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The Protestant reformers named three "marks by which the true church is known": the preaching of the pure doctrine of the gospel, the pure administration of the sacraments, and the exercise of church discipline to correct faults. Today, church discipline is feared as the mark of a false church, bringing to mind images of witch trials, scarlet letters, public humiliations, and damning excommunications. Does discipline itself need correction and redemption in order to be readmitted into the body of Christ? We have asked several experts from different (and sometimes contrasting) professional and theological backgrounds to explain how church discipline fell into disrepair and how it can be revived, so that the true church can fully embody the pure doctrine of the gospel once again.

Day One | Day Two | Day Three | Day Four | Day Five | Day Six

Among American Catholics, the collapse of church discipline is symbolized by empty confessionals and more than $1 billion in settlements for clergy sexual abuses. Mainline liberal Protestants present the fool's gold standard of church discipline on every count: the hemorrhage in church membership, the closure of churches, the dilution of doctrinal and moral integrity, the absence of confession in worship, hyper-optimistic ecumenical romanticism, the avid neglect of Scripture, and knee-jerk politics. American Episcopalians maintain stubborn resistance to warnings by the world Anglican Communion that they have recklessly broken fellowship. American evangelicals also avoid church discipline as they acclimate to client-driven church strategies, desperately popular preaching, the health-and-wealth gospel, and the appetite to be really okay within modern culture.

Meanwhile, the attempts to revive church discipline are strewn with a long series of either ambiguous victories or utter defeats: the oft-ignored Mandatum on strengthening Catholic teaching in higher education, the epic struggle within the Evangelical Theological Society to resist openness theology, the thwarted efforts of the Judicial Council of the United Methodist Church to enforce the discipline on sexuality and doctrinal issues, and the basket case of the United Church of Canada. Like grade inflation in academia, the lowering of standards for the Christian life seems to have invaded every level of the Christian aspiration to accommodate neatly to modernity. Just try to enforce church law and see what happens.

Whenever laity or clergy are disciplined, it seems to modern eyes, and especially to the secular press, like overbearing legalism, moral insensitivity, and exclusivism. If any constraints are put on reception of Communion, it appears undemocratic. When church trials have sought to call voluntary believers to accountability to their own voluntary decisions and commitments, the press paints a picture of social injustice. Any attempt at accountability, even for the worst abuses, looks to modernity like oppression. Believers understandably wonder: How can meaningful church discipline be recovered in a culture that prefers no accountability at all?

It's true that at times some have been oppressive in their exercise of church discipline, but we must recall that the historical norm for church discipline has held reasonably firm for 18 centuries, from Irenaeus to Athanasius to Augustine to Thomas Aquinas to the Reformers to the Evangelical Revival and finally up to the reckless phase of accommodation to modernity. Then it comes to a full stop. The last century has seen discipline grow increasingly relativistic, flabby, ambiguous, or altogether disappear. Only our contemporaries regard a precipitous drop of standards for baptism and Communion as acceptable and inevitable—maybe even normative and healthy.

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August (Web-only) 2005, Vol. 49