Who Can Forgive Sins

So then, the discipline of the apostles in the strict sense instructs the man who is set over all holiness where God’s temple is concerned, and lays it down as its leading point, that every sacrilegious outrage upon modesty is to be rooted out entirely — with no mention anywhere of restoring the offender. I want, though, to pile on top of that, more fully than I need to, the testimony of one particular companion of the apostles as well, a testimony well fitted to confirm his teachers’ discipline by the nearest right there is. For there is also in circulation a Letter to the Hebrews under the name of Barnabas — a man accredited by God well enough, seeing that Paul stationed him next to himself in keeping up self-denial without a break: “Or is it only I and Barnabas who have the right to work?” And of course the Letter of Barnabas is more widely received among the churches than that made-up “Shepherd” of adulterers. Warning the disciples, then, to leave the first principles behind and press on rather toward what is complete, and not to lay the foundations of repentance from dead works all over again, he says: [a]

“For it is impossible that those who have once been given light, and have tasted the heavenly gift, and have had a share in the Holy Spirit, and have tasted the word of God and found it sweet, should — when their lifetime is already going down toward its setting and they have fallen away — be called back a second time to repentance, since they are crucifying the Son of God over again for themselves and putting him to shame.” “For the ground that has drunk the rain coming down on it again and again, and has borne grass fit for the people it is worked for, gets God’s blessing; but if it brings up thorns, it is rejected and close to being cursed, and its end is burning.” The man who learned this from apostles, and taught it alongside apostles, never knew of any “second repentance” promised by apostles to the adulterer and the fornicator.

For he had an excellent way of interpreting the law, and of keeping its figures even under the Truth itself. It was with an eye to this very kind of discipline, in fact, that the warning was given in the case of the leper: “But if the mottled patch has broken out over the skin, and has covered the whole skin from the head right down to the feet, over everything that can be seen, then the priest, when he has looked, shall pronounce him wholly clean: since he has turned white all over, he is clean. But on the day that living flesh is seen in such a man, he is unclean.” What the Law means is this. The man who has turned wholly away from the old habit of the flesh to the whiteness of faith — a whiteness the world reckons a defect and a blemish — and who has been made new all through, is to be understood as “clean,” because he is no longer “mottled,” no longer dappled with the old and the new mixed together. If, however, after the sentence has been reversed, anything of the old nature has come back to life with its old leanings, then what was starting to be counted altogether dead to sin in his flesh has to be judged unclean again, and the priest may no longer make it clean. So adultery, sprouting up again out of the old stock and spoiling right through the single new color it had been shut out of, is a defect that admits of no cleansing.

Again, take the case of a house. If any spots or hollows in its walls had been reported to the priest, then before he went in to inspect that house he ordered everything in it carried out, so that the household’s belongings would not be unclean. Then, if on going in he found greenish or reddish hollows, and their look was sunk deeper than the face of the wall, the priest was to go out to the doorway and shut the house off for a stretch of seven days. Coming back on the seventh day, if he saw the taint had spread through the walls, he was to order the stones the leprous taint was in pulled out and thrown away outside the city in an unclean place, and other stones, dressed and sound, taken and set in the place of the first ones, and the house replastered with fresh mortar. For in coming to the Father’s High Priest — Christ — everything in the way has first to be carried out, in the space of a week, so that the house that is left, the flesh and the soul, may be clean. And when the Word of God has come into it and has found “stains of red and green,” then at once the deadly passions and the bloody ones must be “pulled out” and “thrown away” out of doors — for the Revelation too has set “Death” on a green horse and a “fighting man” on a red one — and in their place there must be laid underneath stones that are dressed and fit for joining and firm, the kind God makes into children of Abraham, so that the man may be fit for God. But if, after the house was put right and made over, the priest saw in that same house anything of the old disorders and blemishes, he pronounced it unclean, and ordered its timbers and its stones and its whole fabric pulled down and thrown away in an unclean place. This will be the man — flesh and soul — who after being made over, after baptism and after the priests have come in, takes on again the scabs and stains of the flesh, and “is thrown away outside the city in an unclean place”: handed over, that is, “to Satan for the destruction of the flesh,” and never rebuilt in the church once he has fallen down.

So too in the matter of lying with a slave girl who had been promised to a husband but not yet bought back, not yet set free. “She shall be dealt with,” says the Law, “and she shall not die, because she had not yet been set free for the man she was being kept for.” For flesh not yet set free for Christ, the one it was being kept for, used to be defiled and go unpunished. So now, after its freeing, it gets no pardon any more.

