Today, no one retracts their errors; no one repents their faulty speech; no on ever recants what he has written and published. Certainly, the politicians and the chattering class that follows them and their antics never truly retract anything they have said. Instead, what they have said is spun, parsed, spindled, and twisted, until it is unrecognizable. At the risk of being obvious, President Bill Clinton's rather humorous verbal contortion comes to mind: "It depends on what the meaning of the word 'is' is." It is no wonder we have trouble with the biblical teaching of the real presence in the Lord's Supper! Public repentance for morally incompetent acts or retraction of morally reprehensible words is not part of our political culture.

We are in similar straits in the church's way of dealing with the false teaching of leaders. At most, Christians can expect a false teacher to "apologize for misleading the church." Certainly, no one stands up before God and man to apologize because what he said was incorrect (and for that reason has misled the faithful). Seldom do we hear of those who have retracted former teaching that did not square with the divine revelation of God in the Son of Mary, the Word made flesh. When we do, it is arresting because of its rarity. I remember hearing the confession of a colleague, some years after he had left a parish neighboring my own, who lamented that he would never have done, nor permitted to be done, many things in that parish if he had known then what he knew now. He had become wise only too late. Years after the fact, he recognized the mischief he had perpetrated and permitted. His confession was memorable mostly because of its uniqueness.

I am not sure why, but the early church seems to have had many more public cases of confession of false teaching and the retraction of it. One of those retractions was written by a Leporius, who, following the Pelagian doctrine, taught that by his own free will and unaided effort he could become right in the presence of God instead of depending on the help of God. But after admonition he wrote a retraction, in which he both acknowledges his error and gives thanks for his correction. At the same time, in correction of his false view of the incarnation of Christ, he presented the catholic doctrine, acknowledging the single person of the Son of God, and the two natures united in one person. He was well remembered by posterity and honored for his retraction, which faithfully confessed the doctrine of the incarnation. Although it must have been embarrassing at the time, he still faithfully confessed the truth of salvation in the Word made flesh in his retraction, quoted by John Cassian. To be wrong is not bad, as long as it is the precursor to understanding, confession, and an affirmation of the truth.

John Cassian