The Church and the Surprising Offense of God's Love
Book Review (Jonathan Leeman)
Recently I was preparing to preach on a passage that dealt with the topic of church discipline, and among the things I read in preparation was this book. It's by Jonathan Leeman, and it's a slim 411 pages on the topic! Subtitled "Reintroducing the Doctrines of Church Membership and Discipline". No surprise that it's published by 9Marks.
Let me say that there are a number of great things about this book. Firstly, it's not a polity-specific book. The author (intentionally and he says so) writes in a way that address this topic non-denominationally (to an extent). Secondly, the book works with a good range of literature to illustrate both points the author is making, and cultural engagement, and more importantly does a good job of it. Thirdly, the whole frame of the book in terms of God's love is, in my view, the right frame to tackle this topic at large.
And so Leeman begins with a discussion of love, and the ways in which our contemporary cultural context, thanks to historic impulses and changes, largely defines love in terms of a God who doesn't demand anything of you, and neighbours who never judge you. Leeman's argument for a more biblical definition of love is well grounded in deeper theological currents, for example the way Augustine and Aquinas deal with hate. Put simply, a rightly ordered love, involves a love for the person's good, and a hatred of the person's evil. So Aquinas, "Hatred of a person's evil is equivalent to love of his good".
Leeman's definition of love, then, is this:
The lover's affirmation and affection of and affection for the beloved and the beloved's good in the Holy.
Love (1) affirms the inherent goodness of its object, (2) and is drawn in affinity towards it, (3) but does not terminate in the object alone, but is oriented toward the object's good, (4) and that 'good' is defined by God.
To express it less abstractly, I love another human being rightly, when I affirm and love who and what they are, and love what is good for them, taking joy and delight as they themselves are oriented towards and find their fulfilment in loving and knowing God.
It's only in this context that we can make sense of hatred of sin, judgment of evil, and discipline. The more I love you, the more I will also hate what is evil in you, and what evil does to you as well as the evil you do, as both in turn direct you away from God who is our proper end.
The argument of the book proceeds from this basis. Leeman in turn argues that authority (and submission), when not abused, is the operation of love; that there is a right and proper authority within the church, and that includes affirming people as believers, excluding people as imposters, and providing oversight of those who profess faith. This authority then is love in action in the local church, where individual believers are bound together in a covenant, and by the dictates of that covenant, discipline is to be practised as an act of love.
To boil down the practical dimensions of this:
Church membership is a church affirming an individual and saying, "this person is a representative of Christ and his church". I think there's a hidden rider, which is something like "as far as is in our power to know".
Church discipline is a process that begins with saying to that individual, "you aren't living the way a representative of Christ should", and ends with saying, "we don't recognise you as a representative and follower of Christ - you may or may not be, but we can't say that you are".
Even though I said at the start that Leeman writes in a somewhat polity-neutral way, it is very clear that he writes out of his own context, ecclesial and theological, and that is congregational and Baptist. I live and church in a fairly different context, but I also have strong sympathies for his position. In particular, I do think we ought to have stronger processes of membership, as well as a stronger practice of 'fencing the table', and by corollary corrective discipline.
But I'm not here to debate those today. Leeman's book ends with what he thinks is the most difficult chapter/topic, and I think I'm inclined to agree. It's about what godly, loving submission to a local church looks like. If we 21st century westerns are phobic of the idea that love involves any sort of binding, we go ballistic at the suggestion that we submit to any kind of authority. To bind ourselves in a covenant with a group of local believers, geographically, socially, affectionately, financially, ethically, vocationally, and spiritually, is a call to give up our selves and our wills as ultimate arbiters of our lives, and to live in love together, for each other's good and our own, and find that good in God.
