In Defense of Kneeling in Confession

We use our bodies to help us understand what is happening spiritually and to bring our hearts into it. Kneeling in prayer, specifically, became a formal part of confession during the Middle Ages—and it remained a feature of Reformation worship, even as the Reformers (rightly) discarded the sacraments of penance and confession. 

In many parts of our service, we are intentional about the posture of our bodies. We stand for the call to worship and the reading of the sermon text out of reverence for God’s word. We lift our hands for the Gloria Patri and Doxology as a way of directing worship to God. We open our hands to receive when the benediction is spoken over us. 

We do this with intention, using our bodies to help us understand what is happening spiritually and to bring our hearts into it. And this is not unique to us. Dating even back to early Christian liturgies in the first and second centuries, changes in posture were a feature of worship. Kneeling in prayer, specifically, became a formal part of confession during the Middle Ages—and it remained a feature of Reformation worship, even as the Reformers (rightly) discarded the sacraments of penance and confession. 

God’s holiness and justice are so powerful it makes your knees buckle—you would not be able to stand without mercy.

Years ago, we used to (on occasion, at least) kneel for the prayer of confession. For a while now, Nate and I and several others have been wanting to return to that practice. I recently presented the idea to the session, and they whole-heartedly approved us to begin kneeling again in our worship services. It will by no means be required, of course, but we will be inviting people to participate as they are able and willing.

I want to offer a brief scriptural precedent for this practice and to explain why it matters. 

Scriptural Precedent

Probably the most relevant passage for kneeling in prayer is Psalm 130:1–4 (emphasis added):

Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord!
  O Lord, hear my voice!
            Let your ears be attentive
  to the voice of my pleas for mercy!

            If you, O Lord, should mark iniquities,
  O Lord, who could stand?
            But with you there is forgiveness,
  that you may be feared.

Here in the context of a plea for God’s merciful response to our sin, which is always included in our prayers of confession, the psalmist notes a connection between God’s holiness and justice and the inability to stand if it weren’t for mercy and forgiveness. God’s holiness and justice are so powerful they make your knees buckle—you would not be able to stand without mercy. Thus, kneeling is a proper posture of a sinner pleading for mercy. It isn’t that it’s a sin not to kneel in confession, but rather that kneeling is the more appropriate posture. 

We see this exhibited at a narrative level in Ezra, when Ezra breaks over the sins of the people: 

Then, at the evening sacrifice, I rose from my self-abasement, with my tunic and cloak torn, and fell on my knees with my hands spread out to the Lord my God and prayed:

“I am too ashamed and disgraced, my God, to lift up my face to you, because our sins are higher than our heads and our guilt has reached to the heavens. From the days of our ancestors until now, our guilt has been great. Because of our sins, we and our kings and our priests have been subjected to the sword and captivity, to pillage and humiliation at the hand of foreign kings, as it is today.”

Other commands and examples of kneeling in prayer and worship include:

• "Come, let us worship and bow down. Let us kneel before the LORD our maker, for he is our God. We are the people he watches over, the flock under his care" (Psalms 95:6-7).

• “Therefore [because Jesus humbled himself to the point of death] God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father” (Philippians 2:9–11). 

• “And when he had said these things, he knelt down and prayed with them all” (Acts 20:36 ESV).

• “For this reason I bow my knees before the Father …” (Ephesians 3:14).

• Solomon knelt in prayer during the dedication of the Temple (1 Kings 8:54).

• Daniel the prophet knelt three times daily in prayer (Daniel 6).

• Jesus himself knelt in prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane (Luke 22:41).

• Stephen prayed on his knees before his martyrdom (Acts 7:60). 

• Peter knelt down and prayed for telling Tabitha, who had died, to arise (Acts 9:40).

Clearly, we are not doing anything unbiblical when we kneel in prayer—on the contrary, we are following biblical examples. Nor are we doing anything distinctly Roman Catholic. It is something the Church has practiced since its earliest days, and all three major traditions (Catholic, Orthodox, Protestant) have practiced it (and continue to, save many Protestant denominations). For more insight into the practice of kneeling in the Reformed and Presbyterian traditions, read this and this. 

So why is it so uncommon these days, at least in American Evangelicalism? 

Let’s look at why all this matters.

Cultural Influence

I’m no church historian, and there are likely several reasons for why kneeling has fallen by the wayside in American churches, but for our purposes I’ll highlight two. First is the influence of the seeker-sensitive movement. It surged in the ‘80s, but its influence is still dominant in our churches today. The instincts of this movement are to make church comfortable for the unchurched by removing anything non-essential and “overly churchy” or “traditional,” such as steeples and stained glass and pre-written liturgies. 

The reality is that the Christian life is inherently strange. It must, by definition, look different from the rest of the world.

The second is that we’ve become an increasingly gnostic society. Gnosticism is an ancient heresy that sought to label the soul as good and the body as bad, creating a false dualism between the two—as if they exist in conflict with one another. Christians, however, believe that God created both the body and the soul, and that together they form an essential unity. We are embodied souls, and thus what we do in the body matters greatly for the soul. Our culture, on the other hand, likes to pretend that what’s done in the body is of no concern to the soul—thus a rampant culture of one-night stands, pornography use and creation, and other sexual perversions. 

We need to recover what these influences have obscured or outright denied. The reality is that the Christian life is inherently strange. It must, by definition, look different from the rest of the world. As we water down our services to make them more palatable for the unchurched, we dilute the very thing the world needs: an encounter with the gospel and the truth of Scripture. 

And, in a gnostic society that pretends that what happens to the body matters little to the soul, kneeling in prayer makes a powerful statement. As we get on our knees—a clunky process that ends in a humble and uncomfortable position—we proclaim truths with our bodies: we are small before a big God. We are sinners before a holy God. We are guilty before a just God and can only be justified by a free gift of grace. We are needy and helpless—before a generous God, who meets us with forgiveness so that we can stand. 

And so we will begin kneeling. We will get the attention of our own hearts by enacting the gospel with our bodies. We will stand to hear God’s word, kneel in confession that we’ve disobeyed, and stand again by grace because of his forgiveness. In John Newton’s words, “I am a great sinner and Christ is a great Savior.” Let us use our bodies to proclaim it.