How can Catholic priests claim to forgive sins? Doesn’t the Bible teach that “only God can forgive sins”?
Speaker 1:
You are listening to Shameless Popery with Joe Heschmeyer, a production of Catholic Answers.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Hi, and welcome to Shameless Popery. I’m Joe Heschmeyer. Today I want to explore sacramental confession, the idea of confessing your sins to a priest, and particularly I want to address a really common objection that I’ve heard that is in one sense, a biblical objection that only God can forgive sins.
Now I think this is an important objection. I think that people asking it are asking in good faith, but I also think there’s a reason that I call it kind of a biblical objection, because it helps to know where it comes from. Here’s the example I’d give.
There’s a funny meme that floats around on the internet. It’s a biblical calendar, one of those Bible verse day sort of inspirational calendars. And it has Luke 4:7, “If thou therefore will worship me, all shall be thine.” It sounds inspirational, hey, worship God and you get everything you want, health, wealth, prosperity. But that’s not actually what’s happening in context, and so the meme says inspirational Bible quote, less inspirational if you know who said it, because Luke 4:7 isn’t God speaking. It’s the devil promising that you can have everything you want if you just worship him, so less inspirational.
The reason I bring that up, and it’s a little bit tongue in cheek, is to say if all you can find in support for the data that God alone can forgive sins is that line from scripture you should probably know that doesn’t come from Jesus, it doesn’t come from the apostles. It comes from the scribes and Pharisees who are condemned for saying it. So let’s explore that.
Let’s first put that kind of in the biblical context. This is from the healing of the paralytic. This is a beautiful account found in all three of the synoptic gospels. I’ll give you Luke’s version. So it’s Luke 5, and Jesus is teaching the Pharisees, and the teachers of the law, or the scribes, are sitting by there watching him, not faithfully but trying to trap him, right?
And some friends bring their paralyzed friend to Jesus and they can’t get to him, so they open up the roof and they lower the guy through the roof onto the ground. And Jesus sees their faith, he sees the faith of the friends, and he says, “Man, your sins are forgiven you.” Now there’s a lot just packed right there about the power of intercession, the role we ought to have towards bringing our friends who are spiritually or physically paralyzed to God, that whatever is paralyzing the ones you love, bring them to the Lord and move heaven and earth. Move roofs if you have to.
But in any case, the scribes and Pharisees see this and begin to question, saying, “Who is this that speaks blasphemy? Who can forgive sins but God alone?” Now that the line that Protestant critics of confession love to quote, but this is not going to be Jesus praising them for what a great objection this is. He rather says, “Why do you question in your hearts? Which is easier to say, ‘Your sins are forgiven you,’ or to say, ‘Rise and walk, that you may know that the son of man has authority on earth to forgive sins?'”
He then says to the guy who’s paralyzed, “I say to you rise, take up your bed and go home.” Now before we move on to the next verse I want to point something out there, that Luke is telling us, and in fact Jesus is telling us through Luke, that the point of this is to show that the son of man has authority on earth to forgive sins, that this is not a question of divine power. It’s not a question of Jesus proving himself to be God, but rather proving that as son of man he has divine authority.
Now this is something that is subtle, it’s important, but at this point we’re still early on in Jesus’ ministry and it’s not clear that he’s not just the Son of God, not just the messenger of God, that he actually is God, that he actually is a divine person. That part he hasn’t fully revealed yet. So at this point, he’s not saying only God can forgive sins. You’re absolutely right, and I can forgive sins and therefore I’m God. That’s how almost every Protestant commentator takes this.
This is not what’s happening in the passage, but rather this is about showing that the son of man has authority on earth to forgive sin. We’ll unpack what that means later. But in any case, of course this works. The guy picks up his mat and he goes home, and the people then go home glorifying God and saying, “We have seen strange things today.”
Now, how do Protestant commentators make sense of this passage? The weird thing is frequently, especially if they’re targeting kind of why they think Catholicism is wrong, they will take the side of the scribes and Pharisees in this passage. So John MacArthur, he’s got the Grace to You ministry online, he’s a pretty popular, more reformed pastor. And he says all sin is against God’s law. All sin is a violation of God’s law. Since God is the offended one, God is the law giver, God is the judge and executioner, only God can forgive the sin.
And in this passage, Luke 5, the Pharisees were musing in their minds, saying to themselves who can forgive sins but God alone? And frankly that was good theology. I just want to contrast that MacArthur says his is good theology and Jesus says, “Why do you ask that in your heart?” These are 180 degree diametrically opposed kind of responses to the Pharisees. That should be an enormous red flag that something is wrong here.
