I’ve been enjoying the book Him We Proclaim: Preaching Christ from All the Scriptures by Dennis Johnson (P&R), lately. I hope to finish the book and have a review up by next week.
This morning I came across a section that I’ll share in a quote below. I had never thought of the connection between the penal execution laws in the OT legal code and the church’s responsibility to discipline and excommunicate its erring members. May this quote stir you up to thinking more about the marvelous unity of Scripture and the glorious privilege we have as members of Christ’s church.
… Leviticus 20:11 required that Israel put to death a man who had sexual relations with his father’s wife. The apostle Paul, addressing the same situation in 1 Corinthians 5:1-13, instructs the church to exercise ecclesiastical excommunication, not physical execution. This formal expulsion of the unrepentant sinner is a sobering and severe sanction, since it is “to deliver this man to Satan.” Yet, excommunication also envisions the possibility that God’s mercy will soften the offender’s hardened heart through the church’s discipline, to the end “that his spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord” (vs. 5). By closing his discussion with a citation from another text from the Mosaic law dealing with penalties for sexual sins (“Purge the evil person from among you,” Deut. 22:22, 24), Paul identifies the church as the fulfillment of Israel and the spiritual discipline by which the church protects its communal purity as the fulfillment of the penal sanctions by which Israel was to maintain its corporate holiness…. [Him We Proclaim, Dennis Johnson (P&R Publishing, 2007) pg. 281]
The quote contains an error of logic: it is true that the church wasn’t ordered to execute the man who had his father’s wife. But it is also true that the priests didn’t exercise capital punishment either. That was the realm of civil government, not ecclesiastical. In the same way, Paul’s instructions to the church at Corinth tell us nothing about what he expected the civil magistrate to do. I’m not claiming that the capital sentence IS still proper. I merely point out the that the reference used doesn’t address that question. The confusion comes from the fact that OT Israel was a civil state which was co-terminous with the visible church. That overlap doesn’t exist in the New Testament dispensation.
As a Reformed member of a non-Reformed church that purposely foregoes the exercise of church discipline, I find this Old Testament basis for such activity very compelling. I know that the question of whether a church should exercise discipline is not generally asked in a Reformed church, being one of the very marks of the church, but this New Testament application of an Old Testament principle to “purge the evil person from among you” confirms that it is a vital part of church life, not, as the skeptical people who neglect the practice believe, merely an excuse to “kick people out of church.” It is a Scriptural practice based squarely on an application of Old Testament principle.
“Paul’s instructions to the church at Corinth tell us nothing about what he expected the civil magistrate to do.”
Is this not an argument from silence?
Is this not introducing something into the discussion that doesn’t belong, based on a precommitment to theonomy? I don’t know if you are a theonomist or not, but your argument sure sounded a lot like the argument at the above link to a “possibly related post” called “Was the Death Sentence in Israel Excommunication from the Church?”
Rather than arguing from what’s not there, is it not more appropriate to argue from what is there, namely, the application by an apostle of an Old Testament principle to a parallel New Testament circumstance?
The wider context of Dr. Johnson’s comments mitigate against this a little bit. He does realize the covenant community changes from a physical emphasis as a “body politic” to a spiritual membership in the Church. There are other reasons beyond this comparison for understanding the Church to fulfill promises made to Israel. I do appreciate your feedback, however. Thanks for stopping by.