Some New Testament Principles on Church Discipline

Listen as D. A. Carson speaks on the topic of church discipline in this address from The Gospel Coalition sermon library.

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One or two have advised me that I may have unwittingly discouraged some young students at the college who may perhaps be pursuing the BTh and be only 21 or 22 and feel I have come down so hard on young men in the ministry that they wonder whether they have missed their calling or should pack it in or what. To you I would say that I shall not back off one word of what I have said. By that I don’t mean to discourage you but to encourage you to seek the advice and counsel of those who know you best and who are most discerning.

If you get a consensus of genuinely godly opinion saying that you at the age of 22 or 23 are fit now to lead and serve in the church, God bless you, but if they tell you that what you really need to do is work a little, get a job, take some graduate education, and wait till you’re 30 as Jesus did, then do that. It’ll save you and the church a lot of pain, and it’ll make you a little more fruitful. It’ll maybe spare you from burning out too early.

So far from being a discouragement, it is meant to be a realistic assessment. It is meant to be an encouragement to press on for the long haul, not for the short emotional burst. Let me begin this morning by reading 1 Corinthians 5. I do not intend this morning to expound a whole passage but to deal with this topic in a kind of survey fashion, but perhaps we should read this chapter together, as I shall be returning to it again and again.

“It is actually reported that there is sexual immorality among you, and of a kind that does not occur even among pagans: A man has his father’s wife. And you are proud! Shouldn’t you rather have been filled with grief and have put out of your fellowship the man who did this? Even though I am not physically present, I am with you in spirit. And I have already passed judgment on the one who did this, just as if I were present.

When you are assembled in the name of our Lord Jesus and I am with you in spirit, and the power of our Lord Jesus is present, hand this man over to Satan, so that the flesh may be destroyed and his spirit saved on the day of the Lord. Your boasting is not good. Don’t you know that a little yeast works through the whole batch of dough? Get rid of the old yeast that you may be a new batch without yeast—as you really are.

For Christ, our Passover lamb, has been sacrificed. Therefore let us keep the Festival, not with the old yeast, the yeast of malice and wickedness, but with bread without yeast, the bread of sincerity and truth. I have written you in my letter not to associate with sexually immoral people—not at all meaning the people of this world who are immoral, or the greedy and swindlers, or idolaters. In that case you would have to leave this world.

But now I am writing you that you must not associate with anyone who calls himself a brother but is sexually immoral or greedy, an idolater or a slanderer, a drunkard or a swindler. With such a man do not even eat. What business is it of mine to judge those outside the church? Are you not to judge those inside? God will judge those outside. ‘Expel the wicked man from among you.’ ”

This is the Word of God.

Any society based on shared commitments and aims must have the right to discipline itself. I don’t care whether you’re talking about a flying club or a church, whether you’re talking about a philosophical debating society or a homemaker’s association. If there are stated principles and rules of conduct and goals and commitments, and then some seek from within to destroy those goals or commitments or to flout them, then any kind of self-contained society must have the power to discipline itself.

If it doesn’t, then with time its stated purposes evaporate. It may become a kind of nice social club of one sort or another, but its stated purposes either evaporate or change or become something else until its original purposes have so been transformed as to make the organization almost unrecognizable. This is axiomatic. It is nothing profound, but the situation is far more severe within the church once we recognize that from a cosmic point of view, we are engaged in warfare.

We are engaged in a struggle with eternal consequences. We are not simply a society like other societies. We have enemies against us that the local aeronautics association does not have, and those enemies are perfectly capable of insinuating amongst us people who wittingly or unwittingly have as their very heart’s breath the desire to destroy the church of Christ. That means the church must be vigilant.

There are peculiar responsibilities associated with discipline in what is sometimes called the Believers Church tradition. Once the Constantine settlement had taken place and the church more or less overlapped with empire, it was not long before the parish system developed. In the parish system, there is a weakening in certain respects, almost inevitably, of the barrier between the saved and the not saved, between the regenerate and the not regenerate.

By and large, once the system operates long enough, you get a situation where people are more or less assumed to be in the church unless proved pretty dogmatically otherwise, and then depending on the area, you burn them at the stake or confine them to oblivion or send them to outer Slobbovia or whatever. Thus, you maintain a purity of a sort, but it is a kind of purity that is more associated with the preservation of the state than with the preservation of the church.

There can be a parish system that is a little tighter than that, and it has been advanced in the best lines of, let us say, Presbyterianism. Presbyterianism takes on many forms, but in the best forms of Presbyterianism (the kind of form you would see advocated, for example, at Westminster Seminary or Reformed Seminary in Jackson, Mississippi, and other institutions of such remarkable caliber and spirituality), the way the whole business of church discipline is seen is a little different.

Here, the model is still the Old Testament in which there is a categorical distinction between the number of the elect and the number of the covenant community. The locus of the covenant community is larger than the locus of the elect. You and I would agree with that under the old covenant. Those who enter by birth into the covenant community are circumcised, if they’re male, and thus become members of the covenant community.

But that by itself does not necessarily mean they will constitute part of the remnant, part of the elect, part of those who have been transformingly touched by the power of God, who remain faithful to the covenant. There is a distinction, thus, increasingly clear through the progress of divine revelation under the old covenant, between the locus of the elect and the locus of the covenant community.

