Erastianism Without Establishment

How a sixteenth-century debate over church discipline helps reveal the stakes of our contemporary debate over communion without baptism

Can a Christian — or anyone at all — be barred from receiving the Lord’s Supper? And if so, by whom? This is a question that is frequently posed in contemporary mainline circles, mostly around the issue of Communion without Baptism (CWOB). Proponents assert that baptism (and in some cases, even Christian identity or the desire to follow Jesus) is not necessary to receive communion. They frequently ground this argument in the assertion that Jesus doesn’t or wouldn’t ever turn anyone away, that in fencing the table the church arrogates to itself the right to decide who is worthy of what Jesus freely gives. Now, CWOB itself is a profound novelty in Christian theology. But the argument about whether and by whom one can be denied communion has been debated throughout church history, and was disputed with particular intensity among Reformed Protestants in the latter half of the sixteenth century. And I have become convinced that unpacking this dispute within sixteenth century Reformed circles over church discipline helps us unearth some of the submerged stakes of the CWOB controversy.

And so, in this piece, I will first sketch out the two competing sixteenth-century Reformed schools of approaches to church discipline, church-magistrate relations, and the regulation of admittance to the Supper: the ‘Zurich’ and ‘Geneva’ models. Then, I will suggest the relevance of this dive into the sixteenth century to the contemporary CWOB debate. I will show that the pro-CWOB position sounds a bit like the Zurich model insofar as it is suspicious of any ecclesial role of regulating moral behavior. However, where the Zurich model saw this role as the duty of a specifically Christian magistrate, arguments for CWOB show a common tendency in the contemporary mainline to surrender such moral governance to a broadly secular culture and, ultimately, to the secular magistrate. This is ultimately corrosive to Christianity. So, while we do not need to be committed to a particular structure for church discipline, we do need it — and about this, both proponents of the Zurich and Geneva approach would agree.

The Zurich Model

The Zurich model emphasized a significant degree of magisterial control over the church and, as a result, typically saw the regulation of Christians’ moral behavior the duty of the magistrate more than that of the church. The responsibility of the clergy over the discipline of Christians, including via barring them from the Lord’s Supper, was minimized or entirely denied.

This approach arose out of the aftermath of the Second Kappel War of 1531, in which Ulrich Zwingli met his death on the battlefield. Now, during his life, Zwingli himself both argued for a significant degree of magisterial control over discipline and also asserted in very strong terms the right and responsibility of ministers to, if necessary, publicly criticize the magistrate. But after the disaster of the Second Kappel War, the magistrates in Zurich, Bern, and other Protestant confederates blamed ministerial meddling in politics for leading the Swiss Protestants to an unnecessary, failed war. And so, magisterial control over discipline was maintained while the independence of the clergy was reigned in; Heinrich Bullinger, Zwingli’s successor in Zurich, had to fight for the right to even criticize the Zurich authorities in writing, and the 1532 Berner Synodus restricted the rights of clergy to criticize the magistrates in Bern. One shouldn’t overstate the case: Bern and Zurich clergy were not simply appendages of the magistracy, and some theologians in the ‘Zurich’ camp asserted quite strongly the right and duty of ministers to censure even magistrates when necessary (Vermigli is a good example here). But the general principle was of integration of the (visible) church under the magistrate.

Now, while I follow Bruce Gordon in seeing the post-1531 political situation as important for the consolidation of the Zurich approach to discipline and the magistrate, I don’t want to suggest that this was only a matter of political expediency. Rather, supporters of this model articulated a sophisticated political theology which grounded the power of magistrates to order and govern the church in the example of the kings of united Israel and Judah. In the Old Testament, care for religion was the responsibility not just of the Temple priesthood or the Levites but the civil leader as well, from Moses on. For probably obvious reasons, the examples of reforming kings of Judah like Josiah were particularly dear to theologians like Bullinger who articulated this approach. This was not a temporary way to order God’s church, appropriate only for the Old Covenant. Rather, theologians in the Zurich school argued that this was God’s permanent goal and intention for the ordering of his church.

This view tended to place the primary responsibility for the discipline of Christians with the magistrate, rather than an independent ecclesiastical judicial authority. Under this approach, ministers were to preach about the necessity of moral living and reprove sin, but they were not to punish sin. This duty, rather, lies with the civil magistrate. In perhaps its most extreme form, as articulated by the Heidelberg doctor Thomas Erastus in response to the struggles over the proper form of church discipline in the Palatinate, the Zurich model entirely denied the authority of the clergy to excommunicate or withhold the Lord’s Supper from Christians. Erastus uses the common argument that the Old Testament monarchy provides the best model for ordering the relationship between church and magistrate as the basis for this claim. He notes that under the Old Covenant, sinners were not excluded by priests from participating in the sacrifices and other religious rituals laid down in the law of Moses. They might be — indeed, were — punished by the magistrate for their sins. However, there was no exclusion from participation in the ceremonies and sacrifices, and indeed such participation in, say, the Passover was not only allowed but commanded. What was true under the Old Covenant, Erastus believed, is also true under the New: Christians must not be barred from the sacraments, given to us as aids and inducements to piety.

