Absolution and the Grip of Addictive Sin

Transcript (edited for readability).

So, I mean, the essential point in absolution comes when the pastor says "your sin is—" This is the difference between the gospel and an illusion. An illusion says you'll get over it tomorrow. Take two of these, inhale a little more deeply. In Oregon, that's the new recipe, of course — we've got legal marijuana now, so you see people toking up on the corner. Visitors from Idaho. No, no, no, no. There's — I mean, have another drink. Fall into bed with whomever is available. Satisfy the flesh, at all costs deliver yourself from the accusing voice. That's an illusion. The gospel is not an illusion. The gospel says "your sin." And when it says "your sin," it confirms the law's analysis, it confirms the law is wholly good, just, and true. And when the gospel enters, it confirms that the law has done its job. Your sin — but then it goes — is forgiven. Is forgiven for Jesus' sake. Not because you're a nice guy, not because you've been trying hard, not because you're a good woman and you've really been working at this, not because you'll feel better, not because you take two of these, not for any other reason than this: for Jesus' sake. In Jesus' name, your sin is forgiven for Jesus' sake.

No — substitutionary atonement has happened. Not in heaven. It's happened right here. It's happened right in front of you. Christ Jesus has heard the confession, and he has stepped in and said, "You give me that. I want that. That's mine. You can't have that anymore. Give it to me." He'll take it now, see? And he takes it up in himself, and when he takes it up in himself, it has literally been effaced. It has lost its character. It has lost its face. It's no longer able to accuse. It's been silenced. And then forgiveness has happened. You see? And then repentance is ended. Repentance has ended in these words, "your sin." This is why a lot of people fear the absolution. They don't want to hear it because they don't want to hear the overlap. They're afraid of the overlap, and they complain about the absolution because it's made them feel bad. And what's made them feel bad is the overlap. The truth has been told.

And people will say, "I don't like to go to that church because all they ever talk about is sin." Well, if you listen to what's happening at that church, there's very seldom any reference to sin. But what they're hearing is the overlap, and that's agitating. It's doing what it should. It's doing what the law does, and it's working that way. So when you know that, the next step, having said "your sin," is to hit hard on "is forgiven." Because now, finally, I don't have to hide. Now, finally, that has ended. Now, finally, there's a new possibility. Now, finally, I can get up and walk. Now, finally — the paralysis has ended. Your sin is forgiven. Now repentance has yielded to faith, and faith to a new resolve — a bonum propositum, Luther calls it in Latin, a good resolve. No, I can go back — into the same relation, I can go back into the circumstances that have been so destructive — I can live.

Now, when it comes to repetitive sin, that transition from repentance to faith breaks down. And it breaks down, I think, precisely at the point of the overlap. I can hear my sin. And I can hear the "is forgiven." But what I can't hear is "for me." It may be just plain unbelief — I may not be able to hear the "for me" because I just cannot possibly believe that he would actually forgive. You know? And, of course, it's typical that repentance that comes to rest in faith recycles, so that we live in repentance and faith. But in these specific situations where you get repetitive drinking, or repetitive sexual sin, or other addictive behavior, "your sin" becomes an indictment, and the absolution disappears into the indictment. And then the person goes back again to what they've sought as release and relief before — drinking, or sexual addiction, or other addictive, compulsive behavior, where there's a promise of relief, the relief is immediate, and then it becomes a long-term indictment.

So in dealing with these situations, the thing that a pastor has to watch, that a confessor has to watch, is the overlap — that confirmation. You have to make sure that's there, but then you have to guard against the overlap backfiring. You have to guard against the possibility that the confirmation of sin is going to undermine the gospel word. And that's because the only thing that's finally going to bring an end to that kind of addictive circle is the absolution itself — finally hearing that. Absolving over and over again — that's acceptable. There's no limit on the means of grace, on confession as a means of grace. There's no — my wife speaks the absolution to me every morning. This morning on the telephone I spoke the absolution to her. We live in the absolution. You can say it as much as you want, and as many times as you want. There's no such thing as too much. But here now, the thing about absolution as a means of grace is that it's tailored to the hearer. It's the oral word, and so it incarnates itself in the relationship, and you can pursue it.

And, well — you know, my dad always used to say that you never become a pastor till you've had an alcoholic puke down your shirt hanging over your shoulder. It's a paradigmatic experience for pastors — it's just part of the vocation. When you finally have a possibility of something beyond the addiction — that registers in the careful hearing of a heart that's being pursued and hunted, and the heart, therefore, that's quavering and frightened, and recognizes the addiction as addiction but finds its relief for the moment, and will jump and go right back to it. So, to hear — when you know that there's a false gospel working there, that the addiction has become the false gospel — then you're in business. You can hear where repentance and faith are getting short-circuited, and you can speak to the sinner in such a way as to expose the falseness of what has become a gospel, and speak the true word that frees.