Presbyterianism in its best form transfers that view of the relationship between the elect and the covenant community to the new covenant. Under the new covenant, they would say, because this principle of familial blessing, of familial covenant, remains operative, likewise, under the new covenant, there is a distinction to be made between the locus of the elect and the locus of the covenant community. When you are born into a Christian home, you are baptized, in their view, and as a result you become part of the covenant community.

Baptism is a sign of the covenant, but that does not by itself mean that you are part of the elect. That will come to full fruition if by opening up as you go up to the blessings of the covenant, which have already in some measure been conferred upon you by your baptism and by your Christian heritage, you then open your heart in response to the appeal of the gospel in faith and repentance. Then you prove yourself ultimately to be amongst the elect as well, and there is a difference between the two.

Within that kind of framework, there is still room for church discipline, for when you start dealing with adults, people who are coming in from the outside, all the kind of discipline you or I might wish to apply can still pertain. Similarly, if someone grows up within a Christian family under this model, if a person turns reprobate, discipline can also be applied in theory.

But in practice, what often happens, even amongst the best of such circles, is that if a person grows up within that kind of framework and structure, unless he or she kicks the traces so violently as to make an absolutely disastrous federal scene, people don’t check too closely. They may be orthodox in creed without necessarily being regenerate. There may be some kind of acceptance of a certain historical tradition of interpretation of doctrine without necessarily a bold witness to conversion.

So there can be within that kind of tradition, which is about as close to the Believers Church tradition as you can get without actually coming into it, a slackening off of the principle of discipline. In my judgment, the foundational error under that model has little to do with baptism per se. Baptism is merely the entailment of their structure. The fundamental difference is a misunderstanding of the nature of the new covenant, for under the new covenant, the locus of those under the covenant and those under the election of God is identical. That is a distinction.

Under the new covenant, by its very nature, the new covenant members are those whom God has transformed and given a new heart. The familial principle has broken down. Under the new covenant, regeneration establishes the locus of the covenant community and thus, similarly, the locus of the elect. Thus, the ultimate distinction on the front of baptism really turns on an antecedent distinction on the relationship between the elect and the covenant community, and until that is grasped you never get anywhere in your discussions with devout Presbyterians.

That suddenly means that in the Believers Church tradition, which is what I’m referring to now, where the church is defined not by the covenant as distinct from the locus of the elect but rather by the covenant perceived precisely to include only those who are amongst the elect, those who have been regenerate, those who have put their faith in Christ Jesus, those who have been transformed by the Spirit of God …

When the locus of the church is perceived precisely in those categories, the responsibilities for discipline are awesome and immediate. They’re unavoidable. Failure to cope with that area in the life of the church is foundationally to misunderstand the very nature of what puts us within the Believers Church tradition. It is precisely to misunderstand what is the nature of the new covenant. It is to fall back again into the errors of the pre-Reformation days.

Let me then survey a number of areas of New Testament teaching on this matter. I want to begin by some survey remarks on the scale of discipline in the New Testament. Our problem, in part, is when we think of church discipline, we tend to think in black and white terms. There is no church discipline until we arrive at the crisis stage. Then we turf the offender out, and that’s church discipline. Church discipline in that kind of simplistic model amounts to excommunication. Plus nothing, minus nothing.

When we have followed through and ejected the offender, then we say we believe in church discipline. I suggest to you that in the pages of the New Testament there is a gradation of discipline, with excommunication and the handing over of individuals to Satan merely being the final stage. Unless we perceive this clearly, what we will do is let things get too far and then have a knee-jerk reaction that may well have been avoided under a wiser administration.

All of us in the ministry sooner or later face the ultimate test, but meanwhile, many such tests can be avoided by recognizing that discipline is a graded thing. You and I know that in our families, of course. Where we lower the boom on our children should not be decided on the basis of a simple decree in which the children are allowed to get away with absolutely everything until they commit the ultimate breach.

There is a series of rising penalties, a sharp word, some counsel, taking away of certain privileges, a smack, a full-clash confrontation, grounding for a month, and so on. There is a rising scale. If we do not see that, then we will have unnecessary problems with our children. Likewise, I suggest to you that the scale of discipline can be sketched out as in the outline.

First, a great deal of church discipline problems should be handled in the very nature of the ongoing public ministry. If the ministry is clear on the standards of holiness expected, the standards of conduct acceptable to the church, on principles of loving discipline within the church, some problems will be avoided in advance, whereas if we curtail our speech and cut our cloth out of fear of offending those who are most powerful or most influential or, God forbid, richest in our congregations, we may unwittingly be breeding a far greater breach a little farther down the pike.

Then there is the level of personal words of encouragement and guidance, which may not be administered only by the clergy but by one another. There is a place for mutual edification in these kinds of areas. Some people, particularly, have the charisma of encouragement, to use the language of Romans 12. This may go up one stage further to personal words of correction and rebuke.

What this means, therefore, is the church begins to take collective responsibility the one for the other. Thus, as a Christian, if a leader or not perceives that another Christian is drifting or a little cold or uncertain or perhaps tampering with something that might be dangerous, there ought to be within the church the kind of give and take whereby the Christian who is concerned backs off, prays about these things, considers them.

