POWER, VIOLENCE, AND BINDING AND LOOSING IN MATTHEW 18:15-20
Peter and Paul embracing after their public confrontation in Antioch. Public domain.
John Howard Yoder, the infamous Mennonite theologian who molested and harassed women for years, not only evaded repentance and responsibility for his actions, but developed theology to justify his horrific actions. (1) Much of the theology he developed misused Jesus’ instructions in Matthew 18:15-20 to avoid confrontation or accountability. But still, for many Christians Matthew 18:15-20 remains a guide for Christian forgiveness and reconciliation. “Forgiveness is the realization of the disciplined life,” says Marlin Jeschke. (2) Menno Simons called it “the express ordinance of Christ.” (3) Legalistically approaching the instruction in our current context, however, exposes its limitations, and can lead to harmful or abusive results These limitations particularly express themselves in incidents of racialized or sexualized violence or abuse, incidents of public or communal sins.
We need to explore these limitations so that we can appropriately apply the passage in an ecclesial context, especially one that is far removed from the situation envisaged in Matthew. My argument is that Matthew 18:15-20 should be used to privately reprove individuals who are peers to us. Matthew 18:15-20 should not be applied when there is a notable difference in power or authority between two members of a fellowship, nor when the sin is a public one. Matthew 18:15-20 is a powerful tool for the church to use to advocate for the weak, lowly, and oppressed, but it can be weaponized against the very people it is trying to serve.
To take the text and apply it verbatim to our local communities misses some things. First, Matthew 18:15-20 is not a tool for laity to use when rebuking elders or pastors. (4) There are other biblical passages that describe procedures for rebuking elders, such as 1 Timothy 5:19. While this verse can also fall prey to abusive interpretations, for our purposes we simply need to note that when power differentials are involved, a different arrangement is in order. Matthew 18 is a guide for peer-to-peer relationships.
Matthew is writing to Jewish people and reiterating, by and large, a Jewish rule for reconciliation, with the biggest difference from the Old Testament rule being the amount of people (men specifically) who make up an assembly, and with the response of the gathered witnesses being to pray, rather than to punish. I emphasize that gathered men, or heads of households, would make up the congregation, because the interactions here are entirely between men. In fact, women could not be legal or trusted witnesses. (5) Not only are heads of households likely the ones to be confronting one another, but the group that was doing the confrontation was also part of the same ethnic and economic enclave. The audience for Matthew’s Gospel is a segregated Jewish-Christian community. So it was not simply a matter of homogeneity in terms of power and gender that the instructions of Matthew 18 occurred, but also homogeneity in terms of ethnicity and social status. Even the law that the private rebuke is based on, Leviticus 17:19, specifies that the confrontation occurs between fellow Israelites and neighbors. Furthermore, the final step of Matthew 18, the expulsion of the immoral one, re-emphasizes the ethnic enclave that the audience of Matthew lived in. They were to treat the unrepentant one as an outside, as a foreigner, a pagan, a Gentile, an ethnikos (ἐθνικὸς). They were to treat them as if they were not enculturated into the church.
Of course, Christianity imagines a New Humanity in which ethnic differences between Jew and Gentile, male and female, are abolished (see Gal. 3:28). But that project didn’t come to fruition in the first century or, for that matter, in the contemporary church. So while a new vision for Matthew 18 could be fulfilled in the New Creation (see 2 Cor. 5), it requires the aspirational and eschatological work of ensuring that indeed there is no more Greek nor Jew, slave nor free, male nor female. Until we have effectively deconstructed those barriers, as Paul leads us to do, we still must consider the limits of Matthew 18. In our current context, those limitations express themselves in matters of violence and power. Confronting someone who has violently sinned against you is a dangerous proposition on its own, and made more dangerous by a difference in power.
