An admission. . .

Of all the things I have said and done as a pastor for 45 years, I remain uneasy about one thing.  While some are fired up over the failure of some in our Synod to practice close(d) communion as we confess, I am perhaps more concerned over the common, indeed sacred, practice of the general absolution.  I know that most LCMSers and Lutherans in general hold onto the practice of the general confession and general absolution as if it were the most sacred tenet of Lutheran identity.  I do not.  I am deeply suspect on how this absolution came to be normal and even essential among us.  By essential I mean that it is easier in most congregations to omit whole sections of the liturgy than to deprive the people of their beloved absolution (yet one without any real specific confession of sins).

There was I time in which I loved this odd Lutheran thingy.  Perhaps it was because I was newly ordained and it seemed quite the power to raise my hand, make the sign of the cross, and forgive the sins of the assembled people in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.  It did not take long, however, before I began to have some concerns about it all.  It could be the influence of those who were working tirelessly to restore the practice of private confession -- something Lutherans said in their Confession and early practice they had not abandoned but which had become as rare as a full church on the Sunday after Christmas or Easter.  In any case, it gnawed at me that without any real examination and certainly without any confession of a specific sin, the pastor graciously intervened on behalf of the Triune God to forgive those sins.  It strikes me now like the flurry of presidential pardons that follows a defeat or retirement of the current occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.  This is especially true of those pardons which do not define the crime but simply purport to cover anything from one date to another.  I realize that some folks are going to be offended by what I say but these are my frank concerns.

The genius of private confession is not that it is before some all wise and knowing pastor who substitutes for God or that it is sincere.  No, the marvel of it all is that the person says out loud before another the specific sins that afflict the conscience and sit under God's condemnation.  Once said out loud, those words cannot be taken back.  Neither can the sins.  It is easy enough to come to church and confess that you have thought, said, and done wrong or failed to do right and that you sit under the general condemnation of original sin but that still leaves unsaid the specific sins themselves.  Because of that, it is easy enough to omit them from the heart and mind of the one confessing and this is not good, to be sure, but worse is taking those sins back home with you.  It is much more difficult to take home the sins that have been spoken in the hearing of another, confessed, and absolved.  So my concern is two fold.  On the one hand it is that the confession is sufficiently vague enough to omit serious sins or that it does not own those sins in sincerity and repentance.  On the other hand, it allows the one to go back home with the weight of that sin still upon the conscience because they have not been specific.  In either case, the absolution appears to confirm to the one who is not sincere or honest in their confession that they are good to go with God and it appears to allow the individual to take back from the foot of the cross the sins that still afflict and trouble the heart.  

The pastor does not have magical insight into the hearts and lives of his people.  There are surely adulterers and murderers and all sorts of other sinners in the congregation whose specific sins are unknown to the pastor and known only to God and the sinner.  Yet somehow we seem to think that it is more important to exclude those from the Table of the Lord whose confession is not the same as ours than we are to exclude those whose sins are either unknown or unrepented.  Why are we so concerned about the soul and well-being of the one whose confession differs from ours but not so concerned about the one who clings to the absolution without confessing the sin?  Shouldn't we be concerned about both?  Yet the general confession and general absolution do not seem to me to be a very pastoral way to deal with such circumstances.  I could ask why we would generally absolve the person whose confession is not ours but tell them they cannot commune with us.  Is this not its own pastoral problem and serious issue for the person?

Until more modern times, nearly all the folks in the congregation came to the Sacrament after being examined and absolved.  It was the usual practice and Lutherans did not quite abandon this even if we did suggest that it was neither Scriptural nor reasonable to require the confessor to number everyone of his or her sins.  Indeed, until the mid 18th century, Lutheran pastors were pretty busy hearing confessions and absolving sinners privately.  But at some point the whole thing shifted and we introduced something which had never been in the Divine Service before -- a rite of general confession and absolution.  Perhaps we did it because the people stopped coming.  Perhaps we secretly admitted what the Protestants insist -- I don't need a priest between me and God!  Perhaps it was because we thought there were more important things for the pastor to do than to sit around all day and pray and hear confession.  In any case, people stopped coming and we stopped asking them to come.  Indeed, the version of the Small Catechism used in my instruction as a youth did not even include a rite if you wanted to.  We had a better rite in the venerable TLH -- the Congregational Rite (p. 46) with its ominous questions and answers.  That put sin into a serious context.  In my own experience as a child, this was used four times a year or so -- enough not to be completely foreign to life but not often enough to be routine either.  Now, to be fair, it was quarterly because the Eucharist was held only quarterly and that was not a good thing.  It is also true that having the same practice now along with the restored weekly pattern of the Eucharist would be cumbersome, at best, and perhaps even unworkable.  But the reality is that the general confession and general absolution only became normative among Lutherans after the Common Service of 1888.  Luther certainly did not know the practice and where there was confession and absolution (more robust than the Roman confiteor) was in the context of a longer, more detailed exhortation, examination, absolution, and warning to those unrepentant.  To restore this would certainly be a task and people would find it offensive, to be sure.

Anyway, these are some of my concerns over the years about the shift in how and who we admit to the altar rail.  At some point, one's confession of faith became more significant in this answer than one's confession of sin (or lack thereof).  It is something that begs our consideration.