Excommunication

“For I verily, as absent in body, but present in spirit, have judged already, as though I were present, concerning him that hath so done this deed, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, when ye are gathered together, and my spirit, with the power of our Lord Jesus Christ, to deliver such an one unto Satan for the destruction of the flesh, that the spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord Jesus.”—1 Corinthians v. 3–5.

The passage: Paul says that though he is absent in body he is present in spirit, and has already judged the man who did this deed as if he were present. When the Corinthians are gathered together, and his spirit with them in the power of the Lord Jesus, they are in the name of Jesus to hand such a man over to Satan for the destruction of the flesh, so that his spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord Jesus.

Here is the awful formula that was supposed to justify all the excommunications of the Middle Ages, and that makes English Churchmen sometimes complain that the power of excommunication has left them. Protestants who love the name of St. Paul, and have looked to him as a witness against the evils they complain of, do not like to think he gave any warrant for what sometimes seems the greatest of those evils. They try to explain the words away, or to limit them to the Apostle’s own times. Neither expedient has worked. Our conscience rebels against trifling with any words, most of all those we profess to receive as oracles. It asks whether St. Paul was not laying the foundation of a fellowship that was to last for ever, and whether its principles can change from one generation to the next.

I suspect, brethren, that what we need is a stricter, not a looser, reading of St. Paul: a firmer resolve to hold to his words and not to the comments and glosses on them. Had his meaning been honestly drawn from his actual words, the Church would have been warned against her acts of tyranny. Had she taken him as her guide, she would have done more than we can imagine for the moral culture of men, instead of promoting some of their worst immoralities. Let us ask God’s help to do this.

I. You heard in the Lesson why the words were spoken. A member of the Church in Corinth had committed a crime that was odious even among heathens. It was notorious, and the Apostle had been told of it. The Corinthians must have been somewhat affected, but not as seriously as the matter deserved. Other subjects, which they had written to him about, evidently occupied them more. They were far busier deciding between the doctrines of Paul, Apollos and Cephas than clearing themselves of this scandal. St. Paul thought their concern with the one was a chief cause of their indifference to the other. Split into parties, they were naturally forgetting what their common fellowship involved. While they debated the worth of their teachers, they were coming to think their only bond was allegiance to those teachers. Full of their intellectual differences, they did not see how a moral disease beginning in one limb might infect the whole body. To teach them how to deal with this offence was to throw light on many temptations they were liable to, and on the nature and conditions of their Christian calling.

II. The case in this chapter at once suggests that the Corinthians had a strong bias to sensuality. Everything we know of their city, and St. Paul’s warnings, support that. But we would be badly mistaken to think they claimed high privileges for the body and thought meanly of the soul. As Greeks, we could be sure they would lean the opposite way, and we know they did, from the notions they formed about the Resurrection. No men felt more strongly the superiority of intellect to the animal nature, of the soul to what it was to rule. This was the excuse for their partisanship. Many thought they had advanced beyond St. Paul’s lessons and were ripe for the wisdom of Apollos. Some said how attractive these Jewish traditions were; others, how delightful the deliverance from them. Such feelings show an active mind. They also show a lack of any sense of a common order to which all belong, a lack of wide human sympathies, and a restlessness which, once exhausted, is likely to take refuge in fleshly indulgence as more real than mere speculation.

III. The Corinthians wanted to be spiritual men. They were proud of their so-called spiritual gifts, and rejoiced that God’s Spirit had awakened in them powers of thought and utterance that they and others once lacked. St. Paul makes use of this boast. He wants them to be spiritual men, he is thankful for their powers of utterance and his own, and he is glad they come behind in no gift. But if they wish to be spiritual, he says, they cannot be factious. The Spirit in man is what unites one to another, and to be divided is to be carnal. God’s Spirit is given to awaken that common spirit in men and lead it to its true object. It sets before them Christ, who gave up Himself and was crucified, as Head of the whole Society. It makes them sharers of His Mind and Character, and lets them confess His Father as their Father. Owning themselves spiritual beings united in a spiritual fellowship with Christ, they would reverence their bodies. They would no longer think lightly of them as prisonhouses of the soul or temporary tabernacles soon to be done with, but treat them as temples of the Holy Ghost, to be kept from all defilement.

