Do people pay to be forgiven for their sins?

Answer 1

No. God's forgiveness is free for any who wish to turn to him in repentance. Anyone asking for payment for forgiveness is going against all that God stands for, and against all that Jesus Christ taught. Your idea of payment for forgiveness probably comes from the practice in the Catholic Church of selling 'indulgences'. After the Great Schism where the church was split into the Eastern Orthodox Church in the East, and the Roman Catholic Church in the West, the Roman Catholics developed various doctrines including that of purgatory. Purgatory, they claimed, was a 'place' or 'state of being' to where a dead person went for cleansing before he or she was admitted into heaven. Depending upon how well the person had conducted their lives, they would be given more or less time in purgatory before being allowed into heaven. Despite the very idea of purgatory being against both Christ's and Paul's teaching (we are all saved through God's grace in accepting Jesus - and do not need any 'place of cleansing') the Catholic church continued to press with their doctrine of purgatory. The upshot of all this was firstly the development of chantry chapels in large churches, and secondly the selling of indulgences. Chantry chapels were used by the priest to pray for the souls of the recently dead, so that their sins could be forgiven and their time in purgatory could be reduced. For this they accepted quite large sums of money. In fact, in many medieval cathedrals in Europe, there are still chantry chapels surviving, although they are no longer used for that purpose. The chantry chapel idea then developed into selling indulgences - 'certificates' that 'guaranteed' a set number of years off purgatory - for the payment of a large sum of money. The idea was that the priest would then say prayers for the dead thanks to the payment, and issue the family with a certificate guaranteeing, say, 200 years less purgatory as a result. Of course, many of the priests and other church officials simply pocketed the money realising that this was a superb scam and made huge sums from unsuspecting bereaved people when they were most vulnerable. The bubble burst when Martin Luther - a German monk - finally realised, after reading a part of Paul's letter to the Romans, that both he, and the Catholic Church were very wrong in their ideas of indulgences and he pursued the Church in order to expose the corruption. The upshot was that he nailed his list of complaints (his 'theses') to the door of the church at Wittenberg, was swiftly excommunicated by the Pope, but he then started the Protestant movement which spread all over Europe and now the world. When the Protestant movement reached England, King Henry VIII dissolved all the rich, powerful and corrupt monasteries, outlawed both indulgences and chantry chapels and began the Church of England - a protestant Church still thriving today. To be fair to the Roman Catholics, many now see this episode in their history as shameful, and they find it just as abhorrent as other people, and there are movements today to deny the existence of purgatory even in the highest offices of the Catholic Church, but it still remains as a blot on Church, and especially Catholic Church, history - and just goes to show what can go wrong when power, corruption and evil creep in to what should have been a loving organisation proclaiming God's love for all and his free gift of forgiveness and salvation.