My Brief Explanation to Evangelicals (and Catholics) for why Confession is Important

 If we acknowledge our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive our sins and cleanse us from every wrongdoing. (1st John 1:9)

The Universal Agreement that Confession is Important

Confession is generally agreed upon as an essential thing by most Christians.  Many Catholics believe that Evangelicals don’t believe in confession at all, which is untrue.  Most Evangelicals inherently believe that a Christian should have the spirit of a confessing heart.  That is, they should be humble enough to know that they are a sinner in need of God’s grace, and they need to confess that to God in some form or another.  Having a spirit of confession is essential for justification.  One only needs to look at the parable of the confessing tax collector in Luke 18.  “O God, be merciful to me the sinner,” or at the parable of the prodigal son in Luke 15.  At the heart of the prodigal son’s repentance was a spirit of confession.

18 I shall get up and go to my father and I shall say to him, “Father, I have sinned against heaven and against you. 19 I no longer deserve to be called your son; treat me as you would treat one of your hired workers.”’

We see the general spirit of confession all over the scripture narrative and this spirit of confession is viewed as essential to both the Evangelical and the Catholic.

Evangelical Accountability Groups

Many Evangelical circles even have accountability ministries.  An accountability ministry functions sort of like a type of confession.  In my own experience as an Evangelical, accountability partners were incredibly important for my own pursuit of holiness.  I would meet with 3 other brothers twice a month, and during those meetings we would ask ourselves about 8 to 10 questions that we all agreed to honestly answer out loud.  It was a fantastic practice that I believe every Christian should be required to do.  Actually, this statement is something that most Evangelical and Catholics can agree upon.  Confession should be required!  What we don’t agree upon, or at least, historically haven’t agreed upon, is the nuts and bolts of what that accountability structure should look like.

To an Evangelical, confession should be made directly to God, who is everywhere and who can hear us in the privacy of our inner room.  And, to a more pious Evangelical who is really getting serious about their holiness, confession can be made in the context of other brothers and sisters.  We can all agree that there is something incredibly powerful about confessing sins openly to another human being.

For a Catholic, having an accountability partner is certainly something not frowned upon.  By all means, form accountability partners who will walk with you in your struggles and help you to pursue holiness.  But this sort of confession is not enough.  For Catholics, we believe the power of healing comes when we enter into the presence of a priest and confess our sins, in person and out loud, to God.

Why must we do this?  Where did we get this crazy idea?

The Scriptural Paradigm for Confession

This structure was given to us in the Old Testament.  Within the Old Testament, there was an established system of confession that Jews practiced.  We see a small example of this in Leviticus when a person became aware of their uncleanness.

Leviticus 5:5

5 when someone is guilty in regard to any of these matters, that person shall confess the wrong committed, 6 and make reparation to the Lord for the wrong committed: a female animal from the flock, a ewe lamb or a she-goat, as a purification offering. Thus the priest shall make atonement on the individual’s behalf for the wrong.

We see Jesus himself upholding this law in Matthew 8:4 when he tells the Leper to go and “show yourself to a Priest and offer the gift that Moses prescribed.”

What we see in this OT paradigm is relatively clear.  Even though God Himself is everywhere and we have access to Him at anytime, God prescribed for His people to approach Him through ordained priests.

An Evangelical most likely will respond to this statement by saying that we have moved on now to the New Covenant.  We no longer have human priests that we need to interact with because we have the high priest, Jesus himself, who intercedes on our behalf.

Hebrews 4:14

14 Therefore, since we have a great high priest who has passed through the heavens, Jesus, the Son of God, let us hold fast to our confession. 15 For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who has similarly been tested in every way, yet without sin. 16 So let us confidently approach the throne of grace to receive mercy and to find grace for timely help.   