Perhaps he or she invites the other into his or her home and says, “I don’t mean to be nosy. I don’t mean to precipitate a crisis or meddle in your affairs, but I’m a little concerned. It seems to me you’re down recently. I haven’t noticed you praying anymore. Is there something wrong that I can help you with? Please, I’m not talking down to you. I’ve gone through those things myself. Can I help?”

Thus, there is a discharge of personal responsibility that encourages, rebukes, exhorts, and challenges, as each member demonstrates love for the other by discharging those kinds of checkup services, the one toward the other. That can be fostered by the leadership.

Now I can hear somebody saying, “Oh yes, but you don’t understand. In my church, I have one or two nosy old characters who meddle in everybody’s business and feel that they have a direct pipeline to God. Woe betide the person who commits some miscellaneous breach that is neither here nor there. Perhaps some person brought in off the street, barely converted, is seen going to a Disney movie, and that’s enough to lower the boom.”

Well, we will have such things. That’s true. On the other hand, it may be part of discipline to deal with such people as well and suggest that they stop being quite so nosy and teach them a little better way of encouragement and modeling rather than simply destroying people by unqualified criticism. It is extremely important that we foster in our people a sense of responsibility toward other members in the church.

Eventually, it may get to the person-to-person level, and then when you read Matthew 5 and Matthew 18 side by side, you discover that where there is someone who is offended or someone who is the offender, in both cases the offender or the offended is responsible to go to the other party. That means that both parties are responsible to go to each other. The only question is which one is going to obey first.

It’s not a question of the offended saying, “Well, he committed the offense; therefore, it’s his responsibility to come to me. I’m not going to him.” You can’t read Matthew 5 and Matthew 18 back to back without seeing that it cuts both ways. That too must be fostered in the church. If some of the leadership of the church perceives that this kind of thing is going on, then it behooves them to facilitate such confrontation as well.

Then you will find some instances where reconciliation seems to be very difficult, and this raises the level to small-scale confrontation with witnesses, the Matthew 18 passage, bringing two or three along with you. Then the ultimate sanction: tell it to the church. I am persuaded that in the vast majority of our churches, churches that have sat under biblical ministries for years, there is far, far more wisdom on such matters than we give the church credit for. Provided only that it all comes out, tell it to the church.

At that point, if there is no repentance, the church may proceed to excommunication, to putting the person outside the boundary of the church, outside the confessed fellowship of the church. It is at that point that the kind of language Paul uses in 1 Corinthians 5 becomes extremely important. It is not that we are so holy and so good we refuse to deal with drunkards, idolaters, swindlers, liars, thieves, and the sexually immoral. No, we ought to be dealing with them and rubbing shoulders with them every day, but not if they’re professed believers. That’s what Paul says.

If it were the other, Paul says, then you’d have to withdraw from the world itself, and some of us have tried, which is why we don’t have any non-Christian friends to witness to. That’s not what Paul is talking about by separation and holiness. You’d have to exclude Jesus if that were the nature of holiness. But where the person is a professing Christian and flagrant in his or her abuse, then the biblical principle is clear. No association whatsoever, not even to eat.

Then this excommunication may go one stage further: the handing over of individuals to Satan for the destruction of the flesh. Some see this as merely a kind of poetic way to describe excommunication. In other words, once a person is within the church, there is a kind of protection enjoyed by the covenant community under the divine Spirit, keeping, preserving his own.

But once a person has been ejected by that community to outside the church, as it were, the person is principially being cast from outside that protection of the sovereign Lord of the church so that he is already returned to the domain of Satan where he may be destroyed. That’s possible, but I do not think it is quite sufficient to deal with the language that is used, which crops up not only here but in 1 Timothy, chapter 1, where, again, Paul as an apostle by himself is prepared to cast out certain people for the destruction of the flesh.

Then there are hints of this kind of terror elsewhere, when, for instance, Paul writing in his second epistle to the Corinthians, chapters 10–13, where he’s facing false apostles and a church that is going amok, insists that the church exercise discipline on its own leaders and preachers, and if they do not, he says, “Be assured that when I come I will come with wrath.” As he puts it at the end of 1 Corinthians 4, “Do you want me to come like a father or with a whip?”

That suggests something pretty terrifying. Nor is that all that exceptional in the New Testament. We not only think of something like Ananias and Sapphira, but we think of what Paul writes regarding the abuses at the Lord’s Table. “For this reason, some among you are sick, and some have already fallen asleep.” They have died because of their abuses at the Lord’s Table. Well, then, what is this handing over to Satan for the destruction of the flesh?

The NIV in 1 Corinthians 5:5 renders flesh here sinful nature, handing a person over to Satan so that the sinful nature may be destroyed, using the quasi technical sense of flesh that is often found in Paul. The idea in this interpretation seems to be that with this person being buffeted by Satan enough, he will learn a little bit of humility, a little bit of brokenness and contrition, and thus his rebellious sinful nature will be broken down, and hopefully then he will repent and return to the church.