If the apostles understood these figures of the Law better, then of course they were even more careful about them than the apostles’ companions were. But I will go down into the ring on this point too, and draw a line between the apostles’ teaching and the apostles’ power. Discipline governs a man; power sets a seal on him. Quite apart from that, power is the Spirit, and the Spirit is God. And what did the Spirit teach? That there is to be no sharing in the works of darkness. Notice what he orders. And who, besides, was ever able to forgive sins? That is his own right and nobody else’s — for “who forgives sins but God alone?” — and deadly sins above all, sins committed against God himself and against his temple. As far as you are concerned, when men are chargeable with an offense against you personally, you are commanded, in Peter’s person, to forgive even seventy times seven. [j]

So even if it were agreed that the blessed apostles did once grant an indulgence of that kind — a pardon that comes from God and not from man — they would have been able to do it not as an act of discipline but as an act of power. For they both raised the dead, which God alone can do, and restored the crippled to soundness, which none but Christ can do. They even inflicted plagues, which Christ would not do; it did not suit him to be severe, since he had come to suffer. Ananias and Elymas were both struck — Ananias with death, Elymas with blindness — precisely so that this very fact might prove that Christ had had the power to do even things like these. In the same way the prophets of old granted the repentant a pardon for murder, and for adultery along with it, since they gave clear proofs of severity at the same time. Show me, then, even now, apostolic sir, your prophetic credentials, so that I may recognize your divine power and hand you the right of remitting sins like these. But if it is only the duties of discipline that have fallen to your share, and the job of presiding not as a ruler but as a servant — who are you, and how great are you, to grant an indulgence? You show neither the prophet’s character nor the apostle’s, and so you lack the power whose property it is to indulge.

“But the church has the power of forgiving sins.” I admit it, and I decide the point more fully than you do — I, who have the Paraclete himself in the persons of the new prophets, saying: “The church has the power to forgive sins; but I will not do it, in case they commit others as well.” “What if it was a false-prophetic spirit that made that declaration?” On the contrary. It would have been much more the part of a subverter to recommend himself on the score of leniency on the one hand, and on the other to work all the rest into sinning. Or if instead the false-prophetic spirit was eager to strike this note in keeping with “the Spirit of truth,” then it follows that “the Spirit of truth” does indeed have the power of granting fornicators an indulgent pardon, but is not willing to do it where it would harm the majority.

Now I want to look into your opinion, to see from what source you seize this right for “the church.” If it is because the Lord said to Peter, “On this rock I will build my church,” and “to you I have given the keys of the kingdom of the heavens,” or “whatever you bind or loose on earth shall be bound or loosed in the heavens” — if that is why you presume the power of binding and loosing has come down to you, that is, to every church that is a relative of Peter’s — then what sort of man are you, overturning and altogether changing the Lord’s plain intention, when that intention conferred this gift on Peter personally? “On you,” he says, “I will build my church”; and, “I will give the keys to you,” not to the church; and, “whatever you loose or bind,” not what they loose or bind.

The outcome teaches the same. It was in Peter himself that the church was reared — that is, through Peter himself. Peter himself tried the key out; and you see which key: “Men of Israel, let what I am saying sink into your ears: Jesus the Nazarene, a man appointed by God for you” — and so on. Peter himself, then, was the first to unbar the entrance to the kingdom of the heavens, in Christ’s baptism — the kingdom where the sins that were formerly “bound” are “loosed,” and the ones that have not been “loosed” stay “bound,” in accordance with true salvation. And it was Peter who “bound” Ananias with the bond of death, and who “released” the man weak in his feet from his infirmity. Moreover, in that dispute about whether the Law was to be kept or not, Peter was the first of them all to be filled with the Spirit; and after a preface about the calling of the nations he said, “And now, why are you testing the Lord, over laying on the brothers a yoke that neither we nor our fathers were able to carry? But we believe that through the grace of Jesus we will be saved in the same way they are.” That sentence both “loosed” the parts of the law that were given up and “bound” the parts that were kept. So the power of loosing and binding entrusted to Peter had nothing to do with believers’ capital sins. And if the Lord had given him a rule that he must grant pardon to a brother sinning against him even “seventy times seven,” then of course he would have ordered him to “bind” — that is, to “retain” — nothing afterward, unless perhaps such sins as a man may have committed against the Lord and not against a brother. For the forgiving of sins committed in a man’s case is a verdict given in advance against the remitting of sins committed against God.

And what has any of this to do with the church — with your church, that is, Soulish sir? For in keeping with Peter’s own person, this power will belong correspondingly to spiritual men, either to an apostle or else to a prophet. For the church itself, properly and chiefly, is the Spirit himself, in whom is the Trinity of the one Divinity — Father, Son and Holy Spirit. The Spirit gathers into one that church which the Lord made to consist in “three.” And so, from that time forward, any number of people who have joined together into this faith is reckoned “a church,” from the one who authored it and made it holy. And so “the church” will forgive sins, true enough — but it will be the church of the Spirit, by means of a spiritual man, and not the church that is a tally of overseers. For the right and the ruling belong to the Lord, not to the servant; to God himself, not to the priest.

