Lexicography And New Testament Categories Of Church Discipline -- By: Andrew D. Clarke

Journal: Tyndale Bulletin
Volume: TYNBUL 64:1 (NA 2013)
Article: Lexicography And New Testament Categories Of Church Discipline
Author: Andrew D. Clarke


Lexicography And New Testament Categories Of Church Discipline

Andrew D. Clarke

Summary

A range of circumstances, which were formative in the crises prompting the Protestant Reformation, resulted in heightened emphasis on ecclesiastical discipline, with some Reformation Confessions elevating discipline ‘according to the Word of God’ to one of three significant ‘marks’ of the ‘true church’. However, the Bible prompted no similar consensus among either the Reformers or the Reformation Confessions as to how, when, by or to whom such discipline should be exercised. Although the New Testament has no dominant vocabulary for ‘discipline’, the fixing on this term in the Sixteenth Century and subsequently nonetheless became a controlling principle in identifying and interpreting certain New Testament passages as ‘disciplinary’ in focus. Latin lexical roots pose an additional disjunction between first-century and post-Reformation legacy understandings of ‘discipline’. Revisiting New Testament categories of discipleship, education and Christian formation may offer a constructively holistic approach that reaches beyond now traditional views of church discipline.1

1. Introduction

Intellectual History2 is a comparatively recent and dynamic discipline which grew out of the History of Ideas and frequently focuses on how propositions generated in our past are not simply timeless abstractions, located in autonomous and self-sufficient texts, to be studied in isolation from human contexts.3 Rather, they are contingent tools, originally wielded with rhetorical purpose, and with a specific audience in mind. Consequently, historic texts are valuably studied within their originating intellectual contexts, with a view to explaining not only their persuasive thrust (the impact sought by those in whose hands such ideas were being honed), but also to reflecting on the expressive contexts out of which the texts arose (the social, political, ethical, or religious—not just the philosophical—contexts impacting on those who forged and then wielded their ideas).4 This article will explore both the contingency and variety of sixteenth-century responses to the need for church discipline.

One of the Twentieth Century’s significant legacies to New Testament scholarship is the now established awareness that interpretation of biblical texts should not only be historically located (the historical contingency identified above), but is inevitably also circumscribed ...

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