The second clear statement about this process is recorded in Matthew’s Gospel: “Again, truly I tell you, if two of you agree on earth about anything you ask, it will be done for you by my Father in heaven. For where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them.”3 It is in this context of wrestling with fellow believers and their decisions that Jesus promises the presence and guidance of the Holy Spirit to the church. The Holy Spirit is described in the New Testament as empowering to obedience and as driving the church into mission. But just as often the Spirit’s function is leading within the congregation in the discovery of the path of obedience.
It is this mutual pastoral responsibility of every member for every member, this “cure of souls” exercised by every believer as a priest for fellow believers, which prevents us from being led by anti-Catholic reflexes into a posture of spiritual solitude. As a matter of fact, in the sixteenth century, the first Anabaptists did not say that infants should not be baptized because they cannot have an experience of faith and the new birth, nor did they reject infant baptism only because there was no biblical text commanding it. Rather, their belief was that one who requests baptism submits oneself to the mutual obligation of giving and receiving counsel in the congregation—this is what a child cannot do. In the first clear statement rejecting infant baptism, in September 1524, before going on to discuss whether water has a saving effect or whether unbaptized children are lost, Conrad Grebel says, “even an adult is not to be baptized without Christ’s rule of binding and loosing.”4 Thus, the issue is not the age of the one baptized but the commitment one makes upon entering into the covenant community with its claims on the believer. Likewise, Balthazar Hubmaier, the theological voice of the earliest Anabaptism and author of its first catechism, writes:
Q. What is the baptismal pledge?
A. It is a commitment which man makes to God publicly and orally before the church, in which he renounces Satan, all his thoughts and works. He pledges as well that he will henceforth set all his faith, hope and trust alone in God, and direct his life according to the divine Word, in the power of Jesus Christ our Lord, and in case he should not do that, he promises hereby to the church that he desires virtuously to receive from her members and from her fraternal admonition, as is said above.
Q. What power do those who are in the church have over one another?
A. The authority of fraternal admonition.
Q. What is fraternal admonition?
A. That one who sees his brother sinning goes to him in love and admonishes him fraternally and quietly that he should abandon sin. If he does so he has won his soul. If he does not, then he takes two or three witnesses with him and admonishes him before them once again. If he follows him, it is concluded, if not, he says it to the church. The same calls him forward and admonishes him for the third time. If he now abandons his sin, he has saved his soul.
Q. From where does the church have this authority?
A. From the command of Christ, who said to his disciples, all that you bind on earth shall be bound also in heaven and all that you loose on earth shall also be loosed in heaven.
Q. But what right has one brother to use this authority on another?
A. From the baptismal pledge in which a man subjects himself to the church and all her members according to the word of Christ.5
Far from being the extreme expression of individualism, the baptism of believers is the foundation of the most sweeping community responsibility for the life of all members. It is this process of binding and loosing in the local community which provides the practical and theological foundation for the centrality of the local congregation. It is not correct to say that the local congregation is of central importance because no other gathering of Christians can be called the church. The Bible uses the term “church” for all of the Christians in a large city or in a province. In recent centuries, the concept of local congregational autonomy has sometimes been misunderstood in such a way as to deny mutual responsibilities between congregations or between Christians of different congregations. We understand more clearly and correctly the priority of the congregation when we study what it is that it is to do. It is only in the local face-to-face meeting, with brothers and sisters who know one another well, that this process can take place, this process in which what is decided stands decided in heaven. Whether the outcome be the separating of fellowship or its restoration, the process is not one that can be carried on in a limited time and by means of judicial formalities. It demands conversation of a serious, patient, and loving character. Only when people live together in the same city, meet together often, and know each other well can this “bearing of one another’s burdens” be carried out in a fully loving way.6 The church is defined by this process—not as a legal organization nor in a purely spiritual sense. The church is where two or three or more are gathered in the name of Jesus around this kind of need. The Synod, or the overseer from outside the congregation, may very well be of real assistance, but there is no way such persons could replace the process of binding and loosing community conversation.
If we understand the significance of the promise of the Holy Spirit deeply enough, related so specifically in Jesus’ words to the church which gathers to bind and to loose (Matt 18:19-20), this may even protect us against certain misunderstandings of the use and the authority of scripture. One of the most enduring subjects of unfruitful controversy over the centuries has been whether the words of scripture, when looked at purely as words isolated from the context in which certain persons read them at a certain time and place, have both the clear meaning and the absolute authority of revelation. To speak of the Bible apart from persons reading it and apart from the specific questions which those persons reading it need to answer is to do violence to the very purpose for which we have been given the Holy Scripture. There is no such thing as an isolated word of the Bible carrying meaning in itself. It has meaning only when it is read by someone, and then only when that reader and the society in which one lives can understand the issue to which it speaks. Thus, the most complete framework in which to affirm the authority of scripture is the context of its being read and applied by a believing congregation using its guidance to respond to concrete issues in the witness and obedience of this congregation. Our attention centers not on what theoretical ideas a theologian separated from the church can dissect out of the body of scripture in order to relate the one to another in a system of thought. It is for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for instruction in right behavior that the inspired scripture is useful. Let us, therefore, not be concerned as amateur philosophers to seek for truth in itself as if it were more true by its being more distant from real life. The Bible is the book of the congregation, the source of understanding and insight as the congregation seeks to be the interpreter of the divine purpose for humans in the congregation’s own time and place with the assistance of the same Spirit under whose guidance the apostolic church produced these texts.
A Community of Grace
If we think of church discipline in the puritanical sense, as an expression of the narrowness of the vision of persons without love concerned only for an ideal pattern of life, then we shall stand before this divine promise—“If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained” 7—dismayed at its hardness and afraid of its demands. But if we see in this promise of forgiveness the way of making real in the minds of guilty people the fact that God does genuinely forgive, then we may discover again (as has been the case in one revival movement after another