The problem with that view, it seems to me, is that the language of chapter 5, verse 5, and the corresponding passage at the end of 1 Timothy 1 relates the destruction of the flesh to Satan’s intent, to what Satan is doing, and whatever Satan is doing, he’s not trying to destroy the sinful nature. He’s trying to destroy the flesh. There may be an overarching purpose from our framework that says we hope the result of all of this will be restoration and repentance, but that surely isn’t what Satan is hoping for.

Because syntactically this destruction of the flesh is tied into Satan’s purpose, I take it that this is a self-conscious handing over of the individual under extreme circumstances, not only to the domain of the ruler of the power of the air but to the actual self-conscious determination by God through his people to destruction.

A friend of mine quite a number of years ago, who has now gone to be with the Lord, was pastoring a church in the outback of Australia. It was a small town. This was a Baptist church, but it was really the only church in town. A lot of people had gone. Maybe 200 people on a Sunday morning. He went there as a young man and found that he couldn’t control the situation.

It was allegedly a Baptist church, superficially confessionally correct and sound, but he wasn’t there very long before he found that in this rough, tough outback situation, the leading people on his board were either crooked in business or sleeping around or harsh and cruel at home. He tried to preach the Word for 18 months and bring discipline, but because the leaders in the community and the leaders in the church were one and the same, discipline just couldn’t be exerted.

There wasn’t anything he could do. He was only a young man in his late 20s. He was lonely, single, far away from the nearest fellowship. After 18 months, he began to cry to God daily with tears. The heart of his prayer was, “Lord God, this is far beyond me. I can’t cope with this. Either remove me, put me someplace in a job the size of my ability, or you clean up the church. God, you know I’ve tried, but I can’t do it. You clean up the church or take me out.”

He prayed like that in earnestness and brokenness for three months, and in the next three months he had 16 funerals, all leading men in the church, and the next year he baptized 200. Brothers and sisters, we are not playing games. We just don’t take the Word of God seriously enough. Nor is this the kind of prayer to be prayed too quickly (we might be the first to go), nor with vindictiveness, but only with contrition and very careful self-examination and after all other recourse has been carefully exploited.

If you believe Christ died to make a holy bride, can there be any other explanation? Let me turn to some realms of conduct and thought that demand discipline. They are in the Scripture three: the realm of truth, the realm of moral action, and the realm of love. I do not have time to go over these in great detail. Let me list you some examples.

First of all, the realm of truth. There are certain confessional statements, which, if denied, render the judgment necessary that the denier is not a Christian. What those statements are in the New Testament vary, as I’ve already indicated, from epistle to epistle, depending on the particular error the writer is confronting. In the case of the Johannine epistle, the crucial error is some kind of proto-Gnosticism in which Jesus is not confessed as Christ.

Thus, you find in 1 John the judgment made in the strongest possible terms. First John 2:22: “Who is the liar? It is the man who denies that Jesus is the Christ. Such a person is the antichrist—he denies the Father and the Son.” The same theme recurs again and again. Correspondingly, the truth test, enunciated in chapter 4, verses 1–6, is precisely the confession that Jesus is Christ come in the flesh.

Elsewhere, other truth tests are applied. They are almost always foundational, Christological, dealing with something like Christ rose from the dead or the like. They are not peripheral points, but when the cardinal truth of the gospel is denied, that central truth without which a person is not a Christian, discipline is sometimes meted out in the strongest terms.

Then there is the realm of moral action like that we saw in 1 Corinthians 5, where apparently someone is sleeping with his stepmother. We judge his stepmother rather than his mother simply because of the odd expression. It is reported that a man is taking his father’s wife. If it was just his mother, it would probably just say “mother,” but “his father’s wife” probably hints at a stepmother kind of situation. Even so, this is viewed biblically as incest. Such gross incest, in fact, that Paul says the pagans of Corinth, notorious for their immorality, scarcely know what to do with it.

The third is the realm of love. That one I suggest we have given too little thought to, partly because most of us have come out of fundamentalism, historically considered, in which we have waged a great deal of effort on this matter of defending the truth. In fact, the Scriptures also teach, “Warn a divisive person once, and then twice, and then have nothing to do with him.”

When was the last time in your experience that church discipline was exercised on a perpetually divisive person, on a chronically and persistently loveless person? Let somebody sleep around and we’ll lower the boom. Let somebody deny one of the tenets of the faith and he’s in big trouble. Let somebody be a perpetual critic, a bad-mouther, a divisive person, and we’ll simply skate gingerly around him so as not to cause unnecessary offense.

The truth of the matter is the power of the gospel results in a transformed life, which includes love for the brothers. The same epistle of John that insists in the strongest possible terms that the person who denies that Jesus is the Christ is the antichrist also insists that anybody who claims to obey Christ but does not do the truth is also outside the pale and also insists beyond that that the person who does not love does not know God.

First John 3, verse 14: “We know that we have passed from death to life, because we love our brothers. Anyone who does not love remains in death. Anyone who hates his brother is a murderer, and you know that no murderer has eternal life in him.” The description is just as strong as in the truth area or in the moral area. I hasten to add that none of these things should be exploited too quickly or the chain pulled too fast.

