Repentance

Repentance is the turning from wrongdoing toward God, and the traditions that share the idea describe the human act in strikingly similar terms. Where they differ is in what mediates it, and whether anyone is authorised to declare it accepted.

Sacramental: Catholic and Orthodox. Repentance is enacted in a sacrament. The Western form, contrition, confession to a priest, absolution, and satisfaction, developed out of the public and once-only penance of the early church, through the private and repeatable penance spread from the sixth century by Irish monks with their handbooks of assigned penalties, to the Fourth Lateran Council's requirement in 1215 that all the faithful confess at least annually. Eastern Orthodoxy has a parallel practice with a different emphasis: the priest stands alongside the penitent facing the icon rather than sitting as judge, and the prayers are more often supplicatory than declaratory. Both hold that the sacrament conveys forgiveness rather than merely announcing it.

Reformation. The Reformers attacked the penitential system and, specifically, the sale of indulgences. The first of Luther's ninety-five theses (1517) states that in saying "repent" Christ willed the whole life of believers to be repentance, and his objection is partly philological: the Latin poenitentiam agite had been read as "do penance" where the Greek metanoeite means change your mind. Protestant traditions retained repentance and confession while directing them normally to God alone; private confession was preserved in Lutheranism as available rather than required and largely disappeared elsewhere. Assurance of forgiveness rests on the promise of the gospel rather than on a priest's absolution.

Teshuvah: Jewish. Return rather than penance, requiring regret, abandonment of the act, confession and resolve, with no intermediary and no absolution pronounced by anyone. Offences against people must be settled with those people before the Day of Atonement covers them. The calendar carries the practice, in the month of Elul and the Days of Awe.

Tawba: Islamic. Turning, likewise direct, with substantially the same fourfold conditions and the same rule that wrongs against people require restitution or pardon from them. God is al-Tawwab, the one who turns toward, and the concealment of one's own sins is encouraged rather than their disclosure.

Set side by side, the four describe the interior act almost identically, regret, cessation, resolve, repair. The differences are institutional: whether the community mediates the turning, whether it can be repeated and how often, whether anyone may pronounce it complete, and what happens to those whose repentance the community does not accept.

The developed, private, repeatable penance familiar from later Catholic and Orthodox practice was not how the early church handled serious sin, and the difference is stark enough to be worth describing on its own.

For roughly the first four centuries, many churches practiced exomologesis, an order of public penance available, in the strictest sense, only once in a lifetime, for grave sins, chiefly apostasy, murder and adultery. A penitent confessed to the bishop, was enrolled in an order of penitents, and underwent a period, sometimes years, of exclusion from communion, distinctive dress, fasting and public humiliation, standing at the church door or among the penitents at the back, before formal reconciliation and readmission to the eucharist, often at Easter.

The system produced its own crisis. Because it could be used only once, some Christians delayed baptism itself until near death to avoid the risk of needing penance they could not receive again, a practice Constantine himself is reported to have followed. The rigor of the system was also directly implicated in the Novatianist and later Donatist schisms, both arising from disputes over whether and how those who had lapsed under persecution could be readmitted at all.

The transition to private, repeatable confession is credited to Irish and British monastic practice, using penitential handbooks that assigned specific fixed penances to specific sins, itself a controversial innovation when it spread to the continent from the sixth century, precisely because it broke with a public, once-only model that had stood for centuries and looked to some contemporaries like the church going soft on sin rather than developing its pastoral care.