3 Reasons to Confess Your Sins to a Priest

In this episode, Trent offers three biblical reasons that every Christian should confess his sins to an ordained priest.

Transcription:

3 Reasons You Should Confess Your Sins to a Priest

Why confess your sins to a priest when you can just go straight to God? It’s a common question Catholics get asked and today we are going to look at three reasons why you should confess your sins to a priest. But before I do that I want to be absolutely clear that the Catholic church does not teach that priests forgive our sins. Only God forgives sins. Paragraph 1441 of the Catechism of the Catholic Church says:

Only God forgives sins. Since he is the Son of God, Jesus says of himself, “The Son of man has authority on earth to forgive sins” and exercises this divine power: “Your sins are forgiven.” Further, by virtue of his divine authority he gives this power to men to exercise in his name.

God forgives sins, but he does so through a minister of the Church. In fact, Protestants already believe in this concept to some extent.

Consider baptism. Nearly all Protestant denominations believe that you can’t baptize yourself. Instead, someone else has to baptize you and, ideally, it is a minister of the Church you attend. For Protestants who believe baptism saves us from sin, they believe that we need the involvement of a minister of the Church to take us from a state of sin to a state of grace. If we need that the first time we go from being dead in sin to being alive in Christ, why wouldn’t we need a minister the other times we fall from grace and seek to be reconciled to God? Paul even says in 2 Corinthians 5:18 “Christ reconciled us to himself and gave us the ministry of reconciliation.”

I’m not saying you will go to hell if you are unable to confess your sins to a priest. God can save people in extraordinary ways if they are unable to seek him through the ordinary ways he gave us. For example, most protestants say we are saved by faith but that children who die in infancy can still go to heaven even if they don’t have faith. Likewise, God can save someone if they express genuine sorrow for sin and repentance, but it is not the ordinary means God gave for forgiving Christians who sin after baptism.

With that said, let’s get to the three reasons to confess your sins to a priest.

1. The New Testament never says to confess your sins to God

While Jesus taught his disciples to ask God to forgive us our trespasses, the New Testament authors never say that we should confess particular or individual sins to God. The New Testament doesn’t prohibit it just as it doesn’t prohibit praying to the Holy Spirit or asking saints in heaven to pray for us. But it never says that is what we should do as the ordinary means to have sins after baptism forgiven.

A common verse that is cited for confessing sins to God is 1 John 1:9. It says: If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just, and will forgive our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness.

However, the assumption is that the word confess here refers to a confession made to God, when in John’s letter it’s actually used to refer to the confession we make to other human beings. In 1 John 2:23 he says “No one who denies the Son has the Father. He who confesses the Son has the Father also.” This is referring to the confession we make to other people. 1 John 1:9 is bracketed by verses that also refer to what we say to other people:

If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. 9 If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just, and will forgive our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness. 10 If we say we have not sinned, we make him a liar, and his word is not in us.

So there’s no reason to think verse 9 only refers to what we privately say to God and not what we say to other people. The Greek word homologeō, that is translated “confess” in this verse means “I confess, profess, acknowledge, praise”. It is used twenty-six times in the New Testament. Each time it is used, with one exception, it refers to a person publicly declaring something to another human being. In John’s writings it always used to describe confessing something to another human being.

This understanding of confession in the first epistle of John is not new. The nineteenth-century Anglican New Testament scholar Brooke Westcott (who helped create the Greek New Testament that scholars still study today) said the phrase “confess our sins” means “not only acknowledge them, but acknowledge them openly in the face of men”

Hans-Josef Klauck, a prolific New Testament scholar, likewise held that 1 John 1:9 referred to some kind of public, liturgical confession of sin. The Johannine New Testament scholar David Rensberger writes in his recent commentary on John’s letters:

Confession of sin was generally public (Mark 1:5; Acts 19:18; James 5:16; Didache 4:14, 14:1), and that may well be the case here. The use of the plural “sins” (rather than “sin,” as in 1:8) is a reminder that not just an abstract confession of sinfulness but the acknowledgement of specific acts is in mind

Fr. Raymond Brown, who was a moderate in the field of biblical studies, reached the same conclusion in his Anchor Bible commentary on 1 John. After listing the public confession of sins in the Old Testament to which John is alluding (Lev. 5:5-6, Prov. 28:13, Sir. 4:25-26, Dan. 9:20), he writes, “All the parallels and background given thus far suggest that the Johannine expression refers to a public confession rather than a private confession by the individual to God”.

2. Jesus gave the apostles power to forgive sins

The only place where confession of sins is mentioned in scripture is James 5:16 which says “Therefore confess your sins to one another, and pray for one another, that you may be healed.” In the context James is referring to the elders, the presbyteroi, from which we get the English word priest, who anoint the sick. James says in verse 15, “the prayer of faith will save the sick man, and the Lord will raise him up; and if he has committed sins, he will be forgiven.” Notice this is joined with the conjunction *therefore*, in Greek oun. This places the confession of sins to one another in the context of seeking out the church’s presybters.

John’s gospel describes Jesus appearing to the disciples after his resurrection and says “he breathed on them, and said to them, “Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.”