After all, people get converted from all kinds of levels of background and understanding, and you might find someone who is converted from a terrible background, where there has been no emotional security in the home and no knowledge of the Word and where the steps of growth are small, where there might be real emotional, almost syrupy kind of love for the Christians one day, and then violent temper and hatred the next day. We’ve all seen these kinds of transformations taking a long time, and you don’t say, “Boy, you blew up today, brother. You’re on your way out.”

What is at stake in this kind of discipline, whether it’s in the truth area or even in the moral area or in this love area, is the direction of a life … whether there is change toward the good as we see the transforming grace of God gradually taking over progressively, or whether there is a persistent, defined, defiant stance. Where that takes place in any of three areas, ultimately the sanctions of the church are increased until the ultimate one is applied.

Then I may briefly comment on the people who exercise discipline. Some of this, of course, is already implied in what has been said so far. There are those passages, for example, where ordinary Christians are exhorted to admonish one another, to confront one another and help one another, which presupposes that it is a kind of corporate undertaking. You find this kind of thing in 1 Thessalonians, chapter 5, verses 12 and following. A balance between the two.

“Now we ask you, brothers …” Here quite clearly writing to the whole church. “… to respect those who work hard among you, who are over you in the Lord and who admonish you. Hold them in the highest regard in love because of their work. Live in peace with each other. And we urge you, brothers, warn those who are idle, encourage the timid, help the weak, be patient with everyone. Make sure that nobody pays back wrong for wrong, but always try to be kind to each other and to everyone else.”

There is a responsibility in the entire community to exercise this kind of level of discipline. Then the situation may exacerbate to the final level where the church is brought into things. “Tell it to the church.” Until Paul can picture the situation in 1 Corinthians 5 and say, “I’m not really there, but I’m with you in spirit,” by which he does not mean he’s almost omnipresent himself.

It’s the same kind of language we use in our letters, saying, in effect, “I may be separated from you by half a continent, but I’m with you in my heart,” or “I meet you around the throne of grace in prayer,” or something like this. That’s all that Paul means by this kind of language. But then he says, “When you come together as a whole church in the name of the Lord Jesus, this is what you, as a church, are to do,” which is congregational government.

Final sanctions, then, are imposed by the consensus of the church, meeting in the name of the Lord Jesus, on errant members, but there is a sense in which there is also responsibility given to individual leaders. This is not only exemplified by Paul, for whom allowance must be made because of his special apostolic insight from time to time, but also in Paul’s perception of the responsibilities of elders to handle the affairs and discipline of the church.

This means they will have more choices to make. They will be the ones who initiate action again and again. They will be the ones who will bear the brunt of such matters, and it may be on occasion, when they sense that the church has so far gone they cannot bring the church to consensus, they may intercede with God in some kind of desperate way to bring about the purity they cannot achieve through the consensus of the church.

Ultimately, it is God who brings judgment, and his normal route may be through the church, through individuals, through mutual admonition, but Peter reminds us that judgment must begin with the help of God. God wants a pure church. The whole burden of 1 Corinthians 10–13 is that the church had better get its act together and clean up the false leadership that is leading it astray, because if they don’t, when Paul comes he’s going to do it. God is going to do it through the apostolic hand.

The burden of five of the seven letters in Revelation 2–3 is that the exalted Christ says to these aberrant churches, “Clean up your act, or I’ll come and take your candlestick away. I’ll destroy you as a church. I’ll spit you out of my mouth. I’ll wipe you out.” This may not be sudden and dramatic. It may take a generation or two, but he’ll do it, because God wants a pure church. There is no particular inside track available to us who are Anglo-Saxon North Americans because we are Anglo-Saxon North Americans.

It does not follow because we are Fellowship Baptists that we will be on the cutting edge of the thrust in Canada. God will use whom he will use. If other groups who may not have their doctrine as much in order are purer or more aware of the transcendent power of God operating among them, if they are more profoundly committed to the lordship of Christ than we, even without all of their theological dots dotted and their T’s crossed, God may pass us by.

There are numerous purposes, in fact. The aim always, the hope invariably is for restoration. That is why Paul says in 1 Corinthians, chapter 5, “Hand this person over to Satan with the hope that this person’s spirit will be saved on the day of the Lord.” That’s the hope: restoration. Because of that, after you have gone through all of the biblical principles and see where the land lies, there are always huge tracts of turf where you must exercise a kind of pastoral discretion, spiritual wisdom.

When I was pastor in this province, I was phoned early one morning by another pastor, and he said, “Don, I have just found out that the chairman of my deacon’s board and the teacher of my adult Sunday school class has been arrested for embezzlement of hundreds of thousands of dollars. What next? What do I do now?”

In point of fact, the pastor wisely backed off. “No immediately calling the council. Back off. See how the man himself responds. Go and talk with him. You don’t shoot from the hip.” Before the day was out, the offender was out on bond and sought out the pastor, since this hit the press and the community in question.

The man came to the pastor with tears, and he said, in effect, “I want to tell you how it happened, why it happened, and where I am now, and then you tell me what I should do. I was living in too high-flying a style, so I began to borrow money that I had control over in the company. I did get my act together, and I was paying it back, but they called a surprise audit, and I was caught short. I don’t deny that I was stealing. What I did was wrong, and I have disgraced the name of Christ and hurt my family, lost my job, offended the church. Now you tell me what I should do.”

