Part III, Chapter XLII, 2

But what, then, shall we say of all those Martyrs in the history of the Church—did they needlessly throw away their lives? In answer we must distinguish among those put to death for this cause. Some received a calling to preach and openly profess the Kingdom of Christ; others had no such calling, and nothing more was required of them than their own faith. If those of the former kind were put to death for bearing witness that Jesus Christ rose from the dead, they were true Martyrs. For a Martyr, to give the word its true definition, is a witness to the resurrection of Jesus the Messiah. Only those who lived with him on earth and saw him after he rose can be such witnesses: a witness must have seen what he testifies to, or else his testimony is not sound. That no others can properly be called Martyrs of Christ is plain from St. Peter's words, Acts 1.21, 22.: “Therefore, of these men who accompanied us all the time the Lord Jesus went in and out among us, beginning from the baptism of John until the day he was taken up from us, one must be appointed to be a Martyr (that is, a witness) with us to his resurrection.” We may observe that whoever witnesses to the truth of Christ's resurrection—that is, the truth of the fundamental article of the Christian religion, that Jesus was the Christ—must be a disciple who lived with him and saw him before and after his resurrection. Such a witness must therefore be one of his original disciples; those who were not can testify only that their predecessors said so. They witness to other people's testimony, and are only secondary Martyrs, or Martyrs of Christ's witnesses.

A man who, to maintain every doctrine he draws for himself from the account of our Savior's life or from the Acts or Epistles of the Apostles, or which he believes on a private individual's authority, opposes the laws and authority of the civil state is very far from being a Martyr of Christ or of his Martyrs. There is only one article for which dying merits so honorable a name: that Jesus is the Christ—he who has redeemed us and will return to give us salvation and eternal life in his glorious Kingdom. No one is required to die for every tenet that serves the ambition or profit of the clergy. Nor is it the witness's death but his testimony that makes him a Martyr: the word means nothing but a person who bears witness, whether or not he is put to death for it.

Moreover, someone not sent to preach this fundamental article, who undertakes it on his own authority, may be a witness and consequently a Martyr—either a primary witness of Christ or a secondary witness of his Apostles, Disciples, or their successors—but he is not obliged to suffer death for it. He has not been called to do so, and it is not required of him; nor ought he to complain if he loses the reward he expected from people who never set him to work. Therefore no one can be a Martyr of either degree without a commission to preach Christ come in the flesh: none but those sent to convert unbelievers. For no one is a witness to a person who already believes and needs no witness, but to those who deny, doubt, or have not heard. Christ sent his Apostles and his Seventy Disciples with authority to preach, not all believers; and he sent them to unbelievers: “I send you,” he says, “as sheep among wolves,” not as sheep to other sheep.

Lastly, none of the terms of their commission expressly set down in the Gospel gives them authority over the congregation.

First, we find (Mat. 10.) that the twelve Apostles were sent “to the lost sheep of the house of Israel,” and commanded to preach “that the Kingdom of God was at hand.” Now the original word for preaching refers to the public proclamation of a King by a crier, herald, or other officer. But a crier has no right to command anyone. And (Luke 10.2.) the seventy Disciples are sent “as laborers, not as lords of the harvest,” and are told (verse 9.) to say, “The Kingdom of God has come near you.” Here Kingdom means not the Kingdom of Grace but the Kingdom of Glory; for they are told to announce it (ver. 11.) as a threat to the cities that will not receive them, saying it will be more tolerable on that day for Sodom than for such a city. And (Mat. 20.28.) our Savior tells his Disciples, who sought precedence, that their office was to serve, just as the Son of man came not to be served but to serve. Preachers, therefore, have not the power of masters but of ministers: “Do not be called masters,” says our Savior (Mat. 23.10.), “for one is your Master, Christ.”