Elsewhere in the same talk he says here’s Jesus, he alone can do it, meaning forgiven sins. When Jesus says this person, “Friend, your sins are forgiven you.” He set himself apart from every human being, whoever walked on this earth because he alone can do this. And he, of course, has to add, no priest can do it in a little box because you’ve confessed.
So his argument is that Jesus is showing his divinity, that he’s showing that he’s not like other human beings. And that would be fine if this was late in Luke’s gospel when Jesus has shown his divinity, but he hasn’t done that here.
And I want to add one more part from this same talk. He talked about how the man became permanently forgiven, present tense, permanently forgiven. This stunned the Pharisees and the scribes that they are saying in verse 21, “Who is this man who speaks blasphemy? Who can forgive sins by God alone?” And again, he said, frankly they had really good theology. If Jesus was a man, this was blasphemy of the worst kind. Now I will just point out that that is heretical nonsense. Now I assume he doesn’t mean that literally.
But notice what’s happened here, that Luke tells us, and this is a passage, and in fact, Jesus speaking in Luke tells us… This is a passage showing the son of man, that man, Jesus Christ, fully man, has the authority to forgive sins, and he has this authority from on high. This is about the son having authority from the father.
And John MacArthur says if Jesus was a human that’s blasphemous. Well of course Jesus is a human. He is not merely a human, but he is in his humanity proclaiming the forgiveness of sins with divine power. So that’s an important distinction, because obviously I understand people sometimes say if Jesus was a man and they mean a mere man and it’s just a misspeak.
I’m not trying to be nitpicky about this. I’m saying there’s actually an important theological difference. If you ignore the role of Jesus’ humanity and the forgiveness of sins here, then of course you’re going to miss the role of the humanity of the Catholic priest, or the role of any of our humanity, because you’re missing something about the nature of how Jesus’ miraculous ministry works, that it’s divine power working through human beings.
So let’s explore the parallel account. This is Matthew 9, and I think this is going to make it really clear, because here it says the scribes, we know it’s the scribes and Pharisees. They say to themselves this man is blaspheming. We even know why they think he’s blaspheming. This is the objection that MacArthur is going to say is a good one. This is good theology he says. Jesus says, “Why do you think evil in your hearts?” That’s not good theology. It’s bad theology. It’s evil theology.
And then he says, “Which is easier to say, ‘Your sins are forgiven.’ or to say, ‘Rise and walk?'” And again notice, “That this is so you may know the son of man has authority on earth to forgive sins.” And so then he performed this miracle, the guy can walk, he goes home, and what does it say? “When the crowd saw it, they were afraid and they glorified God who had given such authority to men.”
So there you have again 180 degrees opposed what scripture says and what MacArthur says. MacArthur says it would be blasphemous if Jesus was a man. It would be blasphemous if Jesus, as a man, forgave sins. Matthew 9 says the people are astonished because Jesus, who is fully human, just forgave sins, that God has given his authority to man. Jesus in his humanity doesn’t have the capacity to forgive sins, but because of this divine power, he does, this authorization, this authority from on high, that the people understand what MacArthur doesn’t, that this is divine authority being exercised by a human being that shows us that God is working through human agents and through human actors.
Now obviously there’s a special sense in which Jesus uniquely occupies that, because he is both fully divine and fully human. But we’re going to see this is a theme throughout the New Testament, so we can call this human participation in divine authority.
And the way I would pose this is just to say does God have the power to work through human actors? Because I think there are a lot of reformed thinkers and Protestants more broadly who are worried that if a priest can forgive sins, this is going to be cutting into God’s turf. It’s going to be cutting into his territory, that God will be less sovereign if he works through a human actor, and I think that’s nonsense, and all of scripture points to the contrary.
When we talk about, for instance, the power of creation, you were made by your mother and father. You were also made by God. God works through those human actors to create you. But we see this with the miraculous authority all the time. So especially I think we see this in John’s gospel, so I’m going to focus on John’s gospel, because I like how obvious John makes it.
In John 2, the Wedding Feast of Cana, Mary says to Jesus, “They have no wine.” Jesus says, “Woman, what have you to do with me? My hour has not yet come.” Mary persists and she says to the servants, “Do whatever he tells you.” This is a critical line. This is actually the last words Mary has in the gospel.
