Word Finder - confession

definition

The open admittance of having done something (especially something bad).

example

Without the real murderer's confession, an innocent person will go to jail.

definition

A formal document providing such an admission.

example

He forced me to sign a confession!

definition

The disclosure of one's sins to a priest for absolution. In the Roman Catholic Church, it is now termed the sacrament of reconciliation.

example

I went to confession and now I feel much better about what I had done.

definition

Acknowledgment of belief; profession of one's faith.

definition

A formula in which the articles of faith are comprised; a creed to be assented to or signed, as a preliminary to admission to membership of a church; a confession of faith.

The confession consisted of forty articles.

Startled by the confession, Jessi rested her elbows on the table and leaned forward.

His so-called deathbed confession is not genuine.

The Confession, written towards the end of his life, gives a general account of his career.

In the Greek Church confession has become obligatory and habitual.

The Religious Peace of Augsburg (1555) recognized no Protestants save adherents of the Confession; this was modified in 1648.

Strict personal poverty was enforced, and all were encouraged to approach confession and communion frequently.

A culprit is easily discovered either by an appeal to a local diviner or in torturing some one into confession.

One hundred members, many of them foreign divines, composed this great assembly, who after 154 sittings gave their seal to the doctrines of the Netherlands Confession and the Heidelberg Catechism.

The final perplexity, concealed by various forms of expression, comes forward at the close of the Treatise as absolutely unsolved, and leads Hume, as will be pointed out, to a truly remarkable confession of the weakness of his own system.

The only combination which, even in appearance, could be explained satisfactorily by its means was the formation of a complex idea out of simpler parts, but the idea of a relation among facts is not accurately described as a complex idea; and, as such relations have na basis in impressions, Hume is finally driven to a confession of the absolute impossibility of explaining them.

Such confession, however, is only reached after a vigorous effort had been made to render some account of knowledge by the experimental method.

Based upon the Confession of Faith of 1560, this document denounced the pope and the doctrines of the Roman Catholic Church in no measured terms. It was adopted by the General Assembly, signed by King James VI.

The palace of the bishops, where the memorable Confession of Faith was presented to Charles V., is now used for government offices.

Of its conventions the most memorable are those which gave birth to the Augsburg confession (1530) and to the Augsburg alliance (1686).

As an ecclesiastic he was not so successful; he helped to compile his church's Confession of Faith in 1823, and laid great stress on a clause which limited the scope of the atonement to the elect.

He was the author of a Catechism (Kiev, 1645) and other minor works, but is principally celebrated for the Orthodox Confession, drawn up at his instance by the Abbot Kosslowski of Kiev, approved at a provincial synod in 1640, and accepted by the patriarchs of Constantinople, Jerusalem, Alexandria and Antioch in 1642-1643, and by the synod of Jerusalem in 1672.

In June he opene4 the diet at Augsburg, and here the Lutherans submitted a summary of their doctrines, afterwards called the Augsburg Confession.

Four Zwinglian cities, Strassburg, Constance, Lindau and Memmingen, replied with a confession of their own and the Romanists also drew up an answer.

All the states and cities which subscribed to the confession of Augsburg were admitted to it, and thus a large number of Protestants, including the duchies of Wurttemberg and Pomerania and the cities of Augsburg and Frankfort, secured a needful protection against the decrees of the Reichskammergeric/it, which the league again repudiated.

In consultation with both Romanist and Lutheran divines a confession of faith called the Interim was drawn up; this was in the nature of a compromise and was issued as an edict in May 1548, but owing to the opposition of the Romanist princes it was not made binding upon them, only upon the Lutherans.

This required an ecclesiastical prince, if he accepted the teaching of the confession.

Its theme is the duty of Christian repentance, with a view to obedience to Christ's precepts as the true confession and homage which He requires.

The functions of the confessor are dealt with in the article Confession.

The maintenance of the indivisibility of the realm and of the Christian faith according to the Augsburg Confession, and the observance of the Kongelov itself, are now the sole obligations binding upon the king.

The Sunnites, who accept the orthodox tradition (Sunna) as well as the Koran as a source of theologico-juristic doctrines, predominate in Arabia, the Turkish Empire, the north of Africa, Turkestan, Afghanistan and the Mahommedan parts of India and the east of Asia; the Shi`ites have their main seat in Persia, where their confession is the state religion, but are also scattered over the whole sphere of Islam, especially in India and the regions bordering on Persia, except among the nomad Tatars, who are all nominally Sunnite.

