Alexander Schmemann

1. The Beginning of the Church (28 pages)

Page 21

By the middle of the second century we begin to hear, along with hymns to the unity and sanctity of the Church, admissions of sins by Christians. Hermas’ Shepherd, a second-century Roman document written by a layman, resolutely raises the question of sin in the Church. How is it possible? If baptism gives birth to new life and frees man from the power of sin, what is the meaning of its existence among Christians? It was hard to understand how there could be any repentance “except that which we have made when we entered the water and received in it forgiveness of our former sins . .
. For he who has received forgiveness or sins ought not to sin any more, but remain in innocence.”

The early Church cut off all who fell away from grace and rejected the new life. “For it is impossible for those who have once been enlightened . . . if they shall fall away, to renew them again unto repentance; seeing they crucify to themselves the Son of God afresh and put him to an open shame” (Heb. 6:4-6). Unfortunately, however, sin continues to enter men’s lives, and they have no recourse but to repent once more. The Church is called upon to save, not to judge, until the Last Judgment. Therefore a “second repentance” was made possible to the excommunicant, permitting him to return to the Church and restoring the forfeited power of his baptism. As gradually developed, this new chance for sinners was guarded by the requirement of confession to the bishop or his representative, sometimes public confession; prolonged evidence of repentance, including various sorts of penance; and reinstatement only by stages in the freedom of Christians to worship together and partake of the sacraments. In very serious cases, restoration of the saving power of baptism was sometimes withheld until the deathbed of the sinner.

Christians did not take the matter lightly.
Hermas continues, “If anyone sin, submitting to the temptations of the devil, only repentance lies in store for him, but if he keeps falling in order to keep on repenting, let him not expect good fruits. His salvation is in jeopardy.” A little later Tertullian, the African teacher of the late second and early third centuries, warned that “God allows us to knock at the door of this second repentance once, only once.” One must “day and night call on God and our Savior, fall at the feet of the priests, kneel before our brothers, begging the prayers of all.”

Some historians have regarded this second repentance as a revolution in the mind of the Church, a transformation from a society of the “saved” into a society of “those being saved.” This judgment is superficial, however. As awareness of sanctity in the Church presupposes constant repentance and a sense of one’s own unworthiness, so now the evidence of decline did not mean that the ideal of a society of saints had been abandoned.
Life and history reveal the full force of evil in man, even the “new” man who has been reborn in water and the Spirit. From the beginning the Church had known itself to be a society of saved sinners, and in this apparently contradictory combination of words we may find the explanation for its inconsistency in regard to repentance. Christians were sinners to whom salvation was given. This salvation is not magic; it is given for free acceptance, for struggle, for growth. While in the joy of the first decades the Christians felt more forcibly the wondrous newness of the gift, as time passed they could not help but become aware of the dimensions of the struggle to which it committed them. There is no room in the Church for sin; yet it exists for sinners. Therefore the development of a “discipline of repentance” — an obvious lowering of standards — does not mean a change in the Church’s original ideal, but a fulfillment of its eternal task, the salvation and renewal of man.

 

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Reference address : https://www.ellopos.net/elpenor/schmemann-orthodoxy-1-beginning.asp?pg=21