This sermon is from the Rev. Charles G. Dennison sermon archive, part of the “Considering the Church” series, and was preached at Grace Orthodox Presbyterian Church in Sewickley, PA, during a worship service on Sunday, March 6, 1994.
About this sermon
A specific case of church discipline opens onto a much larger survey: discipline’s near-total collapse across the mainline denominations over the past century, a collapse Machen himself could not finally stop. Both Old and New Testament patterns of discipline are set against that decline. What looks like an isolated case belongs to a long, documented history.
Sermon transcript
We turn first this morning to 2 Chronicles. 2 Chronicles chapter 19, and we begin reading at verse 4. Give your attention to the word of God. So Jehoshaphat lived in Jerusalem and went out again among the people from Beersheba to the hill country of Ephraim and brought them back to the Lord, the God of their fathers.
And he appointed judges in the land in all the fortified cities of Judah, city by city. And he said to the judges, Consider what you are doing. For you do not judge for man, but for the Lord, who is with you when you render judgment. Now then, let the fear of the Lord be upon you. Be very careful what you do, for the Lord our God will have no part in unrighteousness or partiality or the taking of a bride.” And in Jerusalem also Jehoshaphat appointed some of the Levites and priests. and some of the heads of the father’s households of Israel, for the judgment of the Lord, and to judge disputes among the inhabitants of Jerusalem. Then he charged them, saying, Thus you shall do in the fear of the Lord, faithfully and wholeheartedly. And whenever any dispute comes to you from your brethren who live in their cities between blood and blood, between law and commandments, statutes and ordinances, you shall warn them that they may not be guilty before the Lord, and wrath may not come on you and your brethren. Thus you shall do, and you shall not be guilty.
And behold, Amariah the chief priest will be over you in all that pertains to the Lord, and Zebediah the son of Ishmael, the ruler of the house of Judah, in all that pertains to the king. Also the Levites shall be officers before you. Act resolutely and the Lord be with the upright.” Then, turning over to Matthew 18, beginning at verse 15, and this is Matthew 18, verse 15, verse 15.
And if your brother sins, go and reprove him in private. If he listens to you, you have won your brother. But if he does not listen to you, take one or two more with you, so that by the mouth of two or three witnesses every fact may be confirmed. And if he refuses to listen to them, tell it to the Church. And if he refuses to listen even to the Church, let him be to you as a Gentile and a tax gatherer.”
Truly, I say to you, whatever you shall bind on earth shall have been bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall have been loosed in heaven. Again, I say to you that if two of you agree on earth about anything that they may ask, it shall be done for them by my Father who is in heaven.
For where two or three have gathered together in my name, there I am in their midst.” Finally, turning to 1 Corinthians 5, it is actually reported that there is immorality among you and immorality of such a kind as does not exist even among the Gentiles that someone has his father’s wife, and you have become arrogant and have not mourned instead in order that the one who has done this deed might be removed from your midst. For I, on my part, though absent in body but present in spirit, have already judged him who has so committed this, as though I were present. In the name of our Lord Jesus, when you are assembled and I with you in spirit, With the power of our Lord Jesus, I have decided to deliver such a one to Satan for the destruction of his flesh, that the spirit may be preserved in the day of the Lord Jesus.
Your boasting is not good. Do you not know that a little leaven leavens the whole lump of dough? Cleanse out the old leaven, that you may be a new lump, just as you are in fact unleavened. For Christ, our Passover, has been sacrificed. Let us therefore celebrate the feast not with old leaven, nor with the leaven of malice and wickedness, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth.
It is your pleasure, O God, that the message which you have for the world would go forth in the foolishness of preaching. Lord, through these weak things, then, and by weak vessels, you proclaim your truth and your mighty works. Grant mercy, O God, through the ministry of your word today, not just here, not just in this area, but throughout the world, that your people may be gathered, that they may be assembled in hope in hope of you and of coming glory, and that they might live for you presently in all godliness and reverence. We pray this in Jesus’ name. Amen.