Another term of their commission is to teach all nations, as in Mat. 28.19., or, as St. Mark puts it (16.15.), “Go into all the world, and preach the Gospel to every creature.” Teaching, therefore, and preaching are the same thing. Those who proclaim the coming of a King must also make known by what right he comes, if they want people to submit to him. St. Paul did so with the Jews of Thessalonica when, “for three Sabbath days he reasoned with them from the Scriptures, explaining and showing that Christ had to suffer and rise again from the dead, and that this Jesus is Christ.” But teaching from the Old Testament that Jesus was Christ—that is, King—and had risen from the dead is not saying that, once people believe it, they are bound to obey those who tell them, against the laws and commands of their sovereigns. It means that they will act wisely if they await Christ's future coming in patience and faith while obeying their present magistrates.

Another term of their commission is to baptize “in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.” What is baptism? Immersion in water. But what does it mean to immerse someone in water in the name of anything? The words of baptism mean this: the baptized person is immersed or washed as a sign of becoming a new person and a loyal subject of that God whose Person was represented long ago by Moses and the High Priests when he reigned over the Jews; and of Jesus Christ, his Son, God and man, who redeemed us and, in his human nature, will represent his Father's Person in his eternal Kingdom after the Resurrection; and as a sign of acknowledging the Apostles' doctrine as the sole, sure way to that Kingdom, for the Apostles, assisted by the Spirit of the Father and the Son, were left as guides to bring us there. This is our promise in baptism; and the authority of earthly sovereigns will not be abolished before the day of Judgment. St. Paul expressly affirms it (1 Cor. 15. 22, 23, 24.), saying, “As in Adam all die, so in Christ all shall be made alive. But every man in his own order: Christ the first fruits, afterward those who are Christ's, at his coming; then comes the end, when he shall have delivered up the Kingdom to God, even the Father, when he shall have put down all rule and all authority and power.” It is therefore clear that in baptism we do not establish another authority over ourselves to govern our outward actions in this life, but promise to take the Apostles' doctrine as our guide on the way to eternal life.

The power to remit and retain sins, also called the power to loose and bind and sometimes the keys of the Kingdom of Heaven, follows from the authority to baptize or refuse baptism. For baptism is the sacrament of allegiance for those who are to be received into the Kingdom of God—that is, into eternal life, or the remission of sin. As eternal life was lost by committing sins, it is restored by their remission. The aim of baptism is the remission of sins; hence St. Peter, when those converted by his sermon on the day of Pentecost asked what they should do, advised them to “repent, and be baptized in the name of Jesus, for the remission of sins.” Since baptizing declares the reception of people into God's Kingdom, and refusing baptism declares their exclusion, it follows that the same Apostles, their deputies, and successors were given the power to declare people expelled from it or retained within it. Thus, after our Savior breathed upon them and said (John 20.22.), “Receive the Holy Ghost,” he added in the next verse, “Whose sins you remit are remitted to them, and whose sins you retain are retained.” These words do not confer authority to forgive or retain sins simply and absolutely, as God forgives or retains them, knowing the human heart and the truth of a person's repentance and conversion; rather, the forgiveness is conditional upon repentance. If the absolved person's repentance is only feigned, this forgiveness or absolution becomes void without any further act or sentence from the one who absolved him. It has no effect toward salvation but instead aggravates his sin. The Apostles and their successors must therefore rely solely on outward signs of repentance. When these appear, they have no authority to deny absolution; when they do not, they have no authority to grant it. The same holds for baptism: the Apostles had no power to deny it to a converted Jew or Gentile, or to grant it to someone unrepentant. But since no one can discern the truth of another's repentance beyond outward signs in words and deeds, which may be hypocritical, a further question arises: who is appointed judge of these signs? Our Savior himself decides it (Mat. 18. 15, 16, 17.): “If your brother trespasses against you, go and tell him his fault between you and him alone; if he hears you, you have gained your brother. But if he will not hear you, take one or two more with you. And if he neglects to hear them, tell it to the Church; let him be to you as a heathen and a publican.” It is plain from this that judgment concerning the truth of repentance belonged not to one individual but to the Church: the assembly of the faithful or those authorized to represent them. Besides judgment, however, the pronouncement of the sentence is also needed. This always belonged to the Apostle or a pastor of the Church acting as its spokesman; our Savior speaks of it in verse 18: “Whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.” St. Paul's practice agrees with this (1 Cor. 5.3, 4, & 5.), when he says, “For I, though absent in body but present in spirit, have already decided, as though I were present, concerning the man who has done this deed: in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, when you are gathered together and my spirit is with you, with the power of our Lord Jesus Christ, to deliver such a one to Satan”; that is, to cast him out of the Church as a person whose sins are not forgiven. Paul pronounces the sentence here, but the assembly first had to hear the case, since St. Paul was absent, and consequently to condemn the man. In the same chapter (ver. 11, 12.) judgment in such a case is assigned even more expressly to the assembly: “But now I have written to you not to associate with any man called a brother who is a fornicator, &c.; not even to eat with such a one. For what have I to do with judging those outside? Do you not judge those within?” The Apostle or pastor thus pronounced the sentence excluding someone from the Church, but the Church judged the merits of the case: that is, before the conversion of Kings and others with sovereign authority in the Common-wealth, the assembly of Christians residing in the same city—at Corinth, for example, the assembly of Corinthian Christians.

