Part III, Chapter XLII, 3

As for excluding them from their synagogues or places of assembly, they had no power to do so except the power of the owner of the place, whether Christian or heathen. And because all places lie by right within the dominion of the Common-wealth, the excommunicated person, no less than someone never baptized, might enter them by commission of the civil magistrate; just as Paul, before his conversion, entered their synagogues at Damascus (Acts 9.2.) to seize Christians, men and women, and carry them bound to Jerusalem, by commission of the high priest.

From this it appears that, for a Christian who became an apostate in a place where the civil power persecuted the Church or gave it no assistance, excommunication brought neither harm in this world nor terror. It brought no terror because of his unbelief, and no harm because it restored him to the favor of the world; and in the world to come he would be no worse off than those who had never believed. The harm fell rather upon the Church, since casting such people out provoked them to carry out their malice more freely.

Excommunication therefore had an effect only on those who believed that Jesus Christ would return in glory to reign over and judge the living and the dead, and would therefore refuse entry into his Kingdom to those whose sins were retained—that is, those excommunicated by the Church. This is why St. Paul calls excommunication a delivery of the excommunicated person to Satan. For outside the Kingdom of Christ, all other kingdoms after Judgment are included within the kingdom of Satan. This is what the faithful feared while they remained excommunicated, that is, in a state in which their sins were not forgiven. We may therefore understand that when the Christian religion was not authorized by the civil power, excommunication was used only to correct conduct, not errors of opinion. It is a punishment that none could feel except those who believed in and awaited the return of our Savior to judge the world; and those who believed this needed nothing beyond uprightness of life to be saved.

Excommunication is prescribed for injustice, as in (Mat. 18.): if your brother offends you, tell him privately; then tell him with witnesses; finally tell the Church; and if he will not listen, “Let him be to you as a heathen man and a tax collector.” Excommunication is also prescribed for a scandalous life, as in (1 Cor. 5. 11.): “If anyone called a brother is sexually immoral, or covetous, or an idolater, or a drunkard, or an extortioner, you must not eat with such a person.” But Scripture offers no authority, nor the Apostles any example, for excommunicating someone who holds to this foundation, that Jesus was the Christ, over a difference of opinion on other points that do not destroy that foundation. There is, indeed, a passage in St. Paul (Titus 3.10.) that seems to say otherwise: “Reject a man who is a heretic after a first and second admonition.” A heretic is someone who, while a member of the Church, teaches a private opinion forbidden by the Church; and St. Paul advises Titus to reject such a person after a first and second warning. But “reject” here does not mean excommunicate the man: it means stop admonishing him, leave him alone, set aside debate with him, as one who can be convinced only by himself. The same Apostle says (2 Tim. 2.23.), “Avoid foolish and ignorant questions.” “Avoid” here and “reject” in the former passage are the same word in the original, paraitou; yet foolish questions can be set aside without excommunication. And again (Tit. 3.93), “Avoid foolish questions,” where the original periistaso, “set them aside,” is equivalent to the earlier word “reject.” There is no other passage that could even plausibly be used to support casting faithful people out of the Church—people who believe its foundation—merely for a distinctive structure of beliefs of their own, perhaps arising from a good and pious conscience. On the contrary, all the passages commanding us to avoid such disputes teach pastors, such as Timothy and Titus, not to create new articles of faith by deciding every minor controversy, burdening consciences needlessly or provoking people to break the Church's unity. The Apostles themselves observed this lesson well. Though the dispute between St. Peter and St. Paul was serious (as we may read in Gal. 2.11.), they did not cast each other out of the Church. Nevertheless, even in the Apostles' time there were other pastors who did not observe it: Diotrephes (3 John 9. &c.), out of his pride in preeminence, cast from the Church people whom St. John himself thought should be received into it. So early had vanity and ambition found entrance into the Church of Christ.

For a person to be liable to excommunication, many conditions are required. First, he must belong to a community, that is, a lawful assembly or Christian Church with the power to judge the cause for which he is to be excommunicated. Where there is no community there can be no excommunication; and where there is no power to judge, there can be no power to pronounce sentence. It follows that one Church cannot be excommunicated by another. Either the two have equal power to excommunicate each other, in which case excommunication is not discipline or an act of authority but schism and a dissolution of charity; or one is subordinate to the other, so that both have only one voice and are therefore one Church, while the excommunicated part is no longer a Church but a dispersed collection of individuals.