They were both weeping. The pastor called for the elders of the church. In fact, in that church they were deacons, or perhaps I should say they were elders but they were called deacons, or more precisely yet, they were elders and deacons but they were called deacons. He related all of these matters to them, and they came up with a plan that was then put into practice. The offender told the entire story to the board. They agreed together to present the whole matter to the church.

The man was asked to confess his sin to the church and to submit to the judgment of the church, precisely because this whole matter had hit the press. When the man had told the whole story, the elders then gave their recommendation to the church. They said in the light of the public breach that had been caused and the offense to the name of Christ, yet on the other hand in the light of the man’s repentance, they did not recommend excommunication.

What they recommended, instead, was that the man cease from all office holding in the church for a period of at least one year. They also recommended that the man be excluded from the Lord’s Supper for the same time. (In my judgment, that was a mistake.) They also recommended that the church support financially the man’s family through the crisis. Then the board told the church that if there was backlash against the family in the wake of these church decisions, anybody who committed such would, in turn, be disciplined by the church.

The whole matter turned out to be an immensely healing kind of thing. I can’t give you chapter and verse for each one of those steps. I can tell you the parameters, the principles. I changed, incidentally, one or two of the details in that story purposely to protect the guilty, because some of you with long memories may know of the case, but that was essentially what happened. I am persuaded that there are biblical parameters to be obeyed, and where the parameters are clear in the hard cases and in the light cases, it is fairly easy to follow Scripture exactly.

Where the Scripture does not speak explicitly, it still lays out parameters, and then there is a question of pastoral judgment and wisdom and discernment that has to be invoked. It’s not possible to say, “I can give you a proof text for each part of such decisions,” but it is possible to deal with the principles, the purpose of the restoration, the limits of the offense, the nature of the breach, the effect on the public testimony of the church, and come up with steps that are restorative.

That brings us to this principle of the purity of the church. There is no other purpose to Paul’s statements in chapter 5, verses 9 and following, where he insists that it is precisely with brothers and sisters who are flagrantly immoral or greedy or idolatrous, or whatever, that such separation must take place.

There is also, I think, the question of example. This comes out in a number of passages, perhaps nowhere more clearly than in 1 Timothy, chapter 5, where the church through Timothy is exhorted to refuse to entertain criticisms against elders unless there is a multiplicity of witnesses, but once an elder is found in breach, then he is to be rebuked publicly so that the others may fear. In fact, the biblical principle in both the Old Testament and the New seems to be that the more eminent a person is, the more public the rebuke must be.

One of the things I objected to so much, although it’s outside of ecclesiastical standards, in the entire Nixon affair was that all of the underlings got jail terms and the president got a pardon … a pardon before he was tried, if you please. It may, in the eyes of some, certainly in the eyes of Gerald Ford, have been a good move to bring peace to the country. I suggest to you it was a shallow peace. There would have been more peace if the man had paid for his crime.

The higher up you are in the pecking order, where there is equivalent breach, the punishment should be correspondingly severe, more severe and public, that the others may fear. For morally, the breach is more of a breach of the public trust, more of an offense to the church, the more public you are. In all of this, there is further a display of holy wrath, an anticipation of the judgment to come, a foretaste of punishment, which is nothing less than an index of God’s justice.

That brings us, then, to motives in discipline. In fact, ideally, our motives in discipline ought to be tightly tied to the purpose of discipline, but perhaps we may focus this a little more by looking at the opening verses of chapter 5. “It is actually reported that there is sexual immorality among you, and of a kind that does not occur even among pagans: A man has his father’s wife. And you are proud!” Apparently, these were people who thought that freedom in Christ meant to exemplify such freedom from the law by a flagrant breach of law.

Paul says, “Shouldn’t you rather have been filled with grief and have put out of your fellowship the man who did this?” There are some churches that are good at exercising discipline but not at being filled with grief. You show some deacons some little hint of moral failure, and they’ll shoot the whole thing to pieces and call it faithfulness, but where are the tears?

I have yet to see an instance where discipline has been exercised with tears that did not turn out well, but I have seen quite a few where there was no discipline or where discipline was exercised harshly and without tears that turned out disastrously. The truth of the matter is that there are two sins in this church. There’s the sin of the man who commits the offense and the sin of the church that did not grieve and exercise discipline.

The heart of the issue, brothers and sisters in Christ, is Christ loved the church and gave himself for her to present her spotless and without blemish in his presence at his appearance. If we have the task of evangelism, and if we have the task of instruction, and if we have the task of discipling people, we also have the task of making the church holy, and part of that task is, in the name of Jesus, with tears, exercising discipline, that Christ’s church may be holy on the day of his appearing. Amen.

Male: Dr. Carson has fed our hearts this week. I think you as much as I have appreciated his ministry very much and would give a hearty amen to my thank you to Dr. Carson for your ministry this past week and for the concerns you have raised, for indeed these issues have been very weighty ones that we must consider and issues that will produce no end of value in our churches as we mull over and apply the principles we have learned. We do have time for questions.

Male: Dr. Carson, with the reference in 1 Corinthians 5 of the gathering together of the church, and then the hint on the analogy with the Passover, is there reason to suggest that some discipline could take place during the Communion?