That part of the power of the keys by which people were driven from the Kingdom of God is called excommunication. To excommunicate is, in the original, Aposunagogon Poiein, “to cast out of the synagogue,” that is, out of the place of divine service. The word comes from the Jewish custom of expelling from their synagogues those they thought contagious in conduct or doctrine, as lepers were separated from the congregation of Israel under Moses' Law until the Priest pronounced them clean.

Before civil power reinforced it, the use and effect of excommunication extended no further than requiring those who were not excommunicated to avoid the company of those who were. It was not enough to treat the latter as heathens who had never been Christians, for Christians could eat and drink with such people, but not with the excommunicated. This appears from St. Paul's words (1 Cor. 5. ver. 9, 10, &c.), where he says he had earlier forbidden them “to associate with fornicators”; but since doing so altogether would require leaving the world, he restricts the prohibition to fornicators and other vicious people among the brothers. “With such a one,” he says, they should not associate, “not even to eat.” This is no more than our Savior says (Mat. 18.17.): “Let him be to you as a heathen and as a publican.” For publicans—that is, farmers and collectors of the Common-wealth's revenues—were so hated and detested by the Jews obliged to pay them that publican and sinner were treated as equivalent terms. Thus when our Savior accepted an invitation from Zacchaeus the publican, even though his purpose was to convert him, it was held against him as a crime. By adding publican to heathen, therefore, our Savior forbade them to eat with an excommunicated person.

But then what should we say about all the martyrs described in church history? Did they throw away their lives for nothing? To answer, we must distinguish between those who were called to preach and openly profess Christ's kingdom and those who received no such calling and were required to do nothing more than believe in their own hearts. Those in the first group who were put to death for testifying that Jesus Christ rose from the dead were true martyrs. A martyr, properly speaking, is a witness to the resurrection of Jesus the Messiah. Only those who knew him on earth and saw him after he rose can be such witnesses. To testify reliably, a witness must have seen the event. St. Peter's words make clear that only such people can properly be called Christ's martyrs. In Act. 1.21, 22. he says: “From these men who accompanied us throughout the time the Lord Jesus moved among us, from John's baptism to the day he was taken from us, one must be appointed to be a martyr—that is, a witness—with us to his resurrection.” Notice that a witness to the truth of Christ's resurrection, and thus to the fundamental Christian teaching that Jesus was the Christ, must be a disciple who knew him and saw him both before and after his resurrection. Such a person must be one of his first disciples. Others can testify only that their predecessors said it. They are witnesses to other people's testimony: secondary martyrs, or martyrs of Christ's witnesses.

Someone who opposes the laws and authority of the civil state to defend every doctrine they themselves infer from the accounts of our Savior's life or from the apostles' Acts and letters—or believe on some private person's authority—is far from being either a martyr of Christ or a martyr of his martyrs. Only one teaching deserves so honorable a name for those who die defending it: Jesus is the Christ. This means that he redeemed us and will return to give us salvation and eternal life in his glorious kingdom. No one is required to die for every doctrine that benefits the clergy's ambition or income. Nor is it a witness's death that makes someone a martyr. It is the testimony itself. The word means nothing more than someone who bears witness, whether or not that person is killed for it.

