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Credo
20 November 2023

1 Corinthians 5:1-13

This is a slightly revised version of a sermon I preached at True Way Presbyterian Church on 18 June 2023.

 

In June 2021, The New York Times reported that the bishops of the Roman Catholic Church in America were at loggerheads about whether they should bar their most illustrious lay person from receiving Holy Communion.

The person in question is Joe Biden, the 46th president of the United States, and the issue in question is his liberal policies on abortion, which are an affront to the teachings of the Church.

Following the decision in 2022 by the Supreme Court in the United States to overturn the 50-year-old-decision Roe v. Wade, the issue regarding the excommunication of America’s Commander-in-Chief was revisited.

In May last year (2022), the Archbishop of San Francisco, Salvatore Cordileone, had boldly barred Nancy Pelosi from receiving Holy Communion for her pro-abortion activism, while she was still House Speaker.

The current debate has to do with whether the American bishops should take the same course of action against the President. For Biden is not only committed to support abortion (through all nine months of pregnancy); he is also equally determined to fight against those who oppose it.

Church discipline has always been a vexed issue, especially for the modern church. Many reasons have been attributed to this.

Some question whether disciplinary actions such as excommunication are the best ways to deal with a Church member who is living in sin or a Christian leader who is promoting heresy. Perhaps a gentler approach would work better.

Even those who believe in disciplinary actions such as excommunication hesitate when it comes to deciding when is the right time to implement it. Perhaps the offender should be given a little more time to come to his senses, repent, and change his ways.

Others argue that excommunication simply won’t work today, especially in Protestant churches. This is because there are insufficient institutional ties between the churches in the different denominations.

For example, if True Way Presbyterian Church were to excommunicate one of its members, he or she could just attend the church down the road. After all, Faith Methodist Church is just one MRT station away!

Still others have offered deeper reasons why Church discipline is such a neglected topic and practice today. Perhaps the Church is influenced by the postmodern dismissal of objective truth, and perhaps this has resulted in some ambiguity, some distortion to her moral compass.

In our passage from Paul’s first letter to the Church in Corinth, we come to the difficult subject of Church discipline. The apostle grabs the bull by its horns, and deals with the problem head-on.

‘It is actually reported that there is immorality among you, and of a kind that is not found among the pagans’, he writes in verse 1. ‘For a man is living with his father’s wife.’

Paul was appalled by the way in which the Corinthian church and its leaders dealt with this gross immorality: ‘And you are arrogant! Ought you not rather to mourn?’

He then instructed that the Church takes swift and firm action in the form of the most extreme mode of discipline: excommunication. ‘Deliver this man to Satan’, he writes in verse 5. And in verse 13, he commands the Corinthians to ‘Drive out the wicked person from among you’.

Besides Matthew 18:15-18, 1 Corinthians 5 is arguably one of the most important passages in the New Testament about Church discipline.

In this short sermon, I would like to invite you to reflect together with me on this important, if neglected, topic. I would like to guide our reflection by attempting to answer the following questions:

  • What is Church discipline in general, and excommunication in particular?
  • Who must the Church discipline?
  • What is the logic of discipline? What purpose does it serve?

WHAT IS CHURCH DISCIPLINE?

Let us turn to the first question: What is Church discipline?

Jonathan Leeman, an evangelical theologian and editorial director at 9Marks, has provided a clear working definition of Church discipline.

He makes the distinction between Church discipline that is formative and that which is corrective.

Formative discipline takes place whenever Christians ‘spur one another towards love and good works’ (Hebrews 10:24). So formative discipline occurs all the time – at the Sunday pulpit, in Sunday School classes and at small group gatherings.

Corrective church discipline is different.

According to Leeman, ‘corrective church discipline occurs any time sin is corrected within the body’. Corrective church discipline, he adds, ‘occurs most fully when the church body announces that the covenant between church and member is already broken because the member has proven to be un-submissive in his or her discipleship to Christ.’

Corrective discipline has always had an important place in the history of the Christian Church, and it is regularly exercised throughout that history.

In the teachings of the Reformers, corrective church discipline is one of the two keys of the kingdom of God, the other being the preaching of the Gospel.

