Unfashionable Discipline and Forgiveness

Imagine the two hypothetical situations below. 

Situation #1

A deacon at a small, close-knit church falls headfirst into an adulterous relationship with a coworker. Despite the efforts of close friends, family, and pastors within the church, the deacon persists in sin and moves into his new girlfriend’s apartment after separating from his wife. 

The man is removed from the office of deacon but continues to attend the church with his girlfriend as if everything is normal. Meanwhile, his wife and kids sit as far away as possible in the small sanctuary. The church continues to plead with the man to repent to no avail, and an awkward tension hangs over the church every Sunday morning. 

When the prospect of placing the man under discipline and removing him from membership arises in a members meeting, several people voice concerns: “What right do we have to judge him? Isn’t his relationship with Jesus between him and God? How is discipline consistent with the free grace of God?”

Situation #2 

Across town, a prominent Sunday school teacher in another church begins promoting the prosperity gospel. Without qualification, he presents Christ primarily as a means for health and wealth. When confronted, he doubles down and gathers a group of people in the church to oppose the pastors. The congregation as a whole is slow to defend their leaders, and an obvious passive aggressiveness starts to crop up in relationships throughout the church.

Everything comes to a head at a contentious members' meeting. The Sunday School teacher publicly insults the leadership of the church and leads a faction to fire the lead pastor. The congregation realizes the danger of this false teaching, and they discipline the Sunday School teacher, barring him from taking the Lord’s Supper.

After a few months, the Sunday School teacher repents and returns to the church. He offers an honest apology to the pastors and congregation, but several people have doubts: “Why should we allow a person who threatened the integrity of the church to return? Wouldn’t it be better for him to go somewhere else? How can we know that his repentance is genuine?”

What if I told you that equivalents of both of these situations occurred in the same New Testament church? The church at Corinth was kind of a mess. They had trusted Christ. They were saints, bought with a price by the blood of the Lamb. But the status-obsessed, sexually-licentious culture around them still affected them more than they knew. In his letters to the Corinthians, we can find Paul urging them towards both unfashionable discipline and unfashionable forgiveness.

Unfashionable Discipline

The city of Corinth had a scandalous reputation. A temple to Aphrodite loomed in the skyline and was likely a source of cult prostitution. One philosopher from Athens even used “Corinthian” as a slur for a sexually promiscuous person. So when Paul wrote, “It is actually reported that there is sexual immorality among you, and the kind of sexual immorality that is not even tolerated among the Gentiles,” he was referring to particularly heinous sin (1 Cor. 5:1). A man was sleeping with his father’s wife, and the Corinthian church had done nothing!

In their attempt to be more gracious than Jesus, they were actually threatening the purity of the entire church (1 Cor. 5:6). A strange hypocrisy had settled over the Corinthians. They were quick to wag their fingers and disassociate from sexually immoral unbelievers, but they were perfectly fine with incest in their own church (1 Cor. 5:9-12). Instead of being filled with godly grief at his sin, they arrogantly boasted of their own forbearance and mercy (1 Cor. 5:2). Therefore, Paul was forced to write two verses that might cause us to wince at first glance:

When you are assembled in the name of our Lord Jesus, and I am with you in spirit, with the power of our Lord Jesus, hand that one over to Satan for the destruction of the flesh, so that his spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord (1 Cor. 5:4-5). 

The New Testament presents the church as an outpost of the kingdom of God. God intends each local body to be a community where the loving lordship of Jesus is put on display. The church’s life together is tangible evidence that God has redeemed his people from the domain of darkness and brought them into his marvelous light (Col. 1:13).

But this incestuous man’s sin told a lie about the gospel. He was living as if the lordship of Jesus had no day-to-day impact on his life, and his actions ruined the church’s public witness. Therefore, Paul commanded the Corinthians to discipline the man, to remove him from church membership, because his life no longer matched up with his public profession of faith in Jesus.

Yet even this unfashionable discipline envisioned restoration as the ultimate goal. To be excommunicated is to be removed from the spiritual shelter found under King Jesus and released into the world where Satan prowled. If this man refused to repent and considered the Bible’s sexual ethic a barrier to his own happiness, then the church should let him go. Lord willing, he would taste the bitter fruit of his own destructive actions and repent. Like the prodigal son, he would come to his senses in the pig pen and return to the open arms of the father (Luke 15:16).

The day of the Lord loomed large over Paul’s thinking. Sin might be papered over and swept under the rug, but all would be laid bare on the day when Jesus returned. In light of this reality, it was far more unloving to give the incestuous man false assurance about his relationship with Jesus. Despite the difficulty of discipline, preferring temporary relational peace over the eternal condemnation of another’s soul was self-serving and hard-hearted. 

