Bind and Loose: What the Church May Decide

Christ gave His church real authority to decide things, and said heaven would stand behind it. That sentence has been used to justify almost everything the church has ever done, and it is almost never quoted with the paragraph it sits in. This page reads it in context, watches the apostles use it once in the open, and then asks the harder question: what can it not do? The companion question, which lines should exist at all, is Lines Drawn.

Which is not the same as never judging anything

It would be easy, and wrong, to take any of this as if Paul had forbidden the church to draw any line at all. The whole question of judging, who does it, over what, and toward whom, has its own letter here ("Judge Not"?). What matters for this page is the shape of it. Three chapters later he draws one himself, hard, and tells them to enforce it.

"But now I have written unto you not to keep company, if any man that is called a brother be a fornicator, or covetous, or an idolater, or a railer, or a drunkard, or an extortioner; with such an one no not to eat" (1 Corinthians 5:11). And then he marks the boundary of the boundary, which is the part usually left out: "For what have I to do to judge them also that are without? do not ye judge them that are within? But them that are without God judgeth. Therefore put away from among yourselves that wicked person" (1 Corinthians 5:12-13).

So the judging that is commanded is inward, and the judging that is refused is outward. The modern instinct runs exactly backwards: severe with the world, indulgent with ourselves. Paul is the reverse, and Christ set the same order in the process He gave, private first, then witnesses, then the church, and only at the end "let him be unto thee as an heathen man and a publican" (Matthew 18:17).

Notice what the lists contain, too. Fornicator, covetous, idolater, railer, drunkard, extortioner. Not a man who read Daniel differently. The discipline Paul commands is over conduct and over open heresy after warning, "a man that is an heretick after the first and second admonition reject" (Titus 3:10), and even that requires two admonitions first.

And the aim is stated: "Brethren, if a man be overtaken in a fault, ye which are spiritual, restore such an one in the spirit of meekness; considering thyself, lest thou also be tempted" (Galatians 6:1). Restore, in meekness, watching yourself while you do it.

The verse about the spiritual man says both halves at once: "he that is spiritual judgeth all things, yet he himself is judged of no man" (1 Corinthians 2:15). He discerns everything and is not himself at the mercy of anyone's verdict. That is not licence and it is not immunity. It is a man under one Judge, discerning by one Spirit, and it is the same man Paul has just told to put away the wicked person and to restore the fallen one in meekness.

And between doing nothing and putting a man out there is a whole middle Paul commands and almost nobody practises: ordinary admonition, done by everybody, all the time.

He assumes it of a church he has never visited: "I myself also am persuaded of you, my brethren, that ye also are full of goodness, filled with all knowledge, able also to admonish one another" (Romans 15:14). He builds it into worship, of all places: "teaching and admonishing one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs" (Colossians 3:16). He spreads it across a congregation with the tone sorted by case: "warn them that are unruly, comfort the feebleminded, support the weak, be patient toward all men" (1 Thessalonians 5:14). Hebrews makes it daily: "exhort one another daily, while it is called To day; lest any of you be hardened through the deceitfulness of sin" (Hebrews 3:13).

And when he has just told a church to withdraw from someone, he guards the withdrawal in one sentence: "Yet count him not as an enemy, but admonish him as a brother" (2 Thessalonians 3:15).

That sentence is the whole thing. Even the man being disciplined is still being admonished, and still being called brother. If admonition were happening daily, as a normal act of love between people who expect it from each other, the extreme case would arrive far less often, and when it did arrive it would not feel like an execution.

And Paul did it himself, to the most senior man in the church, in public. "When Peter was come to Antioch, I withstood him to the face, because he was to be blamed" (Galatians 2:11), and the reason was not a private grievance but the gospel: "when I saw that they walked not uprightly according to the truth of the gospel, I said unto Peter before them all" (Galatians 2:14). The apostle to the Gentiles corrects the apostle to the circumcision, out loud, and the church keeps both men.

So it is not a thing he assigned to other people. And notice it does not end the relationship. Peter later calls him "our beloved brother Paul."

Then he grades the manner by who is in front of you, which is the instruction most likely to be skipped by anyone who enjoys this work: "Rebuke not an elder, but intreat him as a father; and the younger men as brethren; The elder women as mothers; the younger as sisters, with all purity" (1 Timothy 5:1-2).

Read that as a set. The older man is not rebuked at all; he is entreated, and as a father. The younger are brothers. The older women are mothers. And the young women get an extra guard clause, with all purity, because Paul knows exactly how that goes wrong. The same letter can still say "them that sin rebuke before all, that others also may fear" (1 Timothy 5:20), and the two are not in conflict: the offence sets the seriousness, the person sets the tone.

And the whole thing carries a time signature: "reprove, rebuke, exhort with all longsuffering and doctrine" (2 Timothy 4:2). With longsuffering. Which is to say, slowly, and more than once, by someone prepared to still be there afterwards.

So the site's argument is narrower than it sometimes sounds, and should be. Not that lines are wrong. That lines drawn beyond what Scripture plainly says have divided the Body, while the ones Scripture does plainly draw, over conduct, over open and admonished heresy, over the floor of the faith itself, have too often gone unenforced by the same people busy defending the others.