In Matthew 16, we have the account of Peter’s confession concerning Jesus. In his answer to the question that Jesus put to his disciples, ‘Who do you say that I am?’, Peter declared: ‘You are the Christ, the Son of the living God’ (Matthew 16:16).

In response to Peter, Jesus said:

Blessed are you, Simon Bar-Jonah! For flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father who is in heaven. And I also say to you that you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades shall not prevail against it.

 

 

Then, in verse 19 of Matthew 16, Jesus said:

And I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.

 

Question 83 of The Heidelberg Catechism (published in 1563) asks: What are the keys of the kingdom of heaven? (Matthew 16:19). The answer:

The preaching of the holy gospel, and Christian discipline, or excommunication out of the Christian church; by these two, the kingdom of heaven is opened to believers, and shut against unbelievers (John 21:23; Matt 18:15-18).

 

The doctrinal standard of the Presbyterian Church, The Westminster Confession (1646), concurs. Chapter 30 states that as King and Head of the Church, Jesus Christ has appointed a government, with its own officers. ‘To these officers’, it explains:

… the keys of the kingdom of heaven are committed; by virtue thereof, they have power, respectively, to retain, and remit sins; to shut the kingdom against the impenitent, both by Word, and censures; and to open it unto penitent sinners, by the ministry of the gospel; and by absolution from censures, as occasion shall require.

 

Thus, in Reformation theology, corrective church discipline is placed alongside the preaching of the Gospel – they are the two keys which Christ gave to the Church.

The most severe form of corrective Church discipline is excommunication. This penalty is imposed on persons who have committed a grave sin, or whose actions have caused a serious scandal and division in the body of Christ.

An excommunicated person is excluded from the life of the Church. He is forbidden to participate in worship, and denied the sacrament of Holy Communion.

The Church’s practice of excommunication has its roots in the Old Testament. The foundational texts upon which this practice of Church discipline is based are found in Deuteronomy, especially in chapters 13, 17, 19, 21, and 24.

Those who are guilty of idol worship, contempt of the Lord, sexual offences and a variety of social crimes are condemned with the formula: ‘you must purge the evil from among you.’

WHO ARE TO BE SUBJECTED TO CHURCH DISCIPLINE?

This naturally leads us to the next question: Who should be subjected to the discipline of the Church?

Generally speaking, all breaches or transgressions of the biblical standards of doctrine and behaviour require some form of discipline. However, according to the tradition of the Church, there are at least two classes of sin that warrants discipline in the form of excommunication.

They are: serious moral delinquencies and heresy. We shall discuss each of them in turn, albeit very briefly.

Grave Moral Delinquency

The first offense that requires the Church to exercise excommunication is moral delinquency of a very serious and grave nature. In our passage in 1 Corinthians 5, Paul deals with an instance of this class of sin.

In verse 1 we read: ‘It is actually reported that there is sexual immorality among you, and of a kind that is not tolerated even among the pagans, for a man has his father’s wife’. The NIV renders it as ‘A man is sleeping with his father’s wife.’

Here, we have a case of adult incest. A man is having sex with his mother (probably his stepmother) and treating her either as his own wife or as a concubine, while his father is still alive.

Incestuous relationships are clearly prohibited in the Torah. We find this clear injunction in Leviticus 18:8, where we read: ‘Do not have sexual relations with your father’s wife; that would dishonour your father.’

Although Paul begins by addressing this concrete case of incest, he later expands the list to include other instances of moral delinquency in the Church that require discipline – immorality, greed, idolatry, slander, etc.

He ends the passage with a clear and uncompromising instruction: ‘Purge the evil person from among you’. This instruction echoes the refrain from Deuteronomy that I mentioned earlier which says ‘purge the evil from among you’.

Heresy

The second class of sin that warrants excommunication is heresy.

The New Testament is replete with warnings about false teachers and the destructive doctrines they peddle.

In Matthew 7:15, Jesus warns: ‘Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing but inwardly are ravenous wolves.’

Peter, writing to the Christians in Asia Minor, alerted them to the fact that ‘there will be false teachers among you, who will secretly bring in destructive heresies … Their condemnation from long ago is not idle, and their destruction is not asleep’ (2 Peter 2:1-3).

