Why Do We Practice Corporate Confession?

Why Do We Practice Corporate Confession?

There is no other way to enter into the worship of a holy God than with humility. We find reminders of this liturgical truth from the mouth of God to Israel (2 Chron 7:14), by way of the Psalmists (Ps 25:9, 51:17, 96:9), in the exhortation of the wisdom literature (Ecc 5:1-2; Prov 3:34), from the voice of the prophets (Micah 6:8; Is 57:15, 66:2) from Christ himself (Mat 23:10-12; Lk 14:11) and in the witness of the apostles (1 Cor 1:28-29; 1 Pt 5:6, James 4:10).

This is why every week in our corporate worship we start with a recognition of God’s holiness, and move quickly to a confession of sin. Without a confession of our own sinfulness, we approach God in danger of pridefully assuming it was our own righteousness that allowed us an audience before him. But when we humble ourselves by praying prayers of confession, we rightly orient our hearts towards the truth that it is only his grace in Christ that provides for his people a seat at the table.

What is confession of sin?

For the sake of clarity, let me define what I believe is a Biblical understanding of the confession of sin.

Confession of sin is a cognitive recognition and outward acknowledgement of sin that leads to renunciation, remorse, and repentance.

Confession of sin is first cognitive recognition. By this I mean that it starts somewhere in the intellect and is not just assumed, but recognized. How could you ever confess something that you never realized was there? In this way, confession of sin is willful. You might be roped into saying something you don’t mean, but that isn’t real confession, it’s just recitation.

This recognition must then move from seeing to acknowledging. To see a sin but immediately dismiss it is not confession: it has to be called out. Here is how the Psalmist David puts it: “I acknowledged my sin to you, and I did not cover my iniquity; I said, ‘I will confess my transgressions to the LORD’”... (Psalm 32:5). However, the acknowledgement of sin is not enough to constitute Biblical confession. The confession must be outward. James 5:16 calls us to “confess to one another”, implying an actual, verbal, acknowledgement. The whole nature of confession is outward—the way to salvation is to “confess with your mouth” Jesus is Lord (Rom 10:9). This outward acknowledgement can be in the form of inward prayer to God, but the assumption in Scripture is that confession of sin is not just kept locked away but is expressed in a tangible, outward way.

Next comes renunciation of sin. Renouncing sin is simply calling sin what it is and wanting nothing to do with it. What is sin? Sin is an evil rebellion against God by failing to worship and obey him rightly. So Paul explains in Romans 1 the state of fallen humanity: “although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened.” Sin is always against God (Psalm 51:4), and oftentimes directly against another image bearer of God. Christians recognize that any sin, since it is rebellion against God and hurts others, is lamentable. Part of confession is honesty about the state of the world and the sin that resides in it.

Renunciation also should lead to conviction and remorse over sin: what Scripture describes as “Godly grief” (2 Cor 7:9-10) and being “cut to the heart” (Acts 2:37). To confess sin without a sense of remorse or grief is to misunderstand the seriousness of sin and fail to confess at all. Sometimes that grief is general, like a lament for injustice or pain and the effects of sin, and sometimes it is personal. This is how confession opens the door to repentance. Repentance is the turning away from sin and towards God for mercy. Peter utilizes this understanding of repentance as he preaches at Solom’s Portico in Acts 3, calling on the Israelites to “Repent therefore, and turn back” to God, the same language used by the prophets (Ezk 18:21-23; Is 55:6-7), John the Baptist (Mk 1:4) and Jesus himself (Mt 4:17).

The word “confession” is used in different contexts, and is not always related to sin. For instance, the scripture talks often about making a “confession” as simply a statement or profession of faith (Lk 12:8; Rom 10:9; 1 Jn 4:15; 1 Tim 6:13). So let’s clarify one more thing here: when you confess sin, you are not doing less than professing sin and calling it out. But if you are confessing sin Biblically, you are doing more than professing. You are leaning in not just to profession but also to repudiation, conviction, and repentance. This is because those who experience the true conviction of the Holy Spirit cannot help but turn from sin and to God for mercy. In other words, confession of sin is a work of the Holy Spirit, the one who is sent to “convict the world concerning sin and righteousness and judgement” (Jn 16:8).

