Forgotten Church Discipline

An Alabama blogger named Ron Etheridge has linked to a 2005 series of articles on church discipline from the pages of Christianity Today. One of the articles, "Healing the Body of Christ," was mine, but until he pointed to it, I'd forgotten I'd written it. (Such are the demands of my life, that I must, as St. Paul says, constantly press toward the mark, forgetting those things that are behind.)

Here's that 2005 article, which discusses the high ethical demands of church membership in the apostolic and patristic eras and ties those demands to the character of God.

The points are parallel to article 5 of the Call for an Ancient Evangelical Future, which demands that the "spiritual formation of the people of God" be "based firmly on a Trinitarian biblical narrative." Article 5 continues:

We are concerned when spirituality is separated from the story of God and baptism into the life of Christ and his Body. Spirituality, made independent from God's story, is often characterized by legalism, mere intellectual knowledge, an overly therapeutic culture, New Age Gnosticism, a dualistic rejection of this world and a narcissistic preoccupation with one's own experience. These false spiritualities are inadequate for the challenges we face in today's world. Therefore, we call Evangelicals to return to a historic spirituality like that taught and practiced in the ancient catechumenate.

And now, my 2005 article:


Healing the Body of Christ

Church discipline is as much about God as it is about erring believers.

All of the offerings in this special section presume one particular truth: that church discipline hinges on a high-demand understanding of what makes the church the church.

In For the Glory of God, Baylor sociologist of religion Rodney Stark discusses the dynamics of high-intensity religious movements. High-intensity religion is often created by reformations, he says, by attempts to restore religious belief and practice in existing organizations to a more demanding level. When such attempts fail, reformers are pushed out of the existing structures and create "high-intensity religious alternatives." That is what happened in the 16th-century magisterial and radical reformations, as well as in later movements such as Methodism, Puritanism, Quakerism, and the Salvation Army.

In economic terms, high-intensity religion demands a high price. But, Stark points out, people will pay a high price to obtain a product of high value. And high-demand evangelical religion indeed offers great value: transformed lives, support and motivation for moral reform, a deep sense of connection to a community of believers, intimacy with God, and ultimately, salvation.

Evangelicalism sprang to life in the ministries of John Wesley and George Whitefield. Methodism, in both its Wesleyan and Calvinistic forms, expected a reorientation of the affections from worldly pursuits to godly goals. Rigorous moral, financial, spiritual, and practical disciplines have long been part and parcel of evangelical religion.

But over the past few decades, evangelicalism's eagerness to reach the lost has taken a cue from a different economic model: discount retailing, where prices are low and the customer is king. In some corners, a radically abstracted doctrine of justification by faith has been used to marginalize any concern for renewed and reoriented lives. Dietrich Bonhoeffer called this "cheap grace."

In the beginning, things were not so. The religion of Yahweh was distinct from other religions of the ancient Near East because it emphasized the ethical imitation of its god: "Be holy, because I am holy" (Lev. 11:44, CF. Lev. 19:2, 1 Pet. 1:15-16). The prophet Moses taught that choosing and living the right and good leads to health for individuals, families, and society. Choosing the wrong and corrupt leads to death. These themes run through the final chapters of Deuteronomy and come to a climax in 30:15ff: "See, I set before you today life and prosperity, death and destruction. … This day I call heaven and earth as witnesses against you that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Now choose life…"

The followers of Jesus understood their calling in similar terms. They called their movement "The Way." And The Teaching of the Twelve Apostles, one of the earliest and most highly esteemed Christian documents that almost made it into the New Testament (and written while some of the apostles were still alive), begins, "There are two ways, one of life and one of death, but a great difference between the two ways." The book goes on to exhort readers to love God and neighbor, forgive enemies, and avoid adultery, fornication, and idolatry.

Reconciling the Brother

This early ethical focus arose from the theological. God's saving action brought with it the demand that our lives mirror his character. Church discipline was (and is) one of the key ways of manifesting the intersection of the horizontal and vertical dimensions of our faith.

The classic text for discussing church discipline is Matthew 18:15-20. Despite the way we often use the text, it is not about procedure. Jesus is teaching first about reconciliation between "brothers"—that is, fellow followers of Jesus. "If your brother sins against you," Jesus begins, "go and show him his fault, just between the two of you. If he listens to you, you have won your brother over." Reconciliation is the goal. The church gets involved only when the offending brother refuses to reconcile. And if that brother remains unrepentant, the church should "treat him as you would a pagan or a tax collector."