What of passages like Matthew 18 which seem to give the church authority to make judgments in moral disputes? Erastus argues that Jesus there was not instituting a permanent form of church government with some form of judicial authority, but was rather providing advice for how Jews should handle disputes while under foreign domination. This advice is not broadly applicable to the church, but only to those churches which lack a Christian commonwealth. That is, Jesus was saying that the Jews of his day should attempt to resolve disputes among themselves, by taking it to the Sanhedrin if necessary, and only treating offenders like a tax collector or publican — that is, going to the Roman law-courts — if such offenders would not obey the Sanhedrin. The same applies to Christian communities without a Christian magistrate in his own day, Erastus believed. They could select elders to judge cases and punish (although not by barring people from the Supper), not as an inherent ecclesiastical function but as taking on a magisterial role forced upon them by the sad lack of a Christian state.

Now, not all adherents of the Zurich model — really less a single ‘model’ than a tendency — went as far as Erastus. In England, for example, conformist theologians did not wholly reject the barring of sinners from the sacrament, nor did Peter Martyr Vermigli. But all the same, Erastus provides a helpful account of the Zurich model as ideal type, taken to (or arguably even beyond) its logical extreme.

So, to review, this is the Zurich model: the magistrate governs the church on the example of the Old Testament monarchy; the magistrate rather than the church is responsible for punitive measures that ensure the integrity and virtue of the Christian community; the duty of ministers to exclude open sinners from the Supper is downplayed or rejected entirely.

The Geneva Model

This Zurich model was not the only approach to church-magistrate relations and church discipline that emerged from Reformed churches in the sixteenth century. Another model, associated in particular with Geneva, but actually originating in Basel and Strassburg, emphasized a degree of ecclesial independence from the magistrate in the church’s judicial authority and duty to punish sinners by excluding them from the sacrament.

Martin Bucer, the Strassburg reformer, is a key early example of this approach. For Bucer, the fundamental marks of the church were not only the right preaching of the Gospel and administration of the sacraments, but also the exercise of church discipline. Indeed, in his 1550 De Regno Christi, he blamed Protestant setbacks on the Continent such as the disastrous outcome of the Schmalkaldic War and imposition of the Interim (which forced Bucer to flee Strassburg for England) on Protestant failures to embrace church discipline.

Thus, when describing what it would look like to restore the Kingdom of Christ, Bucer writes that the Gospel must be preached, sacraments must be rightly administered — which means the exclusion of open sinners not only from receiving the Eucharist but even from attending eucharistic worship — and discipline carried out by the church. All Christians, Bucer believers, have the right and responsibility to care for their neighbors by exhorting them to holiness and reproving them for sin. But this is especially the responsibility of ministers of the Word and those elders appointed to help them exercise discipline. Such ministers are to admonish and encourage their flocks and, if necessary, put to public penance and excommunication those who have fallen into serious sins. He adds that mere verbal confession is not sufficient for readmission to communion; genuine fruits of penance must be shown. But the point, of course, is not punishment for punishments’ sake: Bucer believes that this is the necessary use of the tools given to the church by Jesus in Matthew 18 and other places to care for Christians and lead them to eternal life.

Calvin, with whom the ‘Geneva model’ is particularly associated, had a broadly similar account of church discipline and the church officers who should carry it out. To be sure, he rejected the three-mark ecclesiology of Bucer; for him, as for most adherents of the Zurich model and Lutherans, the preaching of the Gospel and the administration of the sacraments were the only two marks of the true church. But he believed that the church had a judicial authority over sinners distinct from that of the magistrate, and an authority necessary even if one had a Christian magistrate. For he notes that after civil punishment for, say, fornication or adultery, the sinner might still be unrepentant, and the church was thus given authority to censure and excommunicate to bring sinners to repentance. Such authority, Calvin believed, was to be wielded by pastors assisted by elders in each congregation. The goal of such ecclesiastical censures is that sinners be reformed, the good be not corrupted by bad company, and the worship of God — especially the Lord’s Supper — be not profaned.

Indeed, both Bucer and Calvin were particularly concerned about the profanation of the Lord’s Supper. Bucer writes in De Regno Christi that the proper administration of the sacraments means that “holy and blameless ministers administer each sacrament, and that they administer them only to those whom they know to be holy and blameless according to the Word of the Lord.” Thus, he thinks that it is “fitting that faithful ministers of Christ have evidence of true repentance for sins and a solid faith in Christ the Lord from the fruits of those to whom they offer the Eucharist.” Calvin writes in the 1559 Institutes that “he to whom its distribution has been committed, if he knowingly and willingly admits an unworthy person whom he could rightfully turn away, is as guilty of sacrilege as if he had cast the Lord's body to dogs.”

