The Thirteenth Discipline

Formative and Reformative Discipline in Congregational Life

Lionel M. Moriah

• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN:
  9781610970624
  9781498258937
• eBook ISBN:
  9781630877217
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Church

Perhaps the most critical issue for healthy, growing churches is member care or life together, in keeping with the biblical emphasis on allalon--"one another." Member care demands that believers be passionately concerned for one another's spiritual welfare and physical and social well-being. This mutual care may be expressed in different ways, but they are always to be directed to the needs of the members of the body of Christ. That is the approach taken by the author of this book, which focuses on what may be construed as a negative subject--discipline. The hope is that a careful reading will reveal that Christian discipline, seen holistically, may be a most rewarding ministry, one that brings many benefits to healthy, growing churches as it nurtures loving relationships among people who care enough to speak the truth with love, as Jesus did.

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What is Christian Discipline? Should the Church Practice It?

What is Christian Discipline?

According to the World Book Dictionary, the semantic range of the English word “discipline” includes the following definitions: (1) training of the mind or character; (2) the training effect of experience, misfortune, or other happenings; (3) a trained condition of order and obedience; (4) order kept among pupils, soldiers, or members of any group; (5) a particular system of rules for conduct; (6) punishment, chastisement; (7) a branch of education or instruction; (8) methods or rules for regulating the conduct of members of a church; (9) control exercised over members of a church.1

“In its most general sense, discipline refers to systematic instruction given to a disciple. This sense also preserves the origin of the word, which is Latin, disciplina, ‘instruction,’ from the root discere, ‘to learn,’ and from which discipulus, ‘disciple, pupil’ also derives.”2 The word thus denotes the process of personal character formation of an individual in subjection to a master or system of study, as illustrated in the disciples’ relationship with Jesus: the formation of their characters was guided by his precepts and practices. By extension, discipline is a name given to the formal system of laws and directions intended to shape the private and public conduct of the church’s disciples—those being formed—and it includes training in such matters as the liturgical (worship) and pastoral care (service) practices of congregations and ministers or priests.3

In addition to its formative aspect, discipline also carries a reformative connotation, as seen in a number of the definitions outlined above: e.g., discipline means “punishment, chastisement” or “methods or rules for regulating the conduct of members of a church.” The Hebrew and Greek words usually translated “discipline” are also sometimes rendered “chastise” in English translations of Scripture,4 and that word certainly makes the corrective or reformative element of discipline more explicit. Discipline as chastisement may be described this way: “Church discipline is a response of an ecclesiastical body to some perceived wrong, whether in action or in doctrine. Its most extreme form in modern churches is excommunication where the offender is banished from the church community until such time as he or she repents or recants. Along with preaching and proper administration of the sacraments, Protestants during the Reformation considered it one of the marks of a true church.”5

Should the Church Practice Christian Discipline?

This is often where congregational conversations about Christian discipline—if they ever take place—begin and end. As has been noted, there is far from universal agreement that the ministry of Christian discipline should be exercised at all within the body of Christ. People who think it out of place usually raise one or more of the following overlapping objections: (1) Jesus always forgave sinners; (2) Jesus did not commission his church to practice internal discipline; and (3) Jesus decreed that the wheat and the tares should be left alone to grow together. Let us look at each of these objections in turn.

Objection 1: “Jesus always forgave sinners.”

The claim is often put this way: “Jesus never taught or modeled Christian discipline. He always demonstrated forgiveness toward those who were guilty of any offence.” Jesus’ treatment of the woman caught in adultery, recounted in John 8:1–11, is usually cited as evidence of his purportedly lax view on moral issues. The fact that Jesus did not declare that she was innocent, that he pointedly directed her to stop what she was doing—“. . . go, and do not sin again” (v. 11)—is often ignored in popular discussions of the passage, although commentators generally agree that Jesus acted here with both judgment and the merciful grace of forgiveness.

While many think the passage is the work of a redactor and not that of the original gospel writer,6 it is nevertheless accepted as paradigmatic of Jesus’ attitude toward moral behavior, in that his actions were balanced “. . . between truth on the one side, by which he condemns the woman’s sin, and grace on the other, with which he withholds condemnation from the woman herself.”7 In addition, in his response to the actions of the Pharisees and the crowd, Jesus pointedly, if tacitly, condemns their wrongheaded application of community discipline. He challenges their misapplication of Scripture, for the Mosaic law as set out in Leviticus (20:10) and Deuteronomy (22:22–24) called for both participants in adultery to be punished. He also realizes that this situation is less about the woman than it is an attempt to trap him, and he refuses to be drawn: His response to the question of the religious leaders—“Now in the law Moses commanded us to stone such. What do you say about her?”(John 8:5)—challenges the crowd directly by forcing its members to acknowledge the universality of sin: “Let him who is without sin among you be the first to throw a stone at her” (8:7b), and he appeals directly to the Deuteronomic passages, which say that “. . . those who witness a crime and bring home a successful accusation must then be the first to stone the victim. But the accusers must engage in self-examination.”8 Jesus thus illuminates the hypocritical and dangerously biased practice of judging others without at the same time judging ourselves, a phenomenon all too often present when discipline is misapplied, as it is here: There has been no trial; the woman has been summarily judged and is being publicly humiliated and punished as if she, alone, has sinned.

