The Decline of Church Discipline

Mark Dever on the history of church discipline, and the cause and effect of it’s decline: 

Historical data on the life of the church immediately after the New Testament period is only intermittent and partial. The church was, after all, a small and sometimes illegal group. Written sources multiply greatly after the Christian church was legalized throughout the empire under Constantine. For the 1200 years between Constantine and the Protestant Reformation, church discipline, whether by individual excommunication or interdict (withholding the sacraments from the population of a political entity), was often used more to protect the church’s corporate interests against the claims of the state than to reclaim Christians from sin and protect the gospel’s witness. 

When the leaders of the Reformation began to recover a more biblical understanding of preaching and administrating the sacraments as the two marks of a true church, the recovery of church discipline as a consequent mark followed. Implied in the right administration of the sacraments was the correct practice of church discipline. After all, if marking out the church from the world is one function of the sacraments, then discipline becomes the mechanism for enforcing that mandate. The right discipline of the church became so significant that it began to be presented as a third mark of a true church. 

The twenty-ninth article of the Belgic Confession (1561) stated:   Continue at Thirsty Theologian