Is there a difference between speaking absolution when someone is a sinner versus when someone has been sinned against — when they've been the object of someone else's misuse?

Well, that's very dangerous, and it's because of the overlap. If you speak the absolution to someone who's been sinned against, they're likely to believe the self-accusations that they've been making, and the confirmation will be false. See, so, for instance, when I was — you know, John Hagg — not the same. We've confronted many people, due to addictions and abuse of various sorts, who feel as though they're guilty but they're actually ashamed.

That's exactly — and the ministry in that case, the ministry of the gospel, is not absolution but cleansing.

That's exactly true. And the blood-price cleanses.

Yeah, exactly. It's sanctified.

Yeah, I love that. I just love that. Yeah, that's true. I don't like — you know, I heard there was a guy who taught pastoral care, Carl Luther — he was, he was deeply shamed himself, and he was convinced that forgiveness was nothing. And so he always used to say, "The answer to guilt is forgiveness; the answer to shame is acceptance." And so he was all in favor of indiscriminate acceptance, so he had his classes hugging one another. I mean, Norwegians are allergic to full frontal exposure. It's way too much — it just fries me. I can't stand it when congregations run around hugging one another. I just want to go stand in a corner and protect myself. So he had all these upper-Midwestern people hugging one another — you can't imagine anything more gross. It was just terrible. I was once in a congregation in California where passing the peace was a form of foreplay. I don't know — the bosom, you ladies come with these big hugs.

That's right — three times, for habitual sins.

I think you mentioned before that the goal of the addict is to retrieve self.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

With repentance and faith in that intersection that you were —

Oh, yeah, that's great.

What confuses me — or what seems to be a very difficult problem, maybe more than just confusing — is with the addict and all that they're dealing with, with this disease, and the recurrence of the vicious cycle… and, uh, that intersection where you said we have the repentance and the belief, and then this exposes our unbelief when we keep on recycling. I understand that we keep on — but how fearful should we, as pastors, be for those we care for, the souls of those we care for, who keep on recycling? Is the biggest fear or concern that they will stop receiving the absolution? Where — how do we get to the real root of the problem and the addiction — not the absolution itself, but what it is that we're — I don't know if I'm couching my question very well.

No, I can help you with that. Ultimately — I mean, if you make a distinction between penultimate and ultimate, you can locate your question. Ultimately, the solution is the absolution. Absolutely — ultimately, that's the only solution. But penultimately, the absolution might be the enemy of genuine repentance. And therapeutically, when you deal with repetitive sins — alcoholism, gambling addiction, sexual addiction, the normal stuff — every good thing the old Adam touches turns out to be addictive, compulsive. So when you're dealing with a form of self-loss, it's inappropriate. A person should be able to have a drink and sit down and enjoy it without starting to think about the third. And I should be able to enjoy my wife without fantasizing. What is sacred and holy and good and true, and for our blessing — the old Adam takes it and immolates itself with it. And then you get this inappropriate self-loss. And so when you get the inappropriate self-loss, and you come to the junction of therapy and faith, everything gets obscure. Because no matter how careful you are in the distinctions you make, you've got the heifer on the hoof — it's right there in front of you, and it's moving, and to actually see what is therapeutic and what is a matter of faith is very difficult.

Particularly because addictive, compulsive people — drunks — can't make any distinction at all. In an alcoholic, an old drunkard, it's always thirsty. I have a friend who's got his twenty-three-year pin from AA — he's been dry for twenty-three years. I said, "Do you still go to meetings?" He said, "I still go to meetings. Otherwise that old bastard is going to stage a resurrection of its own." It's always there. It's always there. And I'm not sure how much you can see with clarity — I mean, the distinction is helpful from a distance. I think it's important to be able to say, "This is therapeutic, and this is a matter of faith," and there is a form of self-loss that's entirely appropriate — the one who seeks his life will lose it, and he who loses his life for my sake — that's the appropriate self-loss. And so this is why, in some ways, pastors shouldn't be messing with therapy. We do it because we have to, we do it because we get caught in it, we do it because we're the first line of defense. I did a lot of it, both in my parishes and at the seminary, because there was nobody else. And I knew the trash that was being distributed elsewhere, so I figured I might as well do this. But we serve the appropriate self-loss, and everything else has to be measured accordingly.