And because the sentence of excommunication advises people not to associate, or even eat, with the excommunicated, the sentence has no effect if a sovereign prince or assembly is excommunicated. All subjects are bound by the Law of Nature to attend and be present with their own Soveraigne when required; they cannot lawfully expel him from any place in his dominion, sacred or secular, or leave his dominion without permission, much less refuse to eat with him if he calls them to that honor. As for other princes and states, since they are not members of the same congregation, they need no sentence to keep them from associating with the excommunicated state. The very institution that unites many people into one community also separates one community from another. Excommunication is therefore unnecessary to keep kings and states apart and has no effect beyond what belongs to the nature of government itself, unless it is to incite princes to war against one another.

Nor has excommunication any effect on a Christian subject who obeys the laws of his own Soveraigne, whether Christian or heathen. For if he believes that “Jesus is the Christ, he has the Spirit of God” (1 Joh. 4.1.) and “God dwells in him, and he in God” (1 Joh. 4.15.). But someone who has the Spirit of God, dwells in God, and has God dwelling in him can suffer no harm from the excommunication of men. Therefore whoever believes Jesus is the Christ is free from all the dangers threatened against excommunicated persons. Whoever does not believe this is no Christian. Thus a true and sincere Christian is not liable to excommunication; nor is a professing Christian until his hypocrisy appears in his conduct—that is, until his behavior violates his Soveraigne's law, the rule of conduct to which Christ and his Apostles have commanded our submission. For the Church can judge conduct only by outward actions, and those actions cannot be unlawful unless they violate the law of the Common-wealth.

If someone's father, mother, or master is excommunicated, the children are not forbidden to associate or eat with them. That would, in most cases, require the children not to eat at all, since they have no means of obtaining food, and would authorize them to disobey their parents and masters, contrary to the Apostles' command.

In sum, the power of excommunication cannot extend beyond the purpose for which the Apostles and pastors of the Church have their commission from our Savior: not to rule by command and coercion, but to teach and direct people along the way to salvation in the world to come. A master of a science may abandon a student who stubbornly neglects to practice his rules, but cannot accuse him of injustice, since the student was never bound to obey him. In the same way a teacher of Christian doctrine may abandon disciples who persist stubbornly in an unchristian life, but cannot say they have wronged him, because they have no obligation to obey him. To a teacher who complains in this fashion, God's answer to Samuel on a similar occasion may be applied (1 Sam. 8.): “They have not rejected you, but me.” Excommunication, then, when it lacks the aid of civil power—as it does when a Christian state or prince is excommunicated by a foreign authority—has no effect and consequently should cause no terror. The name Fulmen Excommunicationis, or “Thunderbolt of Excommunication,” arose from the fancy of the bishop of Rome who first used it: he imagined himself King of Kings, as the heathen made Jupiter King of the Gods and gave him in their poems and pictures a thunderbolt to subdue and punish giants who dared deny his power. That fancy rested on two errors: first, that the Kingdom of Christ is of this world, contrary to our Savior's own words, “My Kingdom is not of this world”; second, that the bishop is Christ's vicar not only over his own subjects but over every Christian in the world—a claim without foundation in Scripture, whose contrary will be proved in its proper place.

When St. Paul came to Thessalonica, where there was a Jewish synagogue, (Acts 17.2, 3.) “As was his custom, he went in to them, and on three Sabbath days reasoned with them from the Scriptures, explaining and showing that the Christ had to suffer and rise again from the dead, and that this Jesus whom he preached was the Christ.” The Scriptures mentioned here were the Scriptures of the Jews, that is, the Old Testament. Those to whom he had to prove that Jesus was the Christ and had risen from the dead were also Jews, and already believed those Scriptures to be the Word of God. Thus, as verse 4 says, some of them believed; and, as verse 5 says, others did not. Why, if all believed Scripture, did they not all believe alike? Why did some accept and others reject St. Paul's interpretation of the passages he cited, with each interpreting them for himself? The reason was this: St. Paul came to them without any legal commission, as someone seeking not to command but to persuade. To do this he had either to work miracles, as Moses did before the Israelites in Egypt, so that they could see his authority in God's works, or to reason from Scriptures they already accepted, so that they could see the truth of his doctrine in God's Word. But anyone who persuades by reasoning from written principles makes the person addressed the judge both of their meaning and of the force of his inferences from them. If these Jews of Thessalonica were not the judges, who else judged St. Paul's arguments from Scripture? If it was St. Paul, why did he need to quote passages to prove his doctrine? It would have been enough to say, “I find it so in Scripture”—in other words, “in your laws, which I am sent by Christ to interpret.” There could therefore be no interpreter of Scripture whose interpretation the Jews of Thessalonica were bound to accept: each could believe or not believe according as the citations appeared to him to agree or disagree with the meaning of the passages cited. In general, in every worldly case, whoever offers a proof makes the person he addresses the judge of that proof. As for the Jews in particular, they were bound by explicit words (Deut. 17.) to accept the decisions on all difficult questions of the priests and judges of Israel then in office. But this applies to Jews who had not yet converted.