And Paul warns the Corinthians of ‘false apostles, deceitful workmen, disguising themselves as apostles of Christ … Their end will correspond to their deeds’ (2 Corinthians 11:13, 15).

In fact, Paul never tires of calling out and rebuking the false teachers who were circulating heresies in the churches under his charge.

In his letter to Timothy, the apostle instructs his young protégé to rebuke these false teachers publicly. In 1 Timothy 5:20 he writes: ‘As for those who persist in sin, rebuke them in the presence of all, so that the rest may stand in fear.’

But what about those who persist in promoting their false doctrines? Such persons should be subjected to the most severe form of Church discipline: excommunication.

The great medieval theologian, Thomas Aquinas, has provided us with a clear statement which helps us to understand how the Church should deal with a false teacher who refuses to repent.

In Summa Theologica, Thomas Aquinas writes: ‘if he is stubborn, the Church no longer hoping for his conversion, looks to the salvation of others, by excommunicating him and separating him from the Church …’

THE LOGIC OF EXCOMMUNICATION

We’ve come to our third and final question: ‘What is the logic of Church discipline? What do we hope to achieve by excommunicating a brother or sister in Christ?’

I would like to spend more time on this question because it is very important that we understand the purposes of Church discipline, especially excommunication.

I suspect that for many Christians, excommunicating a brother or sister in Christ from the communal life of the Church seems extremely harsh.

Didn’t Jesus command his disciples to love one another? And doesn’t the Bible teach us that love is patient and kind? That it bears all things, and endures all things? And didn’t Jesus command us to even love our enemies?

Of course, when a brother has sinned against God or is stubbornly promoting a false doctrine, we should confront him. We should rebuke him, and ask him to repent.

But God’s Word also instructs us to rebuke our errant brother gently. For in 2 Timothy 2:25 we read: ‘Opponents must be gently instructed (or corrected), in the hope that God will grant them repentance leading them to a knowledge of the truth.’

For these Christians, therefore, excommunication is such an unloving act. It is so intolerant and unkind. It is harsh, even brutal. Some Christians might go so far as to say that excommunication is an unchristian way to treat another Christian.

Surely, there must be a better way, a gentler form of spiritual correction and nurture, a kinder way to help our brother or sister who is struggling with sin.

I fully understand the concerns expressed by Christians who think that excommunication is too harsh and too extreme. In response to this view, I would like to reiterate a couple of points that I alluded to earlier.

Firstly, as an extreme form of Church discipline, excommunication should be used only for very serious offenses or sins.

In the case of the Corinthian church, Paul instructed the leaders to excommunicate the member because of the seriousness of his sin. Paul says that his sin is ‘of a kind that is not found even among the pagans.’

Secondly, as an extreme form of Church discipline, excommunication should only be implemented as the last resort – when all other efforts to convince the errant brother to repent have failed.

However – and this is extremely important – the Word of God clearly teaches that when a member of the church has committed a very serious offense, a grievous sin, and when he refuses to repent even after he has been confronted repeatedly by the leaders of the church, the church must act decisively. The church must discipline him by excluding him from its communal life.

Following the teachings of Scripture, the Church offers two reasons why discipline in the form of excommunication must be practised.

The first is that it is good for the Church, the community of believers. And the second is that it is good for the offender, the brother or sister who is disciplined.

Let’s take a brief look at each of these in turn.

Firstly, the exercise of Church discipline, even in its most extreme form, namely, excommunication, is for the good and wellbeing of God’s people.

I said earlier that the Church’s practice of excommunication is patterned after certain injunctions found in Deuteronomy to expel offenders from the community. The reason that is repeatedly offered for this harsh disciplinary action is so that ‘it may be well with you’.

This harsh disciplinary action is necessary. It is carried out for the sake of the spiritual health of the community.

For example, in Deuteronomy 19:11-13, we have the case of a man who attacks his neighbour and kills him. When the offender is caught, he must be brought to justice and put to death.

Then in verse 13 we read: ‘Your eye shall not pity him, but you shall purge the guilt of innocent blood from Israel, so that it may be well with you.’