One of the things about Doxology, of course, is that the uniqueness we have is a partnership between spiritual care and Christian psychology.

That's great — it's a great plus.

And so you look at the same phenomenon, if you will — namely, you know, a besetting sin from a spiritual point of view, or addictive behavior — it's the same external behavior, but it's a different animal, and different forces at work. And I'm wondering if you have some clarifying questions, or something to help us sit with this.

I have a question. The current metaphor as you talk about the pastor being the first line of defense — he sees this gaping, wounded heart —

Oh, yeah.

— and our task is triage. What is it you take on?

Fabulous — that's just great.

It concerns me, occasionally, that I'm a pastor so dedicated to giving absolution — erroneously — that I believe that's all that needs to be tended to. When resources were available to you in terms of Christian psychologists, or psychologists in unity, would you see benefit in being able to team with someone on an addictive personality? I also — like the poor dear woman you referred to, who had mistakenly understood what had happened in the midst of an abusive situation and presumed herself to be the sinner, when she had been sinned against — a woman who was trapped by delusions.

Yeah, exactly, one hundred percent.

Are pastors able — or do they want, from your perspective — to learn more about helping people by learning psychological tools? Or would they prefer to be able to say, "I have tended to the needs you've brought to me; that's equipped me to speak this word to you, but there are some issues that invite careful—"

The facts are beautiful. Just beautiful, that's just beautiful. Personally, I was able to deal best with this when I had a partner who was a psychiatrist. He did the psychotherapeutic work, and I did the pastoral work. And that was — I mean, he was unusually — he was a man of profound faith himself, who was also deeply addicted, sexually. So he knew it from the inside. I have never known anybody as effective. We were a pair — we were teamed by the old ALC, and for five years we went almost nonstop dealing with pastors who had sexually violated members of their congregation. We went in as a team, particularly because we could make these distinctions more effectively together than we could individually. That's magic when you have it available to you. And I just love Doxology, because I know the gifts are paired here.

Most pastors serve in small towns, and for most pastors the possibility of effective services like that is limited. In my experience, pastoral care has not respected the boundaries. The teachers of pastoral care whom I've known have not respected — except for one or two — have not respected the boundaries, and consequently you get pastoral counselors trying to do work who aren't even effective pastoral counselors.

One of my favorite stories is about a woman in San Diego who called the suicide prevention line and said, "I hate myself, I'm going to kill myself, I can't go on like this." And the guy said, "I hear you saying that you're frustrated." And she said, "Oh, no — not an effing pastoral counselor," and slammed the phone down. Which I thought was entirely appropriate. The best thing of all would be if we had at least enough of the ABCs to be able to recognize boundaries when we saw them.

Yeah, right. Here's a worse example. I had a woman in my parish who came to me specifically asking for absolution. And as the story unfolded — she had five boys, that's enough for suicide all by itself, you know — she had five boys, four of them in four years, and she told me that she'd had dreams of drowning them. She was bathing the kids, and she was scared to death of her dreams. And then, as the narrative unfolded, you knew there was more. She was from Idaho, growing up in the panhandle — I suppose that explains something. But she said that when she was a girl, her father had called her out to the barn, and when she was on the way out to the barn, he'd put a shotgun in his mouth and blown his brains out.

I was so overwhelmed by that story I didn't ask the questions I should have. For instance, if it had been now, I would have asked her if she was getting her figure, or had gotten her figure — because that was incest, for sure. And it took me almost twenty years before a psychiatrist picked that out of that story. I told the story innumerable times, and he stopped me — it was my friend — and he pointed it out. So a partner like that is just about what every pastor dreams of, I think. You can't have it better than that, because it's in the nature of it that you get fooled. And a pastor is fooled just as easily.

Oh, for sure, but —

Yeah. It's like creating a special illness.

Yeah. Well, you get to have, for commandment issues, to be tried — it's a proposition on the scientist's order — it's really the first commandment reframed as a disorder.

Oh, yeah, sure, there you go. There you go, there you go. I love it. You are a gift.

I have a question for you about scrupulosity — a pastoral care approach to that. From a clinical perspective, you see someone who obsesses about small details and imperfections in life. If that individual moves to a place where they are seeking pastoral care and absolution, and the individual is remarkably scrupulous, and sees everything he does as an offense, and flagrantly so — how does the pastor, how do you handle this kind of case, and how does the guy ever unblock himself for something new?