I recently did a video addressing Allen Parr’s errors about Catholicism and I promised I’d save his thoughts on confession to a priest for its own video. So here are his objections to the Catholic interpretation of John 20:23, that he cites from gotquestions.org:

There are several problems with this interpretation. Problem number one: John 20:23 nowhere mentions confession of sin. Problem number two: John 20:23 nowhere promises or even hints that apostolic authority of any kind would be passed on to the successors of the apostles. Problem number three: The apostles never once in the New Testament acted as if they had the authority to forgive a person’s

These are just arguments from silence. Other passages do describe apostolic authority being given to successors so this doesn’t have to be found in every passage talking about what the apostles do. And just because an action isn’t mentioned in scripture doesn’t mean it isn’t part of the life of the Church. The New Testament doesn’t describe the apostles or anyone else marrying people but protestants see marriage as an essential part of the life of the Church. Finally, it doesn’t mention confession of sin, but how could sins be forgiven or retained unless the apostles had a way, i.e. confession, to know the person’s sins and if he as repentant in the first place.

Other Protestants claim that in John 20:23 Jesus was giving the apostles the power only to preach the forgiveness of sins rather than the ability to communicate the forgiveness of sins. According to this interpretation, if a person accepted the gospel, the apostles preached then that his sins would be forgiven, but if he did not accept the gospel, the apostles preached then that his sins would be retained.

But In John’s Gospel Jesus rarely refers to the preaching of the apostles, and the subject is not mentioned in this chapter. In verse 23 Jesus simply said, “If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven.” The Baptist scholar George Beasley-Murray admits that John’s Gospel “is directed to the Church, wherein believers stand continually in need of forgiveness of sins”. Concerning John 20:23, he writes, “[When] dealing with sin and guilt an authoritative word of forgiveness is required from a representative of the Lord.”

Still others say that the Greek in this verse means the text should actually say “If you forgive the sins of any they have already been forgiven” which implies they were just preaching the forgiveness of sins and were not ministers of forgiveness on Christ’s behalf. But the Greek here doesn’t mean they merely announced the forgiveness of sins. Consider, Jesus’ declaration about the sinful woman who anointed his head at the house of Simon the Pharisee. He said, “Her sins, which are many, are forgiven [aphiami, the same word in John 20:23], for or because she loved much” (Lk 7:47). Notice that Jesus said the woman’s sins were forgiven after she performed actions that demonstrated her love for him. New Testament professor James Barker says the grammar of this passage “conveys that God concurs with the disciples’ decision, and the perfect [tense] aspect signifies the enduring significance of the disciples’ decisions”. Saint John Chrysostom understood John 20:23 in the same way and said, “What priests do here below God ratifies above.”

Which brings me to the third reason to confess your sins to a priest.

3. The early Christians publicly confessed their sins

The Catechism says that even though the disciplines related to the sacrament of confession have changed over time (public confession in the Church transitioned into private confession to a priest in the seventh century), the sacrament has always maintained a certain fundamental structure. Specifically, the sacrament incl udes the sinner expressing repentance for his sins and God, working through the ministers of the Church, healing the sinner and re-establishing him in ecclesial communion with the body of Christ

In Rensberger’s commentary on John’s letters I cited earlier, he mentions the Didache, a first-century catechism, in the context of the public confession of sins. It gave believers the following instruction: “in your gatherings, confess your transgressions, and do not come for prayer with a guilty conscience” (4:14). Scholars tend to date 1 John as being written in the late 90s A.D. and the Didache as having been written at the same time or even earlier. It makes sense, therefore, to connect John’s instruction to “confess your sins” with the context of public confession in the early Church described in the Didache.

In the second century Irenaeus described women who were taken in by the heretic Marcius saying some of them “make a public confession of their sins; but others of them are ashamed to do this, and in a tacit kind of way, despairing of [attaining to] the life of God”

In the third century St. Cyprian of Carthage gave this advice, “Let each one confess his sin, I beseech you, brethren, while he who has sinned is still in this world, while his confession can be admitted, while the satisfaction and remission effected through the priest is pleasing with the Lord.”

In the fourth century St. Ambrose connected the authority of the priesthood in remitting sins at baptism with the authority to remit sins in the confessional. He said:

“The office of the priest is a gift of the Holy Spirit, and His right it is specially to forgive and to retain sins . . . Why do you baptize if sins cannot be remitted by man? If baptism is certainly the remission of all sins, what difference does it make whether priests claim that this power is given to them in penance or at the font? . . . He calls each blessed, both him whose sins are remitted by the [baptismal] font, and him whose sin is covered by good works.”

And finally, I’ll give one last bonus reason to confess your sins to a priest: it’s comforting. Jesus is the divine physician and a priest stands in the person of Christ. When Jesus told the apostles “He who hears you hears me” this applies in a limited way to priests who ordained by the successors of the apostles, the bishops.

Confessing sins to a priest is like telling a doctor an embarrassing health problem, so I understand the initial discomfort. But there is also a sense of deep comfort in being able to approach another person in the flesh who is a channel of God’s mercy and tell him sins you wouldn’t tell anyone else because you know he’s bound to keep them secret. If a priest ever violates the seal of the confessional he is automatically excommunicated. He can never, under any circumstance, reveal the sins you’ve confessed to him.

And many priests I know say God gives them a special grace to forget the sins they hear in confession. But just as baptism marks a definite sign we have been cleansed of sin, and so we don’t have to doubt if we were really saved, sacramental confession marks a definite sign we have received back into communion with Christ and his church and we don’t have to worry about if we did enough to come back into God’s graces.

If you’d like more information on how to make a good confession or even your first confession, check out the links in the description below. Thank you all so much and I hope you have a very blessed day.