# LCMS Convention Workbook_St. Louis Missouri_2019_S221
# Machine transcription, uncorrected — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

II. THEOLOGICAL DOCUMENTS­­—COMMISSION ON THEOLOGY AND CHURCH RELATIONS
of the kingdom (“the power of the keys”), which bind
or release a person from the bonds of sin, were given by
Christ to His entire Church (Matt. 18:15ff.; John 20:19ff.),
any member of Christ’s Church may be used by God to
assure another person of forgiveness as he confesses his
sin. At the same time, in its Confessions and elsewhere,
Lutheran theology frequently speaks of confession made
to a pastor.6 Martin Chemnitz elaborates on private confession in the context of pastoral care:
… It is the duty of the shepherd, if he knows that
some sheep is sick or broken, that he bind up
and heal it by applying the ministry of Word and
sacrament privately. Therefore private absolution
remits the sins of the contrite, who seek consolation by faith in no other way than that it privately
or to individuals announces the remission of
sins through the Word of the Gospel, which also
Christ Himself shows by His own example (Matt.
9:2; Luke 7:48). This proclamation, whether it is
called either particular, individual, special, or private, is efficacious for the forgiving of sins because
it is a ministry of the Spirit, through which God
strengthens faith and forgives sins.”7

congregation receives, specifically applied to the circumstances of the individual sinner.”9
It is our goal to explain why, even though the same
Gospel is given through the various Means of Grace,
private confession and absolution may be a considerable
aid to all Christians, and especially useful to pastors, who
share in the burdens of their people and who are susceptible to unique temptation and discouragement. It is first
of all necessary, however, to clearly establish the biblical
foundation for confession and absolution.

CONFESSION AND ABSOLUTION
Part One:
Foundations
Scriptural witness

W

e must admit with Luther at the outset
that the “type of confession, which is now
done quietly, into the ear, can be substantiated by no one from divine law.”10 That is not the same
as admitting, however, that the Scriptures of the Old
and New Testaments inform neither our theology nor
our practice of confession and absolution. Our risen
Lord Himself brings the entire Christian proclamation
together under the two headings of repentance and the
forgiveness of sins (Luke 24:47). The “pure, clear fountain
of Israel”11 does not suddenly run dry when the topic of
confession and absolution is raised. The Word of God is
rich in wisdom and truth for the instruction of the life of
the people of God, and it is rich in grace in its invitation
for every child of God, the pastor included, to find in the
Lord God his true hiding place.

Because the pastor, serving in Christ’s Office of the
Holy Ministry, already hears the confession of sins and
pronounces Christ’s absolution in the public Divine Service, it is necessary to offer further clarification about the
importance of private confession and absolution.8
First, no one should assume that a different kind or
quality of forgiveness from Christ our Lord is given in
the context of individual confession. All of the Means of
Grace — Baptism, the Lord’s Supper, preaching — convey the same forgiving Gospel. In this respect, there is
no difference between private confession and absolution
and that which is conducted on Sunday mornings in
public worship. One Lutheran theologian put it succinctly: “Private absolution is neither more nor less than the
absolution the whole congregation receives in the gospel.
Rather, it is nothing other than the gospel the whole

Biblical confession
When we call to mind Bible verses that include the word
confess, we notice immediately that they fall into two
categories. We may think, for instance, of 1 John 1:9, a
verse that we often speak together in worship:

See SC Baptism 15–29, KW 360–362; AC XI, KW 44–45; AC XXV,
KW 72–75; Ap XI, KW 185–187; Ap XII, KW 188–218; LC, “A Brief
Exhortation to Confession,” KW 476–480. For a contemporary order
of private confession before the pastor, see Individual Confession and
Absolution in Lutheran Service Book (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing
House, 2006), 292–293.
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7
Martin Chemnitz, Examination of the Council of Trent (Part II), trans.
Fred Kramer (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1978): 561–562.

Another term for private or individual confession and absolution is
auricular (meaning “into the ear”) confession.
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CONFESSION AND ABSOLUTION

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Nevertheless, he looked upon their distress,
when he heard their cry.
For their sake he remembered his covenant,
and relented according to the abundance of
his steadfast love.
The psalm ends very appropriately with a plea that
the Lord our God would save us and with a call for all
the people to praise the Lord with a confession of our
sinfulness and need for salvation and a confession of the
greatness of our God who is worthy to be praised forever.