That's Luther, of course — you're talking about Luther. Here's one of my favorite stories. In Chicago, at the big factories, they used to pay in cash every Friday. So on Fridays the Brinks truck would roll in, and the tellers on the truck would hand out cash payments for the week's work. They hired two different kinds of people to work on those trucks: Chicago police as drivers and guards, and seminarians from the University of Chicago as tellers. One of the requirements of the job was that every one of them had to take an FBI-administered polygraph test after work. The Chicago police never flunked a polygraph exam, and they were forever helping themselves to the cash. The seminarians never passed a polygraph exam, and they would never touch a dime. That's what you call scrupulosity.

I think — you know the story — he told them to go and commit various heinous sins and come back and get an absolution. He said, "You haven't got enough here." This is where — you know, it's in the nature of the calling, a pastor goes by guessing, by golly. You kind of get a sense when you're dealing with scrupulosity — you recognize it. When you see them clipping the lawn with fingernail clippers before coming to see you, you might start suspecting. But you can hear it in the confession. Like that woman I told about — for me, that was undoubtedly the problem. She was scrupulous in the extreme, and she thought she could make things clean everywhere she went, with her scrupulosity. And when I advised her to use her middle finger, it was about as offensive as it could possibly be, because this is not done. And I knew it, and she knew that I knew it, and she knew I was making her do that because I knew that she knew that I knew it. There were four or five layers there. You can recognize it, but, for both vocations, dealing with the scrupulous is like playing Boggle — Scrabble at three different levels simultaneously — because you're dealing with usually very intelligent people who are also very deceptive and who are very good at leaving false trails.

So I really don't — addictions have affected conscience, and I was simply saying that they had a hardwired function, but it seems like it can go in different directions. Could you talk about that a little bit and explore how — in the conscience?

Oh, it's very important, with that word, to define it. Because in the culture of the Enlightenment, of which we're a part, "conscience" is an innate moral force in the self that knows right from wrong and can direct the traffic. And that's nonsense — that's an Enlightenment view. There's a great professor at the University of Wisconsin named Carl Becker, who wrote a book called "The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers." Boy, if there's a heavenly city, that's it. A conscience, in that view, is an intuitive sense of right and wrong that directs us. I remember a guy who was having affairs with five different women simultaneously telling me that he couldn't do any wrong, because his conscience wouldn't allow it. Well, that's malarkey.

Luther uses the word conscience in a much more sophisticated way, and you're after that use — you already know there's something more here. And that's this: the word syneidesis, the Greek for conscience, is a relational word. It speaks of a relationship. Your conscience is your sense of your standing in relationship to those beyond you — God, the community, your neighbors. It's not inborn, it's not a sense of right and wrong, it's a sense of your value, or your standing, in those relationships. And consequently, it's a playground — it's subject to all kinds of forces. You notice, if you watch advertisements, how they're pitched to the conscience. The advertisers know this — that if they can demonstrate that their product affects your sense of standing in relationship, they've got a much better chance of selling the product. So they pitch their ads to the conscience. This is not a moral matter, it's a matter of standing. So you brush your teeth with sex appeal, not with toothpaste. What does toothpaste do? It shines, it cleans, it freshens your breath, but it's a little far removed from the sexual organs to actually have any real impact in those matters, huh?

The conscience, as a playground, is susceptible to all sorts of influences and powers. The devil attacks the conscience preeminently, to take the conscience captive — that's what he's doing to Jesus in the temptation narrative. He's trying to separate Jesus from God's word so that Jesus will rely on himself. That's why Jesus answers, "It is written, it is written, it is written." He won't allow the devil to bring him even to dependence on the oral word alone — he wants it in print, in the scroll: it is written. That's the devil going after his conscience. "Did God say — did God really say?" That's the question he asked Eve, and it worked, and he got her. But Jesus answers, "It is written, it is written," and he holds to faith in the Word.

See, there's where the conscience finally rests — in the absolution, in God's word, in the promise of the gospel. The absolution has been spoken: "This is my body, given for you. My blood shed for you. You are baptized." So you stand over and against your conscience, and your conscience can rest in the word. If it tries to rest anyplace else, it won't get a good night's sleep. But in the word — "in peace I will lie down and sleep, for you alone, O Lord, make me dwell in safety."

Here's a question. As we address theology and practice confession and absolution as one of the programs, one of the phases of our program — how is it that, by and large, this great gift was lost, for all practical purposes, for so long in North America?

