of chapter. Sometimes such canons are called 'residentary canons' but 'residentiary' is not officially part of the name. Then there are honorary canons. These are priests who do not live at or work at the cathedral but are made members of its chapter. Finally, there are some priests called 'minor canons'. They are called 'canons' because they live and work at the cathedral but are termed 'minor' because they are not on the chapter, i.e. the governing body. The C of E has, in my humble opinion, made cathedral governance complex and so what I said about canons in the previous paragraph may be outdated. I'm not 100% cerain whether one is a canon if you are a member of chapter or if you are a member of the new fangled college of canons. The latter nowadays also has lay members called 'lay canons'.
Thanks PDL, I was reading what you said and thought why doesn't some one write a dictionary of the church of England? Then that light bulb went on, and I searched for it online, and there were two of them, unfortunately they are $114 and $253, too much for me. I have known of only three canons in NZ , one was the priest at our local church when I was a child, one is a well known author and one gave a new meaning to PDL's description " Sometimes such canons are called 'residentary canons' " when one ( a married woman) took up cohabitating with our recently retired also married (male) Bishop. I have known of only one curate and I assumed he was a curate because he was the minister of a church that wasn't the parish church. There were two churches in the same parish. Now that they have split up the parish the second church has always had a vicar.
When I read where you mentioned a dictionary you jogged by memory. There is a website of such terms. I have, howover, just gone into my bookmarks, found it and clicked the link. Alas it's no longer there. I knew it was being replaced because a while ago I wrote to the author to inform him he'd got a term wrong. He accepted he had but said he wouldn't correct it because his site was going to become redundant as the C of E was itself producing something similar. When I clicked on the link there is no link to a new site just the promise of: 'a new exciting site will be arriving soon!'. It really annoys me when a hiatus likes this occurs. Why not keep the old site available until the new one appears? While a dictionary or glossary of C of E terminology is useful I don't think it's something I'm going to get excited about. A quick comment about canons: I've only encountered them at cathedrals. I've never been in a parish where any of the clergy were honorary canons (or as some dioceses call them prebendaries).
@AnglicanAgnostic I've just done a quick search and come up with the following and hope you find it helpful https://www.churchofengland.org/terms-and-conditions/glossary
@AnglicanAgnostic I promise this is my last one. I don't know if this would be available in NZ but there's a Kindle Edition of a C of E dictionary on Amazon and even the print editions aren't as expensive as the ones you've seen: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Dictionary...ngland+Dictionary&s=books&sr=1-1&unfiltered=1