Further, someone who has not been sent to preach this fundamental teaching, but takes on that task on their own authority, may still be a witness and therefore a martyr. They may be a primary witness to Christ or a secondary witness to his apostles, disciples, or their successors. Yet they are not obliged to die for it. They were not called, and no such duty was laid on them. They should not complain if they lose the reward they expected from people who never hired them. No one, then, can be a martyr of either degree without authorization to preach that Christ has come in the flesh. In other words, martyrs must be people sent to convert nonbelievers. No one serves as a witness for someone who already believes and needs no witness. Witnesses speak to people who deny, doubt, or have never heard the claim. Christ authorized his apostles and his Seventy disciples to preach, not everyone who believed. And he sent them to unbelievers: “I send you,” he says, “as sheep among wolves,” not as sheep among other sheep.

Finally, none of the terms of their commission, as expressly stated in the Gospel, gives them authority over the congregation.

First, we read (Mat. 10.) that the twelve apostles were sent “to the lost sheep of the house of Israel” and instructed to preach “that the Kingdome of God was near.” In the original language, preaching means the act of a town crier, herald, or other officer publicly announcing a king. But a crier has no right to command anyone. The seventy disciples are sent (Luke 10.2.) “as workers, not as lords of the harvest.” They are told (verse 9.) to say, “The Kingdome of God has come near you.” Here kingdom means not the kingdom of grace but the kingdom of glory. For they are also told to announce it to cities that refuse them (ver. 11.) as a warning: judgment day will be more bearable for Sodom than for such a city. Our Savior tells disciples seeking higher rank (Mat. 20.28.) that their job is to serve, just as the Son of man came not to be served but to serve. Preachers therefore have the power of servants, not masters. “Do not be called masters,” says our Savior (Mat. 23.10), “for you have one master, Christ.”

Another part of their commission is to teach all nations, as in Mat. 28.19., or as St. Mark 16.15 says, “Go into all the world and preach the Gospel to every creature.” Teaching and preaching are thus the same thing. Anyone announcing the arrival of a king must explain his right to rule if they want people to submit to him. St. Paul did this with the Jews of Thessalonica. “For three Sabbath days he reasoned with them from the Scriptures, explaining and arguing that Christ had to suffer and rise again from the dead, and that this Jesus is Christ.” But teaching from the Old Testament that Jesus was Christ—that is, king—and that he rose from the dead does not mean believers must obey their teachers against the laws and commands of their sovereigns. It means they would be wise to wait patiently and faithfully for Christ's future coming while obeying their present authorities.

Another part of their commission is to baptize “in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.” What is baptism? Dipping a person into water. What, though, does it mean to dip someone into water in the name of something? Here is what the words mean. Baptism dips or washes a person as a sign of becoming a new person and a loyal subject of the God whose Person Moses and the high priests once represented when he ruled the Jews. It is a sign of loyalty to Jesus Christ, God's Son, both God and man. He redeemed us and, in his human nature, will represent his Father's Person in his eternal kingdom after the resurrection. Baptism also means recognizing the apostles' teaching as the only sure way to that kingdom. The apostles, helped by the Spirit of the Father and Son, were left as our guides toward it. This is what we promise at baptism. The authority of earthly sovereigns will not end before judgment day. St. Paul states this explicitly (1 Cor. 15. 22, 23, 24.): “As all die in Adam, all will be made alive in Christ. But each in their own order: Christ the first fruits, then those who belong to Christ at his coming. Then comes the end, when he delivers the kingdom to God, the Father, after he has brought down every rule, authority, and power.” Clearly baptism does not place us under a new authority that controls our outward actions during this life. We promise instead to follow the apostles' teaching as our guide to eternal life.