In the context of the Corinthian Church, Paul calls for the expulsion of the offender or sinner for the sake of the wellbeing of the community. It is to protect the Church from being corrupted by the heinous sin of that individual.

Paul makes this abundantly clear to the sometimes spiritually daft Corinthian Christians not only by rebuking them for boasting about sin, but also by alerting them to the danger of spiritual contamination. ‘Do you not know that a little leaven leavens the whole lump?’

Today, we will say something like: ‘Do you not know that a bad apple spoils the whole barrel?’

But the point is clear. As the NT scholar Gordon Fee explains: ‘… in the NT leaven became a symbol of the process by which an evil spreads insidiously in a community until the whole is infected by it.’

Earlier, in 1 Corinthians 3:16-17, Paul describes the Church as God’s temple. In instructing the Corinthian Christians to expel the offender, Paul is cleansing God’s temple from unholiness and sin.

Secondly, excommunication is also for the good of the offender.

In verse 5 we read: ‘you are to deliver this man to Satan for the destruction of the flesh, that his spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord.’

‘That his spirit (or soul) may be saved’ – the ultimate purpose of excommunication is the salvation of the offender. Church discipline is meant to be redemptive.

But what about the troubling statement that preceded this one? What does Paul mean when he instructs the church ‘to deliver [the] man to Satan for the destruction of the flesh’?

To deliver the offender to Satan is simply to turn him back to the sphere of Satan – as it were – by excluding him from the edifying, nurturing and caring environment of the Body of Christ, where God is at work.

The expression ‘the destruction of the flesh’ does not refer to physical death. ‘Flesh’ here refers to the offender’s evil desires, his carnality, his sense of self-sufficiency, his pride. The New Living Translation has therefore correctly translated the expression as ‘so that his sinful nature will be destroyed.’

So here is the logic of excommunication.

By excommunicating the offender, the Church excludes him from the edifying, Spirit-energised and life-giving environment of the community of believers in the hope that he might come to his senses, repent of his sins and return to God.

Properly understood, therefore, the corrective discipline of the Church – even in its severest mode of excommunication – is never unloving or unchristian.

In fact, the opposite is the case. It is an act that is motivated by love: love for God’s people and, yes, love for the offending brother or sister.

But it is not motivated by a sentimental kind of love. It is motivated by agape – which at times can be tough, and even severe.

One of the best articulations of this that I’ve read comes from the pen of the German Lutheran theologian, Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

It is quite a long passage. But it masterfully summarises what we have been thinking about this morning. Let me read it to you as I bring this sermon to a close.

In his celebrated book Life Together, Bonhoeffer writes these remarkable words:

Nothing can be more compassionate than the severe rebuke that calls a brother back from the path of sin. It is a ministry of mercy, an ultimate offer of genuine fellowship, when we allow nothing but God’s Word to stand between us, judging and succouring. Then it is not we who are judging; God alone judges, and God’s judgment is helpful and healing. Ultimately, we have no charge but to serve our brother, never to set ourselves above him, and we serve him even when we speak the judging and dividing Word of God to him, even when, in obedience to God, we must break off fellowship with him.

 

‘You must throw this man out and hand him over to Satan’, Paul says, ‘so that his sinful nature will be destroyed and he himself will be saved on the day the Lord returns.’

Corrective church discipline is not unloving or unchristian. It is an act of compassionate love, a ministry of mercy. The ultimate goal is not to condemn. It is to restore, to redeem, to save.

Let us close our reflections this morning with prayer. Let us pray for ourselves, that we – as individual disciples of Christ and as a church – may by, God’s grace, continue in the path of holiness and truth.

I will use a prayer that is attributed to Thomas Aquinas:

Give us, O Lord,

steadfast hearts, which no unworthy thought may drag downward,

unconquered hearts, which no tribulation can wear out,

upright hearts, which no unworthy purpose may tempt aside.

 

Bestow upon us also, O Lord our God,

understanding to know you, diligence to seek you, wisdom to find you,

and a faithfulness that may finally embrace you;

through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

 


Dr Roland Chia is Chew Hock Hin Professor at Trinity Theological College (Singapore) and Theological and Research Advisor of the Ethos Institute for Public Christianity.