For the conversion of the Gentiles, there was no use citing Scriptures in which they did not believe. The Apostles therefore worked by reason to refute their idolatry; then, by their testimony to Christ's life and resurrection, they sought to persuade them to believe in him. There could as yet be no dispute about authority to interpret Scripture, since no one while still an unbeliever was obliged to follow another person's interpretation of any Scripture, except his Soveraigne's interpretation of the laws of his country.

Let us now consider conversion itself, and see what in it could give rise to such an obligation. People were converted only to belief in what the Apostles preached. And the Apostles preached nothing but that Jesus was the Christ: the King who would save them and reign over them eternally in the world to come; and, consequently, that he was not dead but had risen from the dead and ascended into Heaven, and would one day return to judge the world—which would also rise again for judgment—and reward everyone according to his works. None of the Apostles preached that he himself, or any other Apostle, was an interpreter of Scripture whose interpretation all Christians had to accept as law. For interpreting laws is part of the administration of a present kingdom, which the Apostles did not possess. They, and all pastors ever since, prayed, “Let your Kingdom come,” and urged their converts to obey their heathen princes of the time. The New Testament had not yet been published as one body of writings. Each evangelist interpreted his own Gospel, and each Apostle his own Epistle. As for the Old Testament, our Savior himself tells the Jews (John 5. 39.), “Search the Scriptures; for in them you think you have eternal life, and they are the ones that testify about me.” If he had not meant them to interpret the Scriptures, he would not have instructed them to take from them the proof that he was the Christ. He would either have interpreted them himself or referred them to the priests' interpretation.

As for keeping them out of synagogues or other meeting places, the church had no power to do that, except when the owner of a place was a Christian or a non-Christian who chose to do so. Every place rightly falls under the authority of the Common-wealth. Therefore a person who had been excommunicated, just like a person who had never been baptized, could enter such a place with permission from the civil magistrate. Before his conversion, Paul entered the synagogues in Damascus under a commission from the high priest. He went there to arrest Christian men and women and take them to Jerusalem in chains (Acts 9.2.).

This shows what excommunication did to a Christian who abandoned the faith in a place where the civil power persecuted the church or did not support it: it caused no harm in this world and inspired no fear. It inspired no fear because such people no longer believed. It caused no harm because it restored them to the favor of the world. In the world to come, their condition would be no worse than that of people who had never believed. The harm fell instead on the church, because expelling them encouraged them to act more freely on their hostility.

Excommunication therefore affected only people who believed that Jesus Christ would come back in glory to reign over and judge the living and the dead. They believed that he would deny entry into his Kingdom to people whose sins were retained, meaning people excommunicated by the church. That is why St. Paul calls excommunication a handing over of the excommunicated person to Satan. After the Judgment, every kingdom outside the Kingdom of Christ belongs to the Kingdom of Satan. This is what believers feared while they remained excommunicated, that is, while their sins had not been forgiven. We can therefore understand that, when the civil power had not authorized the Christian religion, excommunication was used only to correct conduct, not errors of opinion. It is a punishment that only people who believed in and expected our Savior's return to judge the world could feel. People with that belief needed only to live uprightly, not to hold any further opinion, in order to be saved.

