apostolic succession revisited

[Erich]

So while I see AS in that the early church and the apostles received training and the right to teach and in the case of the apostles the binding and loosing I am struggling with the notion that if I confess my sins to the local priest he has the right or the power to forgive them.

Why would Jesus give the Apostles the power to forgive sin and the power to bind and loose, if He didn’t expect them to use it? And how could they even begin to use that power anyway, if not via auricular confession?

Or, as another poster on another thread put it,

I would just like to respond to the “I dont’ need a Priest to confess my sins to…” which is something Protestants love to say. OK… so how about Baptism? Can you just go straight to God - pour water on yourself & be baptized? No - you’ll go through the Pastor. How about communion? Will you just take a cracker & some wine - hold it up yourself & turn it into the “symbol” of Jesus? No… you’ll go through the Pastor. What about the sacrament of marrage… can 2 people just stand out in a field and ask God to join them? No again. They’ll go through a Pastor. So you see, Protestants recognize that they can’t go just directly to God for any of those… but yet confessing sin… something that’s 100% Biblical… they’ve decided they can live without.

When I attended my Prostestant Church I asked my Pastor about that portion of scripture where it says we should confess our sins to each other… He said, “The early Church did it that way… but it’s not necessary today” Oh yeah? Says who? Not the word of God.