"Binding and Loosing"

by James Jacob Prasch

In many areas the church is trying to use biblical teaching about binding and loosing as an instrument to deal with something it was not designed to deal with.

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"Penance"?

If you forgive the sins of any, their sins have been forgiven them; and if you retain the sins of any, they have been retained (Jn. 20:23).

The idea that, by these words, Jesus introduced the Roman Catholic sacrament of “Penance” is absurd. There is no such thing as “Penance” in the Bible, nor any record of it being practiced by the early church fathers. Telling your sins to the priests was a Babylonian custom. In the early church there were no prayers to the dead, no prayers to Mary, no Pope. There was no “Penance”, but there was repentance. People would ask each other for forgiveness for a wrong done, but they never went to a "priest" for this. Those things all came later. They are human inventions, created for the same reason as the Pharisees' teachings: money and power; the same reason the hyper-charismatic churches are inventing doctrines today: money and power.

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