There is rampant among evangelicals the idea that confessing sins to a priest is “unbiblical”. I have elsewhere posted concerns about the popular use of the terms “biblical” and “unbiblical”, but this concern is coupled with the idea that this type of confession is a distasteful display of ecclesiastical authority, an attempt by the Church to insert itself between the individual and God, and/or an aggressive infringement upon individual privacy. I strongly suspect that such concerns stem from longstanding anti-Catholic metanarratives and the democratization of Christianity in America, and this is because, however true or untrue these caricatures of Catholic confession, the emotional rejection of this practice is clearly not based upon any objective reading of Scripture. What do I mean? For starters, nobody disagrees that the act of confession is in Scripture. So let’s consider our options. What types of confession exist?:
- Confession of sin to God
- Confession of sin to people
- Confession of sin to both people and God
What does Scripture say? Just two verses will suffice. In fact, unless a Protestant is willing to entertain the canonical status of Sirach 4.26a (“do not be ashamed to confess your sins”), there are only two verses that couple the “act of confessing” (ὁμολογέω or ἐξομολογέω) with “sins” (ἁμαρτία):
James 5:16: Therefore, confess your sins to one another and pray for one another, that you may be healed. The prayer of a righteous person has great power as it is working. (ESV)
1 John 1:9: If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. (ESV)
Of our options, it is clear that James speaks of confessing our sins to “others” (ἀλλήλων). There is no way to take “others”, which is in the plural, to refer to God, who is singular. Perhaps one could apply it to angels or saints, but then the Protestant is confronted with another uncomfortable problem. The most straightforward and probable interpretation is that “others” simply refers to other believers (option 2) because in the same breath he tells them to pray for one another. Interestingly, this confession to people is a precondition of healing. Sounds pretty important.
Now, the only other verse we have is 1 John, and it is ambiguous. It could refer to people or God. It must be pointed out that the NLT rendering “confess our sins to him [God]” takes interpretive liberties with the Greek text: there simply is no “to him” in the Greek, so we do not know if people are here intended or not.
In other words, what’s in question isn’t whether Scripture counsels confession to people. What’s in question is the Protestant insistence that confession is only to God (or at least, not to a priest).
As mentioned, according to James, this confession to people allows for “healing”. According to John, it brings “forgiveness and purification”. We have to decide if the healing in James overlaps with the “forgiveness and purification” of John. If not, then there is some healing that confession to people will bring that Protestants are missing. On the other hand, if they are the same, then the question arises whether just one type of confession (i.e., to a person) is in view?
A third possibility is that there exists both a confession to God and to people, each of which may have a certain purpose or scope. The problem here is, we simply don’t know. We need recourse to a tradition that tells us.
Luckily we have one, and it dovetails with another distinction Scripture makes that Protestants tend to ignore. We know that John (in 1 John) identifies more than one type of sin, those that lead to death (Catholics call this mortal sin) and those that don’t. Of those that do, John says, “I do not say that one should pray for that.” Now this is awkward for the Protestant. If we can pray to God for the forgiveness of all sins, why not here? The answer is that there are some sins for which prayer won’t suffice. So how do we synthesize?
Again, we need tradition. It just so happens that the Catholic system makes sense of all these details much better, but I do not wish to argue this right now. Instead, I simply want to reiterate that the Protestant has no biblical basis to question the Catholic practice of confession to people. Moreover, who better to confess to than a commissioned spiritual leader who takes an oath of secrecy and is trained to help people find the healing and forgiveness that confession aims to achieve? The Protestant really ought to acknowledge the quicksand into which they step when they declare confession to a priest “unbiblical”. This practice does not run contrary to Scripture, nor does it belong in a domain that is left unhandled by Scripture. It is actually commanded (i.e., the term for “confess” is in the imperative form).
And we know that things like healing, forgiveness, and purification are really important things. And so we must wonder what all the fuss is about. Why shouldn’t the recognition of their importance prompt the Church to respond in tangible ways? Just like the Church has formalized baptism and the Eucharist, why shouldn’t Catholics (and Christians of all varieties) formalize the practice of confession in order to protect this pathway to healing, forgiveness, and purification? Whatever reasons may be given, one of them cannot be that it is “unbiblical”.