Though the focus is on the horizontal, Matthew does not omit the vertical dimension. For Jesus concludes by saying, "Whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven." God affirms the results of both failure and success in reconciliation. (Heaven was often used as a metonym for God.)

Likewise, when in the same chapter Jesus tells Peter to forgive "seventy times seven," seemingly without limit, he adds a warning in the form of a parable. He tells about a servant who begged his king to cancel his debts, but who then turned around and threw another man who owed him money into debtor's prison. "This is how my heavenly Father will treat each of you," Jesus said, "unless you forgive your brother from your heart." This is a matter of simple congruity: Receiving forgiveness from God requires giving forgiveness to brothers and sisters.

We see the vertical and the horizontal intersect in Romans 6, as well. Paul categorically rejects the idea that God's grace abounding unto sinners means that we may continue in sin. "By no means!" he exclaims. To continue in sin would be incongruous.

He writes in startling terms: "We have been buried with [Christ] by baptism into death, so that just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life." He goes on to unpack these ideas: Our old selves were crucified so that we might be freed from our enslavement to sin and made alive to God, just as the resurrected Christ is alive to God. We no longer "present our members as slaves to impurity and to greater and greater iniquity," but we "now present [our] members as slaves to righteousness for sanctification."

The Divine Family

All of this turns on the idea that we are "in Christ." We are made "alive to God in Christ Jesus." In 1 Corinthians 15, Paul teaches us to think of Christ as the second Adam, that is, the head of a new human race. And as reborn people, we belong to that new humanity of which Christ Jesus is the head.

So when we talk about the church, we are not talking about a voluntary society of people who share compatible religious views or similar religious experiences. We are instead talking about those who are related by (re)birth into a new family. We are talking about the body parts of Christ. Our relationships to each other (the horizontal) do not exist apart from our relationship with God in Christ (the vertical). Indeed, it is our vertical relationship with Christ that makes possible our horizontal relationships with each other. The vertical constitutes the horizontal.

Now we are ready to understand why alienation and sin in the church must be dealt with, why accountability is essential, why reconciliation is not optional. It is inconceivable that Christ should be at war with himself. Alienation between followers of Jesus is tantamount to slicing open the body of Christ. Reconciliation between followers is the healing of that wound.

It is also inconceivable that Christ should sin. That is why Paul recommends that a flagrant sinner be separated from the church and handed over to Satan "so that the sinful nature may be destroyed and his spirit saved on the day of the Lord" (1 Cor. 5:5). Christ cannot ignore the sin or division in his body any more than you or I can ignore a growing, cancerous tumor.

Then again, reconciliation between followers or restoration of a sinner is as if a wound is healed, a cancer cured, and full health and vitality restored to the body, Christ's body.

High demand, indeed. High reward, especially.

David Neff is editor of Christianity Today.
Copyright © 2005 Christianity Today. Read more!

Creation Care: Prophetic Vocation of the Church

The last section of the Call to an Ancient Evangelical Future demands a life of “embodied holiness” in the world. Part of that is “to be faithful stewards of the created order.”

Northern Seminary’s Phil Kenyon has planned a one-day seminar that considers creation care “as a prophetic vocation of the church.”

This is something I usually don’t deal with in church. I believe in it, and I practice it. I recycle, conserve, and use compact fluorescent bulbs, but it usually doesn’t impinge on my church life.

The seminar presenter will be Steven Bouma-Prediger, chair of the religion department at Hope College and director of Hope’s environmental studies program.

Steven’s book For the Beauty of the Earth: A Christian Vision for Creation Care won an award of merit for the Theology/Ethics category in the 2002 Christianity Today Book Awards.

Phil sent me this brief description of the seminar:

Deafness, ignorance, denial, indifference. Four reasons Christians today fail to take seriously their calling as caretakers of creation.

How can we regain our prophetic voice against these barriers to living faithfully? What will empower us to be the earthkeepers God calls us to be?

Our sacred text, the Bible, begins and ends with rivers and trees.