Unfashionable Forgiveness

By the time Paul wrote 2 Corinthians, the church had swung the pendulum to the other end. They might have learned the value of discipline, but they were hesitant to pay the cost of forgiveness. 

If anyone has caused pain, he has caused pain not so much to me but to some degree—not to exaggerate—to all of you. This punishment by the majority is sufficient for that person. As a result, you should instead forgive and comfort him. Otherwise, he may be overwhelmed by excessive grief.  Therefore I urge you to reaffirm your love to him. I wrote for this purpose: to test your character to see if you are obedient in everything. Anyone you forgive, I do too. For what I have forgiven—if I have forgiven anything—it is for your benefit in the presence of Christ, so that we may not be taken advantage of by Satan. For we are not ignorant of his schemes (2 Cor. 2:5-11).

Corinth was a status-obsessed city. Rebuilt as a Roman colony about a century before Paul’s arrival, the city was full of up-and-comers eager to make a name for themselves through trade, athletics, and politics. Every relationship with another person was seen as an opportunity to gain honor for oneself. In such a setting, the restoration of love and relationship after hurt felt like losing. Full and free forgiveness was unfashionable.

Though the situation is hard to piece together, the sinner mentioned in 2 Corinthians 2 was probably not the incestuous man from 1 Corinthians 5. Paul makes no mention of sexual sin but he does describe a painful visit and tear-drenched letter in 2 Corinthians 2:1-4. It seems likely that a prominent member of the congregation had publicly challenged the apostolic credentials of Paul. Given the larger context of the letter, this man might have been leading the church to trade in Paul for self-proclaimed “super apostles” who preached a “different gospel” and “another Jesus” (2 Cor. 11:4). 

Apparently the church was slow to defend Paul, prompting an in-person trip and a tearful letter. The Conrinthians recognized the danger and disciplined the divisive man, but after a while, he repented! In the eyes of the Corinthians, he had committed the unpardonable sin. He had challenged Paul’s honor and the church had chosen Paul over him. He had insulted an apostle of the Lord Jesus! To forgive would be deemed weakness in the eyes of the Corinthians. Who was to say that he would not return and simply cause more trouble?

Their hesitancy to forgive told a lie about the gospel though. Instead of a calculating and cautious reception of the man, Paul minimized the offense to himself and urged the Corinthians to “forgive and comfort him” (2 Cor. 2:7). It was not enough to allow him back into the church community. Their loving embrace had to be the corporate and personal embodiment of the full and unfashionable forgiveness found in Christ. Anything less would give Satan a foothold inside the church, and he would be more than happy to use every passive aggressive comment and sideways glance to stir up dissent among the people of God.

The Both/And of the Church

Comparing and contrasting both of these situations within the Corinthian church sheds light on the unexpected nature of Christian community.

The gospel creates a community in which we are not forced to choose between discipline and forgiveness. The gospel-centered church does not chart a middle ground between the two, creating a watered down version of each. Rather, the church that understands the cross rightly takes both discipline and forgiveness more seriously.

If our wrongdoing cost the Son of God his life, then we cannot simply sin more so that grace may abound (Rom. 6:1-2). A life of repentance is the chief marker of a follower of Jesus, and we do not follow Jesus alone. The church as a whole has the corporate responsibility to provide accountability, encouragement, and restorative discipline for one another. We must treat sin with a sober-mindedness that seems shocking. In a world that understands love only as affirmation, the church shaped by the cross loves someone enough to tell them no. 

If Jesus truly hung in the place of sinners and bore God's judgment for their transgressions, then the church must take forgiveness seriously. As the old hymn says, “The dying thief rejoiced to see that fountain in his day.” With no opportunity to return what he stole or live a life full of good works, the crucified thief turned to the crucified King and pleaded, “Jesus remember me in when you come into your kingdom,” and received, “Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in paradise,” as his reply (Lk 23:42-43). The church that offers half-hearted and partial forgiveness to the repentant sinner asks more of them than Jesus. 

The scandal of the cross cuts both ways and creates a truly unfashionable community. We do not choose between discipline or forgiveness. We do both. When we do both, we simultaneously become “too judgmental” and “too accepting” in the eyes of the world. At the same time, we become an attractive counter-culture. In a lonely, forgiveness-starved world, we become the fragrance of Christ, an aroma of life to those who are being saved and an aroma of death to those who are perishing (2 Cor 2:15-16). We might not belong, but we live faithfully as exiles, awaiting the day when Jesus returns and refashions all of creation in his unfashionable glory and grace.