Word of Salvation – Vol. 30 No. 16 – April 1985

 

Order And Discipline In The Church

 

Sermon by Rev. S. Voorwinde on 1Cor.5:1-5

Scriptures: Acts 15:1-21; 1Corinthians 5:1-13

Belgic Confession Article 32

Suggested Hymns: 47; 279; 426; 85; 442

 

Congregation of our Lord Jesus,

How is the church to be governed and by whom.  The Bible gives some very clear directives.  There is a very definite authority structure that the Scriptures lay down.  There are also very specific tasks that are allocated to ministers, elders and deacons.

Today we come to two aspects of the government or authority of the church; if you like they are the positive and the negative aspects of the church’s government.  Firstly, there is the matter of order and secondly there is the matter of discipline.  Obviously these are two sides of the one coin – the church’s life needs to be ordered and it needs to be disciplined.

So these are the two things we’ll be hearing about this morning/evening – order and discipline in the church.  Undoubtedly you’ll agree that we could have thought of 101 things that are more popular and more pleasant to preach about than this.  In fact there are many things that we would rather be speaking about this morning/evening, and there are many things you’d much rather listen to.  And yet, I hope you’ll make a real effort to listen because these are matters that are vitally important for the health and well-being of the church.  There must be order and there must be discipline.

As we look at these two aspects of church life, we consider each in three parts:

(i) in the New Testament,

(ii) in church history,

(iii) in our own day.

To begin with, then, we need order in the church especially when the church is faced with a challenge.  There is an issue that needs to be resolved, and there has to be order in the church if that is to be dealt with.

It is in Acts 15 that the New Testament church is faced with the first major issue and challenge from within its own ranks.  It is stated very forthrightly in verse 1:

“Some men (they were Jewish Christians) came down from Judea to Antioch and were teaching the brothers: ‘Unless you are circumcised according to the custom taught by Moses, you cannot be saved’.”

Why this problem?  It certainly sounds strange to our modern ears.  What Christian today even in his wildest dreams would imagine that you have to be circumcised to be saved?  But in those days it was a relevant issue.  You see the church was growing rapidly.  The Gospel was making tremendous progress, but this growth was somewhat one-sided.  The new converts were nearly all Gentiles.  And perhaps you can understand that this presented the more conservative Jewish Christians with a serious problem.  Before long there would be more Gentile Christians than Jewish Christians in the world!  Wouldn’t the influx of so many Gentile believers mean a lowering of Christian moral standards?  And when you think of what later happened at Corinth that’s not an unfair question.  So how could this new situation be controlled?

Many members of the Jerusalem church had a simple answer.  Since so many Jews had refused to recognise Jesus as the Messiah, they agreed they had to let Gentiles into the Messianic community to make up the numbers.  But these Gentiles should be admitted on the same terms as new converts to Judaism they must be circumcised and they must agree to follow the laws of Moses.

Now under the circumstances this way of reasoning may sound fair enough, but really the whole future of Christianity was at stake.

Was it going to have the right to an independent existence?  Or would it just be a sect within the Jewish religion?  Would it burst out of those old wineskins or would it remain forever confined?

Obviously Paul and Barnabas saw the implications and it brought them into sharp dispute and debate with these Jewish Christians.  To cut a long story short, the issue was settled at the first synod or Church Council which was held in Jerusalem.  After a lot of discussion, James who was possibly the chairman, stated a conclusion that everyone could agree on:

“…we should not make it difficult for the Gentiles who are turning to God.  Instead we should write to them, telling them to abstain from food polluted by idols, from sexual immorality, from the meat of strangled animals and from blood.” (vss.19&20).

And so it was.  It was a decision that was acceptable, that met the needs of the hour, but still it was a compromise.  The council didn’t ride roughshod over Jewish feelings and traditions.  Later on it appears that Paul took a more liberal approach with regard to meat offered to idols.  The church at Jerusalem, on the other hand, became increasingly narrow.  Still a split had been avoided between Jewish and Gentile Christians, between Jerusalem and Antioch, between Paul and the other apostles.  The synod had served its purpose and under the circumstances it had made a wise decision.  But remember they made a decision for then, and not for now.  Like the decisions of many synods it needed to be reviewed in the light of new circumstances.