Don Carson: I doubt that’s Paul’s point here, except that, as far as I can see, most Lord’s Day services in the early church included Communion, but the use of the Passover in 1 Corinthians 5 functions on two axes, neither related directly to the Lord’s Table. One is the yeast thing. The Passover was the beginning of the Feast of Unleavened Bread, and here the use of the yeast is to serve as a symbol for evil. A little yeast contaminates the entire loaf.

The lesson that is drawn is if you don’t discipline people in the church, that little bit of evil will ultimately contaminate the entire church. That’s the lesson that’s drawn, it seems to me, rather than a connection with the Lord’s Supper. The second focal point is Christ our Passover was sacrificed for us, which is again dealing in antitypical terms, it seems to me, dealing with the purpose of Christ’s entire coming and of the purpose of the Passover in its typological foretelling even in the Old Testament.

Insofar, then, as Christ’s death is commemorated by an institution, namely the Lord’s Supper, which is, in some measure, a continuance with transformation of the Passover feast, then I suppose there’s something also to do with the Lord’s Supper, but it’s pretty indirect. It’s not exactly central to Paul’s thought.

Male: The subject is restoration, Dr. Carson, and the questions around the tension between holiness and the church and the grace on restoration and forgiveness, specifically as we apply it to elders and an elder falling into immorality. In your viewpoint, a person who does this, is there restoration to the office? What are some of the conditions that one might bear in mind?

Don: I don’t have a simple answer, but I can tell you the kinds of parameters I would use to test the case. I think it’s one of those where some discretion must be exercised, but there are certain parameters that have to be borne in mind. If one simply takes a simplistic stance … “If there’s ever a flagrant breach along those lines, never under any circumstances can such a person exercise high office again” … we may be saying something we don’t want to say about grace.

In the EFCA, the ministerial has now taken the stance that any man who has been divorced at any time, before his conversion or after his conversion, or married to a divorcee before or after her conversion is forever ineligible from becoming a minister in the Free Church. The argument for that position is that just as in the old covenant the priests, for example, were only to marry virgins and they were to be pure before the Lord and without blemish, so also in the new the leaders of the people ought to be models of holiness.

My problem with that, in part, is that the typological connection between the priests of the Old Testament and the corresponding New Testament characters are either Christ or all Christians, and that kind of thing makes me nervous. It may be sending out signals that we may not want to be sending out. On the other hand, where there is sexual immorality in the leadership of the church, almost always it is a signal of something deeper that comes in defiance of another criterion for that office, namely he who rules his house well.

Where there is sexual immorality, it rarely takes place on the spur of the moment. It is often triggered by some spur-of-the-moment temptation, but it is something that has been toyed with mentally. It is a reflection of a breakdown.… A man who is profoundly, deeply in love with his wife and working hard at the marriage is not easily taken in by a pretty skirt, so there’s a reflection of something much deeper that’s going on there.

Therefore, it’s not just a question of the person saying at the end, “Yes, I was wrong. I was caught, and I’m sorry.” There’s a question of a need for discernment as to whether or not there is a fundamental change in the entire familial relationship at some point. That’s much harder to assess, but it seems to me it’s the kind of thing that is not always borne in mind in such discussions. At the end of the day, what kind of model a person is in his home is still seen as something that is pretty central.

Then other factors. If because of the nature of the community, no matter how much genuine transformation over 10 years or 15 years, with demonstrated evidence of an entirely reformed marriage and an entirely reformed character and a real enduement of the Spirit and a real servant heart, an ideal kind of situation afterwards, where the restoration has made all the difference in the world and no one can speak evil against such a person …

Nevertheless, if in the minds of a particular community, which for good or bad reasons would be offended by the appointment of that person to office again and, thus, render his ministry ineffective, it seems to me that again you can’t appoint him. So there is an expediency level kind of judgment that has to be called for as well. As a rule of thumb, I would want to argue that someone who falls sexually in public office is going to be nine times out of ten, a very high percentage, simply ineligible thereafter.

There are too many complicating factors, and I doubt it will do the church or him any good, but I wouldn’t want to rule out the possibility of restoration absolutely. It seems to me there are some instances where there may be such an evidence of the overflowing grace of God that the part of wisdom, the part of excellent judgment is that there be restoration, even to office, with testing over long periods of time.

Male: How does a normal Joe or Jane Christian rebuke an elder?

Don: There are questions behind that question, if I may put it this way, as you yourself recognize. Occasionally, the Joe or Jane Christian in question is 19 and in his or her view going on 46 and feels that he has a kind of right to rebuke the elders where, in fact, he may simply be ignorant of the fact. Every church collects its catena of self-professed experts who can criticize anybody and everybody, and I want to exclude such people from my answer.

Therefore, the answer has to be a nuanced one so it’s not a question of how you go about it so that the people with that edge simply follow the rules and then feel justified, if you see what I mean. But where there is genuine discernment, where there is maturity, where there is apparently an honest plea, I think there are, again, some guidelines that ought to be observed.

First, don’t do anything without contrite praying about it first. Second, don’t talk about it with a lot of other people. Third, when you do it, do it privately, with a humble air, with a transparent desire to help rather than belittle or confront. If the elder is worth his weight at all, he may listen. Any other way, and I will almost guarantee he won’t.

