Church Discipline
he medieval church did not lack discipline. It had penance, the confessional, interdicts, and excommunications that could be pronounced against kings. What it had lost was discipline of the kind the New Testament describes: the patient, pastoral care of a congregation for its own members, aimed at their restoration and exercised under the Word of God. Excommunication had become a weapon of ecclesiastical politics. The confessional had become a private transaction between a priest and a penitent. The congregation itself had no part in either.
The Reformers set out to recover the pattern Christ gave in Matthew 18:15–17: a private word first, then a word with witnesses, then a word from the church, and only after persistent refusal, separation. They found the same pattern applied in 1 Corinthians 5, where Paul tells the church at Corinth to remove a man living in open sin, and in 2 Corinthians 2:6–8, where the same church is told to forgive and comfort the repentant offender and reaffirm its love for him.
The Sinews of the Church
No Reformer gave discipline more careful thought than Calvin, and none paid more for it. His first ministry in Geneva ended in exile in 1538, in large part over the question of who should control admission to the Lord’s Table. When he returned in 1541, his Ecclesiastical Ordinances established a consistory of pastors and elders to oversee the life of the congregation. Calvin then contended for years with Geneva’s magistrates over whether the church or the city council held the power to excommunicate.
In the Institutes he explained why he would not let the matter go:
As the saving doctrine of Christ is the life of the Church, so discipline is, as it were, its sinews; for to it it is owing that the members of the body adhere together, each in its own place.1 John Calvin
Discipline, he went on, is a curb to restrain those who war against the doctrine of Christ, a spur to rouse the indifferent, and sometimes “a kind of fatherly rod,” by which those who have fallen more grievously are chastised in mercy, “with the meekness of the spirit of Christ.” He named three ends that it serves: that God’s name not be dishonored by those who bear it while living openly in sin; that the good not be corrupted by constant contact with the wicked; and that the sinner himself, put to shame, may be brought to repentance.2 The third end was the heart of it. Discipline was medicine, not punishment.
A Mark of the True Church
Calvin himself named two marks by which a true church may be known: the Word of God purely preached and heard, and the sacraments administered according to Christ’s institution.3 He did not list discipline as a third mark, though he treated it as indispensable to a church’s health. Others went further. The Scots Confession of 1560 named ecclesiastical discipline “uprightly ministered” as the third note of the true kirk, and the Belgic Confession of 1561 did the same, describing the true church as one in which church discipline is exercised in punishing sin.4 That threefold description of the marks of the church became standard in much of the Reformed world, and it is the description given on this site’s page on The Church.
The Lutheran tradition approached the matter through the office of the keys, the authority Christ gave His church to bind and loose (Matthew 16:19; 18:18; John 20:23). Luther counted the keys, exercised both publicly and privately, among the marks by which the holy Christian people may be recognized.5 Martin Bucer at Strasbourg wrote an entire treatise on the pastoral care of souls, Concerning the True Care of Souls (1538), which Calvin knew well from his own years there.
Discipline in Practice
What did this look like in an ordinary congregation? The records of the Geneva consistory, and of the French Reformed churches that copied its pattern, allow a remarkably close look. Every local Reformed church in France had a consistory: the pastor as moderator, a body of lay elders, and the deacons, meeting weekly in the towns and less often in the country. Larger churches divided the town into districts and assigned an elder to each, who was expected to visit every family in his district once a year.6
Much of the consistory’s work was catechetical. On March 31, 1542, the wife of a Genevan sheath-maker came before the consistory and confessed that she could say her creed only in Latin, as in former times, and that her daughter knew the faith better than she did. The consistory’s usual response to such cases was not a penalty but an instruction to attend the sermons and the catechism, and to find someone to teach them what the words of the faith meant.7
Much of the rest was reconciliation. Quarrels, insults, and brawls were common, and the consistory went to great lengths to settle them, requiring the parties to forgive one another, shake hands, and promise to live in peace. The historian Raymond Mentzer notes that by the second generation most members of the French Reformed churches attended worship regularly, knew their catechism, and received the Lord’s Supper four times a year, where their medieval ancestors had communed once. Some members voluntarily stayed away from the Table while they were at odds with a neighbor, because they could not come with a clear conscience.8 That is discipline doing what the Reformers intended it to do.
Cautions and Counterarguments
The history of Reformation discipline is not one to be told without its shadows, and the Reformers’ own principles are the best measure of where they fell short.
It reached too far. The Genevan and French consistories pursued not only open sin but dancing, dress, games, cards, and hairstyles. Officials in some places punished more people for dancing than for sexual immorality, in part because dancing was associated with Catholic festivals.9 Some of this was a sincere attempt to uproot superstition; some of it was the regulation of matters Scripture leaves to Christian liberty. Contemporary critics noticed. One Genevan student demanded to know by what scriptural authority the consistory presumed to question him, and a notary dismissed the whole system as a human invention.10 They had, ironically, learned to ask that question from the Reformers themselves.
It did not fall evenly. Those accused of sexual misconduct before the consistories tended to be women, and the slightest hint of impropriety could bring a woman under investigation.11 A discipline meant to reflect the impartial justice of God did not always do so.
It was entangled with the civil power. In Geneva and in many Reformed cities, the line between church censure and civil penalty was not always clear, and the threat of civil punishment stood behind many consistorial admonitions. Calvin himself fought to keep excommunication in the hands of the church rather than the magistrate, which shows that he understood the danger. But the system as a whole blurred the difference between the spiritual authority Christ gave His church and the coercive authority God gave the state. (See Church and State.)
It has largely been abandoned since. The opposite error is more common today. Many churches that honor the Reformers exercise no discipline at all, and so cannot protect the weak, restore the wandering, or keep the Lord’s Table from being treated as a matter of indifference. Calvin warned that those who wish discipline abolished are contributing to the dissolution of the church. The excesses of Geneva are no argument against obedience to Matthew 18.
Why It Still Matters
Church discipline is not first a matter of exclusion. It is first a matter of belonging. A church that cares enough to warn, to rebuke, to seek out the wandering, and to welcome back the repentant is a church that takes seriously both the holiness of God and the worth of every soul in its care. Its goal is always the one Paul gave: “that his spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord” (1 Corinthians 5:5), and its spirit is always the one he commanded: “restore him in a spirit of gentleness. Keep watch on yourself, lest you too be tempted” (Galatians 6:1).
Discipline rightly exercised is the shepherd going after the one sheep. Its model is Christ Himself, who disciplines those He loves (Hebrews 12:6) and who rejoices over one sinner who repents.