And so Jesus gives her the miracles she asked for. She’s unrelenting, he relents. And so Jesus says to the servants, “Fill the jars with water.” They fill them up to the brim and he says, “Now draw some out and take it to the steward of the feast,” so they took it. Notice Jesus hasn’t touched the jars, he has not touched the water, he has not personally done anything other than telling them what to do. And the steward tastes the wine now, because the water has turned into wine.
And we’re told at the end that this… John tells us this, first of his signs, Jesus did it Galilee and manifested his glory. That is even though Jesus doesn’t physically touch the wine, doesn’t physically touch the water, doesn’t physically touch the jars, he works through these anonymous human agents, these servants at the feast. They’re ministers of the miracle. If you understand that, that they’re not doing it by their own power, but by obeying God, they’re able to perform a miracle, or God performs a miracle through them, however you want to describe that, that Jesus did this miracle, even though Jesus didn’t pick it up, that Jesus did this miracle, he manifested his glory. If you understand that, then you understand the sacraments, because the whole point of the sacraments is that God works through these human actors.
Okay, John 3. We’re told that Jesus and his disciples went into the land of Judea and there he remained with them and baptized. This is right after the conversation with Nicodemus, in which he says, “You have to be born again of water in the spirit.” Then John says after this he goes and baptizes.
But then in John 4 he clarifies that while Jesus was making and baptizing more disciples than John the Baptist, Jesus himself did not baptize, but only his disciples. In other words he can say that Jesus baptized, even though he is baptizing through the disciples, not personally physically doing the baptisms himself, that the apostles in this sacramental ministry of baptism are exercising the power and authority of Jesus, or to put it another way, Jesus is working through them. So we can describe it accurately as Jesus baptizing all these people, even though Jesus may not have been there when it happened physically. That’s an important kind of… like you’ll see this all throughout the gospels if you pay attention to it.
John 9, we see this with the healing of the blind man. Jesus spits on the ground, he makes clay of the spittle, and anoints the man’s eyes with the clay says to him, “Go wash in the Pool of Siloam,” which means scent. That’s important, because Jesus doesn’t even go with him. So the guy goes and washes and he comes back seeing. Now the Pharisees questioned him about this, and he says, “Jesus made clay, anointed my eyes, and said to me, ‘Go to Siloam and wash,’ so I went and washed and received my sight.” It doesn’t happen when Jesus rubs the clay on his eyes. It only happens when the man who he sent goes to the pool and washes himself. And then again the Pharisees ask him and he says, “He put clay on my eyes, and I washed, and I see.” There was divine action, there was human action, and there’s a miraculous cure, that this divine washing, this divine anointing happens with human participation. This is human participation in divine power.
Now just to point out the obvious, obviously the servants at the Weeding Feast of Cana couldn’t personally turn water into wine by themselves. Obviously this blind man couldn’t just go down to the pool by himself and wash and be cleansed. It is only because he’s been sent. It’s only because of this divine authority that Jesus is exercising through himself and then through these human agents, the servants and the blind man and so on, through the apostles with baptism. This is not by human authority in that sense. It’s coming from God, but it’s still human actors who are exercising divine authority. That’s not blasphemous. The scribes and Pharisees are wrong about that.
Now the scribes and Pharisees are right that it would be blasphemous to declare the forgiveness of sins without divine authorization, without divine authority, just like it would be ridiculous to try to cleanse yourself of blindness by just rubbing mud on your eyes and washing in water. But with divine authority and with divine power, that changes everything. That’s the point here, and that’s the point that Matthew, Mark and Luke make in this. This is about the son of man having authority on earth to forgive sins, and then we’re going to see he shares that authority.
So before we get there, before we get the real clear evidence that he shares this authority to forgive sins, I want to point out a little test called the rise walk test. Because if you remember in Matthew 9, and in fact in Matthew, Mark and Luke, Jesus says, “Why do you think evil in your hearts? Which is easier to say, ‘Your sins are forgiven’ or to say, ‘Rise and walk?'”
Okay, so what’s happening here? Jesus has declared the man’s sins forgiven and scribes and Pharisees, balk and say, there’s no way you can do that. Only God can do that. And Jesus flips it to a test, says, okay, well it’d be more audacious to tell the guy to get up and walk. Why would it be more audacious? Not cause it’s a greater miracle. Forgiveness of sins is actually a greater miracle. But this is a more obvious miracle. This is a more undeniable miracle. You can see the paralyzed man getting up and going home, and this is something that only God can do.
