What About Church Discipline?

The purpose of church discipline is restoration, a process that is to be initiated by a person injured or offended by a wrong behavior. The disciplinary process has no valid application to erroneous beliefs, as such. The New Testament never suggests that worldly penalties should be attached to the process.

Church discipline, as taught in the relatively few New Testament passages on the subject, is a process for the correction of harmful behaviors, not the correction of disapproved beliefs.  Matthew 18:15-20 is often identified as the key New Testament passage on church discipline, and it is the only passage that speaks clearly to the disciplinary process to be followed.  Matthew 18:15 starts, not with the whole church, but with two individuals—the person addressed (“you,” singular) and a person who has sinned.  The verb used for sin is the broad term, hamartanō, meaning to miss the mark, err, wander from the right path, do wrong.  Still, the KJV reading that the erring brother must sin “against you” for the passage to apply seems implicit.  If your brother’s sin did not affect you, or escaped your notice, why would you do anything about it?  Further, the word itself implies an action that somehow strays from righteousness, not a wrong idea.  On this point, Matthew 18:15 is in full agreement with Galatians 6:1, which says that, if anyone is overtaken by a “fault” or “trespass”, where the word translated “fault” (paraptōma, a “false step”) implies wrongdoing, those who are spiritual around him should restore him with a gentle spirit, not in anger, being willing to listen to his side. 

Matthew 18:15 is the first step in this restoration process—“you,” a person who was actually affected by the sin–should go to the one who sinned and correct him privately.  If he listens to you, this is all the correction that is needed.  Only if he fails to listen are further steps—first taking a few others with you, then going to the church—even needed.  But the whole process begins with a harmful behavior that affected “you”—the person who is initiating the disciplinary process.

Similarly, in I Corinthians 5, the other major passage often referenced in discussions of church discipline, the causes for discipline that are mentioned are all behaviors, not beliefs.  The bad example which evoked the discussion was very clearly an outward behavior—open and notorious sexual immorality, in which a man in the church was involved with his own step-mother.  1 Corinthians 5:1. This adulterer’s open sin had contaminated the whole congregation, who arrogantly defended his right to do this instead of mourning his sin. 

After passing judgment on that man, and urging the Corinthians to put away malice and wickedness, instead celebrating in sincerity and truth¹, Paul instructs the Corinthian believers individually not to associate with immoral people in the church².  Particularly, they are not to associate with those who call themselves believers, but who are openly sexually immoral (pornos, like the man who had his father’s wife in 1 Corinthians 5), greedy (pleonektēs), an idolater, one who speaks evil of others (loidoros), or a swindler². (I here note in passing that, while the modern church takes great pains to distance itself from sexual immorality, it makes fun of swindlers, usually closes its eyes and ears to evil speaking, e.g., “harmless” gossip, occurring in its midst, and actually promotes greed–“entrepreneurial ambition”–and honors the greedy if they have been successful in amassing wealth.  Yet Paul groups all of these together with idolatry!) The believers could associate with such people in the world—otherwise they would have to leave the world.  But they were not to associate with people who came into the church and claimed to be believers, if they behaved in these ways.   

Of course, there are passages that tell us, individually, to avoid deliberately divisive people within the Body of Christ, until they repent. Romans 16:17; 1 Timothy 6:3-5; Titus 3:10-11. This is merely an extension of the broader principle of shunning foolish questions and empty chatter, which are generally destructive, to the question of church unity. See, 1 Timothy 1:3-7; 2 Timothy 2:16-18; Titus 3:8-11. 1 Timothy 1:3-4 and Titus 3:10 also appear to give church leaders a role in warning such people to cease trying to create divisions by leading others to follow them in false teachings. But even in these scriptures the emphasis is on the behavior–trying to create a faction, a division–rather than on the doctrinal substance of the teaching. Right doctrine is to be taught by clear positive presentation and by living a life in conformity with it, not by arguing with those who dissent from it. Matthew 28:18-20; 2 Timothy 2:1-19; 2 Timothy 3:16-4:5; 2 Timothy 2:1-14.

But, for purposes of this discussion, the most important points about all of these passages are that they deal with damaging behaviors rather than beliefs, and that, even when people must be put out of the church because of their behavior, this is for their ultimate restoration, and, in the interim, they are still to be treated as human.   For instance, the end of the situation Paul dealt with in 1 Corinthians 5 is reported in 2 Corinthians 2:5-11, in which the man who had previously sinned so openly had now repented, and Paul urged the Corinthians to restore him to their fellowship and to comfort him.  And in Matthew 18:17, we are told that a person put out of the church is to be treated as a Gentile and a tax collector–that is, just like any neighbor who is outside the Body of Christ–not a condemned criminal.  Jesus ministered to Gentiles on several occasions, was accused by his enemies—correctly—of going to eat with tax collectors, and even had a repentant tax collector (Matthew, the author of Matthew 18!) as one of his chosen disciples. 

The New Testament never advises that persons disciplined by the church for continuing destructive behavior should be hanged, burned,tortured, imprisoned or exiled. Nor does it ever say anything about imposing these–or any other–penalties on believers whose only “offense” is failure to fully assent to a doctrinal statement. The idea that these earthly penalties should attach to acts of church discipline did not arise until the visible church in the West became “Christendom,” a political entity in which everyone in the political community was formally considered a part of the Church.  In the New Testament, the purpose of discipline is always restoration.