At the Diet of Augsburg (1530) Melanchthon was the leading representative of the reformation, and it was he who prepared for that diet the seventeen articles of the Evangelical faith, which are known as the "Augsburg Confession."

He held conferences with Roman divines appointed to adjust differences, and afterwards wrote an Apology for the Augsburg Confession.

In the Augsburg Confession (1530), which was largely due to him, freedom is claimed for the will in non-religious matters, and in the Loci of 1533 he calls the denial of freedom Stoicism, and holds that in justification there is a certain causality, though not worthiness, in the recipient, subordinate to the Divine causality.

Carlyle's confession of the radical difference of religious opinion had not alienated his friend, who was settling in London, and used his opportunities for promoting Carlyle's interest.

He was, as Froude says, impressed by the story of Johnson's " penance " at Uttoxeter, and desired to make a posthumous confession of his shortcomings in his relations to his wife.

The Convention began business in August, crowded by persons not used to be present, and accepted a Knoxian " Confession of Faith."

The author's confession that, being " thretty 3eris nurist in Fraunce, and in the noble study of Paris in Latin toung," he " knew nocht the gret eloquens of Chauceir," and again that he had written another work in Latin, " the tounge that I knaw better," is valuable testimony to the difficulties in the way of a struggling Scots prose.

The rules for the restraint of the senses, for confession and penance, are subordinated to the central idea of the supreme importance of purity of heart and the love of Christ.

In the summer he was preparing a paper on the Westminster Confession, and preaching in the abbey a course of Saturday Lectures on the Beatitudes.

During their travels the beard was allowed to grow, and they prepared for departure by confession and communion.

If on one or two points, as, for instance, the invocation of saints, some germs of subsequent Roman teaching may be discovered, there is a want of anything like the doctrine of indulgences or of compulsory private confession.

In 1830 he was rector of the university; and in his speech at the tricentenary of the Augsburg Confession in that year he charged the Catholic Church with regarding the virtues of the pagan world as brilliant vices, and giving the crown of perfection to poverty, continence and obedience.

The poem had accompanied him from early manhood to the end and was the repository for the fullest "confession" of his life; it is the poetic epitome of his experience.

In the earliest church life, when Christians fell into sin, they were required to make public confession before the congregation, to declare their sorrow, and to vow to perform certain acts which were regarded as evidence of the sincerity of their repentance.

When the custom of public confession before the congregation had changed to private confession to the clergy, it became the confessor's duty to impose these satisfactions.

Under the older conception the order had been Sorrow (Contritio), Confession, Satisfaction (or due manifestation of sorrow in ways prescribed) and Absolution.

Under the newer theory the order was Sorrow, Confession, Absolution, Satisfaction, and both satisfaction and sorrow took new meanings.

Hence for the indifferent Christian, Attrition, Confession and Indulgence became the three heads in the scheme of the church of the later middle ages for his salvation.

Three separate confessions were presented to the emperor - one from Zwingli, one by the theologians of the four cities of Strassbourg, Constance, Lindau and Memmingen (Confessio Tetrapolitana), and the Augsburg Confession, the future symbol of the Lutheran church.

The first, known also as the Second Confession of Basel, was drawn up at that city in 1536 by Bullinger and Leo Jud of Zurich, Megander of Bern,Oswald Myconius and Grynaeus of Basel, Bucer and Capito of Strassburg, with other representatives from Schaffhausen, St Gall, Muhlhausen and Biel.

The Second Helvetic Confession was written by Bullinger in 1562 and revised in 1564 as a private exercise.

It gained a favourable hold on the Swiss churches, who had found the First Confession too short and too Lutheran.

It was adopted by the Reformed Church not only throughout Switzerland but in Scotland (1566), Hungary (1567), France (1571), Poland (1578), and next to the Heidelberg Catechism is the most generally recognized Confession of the Reformed Church.

He had to deal with the St George's-in-the-East riots in 1859, and the troubles at St Alban's, Holborn, in their earlier stages (1867); he took part as assessor in the Privy Council judgment in the Ridsdale case (1877); he was more closely concerned than any other bishop with the agitation against confession in 1858, and again in 1877.