A Brief History of Church Discipline

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

What Does it Mean to be Baptist? Part 2- Church and State

Those of us who think of Mark Dever as a pastor often forget that he did his Ph.D in church history. In this excerpt, Dever discusses an issue that Nathan Finn alluded to in yesterday's post: namely, that the Baptist view of the church as a voluntarily gathered body of regenerate believers was considered radical until a few centuries ago (excluding, of course, the first three centuries of the church). Dever draws out the implications of the idea of regenerate church membership for the relationship between church and state.

"Recapturing the New Testament picture of a church of believers challenged the assumptions most people had made since Constantine, namely, that the state is responsible to provide fo rthe church and the church is responsible for guiding the state. The strongest connection of this sort between church and state continued among Constantine's heirs ans others in the Eastern Orthodox areas. In the East, what has been called caesaro-papism treated the church as the responsibility of the ruler; in effect, to see Caesar as the pope, thus the name. In the West, a less centralized and more varied relationship has existed between church and state. Whereas the state typically held the dominant position in the East, especially since the rise of Islam, the church typically had predominance in the West, given its more centralized organization and tradition of enforcing episcopal jurisdiction over rulers. At times emperors were excommunicated, and entire cities were interdicted--unthinkable in the East.

During the Protestant Reformation the leading theologians continued to affirm the traditional Western understanding of the relationship between church and state. Whereas a somewhat more passive (Lutheran) or aggressive (Calvinist) stance was taken toward the magistrate's authority, the various reformations effected little immediate change in the state-church relationship. A nation facing a reformation would focus on the questions of which church to recognize and which structures to adopt, two questions about theology and leadership that did not disrupt the basic unit of the European parish. Protestant nations varied in their answers to these questions. But in no magisterial reformation was the local parish dissolved or replaced.

As we have seen, the Baptist denial of infant baptism crucially imperiled the Constantinian church-state settlement in Western Europe. The Baptist belief in regenerate church membership made the relationship between citizens and their church, and thus between church and state, voluntary. This would have been unthinkable in the early and mid-sixteenth century. Ultimately, the Baptist ecclesiology provided the seed for the birth of the modern notions of freedom of religion, in which no one church is established and the rights of every religion are secured. As Christians tried to answer the simple question, "Who should be baptized?" they found that their answer to that question had tremendous effects. If they concluded that only believers should be baptized, that would preclude having a membership that was co-extensive with the general population and so effectively would preclude having an established church."

 -Mark Dever, The Church: The Gospel Made Visible