In what sense can confession of sin be corporate?

When we gather for corporate worship, we have a time set aside for personal confession. The goal of this time is to provide space for every Christian in the room to recognize, acknowledge, renunciate, and repent of their sin privately before God. The reason for this is clear: the nature of sin is deeply personal in nature. No individual can escape the responsibility of personal sin, “For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, so that each one may receive what is due for what he has done in the body, whether good or evil.” Scripture is clear that God does not count sons directly responsible for generational sins, so long as they have not participated in them in the way of their fathers (Ezek 18:20). Neither does the discipline or consequences of past sin always fall on future generations (Jn 9:1-3).

And yet, the majority of the time we spend in confession of sin on a Sunday morning is in corporate confession. This is because the language of scripture guides us towards the practice of recognizing that sin is not simply a personal problem. Sin is common to all people in all places (1 Cor 10:13). For the sake of clarity, let’s define corporate confession of sin like this:

Corporate confession of sin is an act of confession by or on behalf of an interconnected community that assumes corporate solidarity in specific sin and leads to humility, unity, and repentance.

Ezra (Ezra 9-10), Nehemiah (Neh 1:4-11), and Daniel (Dan 9:3-19) all provide examples of corporate prayers of confession. In these prayers, the people of Israel are led to acknowledge, recognize, and renounce the sins of their fathers and the corporate sins of Israel, regardless of whether there is any evidence that they personally committed these exact sins.

But their confession doesn’t stop simply at acknowledgement and renouncement of past sin. The language of these prayers is that of repentance, of calling on God to forgive Israel as a whole. These leaders recognize and lead the Isrealite people to realize that sin has effects that reach much farther than personal, present, situations. The sins of Israel's fathers are their sins too, not because they committed them in the same way, but because they are called to bear the covenant responsibility of the covenant people. By her rebellion against God, Israel had broken the covenant they had with God. That broken relationship carried over generations and generations. When Ezra, Nehemiah, and Daniel lead the people to repent over the sins of the nation, they are calling on God to have mercy on Israel as a whole. They are comfortable bearing both the responsibility and the blessing of their people, because they know that they relate to God not individually, but corporately. The covenant was always between God and his people, not between God and individuals.

Similarly, the people of Israel understood that the sins of their fathers were also their sins. They did not see themselves as the perfect representations of covenant faithfulness. Although their forefathers may have sinned in more egregious or distinct ways, part of repentance is the humble acknowledgement that no one is without sin. As they confessed and repented of the sins of the nation, they searched their own hearts for personal sin. What does Ezra pray on behalf of the people? “From the days of our fathers to this day we have been in great guilt.” (Ezra 9:7) There is no dichotomy between the past sins of Israel and the present sins of Israel, even if they were different in scope or in specific nature. This is what we might call “corporate solidarity”. Corporate solidarity is the unity and agreement of a specific people or group.

In a text like Daniel 9, we find Daniel expressing solidarity with his people, saying “All Israel has transgressed your law and turned aside, refusing to obey your voice” (Dan 9:11). In multiple places in Daniel we actually find the opposite to be true: Daniel obeyed God and did not turn aside by refusing to eat meat sacrificed to Idols (Daniel 1) and by refusing to pray to anyone save God (Daniel 6). But Daniel understands two realities that lead to corporate solidarity: 1) He is part of Israel, and cannot escape his connection; and 2) He is not without sin or disobedience, and his personal disobedience has contributed to the guilt of all Israel. Because both of these realities are true, Daniel can say in agreement and unity on behalf of Israel “We refused to obey your voice.”

