"Thinking Eternally, Acting Locally." - Neal August
Here is a nice ethical question with regards to church discipline:
Let us say that a man in a local church commits a particular sin. Following the Scriptural standards of church discipline as presented by Jesus and Paul, the leaders of the church go to the man and ask him to repent. The man replies that he does not believe that what he did was a sin but agrees to not do it again.
Allow me to restate this.
The man who has sinned believes and continues to believe that what he did was not a sin but, nevertheless, agrees to refrain from committing whatever the sinning act may be.
So my question is this:
What should the leaders of the church do?
Should they allow him to continue to think what he did was not a sin just as long as the act is not committed?
Should they discipline him unless the also agrees that what he did was a sin?
3 comments:
Wow...that is quite a teachable man. I seldom know of many people who are willing to stop behavior against their belief system. The question is, has this man repented of the sin? Considering his refraining of the sin, is that repentance?
Travis
I would agree, that man has much going for him in his attitude of refraining from the activity. I feel that the important part of your dilemma you answered already though, because you stated that a man commits a particular sin. You have defined that action (assuming from a biblical perspective) as sin, and therefore we already know that it is according to your situation posed.
If that is true, then the mans opinion of his action is rather arbitrary. Since we know it to be sin (the only way we could would be that the bible says so and gives us a discernable position) his unbelief of this judgment of his actions matters very little to the truth of the issue.
In church discipline, we are told to discipline others until they repent and ask forgiveness, not until they say "i'll never do it again". The issue is that sin is now among the camp (in OT terms) or among the bride (in NT terms) and God finds this unacceptable and wants his bride/camp pure.
If the man refuses to repent, he would require further church discipline regardless of his decision to refrain from committing the said sinful action again. For with out repentance there is no forgiveness of sins because pride stands in the way of ones asking for true forgiveness. BECAUSE of this, we should never seek discipline as a revenge or judgment (duh! statement there) but always as a means of LOVING reconciliation of a member of the bride of Christ.
I believe there is an interesting reading in "Hard Sayings of Jesus Christ" about a similar scenario .....but I'm not well read enough in that book to know if I'm remembering it from there, or another book.....O well. A+ for his teachable spirit, but he must still repent, or discipline is still called for biblically.
Thoughts? Re-directs?
Athos
This is a hypothetical scenario that came to me the other day. There was no specific case in mind. I was just interested in the ethical questions this sort of scenario posed.
But I like the answers – it gives me a number of nice bones to chew on.
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