Parts of the Evangelical response are definitely true.  We do live in the New Covenant, and praise God for that.  We also have a high priest who is fully effective at removing sin!  Praise Jesus!  However, during Jesus’ ministry on earth, it seems rather clear that He did not merely keep his authority to forgive for Himself, but he gave to his apostles that authority that they might act in persona christi during their ministry on earth.  We see this in John’s pentecost event.  Just after Jesus breathes his Holy Spirit on the apostles, the first thing he gives them authority to act upon is the forgiveness of sins.

John 20

23 Whose sins you forgive are forgiven them, and whose sins you retain are retained.”

Admittedly, this is a short verse, and it does not receive much more explanation in the Gospel, but we should not make light of it.  As an Evangelical, all one needs to do is think about the magnitude of this statement deeply.  The apostles were given the authority to forgive sins? Not only this, but they were also given the authority to “retain” or “not forgive” sins.  We see the parallel of this pericope in the Gospel of Matthew, chapter 16.  It is again not a coincidence that within the context of this very statement, Jesus is essentially handing over his authority to Peter, giving him the keys of the kingdom, and then saying to Peter, “Whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven; and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.”

This seems odd.  Why would Jesus give his authority to others?  Doesn’t he know they’ll just screw it up?

As an Evangelical, I struggled with these passages superficially.  That is, I chewed on them for a bit, marveled at their meaning, and basically said to myself that for the Catholic Church to develop a system out of these two verses is way beyond what Jesus intended.  This is where the thought “they screwed it up” applied, and then I went on with my happy understanding that Jesus is the only priest I need to talk to in this life.

My Experience of Confession as an Evangelical Pastor

However, there were certain experiences that led me to ponder more deeply the meaning of forgiving sins.  For example, when I was a pastor, there were a handful of times during my ministry that men would come into my office, or into my home, and feel the need to confess to me their particular sins that they had been suffering from.  These sins in no way involved me in them.  They were sins that were committed in their own personal lives.  In other words, they had wrestled with these sins, they had confessed them in their interior conversations with God, but still, they had an earnest need for more cleansing.  They never verbally identified why they needed to come to me, but my reflections have concluded that they needed some type of authority figure, which represented God, to confess theirs sins to, out loud.

I mentioned above that there is healing power in the act of confessing sins out loud.  There is even more healing power in the confession of sins out loud to a person that represents God.  There is something innately true in this experience.  And for the Catholic, the church practices this innately true human experience because the creator of humanity, Jesus Christ himself, commanded his apostles to reconcile the world to God through this practice.

Assurance of Salvation

Evangelicals and Catholics often go back and forth in regards to Assurance of salvation.  Evangelicals believe in that assurance whereas Catholics struggle with it.  Ironically, it was when I became Catholic that I have struggled less with my “assurance of salvation.”  One cannot have assurance of salvation without connecting it to an assurance of forgiveness. When I was an Evangelical, there would often times be seasons where I would wonder if God loved me, if he had forgiven me, etc. etc.  Most of the time, those seasons of doubt were brought on by seasons where I struggled with particular sins.  When I became a Catholic, my heavy conscience and my doubt was always lifted in the act of confession.  Not because of my confession itself, but because the person who heard my confession (a.k.a. priest) would say to me the words of absolution.  I remember Fr. Pennings lifting his hands up after my first confession and saying the most powerful words I had ever heard in my life.   

God, the Father of mercies,
through the death and resurrection of his Son
has reconciled the world to himself
and poured out the Holy Spirit for the forgiveness of sins;
through the ministry of the Church may God grant you pardon and peace,
and I absolve you from your sins
in the name of the Father, and of the Son,
and of the Holy Spirit.

There is nothing more assuring of my forgiveness than when I honestly declare my sins and receive immediate absolution of those sins.  TO this day, I receive goose bumps almost every time I go to confession.

Does this make me want to go to confession more?  Of course not!  I hate confession!  Its humiliating and I am a prideful human being.  Nevertheless, I do go, and every time I do it is breathtakingly freeing.

Sin and its Relationship to the Church

There is something else that both Evangelicals Catholics often fail to recognize in the act of sinning.  When I sin, I am not just hurting my relationship with God, I am also destroying my relationship with the church.  Some explanation and context might be needed.

