Thursday Theology #403
March 2, 2006
Topic: A Book Review on Confession and Absolution - Lutheran Style
Colleagues,
This week's posting offers readers Wayne Holst's review of Ronald K.
Rittgers' case study on Confession and Absolution in Lutheran theology and
church life in the earliest days of the Reformation. The identities of author and reviewer are in the text that follows.
Peace & Joy!
Ed Schroeder
THE REFORMATION OF THE KEYS: Confession, Conscience, and Authority in
Sixteenth Century Germany,
by Ronald K. Rittgers. 2004.
Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA. 318 pages. Hardcover. $49.95US. ISBN #0-674-01176-7.
Reviewed by: Wayne A. Holst
Why would anyone want to invest time and energy in a book on private
confession as practiced in sixteenth century Germany when many Protestants -
from day one - rejected it, and when many Roman Catholics themselves have abandoned it
as a religious obligation?
The anwer is because some developments in early Reformation Germany continue
to have contemporary implications - spiritually and theologically.
English-speaking people have been quite unaware of this story, but it is to
their current benefit to be introduced to it.
The Reformation of the Keys by Ronald K. Rittgers, Associate Professor of the
History of Christianity at Yale Divinity School, is much more than an
esoteric sojourn into Reformation history.
The author suggests four goals guiding his presentation. To examine the issue
of private confession, which has received little attention from
English-speaking scholars; to show how the reformation of private confession was
part of a reformation of (the power of) the keys that had important implications for
politics and piety in the German reformation - so that the book is really about
the keys and not just confession; to suggest how the reformation of the keys
provides new light on the way reformers and lay rulers used authority - not
simply to discipline and control, but also to protect and console the human
conscience; and to attempt a kind of history that takes theology and historical
context seriously. Context is important for the author. That is why his study is
not only about ideas related to confession and the keys. It is also about how
these ideas became incarnated into the life of an important German city
profoundly influenced by the Lutheran reformation.
These worthy goals notwithstanding, this reviewer interprets the work as a
nuanced, academic study of how Lutherans, almost from the beginning, attempted
to formulate a reformed position standing between traditional Catholics and
more reactionary Protestants during tumultuous times. Rittgers, indirectly if
not directly, shows how Lutheran theology sought to bridge Catholic and
Protestant understandings of important but conflicting theological and spiritual
issues. That stance, while perhaps more radicalized in earlier times and on some
issues, has not substantively changed in half a millennium.
2.
The book demonstrates that Lutheranism began as a conservative reform
movement within the catholic tradition. Lutheranism affirmed and retained what
it considered evangelically sound from Catholicism. Lutherans did not, for example,
totally reject the medieval system of private confession and penance
administered through a priest (the classic sacerdotal system and the doctrine of
the power of the keys which was based on Mt. 16:13-20).
Instead, Lutherans retained and yet substantially modified what they
inherited; replacing it with a system of pastoral and general soul-care
negotiated in co-operation with lay civic authorities. Here is a case study of how lay
political leaders in the German city of Nurnberg (known also today as Nuremberg)
gradually divested power and influence from the traditional clergy-controlled
structures that had defined their lives. Civic authorities replaced the old with
a new system both Protestant and lay-dominated. In so doing, Rittgers reveals
an early example of what we today might call secularization (or to put it
another way, give evidence of the sacralization of temporal authority).
This is an extensive assessment of archival and printed documents. It is not
a comparative study of various theological understandings of confession or a
reflection on the sacred intimacies of the confessional. Those who would
disagree with Rittgers on this or that theological/spiritual point should
remember that the author is a church historian, not a systematician or spiritual
director. The written word - especially from civic archives - while enlightening, is
not always sufficiently nuanced to convey meanings that are satisfying to
religious or spiritual readers. City archives would not be expected to serve as
the best preserve of theology or spiritual guidance.