Human beings don’t have the power to just reverse paralysis, especially in the first century, so this is showing that Jesus is acting with divine authority because he is working in a miraculous way. Human beings do not have the power to perform miracles apart from God. That’s in the definition of a miracle. And so by having an obvious miracle, and a miracle that can’t be done by mere human authority, Jesus is showing that he acts with divine authorization. Again, remember, he’s not yet showing that he is divine. He’s merely showing that he is son of man sent by the father, able to do divine things on earth through this divine authority. In that sense he’s not that much different in this part from the prophets, because the great prophets would do things like this. They even raised the dead.
But they didn’t do it by their own authority, by God’s authority on earth exercised through human actors. That’s what Jesus is showing so far. He’s going to show us more about who he is, but in Luke 5 and Matthew 9 we’re still pretty early on. He’s just showing us that he has divine authority that he exercises.
Now why do I make such a point of that? Because this test that it’d be more audacious to say rise and walk, well the apostles say rise and walk. In Acts 3 Peter and John go up to the temple, there’s a man who who’s lame from birth. In other words, this is not someone who a human doctor in the first century, or even in the 21st century, would be able to heal. They can’t just reverse this paralysis. And so he asks for alms.
Peter looks at him and says, “Look at us.” He expects to receive something from them. Peter says, “I have no silver and gold, but I give you what I have.” That’s an important line. “I give you what I have. In the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth walk.” And sure enough, Peter lifts him up by the right hand, raises him up, immediately his feet and ankles are made strong. He leaps up, he stands, walks, enters the temple with him walking and leaping and praising God.
So Peter has in that one line there in verse 6 made really clear that this is happening not by Peter’s own authorities, in the name of Jesus Christ from Nazareth, but it’s still something Peter has. He has this divine authority to perform these miracles, “I give you what I have.” He doesn’t have it from himself. He has it from God, but have it He does. This is that human participation and divine authority.
And so it would be ridiculous Jesus’ point is to the Pharisees to believe that you can have the authority to tell a paralyzed man that he can walk, but you don’t have the authority to tell the paralyzed man that his sins are forgiven. That would be absurd. Why wouldn’t that be absurd? Because both of these are things that properly belong only to God, and it would be absurd to think that God cares more about the guy’s legs working than about the forgiveness of his sin.
So it’d be absurd to believe that God would give humans the ability to perform physical healing and not spiritual healing. That’s why Jesus poses his test. And so the astounding thing is that it isn’t that these Protestant authors are just citing with the scribes and Pharisees over Jesus. It’s that they’re failing to even understand the test because they’re thinking, oh yeah, the apostles could certainly say, “Rise and walk.” They can actually perform physical healing but they can’t perform spiritual healings. Even the scribes and Pharisees realized that was a ridiculous position. To say they can heal everything other than the soul is outrageous, because the whole point is the healing of the soul. The spiritual healing is what we need in the first place.
So I want to circle back around and get really to the heart of the question, did Jesus bestow divine authority to forgive sins? Did he give human beings the ability to forgive sins anywhere in the gospel? And the answer to that is only yes. There’s a few places to look. The first and most obvious one is John 20, 21 and 23. This is Easter.
He says to them, “Peace be with you. As the father has sent me even so I send you.” Notice the theme of sending again, notice the theme of authority again. This is not something they can do by themselves, but just as the son of man was sent by the father, now the son sends the apostles. And he doesn’t just send them, he empowers them. He says, “Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any they are forgiven. If you retain the sins of any they are retained.” That’s as clear as day, that we know it’s possible for a human being to forgive sins with divine authority because we saw it in the gospels, and now we see new people with this authority to forgive sins, namely the apostles.
See, you might think, okay, given how clear that is, what do Protestants do with that? Well this is Matt Slick, who has an article, Does John 20:23 Mean the Catholic Priest Can Forgive Sins, and he points back to the original passage that we were looking at the healing of the paralytic in Luke 5 and elsewhere, Matthew 9. He says Jesus forgave sins, and the scribes, students of the law, rightly stated that only God forgive sins. So again, he’s assuming the scribes and Pharisees are right.
Then he says if they were wrong about that then why didn’t Jesus correct them? And the answer is He did. He said, “Why do you think evil in your hearts?” Instead, Matt Slick says he affirms their claim. He didn’t. He states that he has the ability to forgive sins and then heals the paralytic. That’s just not what happens. I mean go back and read the passage. He doesn’t say, you are right, only God can forgive sins, and here I am forgiven sins.
If he had done that, then everyone would’ve known from the beginning of Jesus’ ministry that he was claiming to be God, and they don’t know that yet. We see a gradual revelation of Jesus’ divine claim. We don’t see it super early on. And so he goes on, Matt Slick goes on to say, well it should be clear that only God forgives sins and Christians as representatives of Christ pronounce people what has already been forgiven them by God.
