More Thoughts on Confession

I have been doing a lot of reading lately in church history - particularly the early formation of monastic communities in the third and fourth centuries.  This reading has led me to more thinking in the last couple of days about this idea of confession.

One of the more common objections protestants have to the idea of confession is that it is not a biblical doctrine - that we do not need a priest to forgive our sins because Christ himself has become, as the book of Hebrews teaches, our high priest.  And of course, that is a valid objection - at least to the stereotypical contemporary Roman Catholic understanding of confession.

The more I read of the early church Fathers and their history, though, the more a different picture of confession begins to emerge.  The idea for the earliest monks was that the teaching of Scripture that we should confess our sins one to another needed to be taken seriously.  However, many of these early monastics were not ordained and even resisted ordination in the Catholic church and thus could not adhere to a mode of confession that required a priest.

Instead, what I am discovering is that, for the most part, these early Christ followers believed it was imperative that each believer develop a close relationship with someone who is more spiritually mature and experienced.  It was to this more experienced brother or sister that many of these early monastics would "confess," and one of the primary purposes of the confession was for the more mature brother to help the inexperienced brother determine what was sin and what was not.

How many of us would benefit from such a relationship? I daresay all of us would.  The practice of confession has been much maligned by us protestants, most of the time with good reason.  However, we could certainly do with a renaissance of accountable relationships in our churches!