Church Discipline and the Rule of Christ
As taught in the Anabaptist / Mennonite tradition
How the believers’ church keeps itself pure through the rule of Christ and the ban
Among the Anabaptist churches that descend from the sixteenth-century Radical Reformation, the practice of mutual correction within a gathered, voluntary congregation is not a marginal disciplinary mechanism but a defining mark of the church itself. The phrase "the rule of Christ" became a technical term in this tradition for the sequence of admonition Jesus lays down in Matthew 18:15-18. Where the magisterial Reformers retained a territorial church coextensive with the baptized population of a region, the Anabaptists insisted that a true church is a visible, separated body of those who have voluntarily covenanted to follow Christ. Such a body requires a means of keeping itself "without spot," and that means is church discipline: brotherly admonition leading, where unrepentance persists, to the ban.
By the end of this lesson
- Explain why Anabaptist church discipline presupposes the believers’ church and adult baptism, so that only those who have voluntarily covenanted are subject to the ban.
- Trace the three-stage “rule of Christ” from Matthew 18:15-18 as the Schleitheim Confession applies it, from private warning to public admonition before the whole congregation.
- Distinguish the ban exercised “within the perfection of Christ” from the state’s sword “outside the perfection of Christ,” as Schleitheim Article VI frames it.
- Describe the practice of shunning (Meidung) set out in Dordrecht Article XVII and the scriptural limits Dordrecht places on it from 2 Thessalonians 3:15.
- Account for the 1690s Amish-Mennonite division over the rigor of shunning and the Swiss refusal of the Dordrecht Confession.
- Evaluate where Anabaptist discipline diverges from mainstream paedobaptist and magisterial practice, naming both the points of difference and the tradition’s internal safeguards against cruelty.
Scripture
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