One of the first things to face me when I took up my first pastorate was a situation I was hardly prepared for. It was a situation in that congregation in southern New Jersey that had been lingering for years. It had become the object of gossip throughout that small rural community, and it was the subject of whispered comments and those all-knowing looks among the church members within that congregation which I passed it. But no one did anything responsible before the Lord with regard to that situation. They just talked about it. They talked about a certain church trustee, a married man who had moved his wife out of his house only to move his secretary in. and to live with her as if she were his wife.
Now many in that community never forgave me for raising the issue. And many within that congregation never forgave me for forcing the session to deal with that You see, it would seem that there was one sin, and I was guilty of it. There was one sin more heinous than adultery in the eyes of these people, and that was the sin of demanding that that particular sin be repented of. and that the situation ends. It was even worse than that. Many in that church and within that community, aside from talking about that man’s affair, had decided virtually to ignore They would ignore the sin, but they would not ignore my effrontery.
A few years ago, I got a call from a member of a local mainline congregation here in the The man on the other end of the line wished to know if I would make a trip with him to Washington, D.C. at the end of January for the purpose of protesting the slaughter of the unborn. To take a stand with him publicly against the iniquitous 1973 Supreme Court decision with respect to the execution of the unborn. He was very emotional in his appeal, and I was impressed by his fervor. And as he spoke of the Lord in his comments, I was convinced that he was utterly genuine in his love of our Savior. But I asked him if it wouldn’t be a better use of his time if he began a judicial process within his own denomination for the purpose of bringing the abortionists and the abortion activists to ecclesiastical trial.
There was dead silence. He then spoke and said he had never heard of such a thing. It wasn’t that it had been considered and dismissed. He had never heard of such a thing. But he went on to say that such a procedure would be completely out of place in the Church. It would be in place in Washington. In the civil court, it would be out of place in the Church.
Mainline Protestantism is a disgrace. I hope we are all agreed about that. It has become a movement utterly and completely devoid of any genuine, true, biblical discipline. It has become a movement in which true, genuine, biblical discipline is not only not practiced, it is impossible for it to be practiced in mainline Protestantism. How bad is it?
Adulterers, homosexuals, fetus executioners, political revolutionaries, blasphemers, heretics, open pagans, live comfortably and with impunity in all of the mainline Protestant denominations in this country. Now, they not only live comfortably and with impunity within these denominations. Many of these folks actually have the leadership and determine the attitude and mindset of these churches. You may ask, how can Bible-believing folk, how can conservative individuals who express a love for the gospel of Jesus Christ remain in such churches. I know many who do. This is their approach. They complain. They write letters. They carve.
They grouse. that no one, none of these conservatives, brings charges in the courts of the Church against any of these offenders, regardless of the seriousness of the offense. And that’s simply not because it would be fruitless or impossible to do so. but because such action in their mind is considered to be a greater crime than the crimes that they’re seeking to correct. Church discipline has become a crime, a sin. Not that the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, even though it has separated from the mainline body of Protestantism, can hold its head up too high with regard to this matter of Church discipline.
Our beginnings are not all that exemplary. Jerry Gresham Nation was a great man, we all admit that. But when it comes to Church discipline, he was a failure. And he failed repeatedly. He was present at the 1924 General Assembly, when the protest with regard to the Author Nation came before that General Assembly.
There was no dissent from the floor of the assembly with regard to the report that had been issued concerning the Auburn Affirmation and the Auburn Affirmationists. That report recommended no action. when he gets to the matter of the Church, preferred to talk about protecting the Church trust funds from the hands of the liberals, as opposed to protecting the honor of Christ and the purity of the Church by bringing the liberals to trial. trying to find its way.
There were many cases in those early days that cause us shame now. There was a refusal to deal responsibly with overt sin, especially among the clergy. There was, for instance, the refusal to deal responsibly with homosexuality amongst the clergy. A sad fact that spelled disaster for a number of families, ministries, and congregations.