Indeed, the biblical story tells us that everything God creates and sustains is very good and that we humans are charged with serving and protecting God's good earth. And in the biblical story God's good future is of the earth redeemed and restored, not destroyed. If we are to regain our prophetic voice, we must get the biblical story right, and we must learn to live into that story with faith and joy. We must learn to be faithful stewards of creation.

View details and information about attending the April 16 conference here.

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The Biblical Story and Stem Cell Research

One of the hallmarks of the Call for an Ancient Evangelical Future is the primacy of the biblical story over all the other narratives that try to tell us who we are and what the world is about.

Evangelicals almost always turn first to the Bible when they have a question or are trying to meet a contemporary challenge. But we often fall into proof texting rather than using the entire sweep of the biblical story to inform us. Likewise, we frequently use biblical passages as if they were written in our own day with our own society’s issues in mind. It takes time and effort, but it is worthwhile to look at the whole story and to try to make explicit all the links in the chain of connection between the biblical story and our own time.

At the moment, I’m attending a consultation on Human Embryonic Stem Cell research in Pasadena, California. One of the participants is Allen Verhey, who taught at Hope College for many years and moved to Duke Divinity School in 2004.

In his paper, Allen tries to look at medical research (including stem cell research) in the light of the whole biblical story and not just the familiar proof texts evangelicals got in the habit of quoting when they got entered the abortion debate in the late 70s and early 80s.

Allen contrasts the biblical story with other accounts of reality, including “the Baconian project” (Science and technology are the saviors that deliver us from the world's evils) and “the Capitalist project” (The market saves us from our ills).

He begins his account of the biblical story by noting that most Protestants who want to support stem-cell research start with an appeal to Jesus’ healing ministry. That is a noble place to begin. Jesus was a compassionate healer and so were the apostles. If that text gives us our orientation, it “forms a readiness to celebrate the research, including stem cell research, that may provide help for the sick and suffering,” writes Allen.

But let’s not stop there, he says. The story of creation “orients us both to turn from idols and to delight in the creation as a gift of God.” But what happens when nature (the creation) becomes our enemy (as it does when disease threatens)? And what happens when technology (including medical technology) becomes an idol? At times, the creation story helps us to resist that idolatry. But at other times it helps us to roll up our sleeves and bring nature back into line. It takes wisdom to know in any given moment which we are to do.

We also find in the story of creation respect for human dignity and for natural relationships. Human beings are not mere animals but are made in the image of God. We are also created to be social creatures who form marriages and families and societies. When it comes to medical research, this means that we cannot reduce other people simply to their bodies or their organs, which may be fascinating subjects for research but which are not ours to commandeer.

Clues from the Jesus Story

Now let’s turn back to Jesus. “The stories of his conception and birth point us toward a high regard for and generous hospitality to nascent life,” writes Allen. The application of that orientation to embryonic stem cell research will be familiar to evangelicals.

When as we look at Jesus’ ministry we see that he was not only a healer, but a preacher of “good news to the poor.” That means that when we confront questions of medical technology and scientific advance we need to be oriented to issues of fairness and “the effects of research and development on the lives of the poor.”

And then we look at Jesus’ death. This story (among the many other things it does) calls us to “a readiness to share suffering,” not just to eliminate suffering as modern scientific culture pushes us to do.

The biblical story ends with “God’s good future.” We’re not there yet, but we must always keep that in view as we struggle with contemporary challenges.

Allen summarizes his survey of the biblical story this way:

These orientations ... do not always point in the same direction or towards the same conclusion. Until the good future of God we will live with moral ambiguity. The Bible does not provide a code for research, but it does form a community capable of moral discourse and discernment.

Now, if you’re looking for the Bible to always deliver clear answers to your questions, Allen's summary may not be very satisfying. But mature Christians know that you can’t always expect the ancient text to give you a quick and easy answer. That’s why Jesus promised that we’d have the Holy Spirit to lead us into truth.

Notice what Allen says about how the Bible forms “a community capable of moral discourse and discernment.” Our task as a Christian community is to be formed by the biblical story, to engage vigorously in moral discourse, and under the guidance of the Spirit to practice discernment. That is not an individual task, but a communal one, and like much of what happens in community, it may have a longish timeline.

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The ideas in Allen’s paper were also covered in his book Reading the Bible in the Strange World of Medicine (Eerdmans, 2003).

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