But you go so far as to squander this “power” on the martyrs as well. No sooner has a man put on the chains — by prearrangement, and chains that are soft ones, given the nominal custody now in fashion — than the adulterers are all over him and the fornicators get in to see him. Prayers echo round him at once; at once pools of tears from every polluted eye surround him. Nobody is more diligent about buying his way into the prison than the people who have lost the church. Men and women are violated there in the dark, a darkness their settled habit of indulgence has plainly made familiar to them — and then they beg peace from men who are risking their own. Others take themselves off to the mines and come back from there as communicants, when by that time another “martyrdom” is needed for the sins committed after the “martyrdom.” “Well, who on earth, in the flesh, is faultless?” What sort of “martyr” is a man who is still a resident of this world? Still begging? With coppers in his hand? At the mercy of a doctor and a moneylender? [t]

Picture him, now, under the sword’s edge with his head already set steady; picture him on the cross with his body already stretched out; picture him at the stake with the lion already let loose; picture him on the wheel with the fire already heaped around him — in the actual certainty, I say, and the actual possession of martyrdom. Even then, who gives a man leave to let off offenses that are to be kept for God, offenses God has condemned without discharge, offenses that not even the apostles — martyrs themselves — have judged, as far as I know, to be lettable off? Paul, after all, had already “fought with beasts at Ephesus” when he decreed “destruction” for the man guilty of incest. Let it be enough for a martyr to have purged his own sins. It is the mark of ingratitude, or of pride, to squander on other people as well what a man got at a high price. Who has bought off another man’s death with his own, except the Son of God alone? For even in his own suffering he set the bandit free. That is what he had come for: that being himself clear of sin, and holy in every respect, he might undergo death on behalf of sinners. In the same way, you who copy him in letting sins off — if you have committed no sin yourself, then plainly you are suffering in my place. But if you are a sinner, how will the oil of your little lamp be enough for you and for me both?

Even now I have a test by which to prove that Christ is in you. If Christ is in the martyr for this reason, that the martyr may absolve adulterers and fornicators, then let him tell out the secrets of the heart in public, and so let the sins off — and he is Christ. For that is how the Lord Jesus Christ showed his power: “Why are you thinking evil things in your hearts? For which is easier, to say to the paralyzed man, Your sins are remitted you; or, Get up and walk? So that you may know that the Son of Man has the power on earth of remitting sins — I say to you, paralyzed man: get up and walk.” If the Lord set so much store by the proof of his power that he uncovered men’s thoughts and then gave health by a word, in case he should not be believed to have the power of remitting sins, then it is not lawful for me to believe that the same power is in anyone at all, whoever he may be, without the same proofs.

Besides, in the very act of pressing a martyr hard for pardon for adulterers and fornicators, you admit yourself that crimes of that sort cannot be washed away except by the criminal’s own martyrdom — while you presume they can be washed away by somebody else’s. If that is so, then martyrdom will be another baptism. For “I have,” he says, “another baptism.” And that is why there flowed out of the wound in the Lord’s side both water and blood, the stuff of the one baptism and of the other. Then by the first baptism too I ought to have the right of setting another man free, if I can do it by the second. And we are bound to force this conclusion on our opponents: whatever authority, whatever reasoning, gives the church’s peace back to the adulterer and the fornicator will be bound to come to the help of the murderer and the idolater in their repentance too — at all events of the apostate, and of course of the man whom savagery has knocked down in the battle of his confession, after a hard struggle with the torments. Besides, it would be unworthy of God and of God’s mercy, who prefers a sinner’s repentance to his death, that the men who fell in the heat of passion should have an easier way back into the church than the men who fell in hand-to-hand fighting.

Indignation drives me to speak. You will call back defiled bodies sooner than bloodied ones! Which repentance is more to be pitied — the one that lays low flesh that was tickled, or flesh that was torn? Which pardon is more justly granted, in every kind of case — the one a willing sinner begs for, or the one an unwilling sinner begs for? No one is ever compelled into apostasy with his own will consenting; no one ever commits fornication against his will. Lust is under no violence but its own; it knows no compulsion whatever. Apostasy, on the other hand — what ingenuities of butchery, what whole tribes of punishments, are brought in to force that! Which man has more truly apostatized: the one who lost Christ in the middle of agonies, or the one who lost him in the middle of his pleasures? The one who grieved while he was losing him, or the one who was enjoying himself while he lost him? And those scars cut into the Christian fighter — scars Christ counts enviable, of course, because they were yearning after victory, and glorious as well, because in failing to conquer they gave way; scars the devil himself still sighs over; scars with an unhappiness of their own, but a chaste one, and with a repentance that mourns to the Lord for pardon but does not blush — are these to be remitted all over again to such men, on the ground that their apostasy could be atoned for? In their case alone is the “flesh weak.” No: no flesh is so strong as the flesh that crushes out the Spirit.