A good and proper Church discipline, then, is reclaimed only slowly even by the very best-intentioned churches during the course of this century. And that’s the way it has been for the Orthodox Presbyterian Church. But certainly things always haven’t been this way, have they? Discipline was at one time part and parcel of what the Church was. What has happened, then, to the Church that discipline, once recognized to be an essential mark of the true Church, has disappeared? What has happened that even Orthodox and Reformed Churches find themselves in such an uphill battle either to retain or regain discipline for themselves? As I’ve intimated, it wasn’t all that long ago that discipline in the Church was recognized as being as natural as breathing air. You were part of the Church, you were subject to its discipline, you expected it, you even welcomed it.
I think once more about my first pastorate, a congregation in South Jersey. It was a venerable and famous Church. dating back to 1680. Reading from its session minutes from the middle of the last century, you could find a number of entries describing discipline cases that were at various stages of development. And particularly moving were the accounts of public confession. in which someone guilty of a public sin such as drunkenness confessed it before the entire congregation and was publicly received back into the fellowship of that church, that sin having been laid aside in the name of, to the honor of, and by the power of Jesus Christ. in the Church.
What are the reasons for that? Well, there are many. Some may cite tragic abuse of power, by which the innocent were falsely accused or the guilty cruelly treated. Some may cite ugly hypocrisy, by which Church authorities condemned in others what they allowed in themselves. Some may cite the injustice of partiality, by which clerics, certain families, and individuals remained immune to discipline while others proved to be all too much a target. I think that probably all of us are aware of congregations, if not entire denominations, where everybody is so interrelated that if you were to bring charges against one individual, the entire denomination would be somehow involved. All these things that I’ve mentioned thus far are true and contributing reasons as to why discipline has become unpopular.
But they do not account for the death of discipline in the Church. You see, all of these things—abuse of power, hypocrisy, partiality—are flaws that we observe with respect to any legal arrangement. There are flaws that we observe with respect to our nation’s legal arrangement and its judicial system. But none of us is saying that we ought to discard our judicial system altogether because of these flaws. Are we?
Now, the disappearance of Church discipline is because of reasons far deeper and more complex than the foibles and sins of those who are called upon to administer that system. And I want to point out to you two of those deeper and more complex reasons this morning. First of all, the Church lost her sense of her true identity. The Church lost her sense of her true identity as the community of God, as a community distinct from the community at large, as a people in and of themselves. as a pilgrim and alien people in the world? The question that was being asked by many as they came through the process of this dissolution with regard to discipline, was this.
Is this not a Christian nation? Is this not a Christian country? Do not our civil courts operate according to biblical principles and biblical law? Our societies and our churches, they are the same, are they not? Our civil courts will prosecute our case against those who violate biblical and Christian morality.
But not only did this attitude betray a fundamental breakdown on the Church’s part with regard to her own identity as distinct from the community at large. But quite seriously now, it opened the door for the Church to conclude that all social discipline, all moral discipline, even doctrinal discipline, belonged to the civil court, belonged to the state. And that only those crimes defined to be crimes by the civil authority, were crimes. Which is the more serious crime? Blasphemy or murder?
I can tell you what God thinks. I can also tell you what the state thinks. And they don’t agree. So if the state refuses to prosecute the crimes of Sabbath-breaking, the crimes of blasphemy. If the state refuses to prosecute the crimes related to failure to worship or the worshiping of false gods, then these crimes must not be crimes at all. And if the state won’t prosecute them, where does the Church get off? thinking that it can and even should prosecute them. The situation is even more desperate than that.
You see, as time has gone on, if the state refuses to prosecute parental abuse… Now, I’m not speaking about child abuse. That too is a crime, yes. I’m talking about parental abuse, where parents are abused by their children who are utterly incorrigible and fairly and completely rebellious.
If the state refuses to prosecute such an offense, if it refuses to prosecute in cases of sexual immorality, then these offenses must not be offenses. In fact, since the law promotes and protects a child’s right to a bed, since the law protects the execution of the unborn, since the law promotes and protects anyone and everyone involved in a divorce case with no guilt assigned.
