"Privacy of the priesthood": Keeping our sins to ourselves.

It figures that a radio preacher would encourage his listeners to avoid accountability. After all, who keeps you accountable in a radio ministry?

My friend B has authority issues. Always has, ever since I've first met him. Currently he's been listening to a lot of Fundamentalist preachers on the radio instead of going to church—he's trying to "go it alone" because he doesn't want to be accountable to a church body. Or anybody.

Unfortunately, radio preachers are enablers. I could rant a lot about the sort of person who preaches over the radio, but I'll save that for another time. Meanwhile B is practicing what the host of Christianity Today's leadership blog calls sola radio—believing everything the radio preachers tell him, then critiquing everything that I and my church do because he heard something different on the radio.

Currently he's on about a heretical teaching called "privacy of the priesthood." Gotta admit: I'd never heard the term before, even though I am very familiar with the concept—having practiced it for quite a few years.

I've said before that every Christian is a priest, as John points out in Rv 1.6. It's called "the priesthood of all believers" by many theologians. The privacy issue has to do with confession. Scripture calls upon us to confess our sins. Those who teach "privacy of the priesthood" claim that we only confess them to God, not to one another. But every passage dealing with confession (Lv 5.4-6, Nu 5.7, Js 7.19-20, Ne 9.2-3, Pr 28.13, Mt 3.6, Ac 19.18, Jm 5.16, 1Jn 1.9, etc.) indicates a public confession to God in the sight and hearing of others.

The obvious reason why we're to do this is something I discovered when I was going through a 12-step program as an adult child of an alcoholic: If you don't talk about it, nothing ever changes.

The reason my dad could get away with being an abusive alcoholic is because nobody ever talked about it. We kept secrets. More specifically, we kept Dad's secret, even though for many years we didn't recognize it was alcoholism. We kept the curtains closed in our house 24 hours a day because "the neighbors don't need to see our business." We kept our voices down during arguments and during beatings for fear of the neighbors... when the neighbors really could have stepped in and helped, had we known we could trust them. But Dad didn't trust anyone. Still doesn't.

Okay, those are Dad's issues. What about mine? Well, for many years, I figured mine were between me and God and no one else. So I told no one. I pretended everything was just fine. I pretended my Christian life was perfect. Meanwhile nobody ever knew about the secret sins I was committing... well, no one except family members who stumbled upon them, or pagan friends who knew what sort of person I really was, who called me a hypocrite to my face whenever I talked to them about Jesus.

What was to stop me from being a hypocrite? Simple: I had to stop sinning. How could I stop sinning? Confession.

That's the part that those who believe in "privacy of the priesthood" don't want to step into, or go through. And not just for the legal liabilities—and there are some—in knowing someone's dirty laundry. They honestly don't believe it's necessary. They even think it's sinful. Follow their logic:

• Salvation is by grace, not works.
• If you're not saved by works, you're not un-saved by them either.
• Therefore: Once saved, always saved.
• Works are not necessary for salvation.
• In fact, whenever we perform a work, we're denying God's grace.
• Confession is a work.
• When we confess, we deny God's grace—we're depending on confession, not grace, to save us.
• Therefore we mustn't confess.

You can probably see the flaw in the logic; "Whenever we perform a work, we're denying God's grace." This comes from a misreading of everything Paul says about grace and the law. We are not justified by the law. We are justified by grace. Do we keep sinning so that we can get more grace? Absolutely not. (Ro 6.1-2) Do we keep sinning because we're not under the law? Absolutely not. (Ro 6.15) Do we sin when we follow the law? Absolutely not. (Ro 7.7) The law does not save; but the law is still meant to be followed. We were created to do the good works God prepared in advance for us to do (Ep 2.10) and those good works include the law. And that law includes confession.

No, confessing to me, or to any other priest or church, doesn't save you. That's not why we do it. We do it because if we don't talk about it, nothing ever changes. Our sins stay secret. Our evil festers and grows. Our hypocrisy continues. Continues, that is, until God decides He's had enough and reveals it to everyone, just like He did with Ananias and Sapphira. (Ac 5.1-11) In their case, exposure killed them; in other people's case it just winds up being a giant embarrassment... that could have been avoided, and could have kept the Church from ridicule, if only people had confessed to one another.

"Privacy of the priesthood" is simply a nice way of repackaging this attitude: "Keep your sins to yourself. Don't tell me, or I'll be liable. Keep it to yourself, or I may have to hold you accountable for the sins that regularly tempt you. I don't want to know them. Quite honestly, I don't love you that much."

Or this: "Nobody needs to know I commit this sin. It might cause them to stumble. It'll certainly embarrass me, and shut down my ministry. Besides, who are they to judge me? They probably do worse. Well, I won't judge them either. They can keep their sins private, and so will I, and God will help us work it out."

Secrets are chains, and Jesus has come to set us free.

Anyway, once I realized this, the chains came off. As you may have noticed from the blog, I've got nothing to hide. (Well, other than B's identity, which is none of your business anyway.) I'll tell people anything if they just ask... and sometimes even when they don't. I've been advised many times, "Don't tell people that! They'll just use it against you." Well, they've tried... and failed, 'cause I admit to it, and confess it to everyone long before they can. Or they'll say, "If you tell people too much, it'll weird them out, and they'll never look at you the same." That's partly true... but how were they going to look at me before? Unrealistically? To hell with that.

Anyway. I call this teaching "heresy" because it really is heresy—it's a false teaching that leads us astray and separates us from God. By keeping sin private, we deny other Christians the opportunity of being able to help us with it, and we deny God the opportunity to show us grace through the ministry of other Christians. Did you catch that? We deny God's grace. We cling to the darkness, claim that we walk in the light, claim we haven't sinned, and don't have the truth or God's word in us. (1Jn 1.5-10) We indicate, by our actions, that we're not saved. Once saved always saved; but if you're not saved in the first place, you'll recognize it by your rotten fruit.

I told B as much. Given our past, he might listen to me; but given his problems with authority, he might choose to stick with his radio preacher rather than my counsel. After all, the radio preacher will let him hide his sin and tell him it's okay. I can't. I'm his friend. The radio preacher isn't.