IV. Regarding themselves as spiritual beings ruled by God’s Spirit, they could not help seeing the evil that assailed them as spiritual. They were tempted to unrighteous acts, but first of all to being unrighteous men. The citadel was invaded: Malice, Pride, Covetousness, Hatred and Impurity were trying to master them and hold them captive. Every man was in this battle and none could evade it. Each must take a side, saying either “I submit myself to the Spirit of Good, of Truth, of Charity, and acknowledge myself His servant,” or “I invite His enemy to reign over me and promise to do his bidding.” People might state it differently or prefer other names, but they must somehow come to this issue: obedience of the spirit to a spirit of good or of evil. The Church had already chosen. Its very existence meant that the God of Truth and Charity is God, that He had sent His Son to claim men as His children and give them His life, and that the Devil and his works were renounced. Suppose one of its members were convicted of one of those works, and not a disputable one but one condemned by the conscience of all mankind. What was to be done? St. Paul has no doubt, and pronounces his decision clearly and awfully. How does he frame it?

1. He explains what the Society is. “He is gathered together with them.” “Though absent in the body he is with them in spirit.” These are not random or merely metaphorical expressions; they fit all that goes before and follows in the Epistle. The Society is a spiritual body, and as spiritual creatures they have entered it. Time and space do not confine it. Whether in Athens, Ephesus or Rome, he is still one of them and cannot separate himself from them. This is his only security for judging rightly here. He could not trust his private judgment, which might be the victim of partial, local, temporary impressions or warped by his temperament. His confidence is that the Spirit of Truth will lift him and them above their own haste and vanity, keep them from following their own conceits, and enable them to act as members of a Society whose Head is Christ.

2. With that confidence he decides that “in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, when they are gathered together, and his spirit, they should deliver such an one to Satan.” I do not wish in the least to soften this expression, and for the moment I do not even quote what follows it. As it stands, it seems to me exactly what we should expect from the Apostle, and what he must have said unless he retracted his earlier teaching. By this act the man has solemnly made his choice. He has said our Master is not his, and has declared who is. To that master we must leave him. We have no right to claim from him the renunciation of a service he has devoted himself to, or a profession that is manifestly false. We owe it to ourselves not to. We are not units thrown together by chance, with no cohesion and no relations to each other. We affirm that we are a living body, every limb affected by the well or ill doing of every other. We are set in the world to witness what God would have His world be, and what it is when it has confessed its true Centre and moves in its proper orbit.

3. He presses this reason soon after: “Know ye not that a little leaven leaveneth the whole lump? Purge out therefore the old leaven, that ye may be a new lump, as ye are unleavened.” But now he gives another reason: they owe this to the offender himself. “He was to be delivered to Satan for the destruction of his flesh, that his spirit might be saved in the day of the Lord.” We say constantly, “What foolish tenderness to overlook that man’s offences and let him escape the consequences! Do you not know he must be made to feel his folly and taste the wormwood before there is any hope of reform?” We all recognize the admonition as sound. It shows how cruel much of our mercy is, and what mercy may lie at the bottom of severity. It applies to our dealings with children and wrongdoers, and if we believe the Prophets, to God’s dealings with men and nations. St. Paul acts on what he understands to be the divine principle. In fact he does not think the action is his own. He has no power to cut a man off from God’s Church, and neither have the Corinthians. All they can do is ratify what the man has himself done, believing this to be the way to defeat his madness and finally triumph over his seducer.

There is a breadth and boldness in the Apostle’s speech that we cannot match. What confounds us is not the giving up “to Satan for the destruction of the flesh”; experience tells us only too well what that means. Not by the act of Churches or Apostles, but by their own act, we see men given up to a dark and malignant Spirit, yielding to his suggestions and becoming more and more his instruments. Not by the decrees of Apostles or Churches, but by their own decree, we see the flesh they have pampered and brutalized perishing through its own excesses. What we wonder at, what sounds too good to be true, is the hope in the other clause. That even by such tremendous processes the spirit may be brought out of bondage, that even so the man may be restored and the Tempter defeated: for all we have dreamed of the infinite storehouse of God’s wisdom and loving-kindness, this might stagger our feeble faith. The words stand written. St. Paul did not think them dangerous to utter, even at such a moment, to such a Church, of such a man. I do not suppose we are pious and judicious in being more cautious than he. I suspect the more we meditated on the encouragement he holds out, the more humiliation and awe we should feel.