If the law protects and promotes public obscenity, if the law protects and promotes a state-sanctioned system of larceny, and I am not referring to the Internal Revenue Service. I am referring to the state lotteries. This is public graft. It is a violation of the commandment, Thou shalt not steal.
If, in fact, the state coquettes and even promotes these things, then these things cannot be crimes, you see, but actually become the ingredients of a genuine and true morality in the mind of the state. It is a moral thing to execute your unborn child. It is a moral, commendable, righteous thing to do. The Church then has witnessed the death of discipline because she has lost her sense with regard to her true identity. But secondly, in losing her sense of her true identity, she has changed her identity. She has become something else altogether.
Rossiter’s church discipline has died not only because the church has abdicated to the state, but because somewhere along the line the church has changed her understanding of herself, and become convinced that church discipline is not merely a matter of impropriety, it is an evil. and inevitably and invariably an evil. Church discipline therefore is out of step with the Church’s new identity. It isn’t so much that the Church has surrendered her judgment to the state. No, the Church has surrendered judgment with respect to discipline altogether.
Somehow doctrinal and moral judgment by the Church has become inherently an exercise in self-righteousness invariably encumbered by an improper and evil authoritarianism, and utterly contrary to what the Church is in her true identity. And what is the Church in her true identity? It’s the place where you can go where they love you just the way you are. No change, no repentance, no confrontation, They love you just the way you are.
Well, the Bible presents no such definition. Neither is the Bible bothered by the objections that are raised, suggesting that judgment by the Church is inherently self-righteous and invariably authoritarian. No. The Bible is very positive and plain in its prescriptions for Church discipline. No theoretical paper proposition.
Here is real medicine. Here is true substance. Yes, by which the Church is to be cured. Yes, by which the Church is to be governed. that church made up of sinful people living in a sinful world. We find church discipline then administered in the Old Testament.
That is why I read to you this morning from 2 Chronicles. It’s unavoidable there. And that 2 Chronicles passage isn’t the exception, it’s the rule. We find Church discipline in place in the Old Testament, not because the God of the Old Testament is a God of wrath, but because he is a holy God and his people are to be holy. They are to be like him. That involves discipline brought to bear upon them. But we find that discipline also administered in the New Testament. That is why we read from Matthew’s Gospel.
Jesus himself makes prescription with regard to Church discipline. The apostles also present us with Church discipline through the epistles that they have written. In the actions of the Church, it is clear. And Christ and his apostles set discipline before us, not because they are the advocates of some kind of primal view of what life is all about. But because, you see, they understand that the body of Christ is to be pure, even as Christ himself is pure. We on earth are to reflect the glory of our pure and wonderful Savior in heaven.
Just one final comment. I set before you these passages for a reason. And I want you to look at them again. But I want you to look for something in them. The manner in which discipline is bound to the person of God himself. in each one of those texts. The implication is, you remove the discipline, you remove God. The discipline goes, God goes. I plead with you. especially if you have problems in this area. If you struggle with the issue of the propriety of church discipline, to take another look at your Bibles and think the issue through again.
Our Father, we are asking that an appropriate discipline would belong again to the Church. We are aware of the dangers, and we pray, O Lord, that the dangers would be avoided, that the Church would not pursue a course of severe treatment, cruel treatment of those who were overtaken in offense, but rather that the Church would pursue a course of graciousness, a course of humility, wherein she always looks to herself, lest she be tempted and succumb. We pray, Lord, that in those assemblies where discipline is part of the habit of the congregation and part of the mind of the Church, that you would encourage those who are charged with administering it, that they might always see before them their God and the Lord Jesus Christ. and help us, Lord, especially those of us who are having trouble getting beyond the almost wholesale denial of the right of the Church to discipline. Help us, our Father, to realize that as we are called to submit to you, so also we are called to submit to the proper authority which you have established among your people.
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