The salvation that comes to us in Jesus is a salvation that overcomes sin. John Wesley knew this well when he wrote:

We may learn from hence, in the third place, what is the proper nature of religion, of the religion of Jesus Christ. It is [a Greek phrase meaning 'therapy of the soul'], God’s method of healing a soul which is thus diseased. Hereby the great Physician of souls applies medicine to heal this sickness; to restore human nature, totally corrupted in all its faculties. [From Wesley's sermon "Original Sin"]

Salvation involves the overcoming of the particularities of our spiritual diseases. For some, this means overcoming dishonesty or cowardice. For others, different spiritual diseases need to be overcome. These spiritual diseases are never generic; they always manifest themselves in concrete and particular ways. One can easily overcome sin in general; it is the concrete manifestation of it in our everyday lives to which we tenaciously cling.

This comes from D. Stephen Long’s Living the Discpline (p. 98), which I finished earlier this week. While the whole bit about “dishonesty or cowardice” is in relation to his earlier discussion on the nonsensical nature of some moral stances regarding war, the rest of his statement I find to hold very true and convicting.

In general, I know that I am a sinner. In general, I know that I have sinned. In general, I know that I’ve done all sorts of horrible things. But… specifically, particularly, does anybody know any of this? Do I know this specifically?

I’m not about to make this a bleeding-heart post and air all of my dirty laundry. But, I will admit that I just do not know how to go about being specific with people. People ask me, “How are you?” I reply, “I’ve been better.” This works amazingly well if one is taking MA classes and the end of the semester is nigh. Or I lie and say, “okay.” But really, if I’m feeling crappy, do people have 2-3 hours to listen to myself speak of all my supposed woes?

But when it comes down to it, I do not know what to do about specificity and particularity regarding confession. People often ask me what the Kingdom of God “looks like,” often trying to shoot down some bit of theology as if it is not practical, or at the very least because they are nervous about the claim upon their life that it makes in light of Christ. Typically, it is always more ambiguous than “it looks exactly like this” (as a thought experiment, I wonder if people asked the writers of the Chalcedonian creed, “Well hey now wait a minute, just what does the two natures of Christ look like in practice?”)

Well, now, I am asking, “What does being specific about our confessions look like?”

For a Protestant like myself, this may be a perennial problem. See, most people I know are fine as long as it “doesn’t look Roman Catholic.” See, Roman Catholicism has this whole confession thing worked out pretty well, from what I can tell; or in the very least, they have had something going for a very long time. Now, the fact that not all Roman Catholics may abide by it doesn’t actually speak badly about the practice itself, either. I picked up Adrienne von Speyr’s book called Confession a few weeks ago, and from what I could tell, it seemed like a pretty solid package. I did not read much of it (school work got in the way), but in my limited skimming of it, I was impressed. And sadly, I had to return it to the library.

But, if I were to propose a set practice, or at least to start thinking about what this might look like, almost always people get nervous because to have things “set” must somehow be “Roman Catholic” which of course, for some reason not mentioned, is bad (says who? and then when I say “says who?” people say, “well then why don’t you become a Roman Catholic?”…alas). The church I attend has had a liturgy and followed the lectionary (following the BCP, I think) for as long as I can remember, but I don’t see this same allergic reaction here.

So in the end, people always want some sort of practice, because they know that doing things on their own volition will never ultimately work, knowing that they cannot do things on their own. People thirst for structure, but once people start prescribing a practice, others start sneezing (the allergy mentioned above), so then we must only talk about confession in general. I guess that makes some good ironic sense. If we are only going to confess in general, then we might as well only have some in-general practices to go along side of it.

Somehow, content is often deemed “bad.” So, while I hope I don’t lose too many people here, what is sometimes offered is “religion without religion” (e.g. Caputo, who I think may be following Derrida’s “messianism without a messiah,” who also seemed to follow Levinas in the same manner). The worst of this might be the “seeker-sensitive” service where Christ, the cross, the crucifixion, Christ’s resurrection, and lots of other specific –nay, essential–bits of Christian content are jettisoned so that we do not “offend” people. At best, we agree that we need some content to our strivings, some sort of order to our practice within the Church, but don’t you dare prescribing anything or else you’re quenching the Holy Spirit!

Because we all know the Spirit can’t work through structures? –wait.

Not that we need certainty. From what I can tell, structure within the church is never rigid in the sense that it is its own end that one just asserts; on the contrary, structure and kinds of prescriptive practices have always been guidelines for a doxological life (a.k.a. a life of worship). This has been talked about a little bit before, here and elsewhere, but this idea can be thought of in the metaphor of jazz: standards, solo transcriptions, chord progressions/markers providing the structure and framework for one to move around and be guided to (paradoxical) improvisation. (Now, just don’t ask me, “what about free jazz?” because I don’t know how well the metaphor works with that; it’s not exactly one of the metaphorical “common places” in this example!…metaphors only go so far.)

No, not that we need certainty, but it does get unnecessarily tiring to keep getting close to something over and over again, only to be swatted back. Maybe better education in what these structures actually are and how they function, could be a start.

Ultimately, I don’t really have any prescriptions for this myself. The allergy feels denominationally genetic, so to speak. Or, at least, I have a “genetic predisposition” toward it. I would venture to say that this might specifically be that to which “we tenaciously cling.”