V. Here then is the precedent. Would it have been dangerous for Churchmen to follow? Suppose men had been taught that Christ has called them to be members of His Body; that He awakens their spirits by His Spirit to claim fellowship with Him and one another; and that so far as they yield to that Spirit, God’s laws will be written in their hearts and they will be able to follow Him and resist what fights against them. Would not this have been the greatest witness for true, practical, human morality, and the greatest protest against the artificial, exclusive, sacerdotal morality Churchmen have so often cultivated? Suppose they had been taught that the Devil is in no sense their master, but that they make him so by distrusting their true, righteous, loving Master and ceasing to depend on His daily and hourly help. Suppose they had been taught that no one can know when they withdraw their allegiance from Him and give it to another, but that God knows, will enable them to know, and will bring them back. But if they openly show they have broken loose from God’s law and accepted the Devil’s, it may be needful to let them learn by bitter trial what they have forsaken and what they have preferred. Would not this be the best witness that a man’s position in the Church is determined not by priests, bishops or popes, but by God, who places him there? Would it not be the greatest protest against the notion that ecclesiastics may rightly or safely inquire into the secret thoughts or opinions of their fellow-men, or decide anything about them except by their conduct? Suppose men were taught how careful the Apostle was not to separate himself from the general body of the Church, and that he was confident of his own judgment only because he felt himself one of them, guided by the same Spirit. Would this not greatly encourage every Christian to hope for that Spirit’s help in doubt and temptation? Would it not be the greatest protest against the arrogance of doctors and priests, who have fancied they had gifts and faculties not to minister to their fellows but to be raised above them? Suppose men were taught that Excommunication is the slow, solemn, reluctant confirmation of a judgment the wrongdoer has already passed on himself. Would not this be the greatest witness that Communion is what is meant for human beings, and that the chief duty of Christ’s ministers is to hold out Communion with God and with men as the privilege He has won for us? Would it not be the most effectual protest against the notion that the power of cursing is the great power of Churches, to be eagerly held and exerted by those who have it and coveted by those who have lost it? Suppose men were taught that St. Paul neither recommended nor inflicted any outward penalty on the man he wanted the Corinthian Church to cut off, that he could inflict none, and that the excluded man might, if he pleased, return to heathenism, leave all the perils of a persecuted position, and even become a persecutor himself. Would not this be the greatest witness for the entirely spiritual nature of both Communion and Excommunication, and against those who have made or would make exclusion a plea for injuries to body or estate? If men are taught that the worst fear is of becoming servants of the Spirit of Pride, Malice and Hatred, will not the Excommunicator tremble lest he be excommunicating himself in the worst sense? If they are taught that the Prodigal may at last be brought by riotous living and the swine’s husks to think of his father’s house, and that the very end of Excommunication is that the spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord, who will not see that its whole purpose is inverted when it is used to cut men off from God’s forgiveness and drive them to despair?

VI. But, brethren, I have called your thoughts to this subject not chiefly to comment on the misuse of Excommunication in other days or in ours. I do not think that purpose unimportant, for our feelings about history and about Scripture are often confused because we do not see how far the recorded acts of men correspond to the commands in Scripture. But I should rejoice far more if I could impress on you and on myself the conviction that Excommunication is fearful because Communion is the real foundation of our lives, and the exercise of it is their reasonable, healthy condition. Various opinions and habits among us make this faith very hard to hold, yet we confess it to be true in many ordinary phrases. We confess that we cannot live without a daily renewal of life, and cannot separate our life from the life of our kind. Consider what that acknowledgment involves. Does it not mean that every faculty of sense, feeling and perception is awakened in us by an impulse from above, and reminds us that we must go out of ourselves if we would be truly ourselves? To be always going out of ourselves, always in fellowship with the Source of all Good and Truth, always passing on to those around us what we receive from it: this is the highest perfection we can dream of, the life of Christ, and the life of those spirits who have fought the fight and finished their earthly course. To receive nothing, communicate nothing, and be altogether shut up in self is the Excommunication we can hardly dream of; it must be the condition of devils.

We stand between the two. At every moment something reminds us we may sink into the worst, and at every moment a voice beckons us upward to the nobler. Let each of us understand that this is the Voice of Christ, saying to him, “In thyself lie the capacities of an ever-deepening Death; I have come that thou mayest have Life, and mayest have it every day more abundantly.”