[[!meta author=“Luke Schierer”]]

• CCC 983: “Were there no forgiveness of sins in the Church, there would be no hope of life to come or eternal liberation.”
• Sin is real.
  • Sin is not the same as mistakes, imperfections, or immaturities.
  • Sin is a separation from God
  • The denial of the possibility of sin is a relatively new idea
    • that is not to say that particular people have not denied that they individually have sinned. Such people historically would have said others are sinners.
    • The modern mistake is unique in that people now deny that sin exists at all, and particularly deny that what Catholics understand as mortal sin exists at all.
  • Two kinds of sin: actual sin and original sin.
    • “actual sin” is something we do.
    • “original sin” refers to our state or condition of lacking grace (God’s life). It further refers to our fallen nature.
  • original sin
    • It is difficult to understand what humanity would have been like had Adam
    • our instincts are selfish.
    • we have to train ourselves to resist the effects of this instinctual selfishness.
    • Calvin incorrectly taught that man is totally depraved (evil). This is wrong.
    • Some earlier thinkers, notably the Manichaeism heresy, taught that all matter is evil. This is also wrong. not sinned.
    • Predestination, an idea that heavily influences Presbyterian theology, says that God created us without free will, and that because of original sin, some (perhaps many?) people cannot help but sin. They have no choice. This is wrong. Sin is always a choice.
    • Sin is habit forming, we are conditioned to sin,
      • in that it becomes easier to sin with each sin we commit.
      • in that due to original sin, or starting state is inclined to sin
• God revealed himself first to the Jews then even more profoundly to us as Christians, in a unique way as compared to other people.
  • This lead first the Jews, and then us, to understand sin in a more profound way, as the breaking of a relationship, and not just disobedience to an arbitrary command of an impersonal god (lower case intentional, to distinguish between the false gods of of other religions).
  • The offense of sin against God is infinite, so great that Jesus' death on the cross is the only way to pay the debt of justice.
  • God is Truth, and Truth requires Justice.
  • God, through His death on the cross, took on, and met the demands of Justice for us. If a lack of Justice is understood as a debt, He paid our debt.
  • Because sin is inherently an offense primarily against God, only God can forgive sins. To claim to forgive sins, is to claim God’s authority. The Jews recognized this, and got upset. The Church claims to be given this divine authority by Jesus.
• The Church forgives sins through the sacraments
  • Baptism forgives all sin, completely.
    • Baptism does not remove the weakness of will, and other forms of “concupiscence” that we inherit as part of original sin.
    • Baptism gives us grace.
  • Penance/Reconciliation/Confession (same thing, different names)
    • forgives sins committed after baptism
    • requires the sins be confessed and sincerely repented
    • The power to forgive sins, unlike the power to baptize, is reserved to the priesthood.
  • When Saint Paul talks about unforgivable sins, he is talking about the sins of despair and impenitence. Only the unrepentanted and/or unconfessed sin cannot be forgiven. All sins confessed in the sacrament and sincerely repented are forgiven.
• Hell is real
  • Hell is eternal separation from God.
  • Hell is both a judgment of God as an act of Justice and an rejection by the unrepentant soul turning away from God.
  • Hell is a necessary consequence of free will.
• God’s power is through His spoken word. He creates by speaking in Genesis, and the fullness of God’s power is Jesus, who is described as The Word.
  • If God' power is His word, when God says “you are forgiven” His words have POWER.
  • Protestants talk of Justification, as if God’s forgiveness is a transaction in which God chooses to ignore our sins because Jesus has paid for them, but the sin remains. It is as if Jesus' sacrifice “covers” our sins the way the priest’s white alb covers whatever he wears underneath.
  • Catholics speak of Salvation, because we recognize that while we are in fact Justified, we are also in fact saved. Our sins are not just paid for (justification), but actually removed from us (salvation). See above, God’s words have POWER.
  • This is part of what we mean by the grace of the sacraments. This power fills us, and in turn empowers us to do good in turn.
  • If we are not doing good in turn, it is because we are not filled with grace, which means we are not saved.
    • Not because our works save us, but because the nature of a saint (someone who is saved) is to be a person who uses this power God has filled him or her with.
    • You can tell a tree by its fruit. If a person doesn’t act like a saint, the person isn’t a saint.
    • In the protestant view, the sinner remains a sinner. Catholics believe that God’s forgiveness removes the sin from us.
    • More, the Catholic view is that God has given us grace - God’s own life and power within us. God is acting through us to do good. The evidence of that should be visible.
    • We thus become saints while still here on earth.
• Because we are entirely dependent ant God’s mercy, it behooves us to show mercy to others.