So John 20:23 is not saying that Catholic priests have the authority to forgive sins. It is saying that Christian disciples have the authority to pronounce what sins have been forgiven. Think about what a mess that is. Why would you need a special gift to the Holy Spirit to say these sins have been forgiven? What would the point of that be? And moreover, what exactly does that look like in Christian ministry?
In other words, are there Protestants out there who claim to know which sins have already been forgiven in the lives of other people? Because that’s just a mess. It’s either saying that you have the ability to read souls, which is much more than any Catholic is claiming, or it’s saying that you can just say if Jesus forgave you, then you’re forgiven. You don’t need a gift to the Holy Spirit to do that. Anyone can do that. Anyone can do that. It’s just logically sound. If Jesus forgave you, you’re forgiven. A non-Christian can make that claim. Anyone can make that claim.
Okay, another place to look would be something like Matthew 16, where Jesus says to Peter, “I will give you the keys, the kingdom of heaven. Whenever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven and whenever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.” Jesus does that with Peter individually, with that second person singular in Matthew 16.
He also says in Matthew 18 that when you’re dealing with the dispute, go to your brother one-on-one and then have two or three address him, and then if he refuses to listen to them, tell it to the church. If he refuses to listen even to the church, let him be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector. And he says to the church collectively, “Whatever you bind under earth shall be bound in heaven, whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.” Now there are a lot of ways of understanding the binding and loosening, but it seems to be some kind of power, right? Some kind of authority, that whatever you do here on earth will be ratified or affirmed in heaven in some way.
But let’s get back to John MacArthur, because he’s going to cite to this. He kind of mixes up Matthew 16 and 18. He says we can tell people their sins have been forgiven because they’ve believed in Christ and been saved. We can affirm that. So here I’m going to just pause and say by what authority do you know whether a person’s faith is authentic? The whole point of the Protestant idea of the invisible versus the visible church is because they rightly recognize it’s very hard to tell how authentic a person’s faith is.
Take the example of Charles Templeton. He co-founded the Campus Crusade for Christ with Billy Graham and then he died an atheist. So how do you know if somebody’s the real deal? How can you go around telling them, oh yeah, you’ve been forgiven because you believed in Christ and been saved?
Either you’re saying if you believed authentically, then you’ve been saved. You don’t need a gift to the Holy Spirit to do that. Or you’re making this really unfounded guess on how authentic you believe the person’s conversion is. Either way, that’s a mess. But in any case, that’s what he claims Jesus meant when he said to Peter that he had this binding and loosening authority.
All he was saying there was when people tell you they put their trust in Christ to confess their sins and people have told you they believe you can tell them they’re forgiven, but you can’t forgive them. You can’t forgive the… Look, here’s scripture, right? “If you forgive the sins of any they are forgiven. If you retain the sins of any they’re retained.” And, once again, here’s John MacArthur, you can’t forgive them. One of those two has to be wrong, and I think it should be pretty clear which one it is.
So that’s the idea in a nutshell. It’s true without divine authorization we would not be able to forgive sins, we would not be able to perform miracles, we would not be able to do any number of things. We would not be able to live in faith, hope and charity without divine authorization, a divine gift, or without something coming from God.
John 15, Jesus says, “Apart from me you can do nothing.” But the whole point of sacramental confession is not that the priest forgives you of your sins apart from Christ. The whole point of sacramental confession is that the son of man has power on earth to forgive sins, that a man who was also God entered the world and forgave sins with divine authority, and then shared that divine authority with his followers.
That’s the idea of the forgiveness of sins, and that is explicitly spelled out in scripture. So if this is your first time kind of encountering that, I hope that you chew on that. I hope that this is a good source for meditation. I hope you go back to those passages and just maybe when you’re reading scripture notice the sheer number of times that Jesus chooses to perform a miracle through a human intermediary or through some physical object, or often both, because it tells us something about the sacramental nature of his ministry.
He could have in a totally disembodied way just made everything happen without a word, without a touch, without a human actor. He could have done that just as he created the whole cosmos. He could have done any of that, but he chooses to work through human beings and through physical things. That tells us something about Christianity and tells us something sacramental, and one of the things he’s doing through physical means, including human beings, he’s forgiving sin. Thanks a lot. Hope you enjoyed this video and I’m looking forward to your comments below. God bless you.
Speaker 1:
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