The goal of the process of discipline is repentance and restoration. When the impenitent person repents, we receive them with joy. It is an answer to much prayer. No one has “won” and no one has “lost” but grace has won and darkness has lost. This is why we leave the ninety-nine sheep (Matt 18:12) and go to great lengths to recover the one. We rejoice because heaven rejoices when they return.

In our late-modern (liquid), nominalist, it is widely regarded that truth claims and official acts are nothing but the exercise of power for personal gain. In other words, we live in a time of great suspicion. Whereas the dominant question of the pre-modern age was “What has God said?” and the question of the modern period was “Has God said?” The question of our age is “Who’s asking and what does it want?” The nominalism of this age assumes that there can be no necessary, divinely ordained relations between signs (words) and things signified (realities). It assumes that the relations between them is purely arbitrary. Thus, we speak of “gender” instead of sex. Human beings, of course, do not have genders. They ordinarily belong to one of two sexes. Gender is a grammatical category but the fact that we routinely and almost universally use gender and sex interchangeably signals how deeply influenced we have become by this notion that there is no fixed reality, no objective truth, no divinely ordered relations between signs and things signified.

Our setting then makes the process of church discipline very difficult because it is too easy even for Christians to assume that an act of discipline is not an official, churchly recognition of what is, i.e., an acknowledgement of God’s moral law, of the state of sin (transgression of God’s moral law), and the need for repentance but rather an arbitrary and unjust exercise of authority. To be sure, as I have been noting in this space recently, all church assemblies (courts) are composed of sinful, fallible humans. To be fallible is to be able to fail, to fall, to err, and even to sin. In this life none of us reaches sinless perfection. Nevertheless our Lord gave to the church an unambiguous charge to use the keys of the kingdom (Matthew 16) and even an outline of how to use the second key,church discipline (Matt 18). Thus, the Reformed Churches confess that the use of church discipline is one of the marks of the true church (Belgic Confession art. 29). One of the marks of the “broadening church” (Loetscher) is her refusal to discipline heterodoxy and immorality while simultaneously prosecuting the orthodox for being orthodox. The abuse of the church courts in (what is now) the PCUSA against J. Gresham Machen in 1935 is a case in point. Machen’s great “sin” was to support the Independent Board for Foreign Missions. Looking back from 2015, when the PCUSA is openly flouting God’s Word on the most basic points of biblical teaching their rigor on what now, by comparison, looks like a fine point of Presbyterian polity is almost (but not quite) amusing. The courts and assemblies of the orthodox also err. Recently the General Assembly of a NAPARC denomination overturned the judgment of a presbytery, and synods have overturned the judgments of classes (German Reformed and Dutch Reformed presbyteries or regional assemblies of pastors and elders). The good news is that the church courts and assemblies of the confessional churches, federations, and denominations usually, ultimately get things right.

Trusting our Lord enough to accept and to practice church discipline is an act of faith but it is to such faith that we are called by Scripture. Thus we confess:

85. How is the Kingdom of Heaven shut and opened by Christian discipline?

In this way: that according to the command of Christ, if any under Christian name show themselves unsound either in doctrine or in life, and after several brotherly admonitions do not turn from their errors or evil ways, they are complained of to the Church or to its proper officers; and, if they neglect to hear them also, are by them denied the Holy Sacraments and thereby excluded from the Christian Communion, and by God Himself from the Kingdom of Christ; and if they promise and show real amendment, they are again received as members of Christ and His Church (Heidelberg Catechism 85)Matt 18:15-18. 1 Cor 5:3-5,11. 2 Thess 3:14,15. 2 John 10,11.

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