As history rolled on there were going to be many more issues facing the church and there were also going to be many more councils meeting to deal with those issues.  The council at Jerusalem stood as a great land-mark in the life of the early church.  In principle a great victory had been won: salvation was by faith without the works of the law.

But still more battles lay ahead.  There was the question of the Trinity, of the two natures of Christ and the canon of the New Testament.  These were not matters to be settled in a day.  Sometimes it took centuries and many councils and synods to get a doctrine worded so that it was just right.  Today we enjoy the legacy of their work whenever we recite the Apostles’ Creed or the Nicene Creed.  Doctrines that we take for granted were hammered out during those early centuries of the Church’s existence.

But then by the time of the Middle Ages things started getting a little out of hand.  Soon there was an abundance of church laws and rules which became just as binding as the Bible itself.  This became known as “Canon Law” which had grown as a kind of crust around the Scriptures.  One of Luther’s most momentous acts was the burning of the book of canon law in 1520 in the presence of a crowd of students and professors.  That’s what he thought about the rules and regulations that the church had drawn up; they were fit to be burned.

The canon law might be burned, but something would have to take its place.  The reformers knew that a church without government or order is impossible.  And so, in Reformed Churches the Church Order replaced the Canon Law of the Catholic Church.  Our present Church Order is based on the one drawn up by the Synod of Dort in 1619.  Perhaps one of the best features of our church order is how short it is.  In the edition I have it’s 17 pages.  As someone has said:

“Our fathers purposely steered in the direction of brevity.  They believed that the best interests of the churches and the cause of God would be served by a limited number of rules.  They feared ‘rule upon rule and precept upon precept’.  They felt that multiple and detailed rules would bind the churches needlessly.  They loved their liberties.” (V.Dellen & Monsma, p.15).

So that brings us to the present day, and after almost 2000 years I dare say we aren’t doing too badly.  Those early Gentile churches received a letter from the apostles and elders at that first synod.  And now countless synods later we still have the gist of those decisions in a slender little booklet knows as the Church Order.

You might well ask: How binding is such a document?  If even the letter of the apostles and elders was meant only for those circumstances and not for Christians of all ages, then what about the rules of the Church Order?  Aren’t they just the words of men?

Yes, they are; and as such they must always be subject to the Word of God.  They can always be changed.  Only the Word of God binds the conscience.  The decisions of the church bind the conscience only in as far as they clearly reflect the Word of God.  If anyone believes that the Church Order or the church’s decisions deviate from the Gospel he must raise the matter in the church’s councils.  He is free to speak and must certainly do so if in his conscience he feels strongly about it.

This then brings us to the matter of church discipline and I’d like to deal with this question also as it occurs in the New Testament, in church history and again our own day.

In the New Testament there were various kinds of offences that called for church discipline: An offence could be public or private.  In Matthew 18 Jesus deals with private sins.  “If your brother sins go and show him his fault just between the two of you…!”  Only if he doesn’t repent is the matter brought before the church.  But there are also offenses that need to come before the church immediately.  The incestuous man in Corinth was a case in point.  His immoral relationship was public knowledge and it had to be dealt with publicly by the church.

Then too there might be offences in doctrine or in life.  Discipline might be called for in cases of either false teaching or ungodly living.  In some cases the one might lead to the other as happened in the church at Thyatira in Revelation 2 where Jesus says: “I have this against you: you tolerate that woman Jezebel, who calls herself a prophetess.  By her teaching she misleads my servants into sexual immorality.” (vs.20).

Whether a sin was public or private, whether it was a sin of doctrine or life, if the sinner did not repent he could be excommunicated.  As Jesus said: “Treat him as you would a pagan or a tax collector” (Mat.18:17).  Or as Paul said: “Shouldn’t you rather have been filled with grief and have put out of your fellowship the man who did this?” (vs.2).  “With such a man do not even eat.” (vs.11).  “Expel the wicked man from among you” (vs.13).  This may sound like very strong language, but it still looks rather pale beside the command in verse 5: “Hand this man over to Satan, so that the sinful nature may be destroyed and his spirit saved on the day of our Lord.”