Further complicating things, both racial and sexual violence are a sin against a community of people, and not an individual alone. That is not to say that private sins do not have communal impact, yet some sins have a more apparent communal impact. (6) For example, sins of sexual or racial violence are sins against God and the whole church because they violate the New Humanity and New Creation; they systemically try to reorder the community from how it is ordered in the New Creation. Therefore it is now the wronged community, not an individual, that is doing the initial confrontation. To ask a victim of sexual or racial violence to confront their perpetrator is to misunderstand the communal nature of sexual or racial violence, and to use contemporary vernacular, the systemic nature of both. They are not secret or private sins, but ones committed against the whole Church, worthy of public admonition, as Calvin argues. (7) They are an “open transgression,” as Simons said, “which requires no witness, but is itself its own accuser and witness, as it clear as the meridian sun.” (8)
Secondly, because the nature of the confrontation described in Matthew 18 is peer-to-peer, sibling-to-sibling, we must consider the question of power. When power is noted in the text (as in 1 Tim. 5:19), we see a different code for relating. Here, power is not good or bad, but it nevertheless requires a different approach. Members of Anabaptist communions, and any low church community, have a particularly challenging time soberly acknowledging power differences because we do not codify them, by and large, in terms of positions. Low-church hierarchies can evade the apparently different rules for confrontation and forgiveness that are named in Paul's pastoral epistles because we can deny that they infect our churches. This in turn allows us to ignore the exceptions to Matthew 18, or rather it allows us to exploit the peer-to-peer nature of Matthew 18, ignoring the essential fact that it assumes the community members are on “equal footing.” (9) So rather than ignore the power differences our positions in our churches and in our society create, we would do well to soberly consider them. Jesus demonstrates this difference in the Gospel of John. In John 4, far from rebuking the Samaritan woman at the well, Jesus gently relates to her, directly, preserving her from shame. Many commentators have noted that such a direct correspondence between a rabbi and a woman was unusual. Most sins were addressed peer-to-peer. We see that in John 8:1-13, when Jesus confronts the religious official who are about to stone a woman because of her alleged adultery. Jesus confronts them publicly, not privately. He could speak to them as peers – one religious teacher to another – and but also admonished them publicly because of their public office.
Matthew 18:15-20 remains an important tool for churches to use in terms of conflict resolution and reconciliation. Its rule is forgiveness and retention, and it concludes with prayer for the expelled. It was written for a specific time and place, with the contexts of those places in mind. To be sure, it is the job of the church to recontexualize this teaching, especially concerning modern power dynamics and position. We seek to build fully egalitarian, nonviolent communities. But our vision for a community operating in a New Humanity is both a present reality, and a future aspiration. Just like the Matthean community did, we need to consider our own cultural context when we apply Matthew 18, noting when power and violence change the equal footing we aspire to achieve. Because Matthew 18 largely deals with private concerns, we must also take note when our sins are collective, and not individual. In both cases, we need to take care not to exploit the private rebuke of Matthew 18 to shield the powerful or expose the vulnerable, thereby giving the keys of the Kingdom to the powerful when they are accused, and robbing the community of its God-given power to judge.
Isaac Villegas, The Ecclesial Ethics of John Howard Yoder, Modern Theology, 2020, 1-22.
Marlin Jeschke, Discipling the Brother, (Scottdale, PA: Herald Press, 1979),101.
Menno Simons, “A Scriptural Explanation of Excommunication,” Menno Simon: The Complete Writings trans. by John F. Funk & Brother (London: Independently Published, 2017), 262.
T. France, The Gospel of Matthew, NICNT, edited by Joel B. Breen. (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2007), 18; Keener, Matthew, 8-9; Case-Winters, 692.
Craig Keener, The IVP Bible Background Commentary: New Testament (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2014), IVP Bible Background Commentary, 243.
Marlin Jeschke, Discipling the Brother, (Scottdale, PA: Herald Press, 1979), 63.
John Calvin, Commentary On A Harmony Of The Evangelists, Matthew, Mark, And Luke, Second Volume, Translated by William Pringle Volume (Grand Rapids, MI: Christian Classics Ethereal Library), https://ccel.org/ccel/calvin/calcom32/calcom32.ii.lxiii.html
Simons, 166.
R.T. France, The Gospel of Matthew, NICNT, edited by Joel B. Breen. (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2007), 18; Keener, Matthew, 8-9; Case-Winters., 691.