This is also not a primer on the development of the Lutheran theology of
confession. Rather, it is a chronology of what actually happened to Lutheran
theology and practice in a city whose senate was among the original signatories
to the Augsburg Confession of 1530 (Augsburg was a foundational defence of the
Lutheran Reformation) and Nurnberg was the first imperial city to adopt the
Lutheran reformation.
The author attempts to demonstrate how confession (in this case, the
acknowledgement of sin made privavely and heard by a priest) was disengaged from
penance (satisfaction required from the penitant for wrongs committed). In
truth, the city magistrate sought to reject the latter, in accord with the teaching
of the reformers.
Luther supported private confession from the beginning but objected to the
way it had been practiced due to human manipulation. At the outset he favoured a
renewed, voluntary private confession. In time, however, Lutherans grew
worried about wholesale rejection of the practice because of the resulting
popular reaction to things Catholic.
3.
In time, Luther wrote guidelines for renewed private confession in, for
example, his small catechism of 1529. So Luther supported private confession
from the beginning. His new emphasis was on linking the examination of faith with
voluntary confession of sin. This he sought to make mandatory for participation
in the Lord's supper.
For centuries, the Catholic church had combined confession and penance in
order to maintain what was experienced by the reformers as spiritual control
over the laity and to reinforce what they saw as works righteousness.
Rittgers demonstrates how Lutherans wanted their authority to be different.
Both lay and clerical leaders sought to protect and console as well as to
discipline and control. Rittgers argues that Lutheran private confession
attempted to balance spiritual freedom with moral discipline. Luther's teaching of
justification by grace through faith granted individuals a certainty of
conscience and a greater sense of individual freedom.
Translated into the civil practice of the day, modifed versions of private
confession were developed and these eventually became part of normal evangelical
piety. Compromises ensued in the wake of debates involving various interest
groups - often in an atmosphere of Sturm und Drang.
While the Catholics had used the doctrine of the keys to define and defend
their authority, as well as to console the faithful, the reformers promoted a
fundamental transformation that would rid the church of what they considered to
be clerical abuses. Under the Catholic regime, the faithful often languished
in suspension between the hope of forgiveness and the fear of damnation. This
ambivalence kept them unsure if they were truly pardoned from admitted sins.
Luther wanted them to be assured of forgiveness after an authentic confession
that reflected acceptance, through faith, of the pure grace of God.
Rittgers shows how the central dilemma confronting leaders of the German
reformation was how to enforce moral social discipline without damaging
individual spiritual freedom.
Rejecting penance, Lutherans were compelled to develop private and general
confessional forms that relied on civil enforcement that balanced discipline and
freedom. Discipline for them was administered by city councilors and not
church authorities. Ironically, while the laity experienced relatively more
spiritual freedom thorugh these sacramental reforms than through the old
Catholic sacrament of penance, civic authority often proved more discouraging than church
law. Humane city council-regulated confession became the exception rather
than the rule. The result, for the faithful, was a mixed bag of spiritual
liberation and new forms of imposed social restraint and enforced conformity.
4.
Rittgers gives a detailed summary of the disputes and controversies
surrounding the introduction and implementation of evangelical confessional
forms in the city through the mid-1500s. (The Peace of Augsburg 1555 was formalized
between Catholics and Lutherans, but it did not include the Calvinists). In the
process, Nurnberg civic council sought to prevent their Lutheran clergy from
lording it over lay consciences even as it wanted its pastors to promote
religious and moral conformity.
The Nurnberg fathers were laudably concerned about the city's moral condition
and oversaw both public and private confession to assure personal and social
discipline. These difficult realities were no doubt compromises the Lutheran
reformers were loathe to accept because it went against many of the Christian
freedoms they had fought hard to recover.
Rittgers explains how basic Reformation teachings morphed politically from
positions of protest into a state religion. He shows how leading clergy like
Andreas Osiander attempted to retain both pastoral and political control of the
confessional process in attempts to maintain what was in essence an evangelical
sacerdotalism. Ultimately, however, the council prevailed.