This “handing over to Satan” occurs only one other time in the Bible.  Again it’s in one of Paul’s writings – his first letter to Timothy.  There he says this: “Some… have shipwrecked their faith.  Among them are Hymenaeus and Alexander, whom I have handed over to Satan to be taught not to blaspheme” (1:19,20).  This may sound very grim but notice that in both cases Paul has a positive goal in mind.

The man at Corinth he handed over to Satan so that “his spirit might be saved on the day of our Lord,” and with Hymenaeus and Alexander it was that they might be “taught not to blaspheme.”

But even so, the crucial question is this: Does excommunication always mean that you are handing that person over to Satan?  Or was that only something Paul could do as an apostle?  Louis Berkhof, in his well-known book on Reformed theology, would say “yes” to this last question: “These passages… do not refer to regular discipline, but to a special measure permitted only to the apostles and consisting in giving the sinner over to Satan for temporary physical punishment, in order to save the soul” (p.599).

Yet, we may wonder whether this is correct.  If a person is placed outside the church isn’t he then put into the realm of Satan?  He is expelled from Christ’s kingdom and placed in Satan’s kingdom.  This even seems to be the teaching of the Heidelberg Catechism which says that “by this censure they are excluded from the Christian Church, and by God himself from the kingdom of Christ” (Q.&A.85).  Obviously there are different understandings and interpretations on this difficult point.  Still we may find it hard to escape the conclusion that ex-communication involves handing the sinner over to Satan.  Even so, this is not the same as consigning someone to hell.  In Paul’s second letter to the Corinthians we hear the happy ending to this sad story, the man repented and was received back into the church.  It had been a drastic step, but it had the desired effect.  Again, in church history the practice of church discipline has had a chequered career.  In the early church it was taken very seriously.  Gross sinners were not only barred from the Lord’s Table, but sometimes even deprived of such benefits of worship as public prayer.  More than once even emperors were denied communion.  During the Middle Ages discipline became more and more of a political weapon.  It was applied not only to persons, but to impersonal objects as well such as buildings, lands and books.  Whole regions or even countries could be disciplined, and sometimes it was even applied to the dead.

The Reformers returned to the spiritual and scriptural principles of church discipline.  Calvin strongly emphasised it and in some Calvinistic churches (such as ours) it is regarded as one of the three marks of the church.  In the old Church Order of Dort (1619) the sins worthy of discipline relate to both doctrine and life.  A sample list is given: false doctrine or heresy, public schism, public blasphemy… perjury, adultery, fornication, theft, acts of violence, habitual drunkenness etc.” (Art.80).

So what is the situation today?  Unfortunately, since the 18th Century, church discipline has increasingly fallen into disuse in the larger denominations.  In the Reformed Churches of Australia, however, we have committed ourselves to maintain this Biblical practice.  In the 1982 yearbook for our denomination it mentions that there were 8 excommunications in 1981.

That’s very sad in one way and encouraging in another, in that it shows our churches are still willing to obey what nowadays must be one of the most unpopular commands of Jesus Christ.  As Francis Schaeffer has said:

“There is to be a sharp edge.  There is to be a distinction between one side and the other between the world and the church, and between those who are in the church and those who are not.  The simple fact is that discipline in the church is important.  For a church not to have discipline in life or in doctrine means that it is not a New Testament church on the basis of New Testament norms.”  (Church at the End of the 20th Century, pp 64-5).

Remember, discipline is for the holiness and purity of the church; and the church is to be holy and pure because Christ died for her: “Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her to make her holy, cleansing her by the washing with water through the Word, and to present her to himself as a radiant church, without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish, but holy and blameless.” (Eph.5:25-27).

As yet we cannot be that perfectly, but we can be it really.  And for that reality to shine through the church needs order and discipline.

Amen.

Publisher: Reformed Churches Publishing House, 55 Maud St., Geelong, 3220.