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In the Presbyterian church of my youth, we were admonished each week to confess our sins silently to God. To an impressionable young mind, a minute or so of silence could provoke all sorts of uncomfortable speculations—whether I had committed the unforgivable sin, whether I had confessed all of my sins, why it was I could not focus my attention on God. To me, these were great, lonely pauses, despite the soft coughs and sniffling. Each week, however, the silence was always quickly followed by a warm reassurance of God's free grace and forgiveness. Though I may have been theologically naïve, I knew intuitively, even then, that this proclamation of grace was the main thing—that its validity did not depend on my secret worries.
The Reformation |
Like many who grew up Protestant, my experience of confession has been of a general or purely private sort—either a liturgical reading or a silent prayer. Only Catholics, it seemed, were required to confess their sins to a priest. To the best of my memory, I do not recall having heard a Protestant sermon on the passage in Matthew—the traditional proof-text for Catholic confession—in which Jesus entrusts Peter with the "keys to the kingdom of heaven." I may have heard one, but the exotic powers invoked in the verse—"whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven"—were no doubt too subtle and obscure to remain long in my mind.
There was a time, however, when the issue of the "keys" in general—and private confession in particular—aroused great interest among Protestants. In The Reformation of the Keys: Confession, Conscience, and Authority in Sixteenth-Century Germany, Yale University historian Ronald Rittgers tells a fascinating story of how the first generation of Protestants in the German city of Nürnberg struggled to determine exactly what role private confession and absolution should have in their new church orders. Because English-language sources on the subject are scarce, it may come as a surprise to many readers that German Lutherans developed a distinctively evangelical form of private confession, which lasted into the 18th century. In The Reformation of the Keys, we can relive one 16th-century city's struggle to work out the practical and institutional implications of the new Protestant doctrine of grace, particularly as it related to confession and clerical authority.
"I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven." Jesus' words to Peter had momentous consequences for Western civilization. For centuries, the Church in the West would use them to support its exclusive claims to religious authority. It alone could bind and loose sins; it alone could dispense the divine grace necessary for salvation. On this foundation was built the powerful and omnipresent Church of the Middle Ages, able to hold sway over princes and emperors and to rouse all of Western Europe to crusade. The power of the "keys" also justified the medieval Church's interest in the most intimate details of everyday life, especially through the sacrament of confession—the "second plank" thrown to drowning Christians when they sinned after baptism.
During the Middle Ages, the Church remained more or less secure in its possession of these powers. Though ecclesiastical authority suffered severe setbacks during the 14th and 15th centuries, only in the 16th century did Protestant Reformers radically challenge the traditional interpretation of the "keys"—and with it the sacerdotal authority the medieval clergy had claimed for itself. If God's mercy was fully and freely available through faith, then the clergy's traditional right to parcel out grace was a human fiction, abused for the sake of money, power, and status. Emboldened by this new interpretation, communities throughout Europe began dismantling the innumerable institutions, penitential rites, and clerical prerogatives that had clustered around the Church's monopoly on forgiveness.
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