Excommunication is prescribed for wrongdoing, as in (Mat. 18.): if your brother offends you, tell him privately, then tell him with witnesses present, and finally tell the church. If he still does not listen, “Treat him as a non-Christian and a tax collector.” It is also prescribed for a scandalous way of life, as in (1 Cor. 5. 11.): “If anyone called a brother is sexually immoral, greedy, an idolater, a drunkard, or an extortioner, do not even eat with such a person.” But Scripture offers no authority, and the apostles offer no example, for excommunicating someone who holds to the foundation that Jesus was the Christ over differences of opinion on other points that do not destroy that foundation. There is a passage in St. Paul (Titus 3.10.) that seems to say otherwise: “After warning a heretic once and then twice, reject him.” A heretic is a member of the church who nevertheless teaches a private opinion forbidden by the church. St. Paul advises Titus to reject such a person after a first and second warning. But “reject” here does not mean excommunicate him. It means stop warning him, leave him alone, and set aside the dispute with him, because only he himself can come to be convinced. The same apostle says (2 Tim. 2.23.), “Avoid foolish and uninformed questions.” The original word for “avoid” here and “reject” in the earlier passage is the same: paraitou. Yet one can set aside foolish questions without excommunication. Again, he says (Tit. 3.93), “Avoid foolish questions.” Here the original word, periistaso, meaning “set them aside,” has the same force as the earlier “reject.” No other passage can even plausibly support expelling faithful members of the church who believe in the foundation merely because they have a distinctive belief built on it, perhaps out of a good and sincere conscience. On the contrary, all the passages that tell us to avoid such disputes teach pastors like Timothy and Titus not to create new articles of faith by deciding every small controversy. Doing so would needlessly burden people's consciences or prompt them to break the unity of the church. The apostles themselves followed that lesson. St. Peter and St. Paul had a serious dispute, as we can read in Gal. 2.11., but did not expel each other from the church. Some other pastors in the apostles' time did not follow it. Diotrephes (3 John 9. &c.) expelled people whom St. John himself thought the church should receive, because Diotrephes was proud of his position of leadership. Vanity and ambition entered the church of Christ that early.

Several conditions must be met before a person can be subject to excommunication. First, that person must belong to a community, meaning a lawful assembly or Christian church with the power to judge the matter for which excommunication is proposed. Where there is no community, there can be no excommunication. Where there is no power to judge, there can be no power to pronounce a sentence. It follows that one church cannot excommunicate another. Either the two have equal power to excommunicate each other, in which case excommunication is not discipline or an exercise of authority but a split and a breakdown of mutual goodwill; or one is subordinate to the other so that both speak with one voice, in which case they are only one church. The excommunicated part is then no longer a church, but a scattered group of individuals.

A sentence of excommunication advises people not to associate or even eat with the excommunicated person. So if a sovereign prince or assembly is excommunicated, the sentence has no effect. All subjects are bound by the law of Nature to be in the company and presence of their own Sovereign when required. They cannot lawfully drive their Sovereign from any place in his domain, whether secular or sacred, or leave his domain without permission. Still less can they refuse to eat with him if he invites them to that honor. Other princes and states belong to different congregations, so they need no sentence to keep them from associating with an excommunicated state. The very act that joins many people into one community also separates one community from another. Excommunication is therefore not needed to keep kings and states apart. It has no effect beyond what the nature of political organization already brings about, unless it encourages princes to wage war on each other.

Nor does excommunication affect a Christian subject who obeys the laws of his own Sovereign, whether that Sovereign is Christian or non-Christian. If the subject believes that “Jesus is the Christ, he has the Spirit of God” (1 Joh. 4.1.), and “God lives in him, and he in God” (1 Joh. 4.15.). A person who has the Spirit of God, lives in God, and has God living in him cannot be harmed by human excommunication. Therefore someone who believes Jesus is the Christ is free from all the dangers threatened against excommunicated people. Someone who does not believe this is not a Christian. So a genuine, sincere Christian is not subject to excommunication. Neither is someone who professes Christianity until hypocrisy shows itself in that person's conduct, that is, until the person's behavior goes against the Sovereign's law. That law is the standard for conduct, and Christ and his apostles have commanded us to obey it. The church can judge conduct only by outward actions. Those actions can be unlawful only when they violate the law of the Common-wealth.

If someone's father, mother, or master is excommunicated, children are not forbidden to associate or eat with them. In most cases, such a ban would require children to go without food because they have no means of obtaining it. It would also authorize them to disobey their parents and masters, contrary to the apostles' command.

