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Now we delight in our supposed freedom to baptize without catechizing, and to receive communicants without repentance. If it sounds modern, it is. Such things were seldom heard before modernity among either Catholics or Protestants.

During a time of bloody persecution in 3rd-century Carthage, many believers were tempted to lapse into evasive acts of idolatry. Cyprian, their caring and courageous bishop, painstakingly and compassionately brought them back to a strong community of confession. He carried out this work even amid continued persecution by rigorous discipling and by allowing those who showed thorough evidences of sincere repentance that they were ready to re-enter the community of faith.

Cyprian set the bar assessing those evidences high. Those who wanted to return to the Christian community but spurned the grace that enables godly living were not cast away entirely from the pastoral care of the church. But neither were they allowed to return cheaply into full communion until evidencing a meaningful repentance with acts of reparation. Cyprian himself was willing to die for his faith, and later did.

Martin Luther, in guiding the 16th-century church back to the apostolic teaching of salvation by grace through faith active in love, was aware that the gospel of grace is so freeing that it might become an excuse for licentious behavior. Like Paul, he was ready to answer the question: "Shall we sin that grace may abound?"

Many of his time were ignorant of the meaning of their baptism. Under his reform, every Lutheran communicant was called upon to learn the deeper personal meaning of each of the Ten Commandments in the light of grace, to ask for the grace of repentance through the Lord's Prayer, and to understand each article of the Apostles' Creed as a summary of faith.

Among other significant models of historic church discipline, we see Ignatius nurturing the continuity of the apostolic witness, and Nicaea challenging Arius. The distortions of the Marcionites, Gnostics, and Montanists were carefully examined under the criteria of apostolic testimony. The lapsed were allowed to return, but only with repentance. Efforts to bring the Donatists back into full communion continued for centuries.

Later, Calvin worked tirelessly to tame both the Genevan church and society. Bunyan sought to keep Christian on the narrow path to the celestial city. Spener and Franke sought to transcend conventional, nominal Christianity. Especially Richard Baxter provided Protestants with a rich and thoroughgoing model of lay and clergy church discipline.

We can challenge each of these examples as to its adverse effects, but the point is that Protestant discipline succeeded early patristic, monastic, and medieval forms of discipline with a grace-grounded discipline of faith active in love. The church did not exempt its own orders from the same discipline it taught to the baptized. This is what the church is doing when it is following the Lord's call to the disciplined life in a disciplined community.

John Wesley, in resisting the laxness and hyper-tolerance and relativism of his 18th century Anglican culture, provides a prototype. He tended his vineyard by carefully bringing together small intensive groups to study Scripture, pray, and seek mutual accountability. The only requirement for persons entering these small groups was sincere readiness for repentance—acknowledging how their own decisions had put them at a great distance from the holiness of God ("flee from the wrath to come," in 18th-century language). Grace-forming rules provided boundaries so that, if a participant persistently flaunted, he could not continue until demonstrating a readiness for repentance. Faith by grace was looking for practical means of better reflecting the holiness of God.

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August (Web-only) 2005, Vol. 49