A simple thought experiment might be helpful here to show how we understand corporate solidarity to play out in everyday life. Think of a star football player who misses exactly zero tackles in a game. As far as he can tell, every opportunity he had to play his part for the team, he did. And yet the team still lost. In the locker room, the player righly associates the loss of the team, at least in part, to poor tackling. What does he say? “We lost the game because we failed to tackle well.” The player confessing technically did not participate in the failure he is pointing out, and neither did the offensive players! But still it makes sense to use the corporate “we”. Does that player bear the individual responsibility for the loss of the team? No, if your definition of responsibility is only determined by the individual action of each team member. But if your definition of responsibility is determined by corporate solidarity, then it makes right sense for the star football player to include himself in the guilt of the team. After all, he knows he is not a perfect football player. He could have done more positively to help his team, and there are certainly past mistakes that have contributed in some way to his team's failure.

In a similar way to Israel, Christains are called to bear one another's burdens as part of a new covenant family. Paul calls on specific churches to repent of their error and their sinfulness. Think of the church in Galatia, who is accused of “turning to a different gospel” (Gal 1:6). Certainly there are those in the church who are more deceived than others, but due to their covenant relationship, they were all in some way held responsible to repent. The letters of Christ to Ephesus, Pergamum, Thyatira, Sardis, and Laodicea in Revelation 2-3 imply a similar level of corporate responsibility. As far as a certain sin is recognizable in our local body, we should desire to confess it.

Not all the sins that are being confessed corporately will be sins that you have directly participated in during the last week, or even sins you feel like you have contributed to at all. In corporate confession, the conviction of each individual by the Spirit will look different, because we sin in different ways. And yet, even if you do not feel like your sins contribute to the sins of others, there is Biblical support to say they have. While God does not punish individuals for specific sins they have not committed (to do so would be unjust), our individual sins still have effects that carry far beyond us.

The Israelites felt comfortable confessing the sins of their fathers because they knew that in their hearts, they were no different. In the same way, we understand that by the sin of Adam, no one is without sin. Romans 5:12 teaches us: “Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all sinned.” Notice both the aspects of corporate (sin came through one man) and personal (because all sinned) sin. As Christians, we have a robust understanding of the pervasiveness of sin. We may have never murdered, but we have hated a brother or sister in our heart. We may have never committed adultery, but we have lusted after other men or women in our heart. To confess sin corporately is to confess that we all have one unifying problem of sin. As we share this problem, we should feel the freedom to acknowledge and confess corporately sins that are more specific to our congregation, to the church, to our city, to our culture, and to our nation. Even if we are not assuming the guilt before God of sins we have not committed, corporate solidarity recognizes that our sin contributes to the sin of others in interconnected spheres.

This does not mean that every Christian is responsible for every sin everywhere in some reductionistic way. There are boundaries to this responsibility. In fact, it is the Biblical emphasis on both personal and corporate responsibility that sets apart BIblical justice from most other secular ideologies, which tend to lean towards one extreme or the other: either blaming all responsibility of sin on the individual with no regard for how sin can entrench itself in systems or cultures, or blaming all responsibility of sin on cultural and social factors with no regard for individual responsibility. ¹

Pastor Kevin Deyoung has outlined a helpful thread through the book of Acts to help us understand how far corporate responsibility for sin reaches. Although in Acts 2:23 all of Jerusalem is charged by Peter with crucifying Christ by the hands of lawless men, the book of Acts does not assume this responsibility carries on past those who were in Jerusalem at the time of Jesus’ death.

Paul doesn’t charge the Jews in Thessalonica or Berea with killing Jesus (Acts 17), nor the Jews in Corinth (Acts 18) or in Ephesus (Acts 19). In fact, when Paul returns to Jerusalem years after the crucifixion, he does not accuse the Jews there of killing Jesus; he does not even charge the council with that crime (Acts 23). He doesn’t blame Felix (Acts 24) or Festus (Acts 25) or Agrippa (Acts 26) for Jesus’s death, even though they are all men in authority connected in some way with the governing apparatus that killed Christ. The apostles considered the Jews in Jerusalem at the time of the crucifixion uniquely responsible for Jesus’s death, but this culpability did not extend to every high-ranking official, to every Jew, or to everyone who would live in Jerusalem thereafter. The rest of the Jews and Gentiles in the book of Acts still had to repent of their wickedness, but they were not charged with killing the Messiah. ²

In other words, there is a clear understanding in Scripture that unique responsibility should be only assumed by particular people or people groups for specific sins. There is a unique responsibility to respond to sin among families (Josh 7:10-26), nations or people groups (Is 34), and even cities (Matt 23:37), regardless if the sin of the individuals in these relationships was uniform. This unique responsibility should be confessed and repented of before God, but that responsibility is limited by the solidarity of time, place, and relationship. In expressing corporate solidarity, we must be careful not to take it too far outside of those bounds.