Everything the Body has since broken itself over sits somewhere in relation to that line. Some of it is inside, and worth defending. A great deal of it is outside, and has cost us more than it was ever worth.

Bind and loose: the authority nobody quotes in context

The verse that has caused more argument than almost any other sits immediately after the discipline process, in the same breath, as its warrant: "Verily I say unto you, Whatsoever ye shall bind on earth shall be bound in heaven: and whatsoever ye shall loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven" (Matthew 18:18).

It is not a free-floating grant of power. Christ has just described going to your brother alone, then with witnesses, then to the church, and then He says heaven stands behind that. And what follows is the sentence everyone knows from prayer meetings, which in context is about this: "if two of you shall agree on earth as touching any thing... For where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them" (Matthew 18:19-20).

Jerome, reading it in the fifth century, says plainly why the sentence is there at all, and it is not a grant of power for its own sake:

The authority exists so that a disciplined man cannot simply excommunicate the church back. It is there to end a stalemate, not to start an empire.

And the medieval Glossa Ordinaria, which is the standard gloss the whole Latin West read beside the text, extends the promise to prayer and in the same sentence puts a fence around it:

That qualification is the same one this page is about, and it was already there in the gloss every medieval reader had open: the promise does not cover a decision that breaks the thing it was given to hold together.

Origen turns it on the church rather than on the excommunicated: “our prayers are not granted, because we do not agree together in all things upon earth, neither in doctrine, nor in conversation. For as in music, unless the voices are in time there is no pleasure to the hearer, so in the Church, unless they are united God is not pleased therein.”

So the church really does have authority to decide things. That is plainly written, and no amount of discomfort with how it has been used makes it go away.

And Christ Himself shows what such a decision can be. Asked about divorce, He does not say Moses was wrong to permit it. He says: "Moses because of the hardness of your hearts suffered you to put away your wives: but from the beginning it was not so" (Matthew 19:8). A real concession, given by real authority, for a real reason, and still a concession. It bound and loosed on earth, and Christ names both the permission and its cause without pretending either away.

And the church did it once, in the open, and recorded the wording. The council at Jerusalem loosed the heaviest requirement anyone had asked of the Gentiles and bound four things instead, and the sentence they used should stop anyone who wants this power casually: "For it seemed good to the Holy Ghost, and to us, to lay upon you no greater burden than these necessary things" (Acts 15:28).

Read the direction of it. The apostolic council used the authority to bind and loose mainly to loose, and described its own binding as no greater burden. The Apostolic Constitutions, centuries later, still ties the bishop's seat to that verse: "the power of inspection and of judging, and the authority to loose and bind, are given to them by the Lord."

Which sharpens the question this whole page is asking. It was never whether the church has authority. It plainly has it. The question is what the authority is for. Jerusalem used it to lift a burden and named the four things it kept as necessary. Moses used it to accommodate a hardness Christ later named out loud. Almost every line this site argues about was laid down by men who believed they were doing the same work, and the test is not whether they had the right to decide but whether what they decided lifted a burden or added one.

What the authority cannot do

If heaven backs what the church binds, the obvious question follows: can a church agree to anything at all and make it so? Scripture has already run that experiment, and it records the result.

A congregation agreed, and Paul reversed it. Corinth had accepted something Paul says is "such fornication as is not so much as named among the Gentiles, that one should have his father's wife" (1 Corinthians 5:1). They were not ashamed of it. "And ye are puffed up, and have not rather mourned" (1 Corinthians 5:2). They were proud of their tolerance. Paul overrules them in writing, and says so in the language of a verdict already returned: "For I verily, as absent in body, but present in spirit, have judged already, as though I were present, concerning him that hath so done this deed" (1 Corinthians 5:3). Judged already, from another city, against the settled opinion of the congregation. The church had agreed; the agreement did not make it so.

Jerusalem reasoned under Scripture, not over it. Before the council decides anything it checks itself: "to this agree the words of the prophets" (Acts 15:15). The authority is exercised inside a text it did not write.

Paul bounds even apostles, and puts himself first in the sentence. "Though we, or an angel from heaven, preach any other gospel unto you than that which we have preached unto you, let him be accursed" (Galatians 1:8). Not "though anyone else." Though we.

And Christ, asked about the concession, goes behind it to creation. "Have ye not read, that he which made them at the beginning made them male and female... What therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder" (Matthew 19:4-6). He treats "from the beginning" as the standard the permission departed from. Which is the whole shape of it: a ruling can be real, operative, heaven-backed, and still be a concession to hard hearts. Moses' permission never made the thing good.

So the authority is genuine and it is bounded. The church can bind and loose where Scripture leaves a matter open, and Jerusalem did exactly that on food and circumcision. It cannot turn "from the beginning it was not so" into "from the beginning it was so." Where a church has tried, the correction is already in the New Testament.

And the direction of Jerusalem's ruling is worth keeping in view, because it applies to both sides. The four things they retained were named as the opposite of a burden, "no greater burden than these necessary things" (Acts 15:28). Necessary, and few. That is the pattern: hold what must be held, and be very slow to add a fifth.

Related: Upon This Rock, Lines Drawn, “Judge Not”?, The Church, Do That Which Thou Canst. Scripture from the King James Version, linked to BibleHub.