The Pharisees are attempting to embarrass Jesus, but they succeed only in embarrassing themselves as not one was able to claim to be sinless. Furthermore, they expose their gender bias—why is the male partner of the woman not being punished?—their complete lack of compassion for the woman—they could have brought her to Jesus privately, not in public—and ultimately their indifference to the spiritual well-being of the community, which is always affected by the sin of any member: They do not respond to Jesus or minister to the crowd; they simply drop the stones and scatter.

To be sure, the story demonstrates Jesus’ compassion toward the woman who sins. That does not mean, however, that he ignores or condones her sin: he does not. He bluntly condemns it, and in the clearest of terms, as we see in the language of the King James Version: “Go and sin no more.” Here Jesus demonstrates that a clear call to metanoia—that is, to a change of heart and mind and behavior, in other words, to repentance—and compassion on the part of the authority (in this case himself) are both required in such a situation, and he effectively endorses the process he outlines elsewhere (i.e., in Matt 18:15–22) as the way Christians should deal with sin committed by a fellow Christian. In that passage, Jesus exhorts his followers to deal with sin in the community, not to pretend it doesn’t exist. He describes how his followers should do this and, in strong language, instructs them about what they are to do if someone “refuses to listen even to the church” (v. 17), while nevertheless enjoining his disciples to forgive “seventy times seven” times (v. 22). This passage is placed between the parable of the lost sheep (Matt 18:12–14) and the parable of the unforgiving slave (Matt 18:23–35), underscoring that the context and purpose of disciplinary efforts is reconciliation between persons and restoration of right relationship between human beings and God—i.e., restoration of humans to their position as children of God, heirs to the covenant, those who do his will.

Thus does Augustine interpret the story of the woman caught in adultery told in John 8, arguing that Jesus is contending here for the exercise of courageous action and loving commiseration in the exercise of the pastoral responsibility for spiritual care. Augustine echoes the appeal for balance in dealing with the realities of sinful conduct of church members by pastoral leaders, as the following comment on his own outlines:

As Augustine noted . . . we are in danger from both hope and despair. That is, we can have a false optimism that says “God is merciful so I can do as I please” or a despair that says “there is no forgiveness for the sin I have committed.” This story shows we should keep these two inclinations in balance. There is no sin that God does not forgive. Christ’s death atoned for all sin. The only sin that remains unforgiven is the one that is not repented of. But, on the other hand, God’s call to us is to intimacy with himself, and sin cannot be in his presence any more than darkness can be in the presence of light. Christ’s atonement cleanses us from sin as we repent day by day, and his Spirit is working in us a transformation so that in the end we will come out pure, though not in this life (1 Jn 1:8). But sin must be cut off. We must take it seriously. Jesus himself often tells us to fear God and his judgment.9

Augustine here speaks of the reality of God’s forgiveness and compassion, while he also emphasizes, in no uncertain terms, that the community of the faithful must deal with sin in its midst. In so doing, he echoes the admonitions of Paul in his letter to the Corinthians (1 Cor 5; 12:24–26; 2 Cor 2). Paul says to them: “Your boasting is not good. Do you not know that a little leaven leavens the whole lump?” (1 Cor 5:6). His metaphor suggests that sin (even a little) is like yeast, which, if allowed to, will spread throughout the whole and may destroy the individual and the entire community: sin ignored (or handled badly as the Pharisees do in John 8) infects and affects the whole community. It is important to remember that “. . . Jesus is not implying the woman’s i...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: What is Christian Discipline? Should the Church Practice It?
• Chapter 2: Discipline in the Older Testament
• Chapter 3: Discipline in the New Testament
• Chapter 4: Christian Discipline: Views from the Congregation
• Chapter 5: Christian Discipline: Lessons from History
• Chapter 6: Matthew 18: Blueprint for Christian Discipline
• Chapter 7: Christian Discipline and the Secular Law
• Chapter 8: Christian Discipline: Confronting the Tide of Modern Western Culture
• Chapter 9: Establishing the Ministry of Christian Discipline: The First Three Pillars
• Chapter 10: Establishing the Ministry of Christian Discipline: The Fourth Pillar
• Afterword
• Bibliography