This is why, for example, it makes much more sense to confess the more unique sins of our city or our country, but far less to confess the sins of the European continent. We should be quicker to identify how our sins have contributed to the sins of a family member or a close personal friend than of someone who we do not know or have not interacted with. A sin that is unique to our church should be confessed corporately with more zeal and specificity than one that haunts the nation. But we remember that in all our interconnectedness, sin runs deep. We are individuals, in families, in churches, in cities, in countries, in the world. In each of those spheres our aim, at least in part, should be to humble ourselves before God and consider in confession how our sin nature contributes to the same sin nature we see there. Corporate confession of sin is ultimately a posture of humble solidarity, a mutual desire not to heap burdens on our back that we should not bear, but to all say “apart from the grace of God, there go I.” It gives us the freedom to express solidarity with all those we associate with while also freeing us to search our own hearts for any personal sin against God.

What does this mean for the Christian? Corporate confession is an exercise in remembering that sin is not just individualistic. When we corporately confess our sins, we should take part in public acknowledgement of all kinds of sin and renunciation of all kinds of sin, even specific sins we may have not personally committed. In corporate confession, we are acknowledging that the effects of sin reach far deeper into our hearts than what we can see or identify. The purpose of corporate confession is not to say “we have all sinned in different ways” but to say “we all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Rom 3:23). Corporate confession is a unifying act, not a segregating one. In corporate confession, we identify and acknowledge all kinds of sin that we are all susceptible to and have contributed to, and leave room for conviction by examining where the roots of that sin may lie in our hearts.

Corporate Confession and Worldly Sorrow

Let’s look at an example. In corporate confession, we may confess the sin of racism or racial prejudice. There is no denying that this sin is an outright denial of the gospel’s unifying nature (Gal 3:28), and historically rooted in the nature of man. However, this sin is difficult to acknowledge at times, because it is a sin that is currently readily identified by culture. You may hear confessions of the sin of racism by the culture that identify it as evil, immoral, and call on you to worldly guilt. The guilt expressed in these secular confessions is diverse: you may rightly be accused of racism because of a statement you said or action you took, or you may be accused of racism unjustly, as a weapon against you to gain some sort of advantage. Certain ideologies like those presented in the popular book White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo may even insinuate personal guilt not just for specific prejudicial actions, but simply by existing as a white or majority person with specific social privilege.³ While the ideologies that DiAngelo and other popular vocies draw from have many flaws, it’s enough to say for now that there is no Biblical warrant for confessing the sin of simply being a certain race or having certain social or economic privilege.⁴ Although it is true that every Christian’s heart should bend towards the plight of those who are oppressed and abused by the powerful, the Scripture does not talk about guilt, responsibility, or even solidarity in this way.

Those who are far from Christ often experience or take part in what looks like confession of sin. There is a recognition and acknowledgement of wrong or injustice, and may be a form of renunciation and public disapproval of certain sins. There may even be a kind of conviction or guilt over the evil or injustice of the world. But no amount of Godless confession can ever produce a true conviction that leads to turning towards God in repentance. Since worldly sorrow does not recognize that all sin is fundamentally against God himself, the goal of worldly sorrow can never be right standing before God. Worldly sorrow and confession over sin may be effective in producing guilt and even spurring positive change and action in the world, but it can never alleviate that guilt apart from simple do-betterness. In the end, worldly sorrow and guilt only produces works-based righteousness, which leads to death (2 Cor 7:10).