Repentance
When Luther argued that the Lord willed the “entire life
of believers to be one of repentance,” he was, of course,
doing no more than reflecting this pattern found in
almost every chapter of the Old and New Testaments.12
Scripture has much to teach us concerning repentance,
and we are in constant need of Scripture’s correction.
The biblical vocabulary of both Hebrew (shub, LXX
usually epistrepho) and Greek (metanoio) imply a turning
around; a change of mind, heart and behavior; and a
“re-orientation” no longer away from God but toward
Him. This is prompted both by God’s word of judgment
and by His gracious invitation, as expressed in Joel
2:11b–13:
For the day of the LORD is great and very awesome;
who can endure it?
“Yet even now,” declares the LORD,
“return [shub] to me with all your heart,
with fasting, with weeping, and with mourning;
and rend your hearts and not your garments.”
Return [shub] to the LORD your God,
for he is gracious and merciful,
slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love;
and he relents over disaster.
Perhaps most important of all, especially for the
questions we are considering, is Scripture’s clear teaching
that repentance is not a humanly generated sorrow or
contrition. Repentance is a gift of God. And it is a good
and gracious gift. When we are tempted to think that
repentance is our work, something we produce and then
offer to God, we need to return again to passages like
Acts 5:31 (“God exalted him at his right hand as Leader
and Savior, to give repentance to Israel and forgiveness
12

AE 31:25.

CONFESSION AND ABSOLUTION

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If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to
forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all
unrighteousness.

9
J.G. Goesswein, “The 11th Article of the Augsburg Confession,” trans.
Christopher Doerr, Wisconsin Lutheran Quarterly 106, no. 2 (Spring,
2009): 5, also at wlsessays.net/files/GoesswienAC11.pdf.

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INTRODUCTION

Many times he delivered them,
but they were rebellious in their purposes
and were brought low through their iniquity.

PART ONE: FOUNDATIONS

221

of sins” [emphasis added]) and Acts 11:18b (“And they
glorified God, saying, ‘Then to the Gentiles also God has
granted repentance that leads to life’” [emphasis added]).
Echoing the thoughts of the psalmist, Paul declares that
God’s kindness is intended to lead us to repentance
(Rom. 2:4). The same idea is expressed in 2 Tim. 2:24–26,
except that here it is the “Lord’s servant” who must
minister in kindness and gentleness, hoping that God
may grant to his opponents repentance, which will then
lead to knowledge of the truth and salvation from the
snares of the devil.
In its teaching of repentance, the New Testament
consistently maintains a twofold emphasis: (1)
repentance is commanded as the only appropriate
response to the knowledge of our sinfulness, and (2)
repentance comes as a gift of God by the working of
His Word and Spirit. We do not find passages that
focus on repentance as our work — even though we
are commanded to repent; nor do we find passages that
stress the quality of our repentance — even though the
“fruits of repentance” (Matt. 3:8) testify to its reality.

10
For references and discussion, see Albrecht Peters, Commentary on
Luther’s Catechisms: Confession and Christian Life, trans. Thomas H.
Trapp (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 2013), 36–40.
11

13
ESV ends verse 9 as “but that all should reach repentance.” The
verb in this clause, χωρέω, may be more literally translated as to go or
to come. It is often used in the context of traveling or “arriving” at a
certain place.

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This unity in confession is beautifully expressed in
Psalm 106, which is rich with words that have to do
with making known and speaking out. The psalmist
seamlessly weaves words of making known the mighty
acts and great mercy of the Lord with words recounting
the repeated rebelliousness of God’s people — including himself. The great chapters of Israel’s history appear
woven together in this tapestry of confession, and verses
43–45 provide a summary of the pattern:

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about ourselves and about our God. It means an entire
life of repentance.

cross the Law spelled out its last word, and every
mouth was stopped. The Gospel is exclusively the
Gospel of the Christ; He has no heroes beside
Him. He will build His church, thus, in spite of
man’s failure and by the Son’s sole triumph. The
disciples are not heroes but witnesses, not lords
but servants, not religious geniuses, not men gifted with unusual religious intuition but recipients
of revelation, not men of outstanding religious
attainments but objects of the boundless condescension of God, not heroes but believers. …

‘I will draw all people to myself’
This rich and fruitful life of repentance will remain
unknown to us, however, if we regard God as someone
to hide from instead of someone to hide in. Perhaps the
psalter’s talk of the protective shadow of God’s wings, of
God as our hiding place and shield, strikes us as nothing
but poetry. Perhaps the very real terror of appearing
before the consuming fire (Deut. 4:24; 9:3; Heb. 12:29)
causes us to run and hide like our first parents. This fear,
this suspicion, this doubt and even terror of ours is also
known to our God, who not only invites us to come to
Him through His gracious and unfailing promises, but
who also comes to us, and comes in a way no one could
fear. As Luther preaches in his sermon on the nativity of
our Lord:
See how God invites you in many ways. He places
before you a Babe with whom you may take
refuge. You cannot fear him for nothing is more
appealing to man than a babe. Are you affrighted?
Then come to him, lying in the lap of the fairest
and sweetest maid. You will see how great is the
divine goodness, which seeks above all else that
you should not despair. Trust him! Trust him!
Here is the Child in whom is salvation. To me
there is no greater consolation given to mankind
than this, that Christ became man, a child, a babe,
playing in the lap and at the breasts of his most
gracious mother. Who is there whom this sight
would not comfort? Now is overcome the power
of sin, death, hell, conscience, and guilt, if you
come to this gurgling Babe and believe that he is
come, not to judge you, but to save.15
This gurgling Babe, this Child, this Man, who came to
save, also died and rose again in order to draw all people
to Himself. Martin Franzmann’s treatment of the death
and resurrection of our Lord as the confession (“confiteor”)16 and the absolution of His disciples is worth
quoting here at length:
But whatever the mouths of enemies and the
eloquent shape of history may have said in witness
to the Christ, however mysteriously and wondrously the Father may have attested the Son, the
disciples were silent, fearful, and faithless. On the

