Public Confession of Sin

While looking at a pile of paperwork I noticed this tract intended for a Roman Catholic readership that had an interesting section on public confession. The tract was written by W. H. Griffith Thomas an Anglican professor in Oxford and Toronto and co-founder of Dallas Theological Seminary. He died in 1924.

Public Confession of Sins before the Church

Our sins often affect our relations to our fellow-men as well as our relation to God. Sin has a social as well as a spiritual aspect. We can see this in the well-known story of the sin of Achan, which involved the whole of the people of Israel in trouble (Jos 7). The same fact is evident in the references to the terrible sin in the Church of Corinth, for it disturbed, and for a time destroyed, the peace, purity, and unity of the whole assembly, and seriously affected their relationships to St. Paul (1 Cor 5). Whenever, therefore, sin had been committed openly against Christian brethren and against the whole congregation of our fellow-believers, it is expected that acknowledgement and public confession should be made, for it is only thus that reparation can be truly offered, true discipline maintained, and Christian unity and fellowship restored, fostered and furthered. As a consequence we find Joshua urging Achan to make public confession of his wrong-doing (Joshua 7:19), and the Apostle’s two letters to the Church of Corinth clearly insisted upon due reparation being made by the offending member.

This form of public Church discipline was well known and almost universally practised in the early Church for the first few centuries. It is also still used in the Greek Church in Russia. From a variety of circumstances, however, it is not prominent in the Churches at home today, although it is often found on the mission field, where converts have lapsed into sin and have there-by brought discredit on the name of Christ are not received back into Church fellowship without a public confession of sin. In such cases the penitent is received back by the whole Church, the minister acting in the name of the entire Christian body in welcoming the erring brother after repentance, confession and, whenever necessary restitution. St Paul clearly shows us that Church discipline was in the hands of the whole congregation and not limited to any Church officials. He calls on the whole church to move in the matter, whether in regard to punishment or restoration. “Sufficient to such a man is this punishment, was inflicted on the majority” (2 Cor 2:6 Greek).

Taken from W. H Griffith Thomas “Shall I Go to Confession” (London: Protestant Truth Society, n.d.)