In short, the power to excommunicate cannot extend beyond the purpose for which our Savior commissioned the apostles and the church's pastors. Their task was not to rule by commands and force but to teach and guide people toward salvation in the world to come. A teacher of any subject may give up on a student who stubbornly refuses to follow the teacher's rules. But the teacher cannot accuse the student of wrongdoing against the teacher, because the student was never obliged to obey. In the same way, a teacher of Christian doctrine may give up on disciples who stubbornly persist in an unchristian life. But the teacher cannot say they have wronged him, since they are not obliged to obey him. God's answer to Samuel in a similar situation applies to a teacher who complains in this way (1 Sam. 8.): “They have not rejected you, but me.” Excommunication without the help of the civil power has no effect. This is the case when a foreign authority excommunicates a Christian state or prince. It therefore ought to cause no fear. The name Fulmen Excommunicationis, meaning “the Thunderbolt of Excommunication,” came from a fantasy of the bishop of Rome who first used it. He imagined himself the King of Kings, just as non-Christians made Jupiter king of the gods and gave him a thunderbolt in poems and pictures with which to subdue and punish giants who dared deny his power. That fantasy rested on two errors. One was that the Kingdom of Christ belongs to this world, contrary to our Savior's own words, “My Kingdom is not of this world.” The other was that the bishop is Christ's representative not just over his own subjects but over all Christians in the world. Scripture gives no basis for that claim, and I will show the contrary in its proper place.

When St. Paul came to Thessalonica, where there was a Jewish synagogue, he went in, as he usually did (Acts 17.2, 3.). “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 whom he preached was the Christ.” These were the Jewish Scriptures, or the Old Testament. The people to whom he was proving that Jesus was the Christ and had risen from the dead were Jews who already believed those Scriptures were the Word of God. Some believed as a result, according to verse 4.; some did not, according to verse 5. If all believed Scripture, why did they not all reach the same belief? Some accepted St. Paul's interpretation of the passages he cited, while others rejected it. Each interpreted the passages for himself. St. Paul came without any legal commission, as someone seeking to persuade rather than command. He had to persuade either by miracles, as Moses persuaded the Israelites in Egypt so that they could see his authority in God's works, or by reasoning from Scripture they already accepted so that they could see the truth of his teaching in God's Word. But anyone who uses written principles to persuade someone through reasoning makes that listener the judge of both the meaning of the principles and the strength of the conclusions drawn from them. If these Jews of Thessalonica were not the judges, who judged what St. Paul cited from Scripture? If St. Paul was the judge, why did he need to cite passages to prove his teaching? He could simply have said, “I find it in Scripture, that is, in your laws, which I am authorized by Christ to interpret.” Therefore there was no interpreter of Scripture whose interpretation the Jews of Thessalonica were obliged to accept. Each person could believe or not believe, depending on whether the claims seemed to match the meaning of the cited passages. In every kind of case, anyone who offers proof makes the person addressed the judge of that proof. The Jews in particular were explicitly required (Deut. 17.) to accept the rulings of the current priests and judges of Israel on every difficult question. But that requirement applied to Jews who had not yet converted.

When converting non-Jews, citing Scripture they did not believe was of no use. So the apostles used reason to argue against their idol worship. Then they sought to persuade them to believe in Christ by testifying to his life and resurrection. At that point there could be no dispute about who had the authority to interpret Scripture. While a person remained an unbeliever, that person was not bound to follow anyone's interpretation of any scripture, except the Sovereign's interpretation of the country's laws.

Let us now consider conversion itself and see whether anything in it could create such an obligation. People converted only to belief in what the apostles preached. And the apostles preached only that Jesus was the Christ: the King who would save them and reign over them forever in the world to come. This meant that he was not dead but had risen from the dead and gone up to heaven. One day he would return to judge the world, whose people would also rise to be judged, and reward each person according to that person's deeds. None of the apostles preached that he or any other apostle was an interpreter of Scripture whose interpretation all Christians had to accept as law. Interpreting laws is part of administering a kingdom that already exists, and the apostles had no such kingdom. They and every pastor since have prayed, “Let your Kingdom come,” and urged converts to obey the non-Christian princes then ruling them. The New Testament had not yet been published as a single collection. Each evangelist interpreted his own Gospel, and each apostle his own letter. As for the Old Testament, our Savior himself said to the Jews (John 5. 39.), “Search the Scriptures, for you think you have eternal life in them, and they testify about me.” If he had not meant them to interpret those Scriptures, he would not have told them to find proof there that he was the Christ. He would have interpreted them himself or referred them to the priests' interpretation.