If the breach becomes public enough, then it may be a question of following the biblical principles through and taking two or three witnesses and then ultimately taking it to the church, but that means it’s a very public breach indeed, and probably you’re not going to find two or three reputable witnesses in the church to even go to the second stage unless you really have a beef.

Male: I have one comment to make. As this is the conclusion of the Baptist basic beliefs conference, I’m beginning to think I’m amongst the Plymouth Brethren. The term elder crops up so many times I’m wondering whether we are not confusing our traditions. I will always refer to our elders as pastors.

That’s just an observation, but I have a question. Isn’t it true that there’s a heresy, almost, in our churches these days that tells us all sins are equal in the eyes of God, and because that is so, therefore no one has a right to discipline? The other question I have is why hand anybody over to Satan? Why not to God who is the Judge?

Don: On the first point, your observation about the nomenclature, I take your point that there is a kind of prevailing force in the traditions of any group, and I have no objection if we always call our elders pastors, provided we call all of them pastors. In favor of loosening up the terminology, we may draw some of the sting who are saying, “Where are the elders?” if we use some of the eldership language now and then and use them interchangeably.

I would also point out that in the New Testament, the term elder is far more frequent than pastor, which may, therefore, raise questions about the wisdom of our own tradition. On the question of the view that all sin is equivalent, there is a true sense of that kind of judgment and a false sense entirely. Your perception is entirely correct, I’m sure. There is a sense in which all sin without exception, large, small, or indifferent, is damning. Sin is sin in that sense.

It is always an offense against God and finds its ultimate heinousness in its defiance of God. In that sense, all sin is equally black, but that does not mean that all sin is equally black in every sense. There is some sin that is more persistent. Otherwise, it would be impossible to make sense of passage after passage after passage in both the Old Testament and the New in which, for example, the various sins and virtues of the kings are compared with one another. “This man was even worse than Jeroboam, the son of Nebat, who caused Israel to sin.”

You can’t make those kinds of judgments unless you can say that some sins are worse, or whatever. Likewise, when you find responsibility level statements, “He to whom much is given, from him shall much be required,” or certain people will be beaten with more stripes and other people with fewer stripes.… All of these things presuppose that there are gradations and levels to sin, and likewise there are levels of punishment in hell to be feared and levels of bliss in heaven to be gained.

Unless we see that, we have distorted biblical teaching on grace. Having said that, of course, I’ve answered implicitly the point of your question. There is, therefore, no warrant at all (I agree with you entirely) in the view that because we all commit sin and sin is always offensive to God, therefore we really cannot exercise discipline in certain cases. That is such a selective reading of the evidence that it needs to be exposed as the reductionism it is.

On the third point, I know that you yourself have expounded Job from time to time. It is true that God is the ultimate Judge, and there is a sense in which it would be appropriate to hand someone over to Satan to judge, but I think the reason this language is used is twofold. Partly, it’s a reflection of the fact that we are in the in-between period, between the already and the not yet, in which the saving reign of God is contested.

So as a result, you do have two spheres. It’s true, on the one hand, that all authority is given to Christ, but under that overarching authority there is a narrower sense of the reign of God in Christ, which is salvific. In one sense, everybody who is under the kingdom of Christ, the reign of Christ, is a Christian. If you’re in the kingdom in that sense, you’re born again.

Without being born again you cannot see the kingdom of God. You cannot enter the kingdom of God. In that sense, the reign of God is a salvific sphere. In a broader sense, since all authority is given to Christ, brother, you’re in the kingdom whether you like it or not. You can be the worst reprobate and you’re still in the kingdom in that larger sense of the king dominion authority of Christ.

Ultimately, of course, in the new heaven and the new earth, where there is no further contesting of the reign of Christ, the saving reign of Christ and the sphere of his authority overlap so entirely, apart from hell itself, that one no longer makes such distinctions, but in the interim period, there is a sphere in which Satan is still said to rule … doubtless under Christ’s supreme authority, but he is still said to rule. Thus, the church is under one authority, and the world is under another authority.

Because of that dipolar situation, if someone is excommunicated, he is then automatically put, in some measure, under the other authority. You’re either under one authority or under the other one. Then there may, in that model, be self-consciously a direct exposure of the person to the full-blooded attacks of the Evil One … from the Evil One’s point of view for the destruction of the Christian, from the church’s point of view in the hope that his spirit will be saved on the day of wrath. I think that probably accounts for the language.

Male: I have a question concerning baptism, which you alluded to at the beginning. In your recently published commentary on Matthew, it seems to me there would have been a couple of choice chapters, like 3 and 28, where you could have expounded the meaning of the Greek word and the theology of baptism and yet you restrained yourself. Any particular reasons for that?

Don: It is often said in Baptist circles that baptizo always means to immerse. That’s not true. There are quite a number of counter examples in the papyri. That’s why I restrained myself. That does not mean I am a crypto-Paedo-baptist, because in the vast majority of instances the word does mean to immerse, but because it doesn’t always mean that, one should not claim that it does.

Male: I don’t want to be in the business of intruding, but there are two or three things I want to say. Those of you who were here on Monday evening after Don’s first message may remember I asked a question with one word. I’m going to ask it again now. Satisfied?