As stated previously, Luther and his Wittenberg associates came to support
private confession but - to many who had to work out agreements with civic
authorities - they failed to provide it with a pragmatic theological rationale.
Once the new order was in place, however, the focus shifted to the catechetical
instruction of the young so that a new generation would have a better
understanding of the resulting civil order.
Lutheranism became the state religion in many parts of northern Germany. But
the Nurnberg story was unique in terms of scope and notoriety.
The Reformation understanding of the meaning of authority came to a head in
Nurnberg and settlements were worked through here. The author gives a positive
accounting of what evangelical catechists taught the young but he is unsure as
to whether evangelical disciplines resulted in any major moral improvement.
The substitution of faith for sorrow for sin, and the authority of the Word for
the ministrations of the priest succeeded in solving some problems but
resulted in creating others.
In a nutshell, sacred authority was secularized and secular authority was
sacralized. Whereas previously, ultimate authority was the purview of the
church, it now rested essentially in the hands of the state. The two kingdoms
theology of Luther went through a certain adaptation in Nurnberg. In the end,
both magistrates and clergy came to respect the divine turf that lay beyond their
purview. Each sought to honor the conscience of the laity and the Word of God as
ultimate authorities in matters pertaining to confession.
5.
This reviewer concludes through his reading of this real life Nurnberg case
study (it is not an idealistic theological treatise removed from the challenges
of daily living) that Lutheranism was, even in its formative years, a
conservative reform movement. Nurnberg challenges those who would make of early
Lutheranism a much more radical and polemical reformation. The Nurnberg story of
a thirty-year period when the Reformation was at its apex, is one during which a
relative equilibrium prevailed in spite of conflicting religious and secular
entanglements. Leading laity and clergy struggled to retain the essential
subtance of traditional Catholicism and to integrate this to new evangelical
understandings and practices.
With Rittgers, readers might equivocate - or hesitate to conclude - whether
the new moral and spiritual state of the city was any better than the old. But
in a true sense such a question is irrelevant because times had irreversably
changed and there was no going back to the past.
Secularization became a legacy of reformed Catholicism in the West. In their
reduced territories and more so in America, Catholics would benefit from
greater freedoms resulting from the influence of the Reformation. At the same
time, those who claim the Reformation as their spiritual heritage have a debt to
the Catholic tradition for redefining in the Counter-Reformation the frame of
reference against which Protestants could measure their challenges and refine
their faith.
In summary, the public record, now half a millennium old, demonstrates how
Lutheranism served as a bridge between numerous political and religious groups
committed to the social and spiritual well-being of Nurnberg. Lutheranism stood
for evolutionary - not revolutionary - change in an era of complex
socio/religious ferment.
The Reformation of the Keys could be faulted - perhaps because of the
personal inclinations of the author - for assessing too artlessly and
irenically, in places, the circumstances it evaluates and for putting the most charitable
construction on some quite unseemly behaviour.
Nevertheless, the author prompts our praise for offering an intriguing
perspective of how early to mid-sixteenth century Nurnberg was transformed while
navigating severe societal destabilization that continued for years into the
future. His work helps to counter some current Reformation historiography that
gives undue attention to discipline and control issues and not enough regard to
serious efforts at integrating the Lutheran principles of freedom and grace
into the civic process.
6.
Counterbalancing religious and political influences in times of
destabilization is the continuing task of any society. Today, we may find it
hard to identify with or fully appreciate the Nurnberg story. But, short of living in
social anarchy, the call to work for renewal in the midst of seeming chaos remains
the same for us.
Reviewer's Bio: Wayne A. Holst is a writer and a facilitator of adult
spiritual develoment at St. David's United Church, Calgary, Alberta. He served
as an ordained Lutheran pastor, missionary and church executive for twenty-five
years and taught religion and culture at the University of Calgary for more
than a decade.
Addendum on Confession Today
For a reflection on contemporary confession here is a link to an article by
this reviewer for Sojourners Magazine, May-June, 2002. It is entitled -