Well, I'd say there are a couple of things. There's a historical answer to this question. In the seventeenth century, there was one of the most frightening alliances possible, between the pietists and the rationalists. The pietists didn't like confession and absolution because it was too Catholic. And the rationalists didn't like confession and absolution because no human being has the authority to forgive another person. And so it passed away — well, there are still a couple of Lutheran church bodies where it's practiced regularly, that weren't affected by this — but for the most part it didn't actually pass away, it moved locations.

So pastors don't often hear confessions anymore, but if you start talking to cab drivers, or bartenders, or beauticians, or people who spend a lot of time with others in confined, private places, they will invariably hear all kinds of confession. And if you start asking them about it, they'll tell you that they're hearing confessions, because they know what's happening to them.

So one of the things I did in my little parish was I learned from an old pastor to walk my parish. I walked everywhere. And people in town knew me as the pastor who walks. And I kept walking because people had access to me when I was on foot that they couldn't get when I was in my car. They would call me into their houses. And I would also see the patterns of traffic in the town — I knew the cars of my parishioners, of course, and I knew where they parked, which was inconvenient for some of them.

But there was a woman in the congregation, an older woman, and I noticed that the cars of a number of the younger women were frequently there in the morning. So one day I said to her — she was a great, earthy old woman — I said to her, "You've got a lot of younger visitors." She said, "I do. The young women in the parish love to come and talk to me." I said, "I suppose they're talking about their husbands, or their kids." She said, "Oh yeah — and their mothers, and lots of others too." I said, "What do you say to them?" "Well," she said, "I just listen." I said, "How'd you like to say something more?" And I taught her to absolve. She had a ministry. The young women would talk to her when they'd never talk to me — I was way too risky — but they would go to her. And when something needed my attention, she would tell me, "You'd better go call on—" I mean, it was fabulous.

So the fact that pastors are not hearing confessions doesn't mean that confessions aren't being made, or that people aren't hearing them. Psychiatrists do, psychologists do. What was his name, in Kansas? Menninger — Karl Menninger — said eighty-five percent of the people who come to a psychologist are looking for absolution. So it's there. It's still there. We just don't know what we're doing, which is the value of the work you're doing.

I want to ask a question related to that: within these locations — friend, father, mother, husband, wife to us all — how do we relocate it?

I have a couple of ways. First of all, by teaching it — it's in the catechism, it's one of the chief parts of the catechism. But it lies there like a treasure, and hardly ever — there are only a few guys, like Ken Korby, who dusted it off, like you have done. And, you know, the thing to do is to teach it, to preach it and to teach it in the congregation. So for years and years and years, when I was still traveling, when I went into ELCA congregations I would teach the service of confession and absolution — the public service in the hymnal — and then I would say, "There's a private one too, that's even better." And I seeded congregations all over the country, and the pastors would get mad at me. They'd call me up and say, "I want you to come and preach, but you're not allowed to teach a class on confession." Because people, when they found out what was there, would demand it — they want it.

And then, once you teach it, you can start teaching specific people. Pastors know who's gifted in this regard, and you can find people in the congregation and teach them. For instance, in the old immigrant Norwegian-American culture of the Midwest, young men will make confession to older women before they will speak to anybody else. And we found out early about this, because when the ELCA started ordaining women, the women I had taught confession and absolution would come and start telling me what was happening to them. They were just being inundated, because they were occupying a traditional role in the culture that had been vacated. And once it was occupied —

Yeah, they had a mother figure.

Well, virtually speaking — one could say that by virtue of baptism everyone's authorized to speak the gospel, which is, by definition, that's all —

True.

— but, obviously, the average person is not in the office, I'd say, and does not have the sophistication or the training.

Well, I mean, but even in terms of the ritual, we don't see it —

Yeah — as a call on our part.

You can say that. But like I said, Christ Jesus died for that sin.

That's right, that's right — no, you can say it. The absolution begs to be preached — you want to make it as incarnate as you can. So you cannot say — I mean, "In his name and in his stead I forgive you your sins" — a person who's not ordained cannot say that. But you can say, "Christ Jesus forgives you." I get real anxious about people who are undisciplined using absolution, because, of course, it can be abused. But part of the Holy Scripture, for us, is the hammer of God — where the opening chapter is an old woman going to a young man. The pastor didn't go — she did. As she called the bastard —

Yeah, exactly, one hundred percent, one hundred percent.

Yep, that's exactly right. That's perfect. Oh, that's just right. Well, I have known women like that, and men like that. Full of the good word. That's the thing about absolution as a means of grace — it's part of the flood, and you don't want to restrain it too much. You want to channel a little bit of it, and you want to make sure — but you don't want to interrupt the flow.