Greg Wills is a professor of church history at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. In this excerpt, he gives a brief summary overview of how church discipline has been practiced across church history, and what factors impacted its practice.
"From the apostolic era to the end of the fourth century,
church discipline was a standard practice in the church, though not always
practiced universally or consistently. From the fifth century the practice of
church discipline diminished, and the practice of private confession and
individual penance largely displaced it. During the Protestant Reformation
there was a broad desire to recover the practice of apostolic church
discipline, but those efforts were not always successful. Both the practice of
infant baptism and the control of civil authorities over the affairs of the
church made full recovery difficult. The Anabaptists were more successful
because of their insistence on the separation of the civil and religious realms
as well as their practice of regenerate church membership. Although Baptists
maintained active church discipline from the seventeenth until the late
nineteenth century, during the twentieth century it waned dramatically.
Churches rarely opposed it in principle, but for a variety of reasons they lost
their resolve to practice it."
-Greg Wills, Those Who Must Give an Account: A Study of Church Membership and Church
Discipline
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