Church Discipline

Church Discipline (Disciplina ecclesiastica), the practice of the Christian Church in dealing with such of its office-bearers and members as have by public scandal caused hindrance to its common spiritual life. Its Scripture authority, resting on such passages as Matt. xvi. 19; xviii. 15 (et seq.), is further enforced in Paul's epistles and in the gospel and epistles of John. Under the Decian persecution there was so much apostasy that special rules became fixed for the restoration of the Lapsed (q.v.), which remained in force till the 5th century. But the great strictness with which Penance (q.v.) was enforced led to the opposite extreme; it became customary for penitents to be restored simply on their producing letters of recommendation (libelli pacis) from persons who had confessed Christ. The Montanists, however, maintained that those who had been once excommunicated should pass their whole life in the status penitentie, and the Novatians denied that the Church possessed the right to assure the Lapsi of the forgiveness of sins, which only God could grant. The Donatists (q.v.) could not arrest the gradual secularisation of discipline. By the 6th century penances began to be commuted for certain fixed taxes. In the Western Church, after public penances had become rare, other punishments took their place, partly derived from the exercises of earlier asceticism, partly from the usages of Frankish law. The episcopal Missi of Charles the Great combined the functions of a civil and ecclesiastical court, and allowed church punishments to be compounded for money. From the time of Gregory the Great the doctrine of Purgatory (q.v.) had been a dogma of the Church; and Peter Lombard and other scholastics built on it the theory of Indulgences (q.v.), which was confirmed by Clement VI. in 1543. The extreme punishments in the middle ages were the Greater Excommunication (q.v.) for the individual, and Interdict (q.v.) for the community. The churches of the Reformation held that 'the power of the keys' belonged to the whole Church, by which it was to be intrusted to the regularly called servants of the Word. They rejected Auricular Confession (q.v.) and the whole system of Satisfaction and Indulgences; restricting the sphere of their church discipline to matters of social morality, and its enforcement simply to spiritual admonition and partial or complete exclusion from the sacraments and offices of the Church. The Lutheran Church rejected the Greater Excommunication as a merely secular punishment with which the servants of the Church had nothing to do; but retained the Lesser, simply as a means of moral training. Though Luther and Melanchthon adhered firmly to the participation of the whole congregation in the imposition of excommunication, yet, in consequence of the development of the consistorial system, it passed into the hands of the consistories in the different states. In the 17th and 18th centuries it fell gradually into disuse. The Reformed Church laid greater stress on congregational discipline. Zwingli assigned it to the civil magistrate of the Christian state; Calvin, on the other hand, referred it to the Presbytery (q.v.). In Presbyterian churches it is exercised by the kirk-session—an appeal lying to the presbytery, and from that to the synod and general assembly. The church discipline provided for by the Canons of the Church of England has almost entirely fallen into disuse.