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That believers both confess their sin and confess the
faith shows that the Scriptures refuse to separate what
we confess to be true about ourselves and our condition before God from what we confess to be true about
God — who He is and what He has done for us. This
inclusive view of confession will prove to be an important component of Luther’s thoughts concerning private
confession and absolution. Confession is not simply a
matter of listing sins; it is a person’s statement before
God or before a brother or sister that he continually sins
and falls short of God’s glory, that he knows God to be
gracious and merciful in and because of Christ Jesus his
Lord, that he lives by faith in the promises of the Gospel,
and that he desires with all his heart to live a life worthy
of a child of God.

PART ONE: FOUNDATIONS

15
The Martin Luther Christmas Book (trans. by Roland H. Bainton
(Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1948), 40.

14
Augustine, Confessions Book X. chap. 29. Translation from The
Confessions of St. Augustine, trans. Rex Warner (New York: The New
American Library, 1963), 236.

If you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord
and believe in your heart that God raised him
from the dead, you will be saved.

KW 527.3.

CONFESSION AND ABSOLUTION

Therefore, the Bible’s teaching on repentance does not
lead us to the conclusion that there is no hope for humanity, that God has given up on us, that our future includes nothing but guilt, shame and despair. God shows
not only great mercy but also great patience toward
us. He does not will that any should perish, rather it is
His will that all should finally arrive in that land called
“Repentance” (as suggested by the original language of
2 Peter 3:913). Perhaps here more than anywhere else, we
pray with Augustine: “Grant us what You command, and
command us what You will.”14
Repentance is one of those good gifts that God grants
freely, graciously, having already given us His Son.
“[Bearing] fruit in keeping with repentance” (Matt. 3:8;
Luke 3:8), then, does not mean being so sincerely and
truly sorry that God counts our contrition as repentance;
rather, it means a turning away from the rubbish of our
old self-righteousness and a turning toward the God who
is just and justifies the sinner. It means the full and honest acknowledgment of both our own vast sinfulness and
of God’s boundless mercy. It means expressing not only
in words but in actions as well what we know to be true

On the other hand, a passage like Rom. 10:9 will also
quickly come to mind:

Literally, the “I confess,” the disciples’ prayer of repentance.

CONFESSION AND ABSOLUTION

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PART ONE: FOUNDATIONS

They came to faith as all men must come, by the
way of repentance. The record of the Passion is the
disciples’ confiteor, their confession of sins. The
whole Passion account voices their confession,
“All we like sheep have gone astray … the Lord
has laid on Him the. iniquity of us all” (Is. 53:6).17
Franzmann immediately adds:
If the Passion narrative is the disciples’ confiteor,
the story of the resurrection is their record of the
divine absolution: “He was raised for our justification.” The disciples experienced in the resurrection the never-to-be-outdone proclamation of
the grace which had spoken the Beatitude upon
the beggar, which had cleansed the leper, which
had been moved to compassion by the harassed
and helpless sheep of the house of Israel, which
had rejoiced in revealing to the simple what was
concealed from the wise, which had given to the
stumbling and halting disciple what had been denied to the prophets and righteous of old, and had
bestowed the Kingdom upon children.18
This pattern of repentance and forgiveness of sins,
of confession and absolution, not only unifies the grand,
overarching narrative of God’s relationship with His
people, it is also here, clear and concrete, at the very
heart of the Gospel message, the story of Christ’s death
and resurrection for us.

Not heroes but believers
The Passion and resurrection narratives also bring to
mind one other feature of the New Testament’s teaching
concerning confession and absolution: Which follower
of Jesus in the New Testament story was not a restored
sinner, a confessing sinner, who did not live and move
17
Martin H. Franzmann, Follow Me: Discipleship according to Saint
Matthew (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1961), 214–215.
18

Franzmann, Follow Me, 215.

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2019 Convention Workbook