Once a person becomes a Christian, that person becomes a part of the universal church.  Catholic or not, the universal church exists and both Evangelicals and Catholics see eye to eye on this.  However, for Evangelicals, because of the lack of clear boundaries, the concept of universal church is very nebulous.  It’s a good idea, but in practice, it sometimes becomes hard to conceptualize outside of the existing context of simply being a member at your local congregation.  Nevertheless, most Evangelicals believe there is a deep personal connection to the church universal, and most see it as important.  Moving on.

When Jesus confronted Paul on the Damascus road (Acts 9), he said something profound.

“Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?”

This is profound because when one looks back at the account of Saul’s persecutions, none of them are actually done to Jesus.  Nowhere in Paul’s own recollections do we see him being present or participating in the actual persecution of Jesus.  So, why does Jesus say to him that he is being persecuted?  This is obvious for the Christian, Jesus is saying if you persecute my brothers and sisters, you persecute me.  If you are a part of the church, you are connected to Jesus by being a part of his body.  We are all one happy family (even if we aren’t happy).

Paul, after his encounter with Jesus on the Damascus road, makes our connection to Jesus and others visually graspable in his letter to the Corinthians 12.

12 As a body is one though it has many parts, and all the parts of the body, though many, are one body, so also Christ…14 Now the body is not a single part, but many. 15 If a foot should say, “Because I am not a hand I do not belong to the body,” it does not for this reason belong any less to the body.…17 If the whole body were an eye, where would the hearing be? If the whole body were hearing, where would the sense of smell be? 18 But as it is, God placed the parts, each one of them, in the body as he intended. 19 If they were all one part, where would the body be? 20 But as it is, there are many parts, yet one body.

To carry this image out further, let’s say I am the pinky on my left hand and somehow I bang my pinky with a hammer.  Is the pinky the only part that is damaged or does that pain resonate throughout the entire body?  Duh, right?  Over the course of my life I have broken and torn my fare share of bones and ligaments.  In the moment when I break bones, I have begun to profusely sweat, I have gotten fevers, I have even thrown up from the pain.  It is clear that the pain does not centralize only in the area that has been broken.  Pain and suffering is distributed throughout the entire body.  This is the same with sin.  When you sin, when I sin, it is not merely affecting my own personal relationship with God.  The pain of my personal sin is somehow, mysteriously causing reverberating effects throughout the world wherever the universal church is present.  That is a sobering thought.  Friends, this is why the universal church is struggling so weakly against the enemy.  We are not seeing the massive negative effects that our sins have on the health of the cosmic church.

That said, when I sin, do I merely need to go to Jesus and ask for forgiveness to be restored.  Or do I also need to go to his body and be reconciled to his body that I have damaged.

Let me give another example that might be more poignant.  Let’s say, hypothetically speaking, that I committed adultery and cheated on my wife.  The moment I commit that sin, there is a great chasm created in my relationship with my wife.  Let’s say that my conscience leads me to stop having the adulterous relationship.  I realize my wrongdoing and I confess my sin to God and God alone in the privacy of my own thoughts.  At that point, is my relationship with my wife restored?  Of course not.  That sin still must be dealt with by her in order for us to have proper reconciliation.  It must be confessed and there must be forgiveness otherwise there will forever be an invisible chasm that separates me from her.

In the same way, when I sin, it is not enough simply to go to God for my sin, I also need to reconcile with the church, whom I have damaged.

For the Catholic, both confession to Jesus and His body is done through the act of confession to a priest.

May God reconcile each of us as we humbly come to Him, confessing our unworthiness and clinging to His abundant grace.     

Psalm 32:3-5

Because I kept silent,[b] my bones wasted away;
    I groaned all day long.

For day and night your hand was heavy upon me;
    my strength withered as in dry summer heat.

Then I declared my sin to you;
    my guilt I did not hide.
I said, “I confess my transgression to the Lord,”
    and you took away the guilt of my sin.