The power to remit or retain sins—also called the power to loose or bind, and sometimes the keys to the kingdom of heaven—follows from the authority to baptize or refuse baptism. Baptism is the sacrament by which those entering the Kingdome of God pledge allegiance. Entering that kingdom means gaining eternal life, and that means having one's sins forgiven. Just as committing sins lost eternal life for us, forgiveness restores it. Baptism aims at the forgiveness of sins. So when the people converted by St. Peter's Pentecost sermon asked what to do, he told them to “repent and be baptized in the name of Jesus for the forgiveness of sins.” Baptizing someone announces their admission to God's kingdom; refusing baptism announces their exclusion. Thus the apostles and their deputies and successors also received the power to announce whether people were excluded or retained there. After our Savior breathed on the apostles and said (John 20.22.), “Receive the Holy Spirit,” he added in the next verse, “The sins you forgive are forgiven, and the sins you retain are retained.” This does not give them the unconditional power to forgive or retain sins as God does. God knows a person's heart and whether their repentance and conversion are genuine. Ministers can forgive conditionally, when someone repents. If the forgiven person only pretends to repent, the forgiveness or absolution becomes void without any further act or ruling by the one who granted it. It does nothing for that person's salvation and instead makes their sin worse. The apostles and their successors must therefore judge by outward signs of repentance. If these appear, they have no authority to refuse absolution; if they do not, they have no authority to grant it. The same goes for baptism. The apostles could not refuse baptism to a converted Jew or Gentile or grant it to someone who had not repented. But no one can judge another person's repentance except from outward signs in their words and actions, which may be hypocritical. So another question arises: who is authorized to judge these signs? Our Savior himself decides it (Mat. 18. 15, 16, 17.): “If your brother sins against you, tell him his fault privately. If he listens, you have regained your brother. But if he does not listen, take one or two others with you. If he refuses to listen to them, tell the church; let him be to you like a heathen and a tax collector.” This clearly assigns judgment of genuine repentance not to any one person but to the church: the assembly of believers or those authorized to represent them. A judgment also needs someone to announce the sentence. That always belonged to an apostle or a church pastor speaking for the assembly. Our Savior refers to this in verse 18: “Whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.” St. Paul's practice agreed with this (1 Cor. 5.3, 4, & 5.). He says, “Though absent in body, I am present in spirit and have already decided, as if I were present, about the man who has done this. When you are gathered in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, with my spirit and the power of our Lord Jesus Christ, hand this man over to Satan.” That means removing him from the church as a man whose sins are not forgiven. Paul announces the sentence, but the assembly first had to hear and judge the case, since he was absent. Later in the same chapter (ver. 11, 12.), he assigns the judgment more explicitly to the assembly: “I have written to you not to associate with anyone called a brother who is sexually immoral, and so on. Do not even eat with such a person. For why should I judge those outside? Is it not for you to judge those inside?” Thus an apostle or pastor pronounced the sentence removing someone from the church. But the church judged whether the case deserved it. Before the conversion of kings and other sovereign rulers of commonwealths, the church here meant the assembly of Christians in one city—for example, the assembly of Christians in Corinth.

This use of the power of the keys to shut people out of the Kingdome of God is called excommunication. To excommunicate is, in the original language, Aposunagogon Poiein, “to cast out of the synagogue,” the place of worship. The expression comes from the Jewish practice of excluding from synagogues people whose conduct or teachings they thought contagious, just as the law of Moses separated people with leprosy from Israel's congregation until a priest declared them clean.

Before civil power enforced excommunication, its only effect was that those who were not excommunicated had to avoid the company of those who were. It was not enough to treat them as heathens who had never been Christian. Christians could eat and drink with heathens, but not with excommunicated people. St. Paul makes this clear (1 Cor. 5. ver. 9, 10, &c.). He says he had previously forbidden associating with people who committed sexual wrongdoing. Since avoiding all such people would require leaving the world, he limits his instruction to such offenders, or others behaving badly, who belonged to the community of believers. With such a person, he says, they must not associate, “not even to eat.” Our Savior means no more when he says (Mat. 18.17.), “Let him be to you like a heathen and a tax collector.” Tax collectors, who leased and collected the commonwealth's revenue, were so hated by the Jews who paid it that “tax collector” and “sinner” meant the same thing to them. Even when our Savior accepted an invitation from Zacchaeus, a tax collector, in order to convert him, people accused him of wrongdoing. Therefore, by adding “tax collector” to “heathen,” our Savior forbade eating with an excommunicated person.