Historical tour of repentance and forgiveness

This is a - very brief! - historical tour (Historical Theology) of the relationship between repentance and forgiveness, and follows on from my previous post on my essay about the relationship between repentance and forgiveness. I've confined it to Christian thought here, although later I'll consider the perspectives of some other religions a bit.

Early church
At the heart of the early church debate about the relationship between repentance and forgiveness are 'the lapsed.' These were believers who had denied Jesus under persecution. The early church understood that baptism was an act of repentance that cleansed an individual of all their sins up to that point, but didn't know how to deal with any sin committed after that. The lapsed presented a real problem - here were Christians who had already been baptised and cleansed, and had then 'lapsed'. The discussion was focused around whether the lapsed should be allowed to participate in communion (the Lord's supper) again - which would be a visible symbol of their forgiveness and restoration to the fellowship of the community. There was a wide range of responses:

• People who said the lapsed should never be restored to communion, no matter how repentance they were, because it could not be a genuine repentance;
• Those who admitted the lapsed to communion on their deathbeds or if they proved themselves faithful under another persecution - although this was tricky because you needed to know when someone was about to die, or needed another persecution to come along;
• Those who restored the lapsed to communion after strong signs of emotional and public repentance (including lots of tears, hand-wringing, etc), when they were accompanied by 'intercessors' (Christians who had proved themselves faithful);
• Those who re-admitted the lapsed with no requirement of repentance.

This problem of how to deal with the lapsed caused deep division within the early church, with different factions and regions adopting different approaches.

Middle ages and Reformation
Throughout the middle ages, the acts of repentance that a believer needed to demonstrate before being offered forgiveness developed into an intricate system of sacraments - confession to a priest, heartfelt contrition and satisfaction (‘penances’). These practices were upheld by the Council of Trent in the counter Reformation.

The Reformation moved away from this visible acts to demonstrate repentance, and re-defined repentance as a ‘change of mind.’ They said 'penance' wasn't a sacrament and that believers didn't need to confess to a priest to be forgiven - Jesus is our great high priest and we can approach him directly.

Luther’s ‘justification by grace alone through faith’ assured forgiveness for those who demonstrated this new understanding of repentance. The implications of this doctrine were developed by Calvin, who saw faith as the key framework for relating to God, by which ‘both [repentance and remission of sin] are obtained’. Calvin taught that repentance does not earn forgiveness, but is a gift with an end in itself.

Recent centuries
Much theology - natural theology, liberalism, parts of the emerging church, to name a few - have moved away from questions of sin and repentance. This makes forgiveness also a redundant topic.

However, forgiveness has become significant in other fields such as social science, politics, philosophy and literature. Research in their fields has been a response to the Jewish holocaust, apartheid in South Africa and the genocide in Rwanda. Questions of how to reconcile vast relational gulfs have produced many explorations of human-human forgiveness - and many have focused on whether forgiveness should be offered to perpetrators who do not repent. Secular writers have tended to exclude the vertical relationship between God and humans. This leaves a strong tension between justice and grace, which is difficult to resolve at a human level.