But worldly sorrow is not what is happening when the body of Christ corporately confesses the sin of racism. Far from identifying corporate responsibility along racial, economic, or cultural lines, we recognize that the guilt of humanity comes from the fact that racial prejudice is a sin against a holy God that we are all guilty of. There is benefit in calling out a sin, particularly one that has been shown to manifest itself in our cultural setting, even if it is not the unique sin of our congregation. The humility of confession recognizes that the roots of racism lie in our own hearts. We are all fallen sinners, susceptible to discrimination or derogatory thoughts. This is the solidarity of corporate confession. We all possess the capability of seeing ourselves as greater or more significant than someone who is different than us. Not only that, but we rightly recognize that the sin of racism has historic roots in our country and even among the church. We are not responsible before God for sins we have never committed, but neither can we deny the reality that we share the burdens of the church universal, of our neighbors in our country, and even the burdens of all those made in the image of God like us. The pervasiveness of sin means that if we are part of a culture, in some way our sin has contributed to that culture’s burdens. No one is righteous on this front, and so we are all sinners in this problem together. We can confess sin corporately, looking into our own hearts to ask the Holy Spirit to bring conviction and repentance for the specific roots of that sin in our hearts.

The Gospel and Corporate Confession

The corporate confession of sin has been a staple of the gathered church for centuries. If we lose our ability to confess sins corporately, we run the risk of assuming the Christian life is one of individualism. Corporate confession is a rhythm that draws us back, week by week, into the humility and holiness without which no one will see the Lord. Most importantly, corporate confession provides opportunities to embrace the breathtaking realities of gospel assurance. When we confess our sins corporately, we build up the unity of our mutual need. We all have guilt before God, we all have the stain of sin on our hearts. But corporate confession also builds up the unity of our mutual solution.

We confess as Christians knowing that we are forgiven. On the cross Christ confessed “Father forgive them” and in his resurrection, his prayer was confirmed. The corporate solidarity can go both ways, since “as one trespass led to condemnation for all men, so one act of righteousness leads to justification and life for all men” (Rom 5:18). When we hear a prayer of corporate confession we do not hear accusation or condemnation, but hear freedom to both lament the not-yetness of the world and to search our own hearts for sin. That freedom does not come from worldly sorrow or worldly confession. It doesn’t come from scrubbing ourselves clean with good deeds, and it certainly doesn’t come from adopting a particular political or social ideology. Freedom to confess sin comes from Jesus. This Christ knew no sin. He wasn’t born of Adam and he didn’t share in our sin nature. He was the perfect passover lamb and the perfect fulfiller of the law of God. There was no need for him to humble himself before the Father: he stands in perfect union with the Father. But for our sake, he humbled himself unto death. He did this for our personal sin, and he did it for our corporate sin. He became sin, so that we might free us to confess it together.

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Notes

1. Dr. Tim Keller recently released a helpful article explaining the difference between a Biblical model of justice and other secular models. Although the article is intentionally succinct, it still provides a great introduction to understanding how Biblical justice stands out as an utterly unique good and needs not stand on other ideologies. You can read it here: https://quarterly.gospelinlife.com/a-biblical-critique-of-secular-justice-and-critical-theory/ ↩
   
2. https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/blogs/kevin-deyoung/thinking-theologically-about-racial-tensions-sin-and-guilt/ ↩
   
3. DiAngelo's book doesn't stand alone on her understanding of corproate responsibility or guilt, it's become the most accesible and popular level work right now. If you are interested in a balanced and diverse critique of White Fragility and it’s popularity, including thoughts on some takeaways for Christstion see this five part article series from Chrsitianity Today: https://www.christianitytoday.com/edstetzer/2020/july/white-fragility-conversation-on-race-and-racism.html If you are confused by specific ideologies like identity politics, critical theory, or other ideas that are being presented by the culture that seem to imply a corporate guilt that is not specified in Scripture, I would love to talk more about it with you. Just reach out. ↩
   
4. This is not to say that there are not sins associated with social or economic privilege. Scripturally, the sin is not the privilege itself but rather if a person fails to be generous with the privilege they are given (Ps 112:5; Lk 6:30; Acts 20:35; 1 Tim 6:17-19). ↩