Confess/Don't Confess II

I’ve had, for some time, an interest in how Protestant churches address the issue of confession. “Forgive our sins” is one of the passages of the Lord’s Prayer. Confession is also implicit in the command to repent. Jesus minced no words. He said (in Mark): “Repent”. That is why I am so pleased with Doug’s thoughtful post on game theory and interpersonal confession among Christians (below).

Unfortunately, I think that many Protestant churches miss the boat on the matter of personal confession. In much of the Protestant tradition, confession is made to God as a part of the worship service. In many mainline Protestant churches, the “prayer of confession” is a rote prayer written (or taken from a book) by the pastor, which may or may not have anything to do with what I have sinned about.

“Lord, forgive us for our lack of concern about the dolphins and the sea turtles.”

I basically tune out after two or three stanzas of this. The ending of these prayers is usually supposed to be a time for silent personal confession. In a recent visit to a mainline congregation, I had barely begun organizing my list of transgressions for the week when, after about five seconds, the pastor began the absolution. If I was going to engage in serious personal confession, I was going to have to do it on top of the next hymn.

The more evocative atmosphere of contemporary services would seem to make confession easier. However, my experience has been that often there is no formal time for personal confession. It is now so natural to equate contemporary worship music with praise music that we inadvertently downplay the role that songs of sorrow, lamentation, and confession should play. An example of where confession of sins is a beautiful, moving and integral part of a non-traditional service is the Maundy Thursday service at the FSU Wesley Foundation.

A different model is direct confession to other Christians outside of worship, a practice passionately promoted by Dietrich Bonhoeffer in his book Life Together. But as Doug showed, the natural strategic structure of this process is a prisoner’s dilemma (and Bonhoeffer appears to acknowledge this danger). So how are we to deal with the strategic problem? I am not an expert on doctrine in the Catholic Church, but I am struck by how the traditional Catholic practice of the confessional changes the situation. The priest is bound by the confidentiality of the confessional. This removes the prisoner’s dilemma aspects of the situation, and confessing your sins becomes the “best response”. But confession to an anonymous priest falls short of Bonhoeffer’s goal of personal, mutual confession to a known brother or sister in Christ, which is also Doug’s optimum.

The second possibility is an intentional, radical transformation of the Christian community so that the prisoner’s dilemma is eliminated not by an institutional change (the confessional) but by a common awareness that nobody will ever be led to the “don’t admit” outcome. Doug and I are going to be periodically making posts on the topic of the Kingdom of God. I am thinking now that the ability of Christians to avoid suboptimal prisoner’s dilemma situations will be a marker for the Kingdom. In this specific case, Christians will confess their sins to one another because no one expects that others will take advantage of the situation. More to come.