Now, it is worth noting that the actual exercise of discipline in Bucer’s Strassburg or Calvin’s Geneva was more complicated than this sketch suggests. In fact, Bucer’s attempt to establish ecclesial jurisdiction over discipline in Strassburg failed, and in Geneva matters also did not entirely go Calvin’s way. The consistory Calvin established in Geneva in 1541 was a joint ecclesial-magisterial body, and Calvin struggled mightily to establish the right of ministers to exclude sinners from communion. Indeed, struggles over discipline in the 1550s caused Calvin to threaten to leave Geneva, and the ultimate victory of Calvin and his supporters was a near thing indeed.

All the same, this Genevan model proved very compelling to many Reformed church leaders, both in areas without an existing Protestant magistrate (as in France or the Low Countries) and areas where a Zurich-style settlement had earlier been established. Calvin’s successor Beza was involved in the dispute with Erastus over the shape of church discipline in the Palatinate, and in England the Puritan party sought to institute Genevan-style discipline in the English church. It is worth noting, as in the case of the Zurich approach, that we have more a tendency than a single, clearly-defined model, with considerable internal diversity. But we can still trace out a ‘Genevan’ model in contrast to (and, not infrequently, in conflict with) the ‘Zurich’ one: where the church was held to have independent judicial authority to administer church discipline and excommunicate sinners to which even the magistrate was subject, an authority vested in ministers and lay elders in each congregation.

Sixteenth-Century Discipline Disputes and CWOB

Now, if you’ve made it this far, you might be wondering what all the above has to do with Communion Without Baptism. Well, while I was reading upon this debate through my comps prep process, it struck me that most adherents of Communion Without Baptism effectively take the Erastian or extreme Zurich position in the dispute over discipline when they assert that we must not turn anyone away from Christ’s table.¹ That is, they deny any right on the part of ministers to bar people from the table — and, in so doing, they deny any independent judicial authority of the church over Christian behavior; if the church cannot even bar people from the table, it is not clear what if anything it can do to move open sinners to repentance.

This is itself something of an irony, since ‘Erastianism’ (understood rather loosely as church subservience to the state) is not infrequently a term of abuse in the same progressive theological circles which tend to harbor CWOB proponents. However, my point is not just to play ‘gotcha’ here. For in fact, it seems to me such proponents go beyond Thomas Erastus in two key, highly illuminating ways. First, most obviously, in the narrow question of sacramental practice, the claim that baptism or even Christian belief is not necessary to receive the Supper is a novelty. But secondly, perhaps more interestingly, CWOB proponents go beyond Erastus in denying the church authority to regulate morals even without a Christian magistrate.

Recall that Erastus argued that the situation in which the church had no authority to discipline its members was under a Christian magistrate (which was, for Erastus, the ideal mode of church-magistrate relations). In this case, the magistrate could see to it that Christians were properly pursuing virtue and avoiding manifest sins. It was, in fact, the duty of the magistrate to punish open sinners, including for religious offences. However, in situations where there was no Christian magistrate, Erastus argued that churches would be forced to take on the properly magisterial role of governing the community and addressing disputes according to Jesus’ advice in Matthew 18.

Thus, in the current situation in North America, even Erastus would argue that Christian churches needed to choose leaders to adjudicate disputes and exercise authority over its members.² This is because both sides in the disciplinary dispute maintained the necessity of specifically Christian regulation of living. The disagreement was about whether in the context of a Christian polity such regulation was under the primary authority of the magistrate or if the church also had an independent judicial authority for discipline. Indeed, those in the sixteenth century who rejected the idea of church establishment altogether, the Anabaptists, earnestly defended the necessity of regulation of Christian living, calling for forms of ecclesially-exercised discipline much fiercer and more stringent than even the Genevan approach demanded. You could probably find a handful of radicals in the sixteenth century who denied the necessity of such regulation altogether, but they were few and far between.

The radicalism of admitting the unbaptized to the Supper is obvious. Less obvious, but no less radical, is the argument that any authority to regulate the lives of Christians in a Christian manner is unnecessary. I worry that, knowingly or not, CWOB proponents surrenders authoritative teaching on the nature of the good life to a secular culture and, at last resort, a secular magistrate with moral commitments that are not necessarily compatible with Christian teaching.

Indeed, it seems to me that CWOB is only a symptom of this deeper rejection the church’s duty to form people in Christian living. Another clear example of this can be found in the Anglican Church of Canada’s response to MAiD (Canada’s euthanasia program). As I have written about before, ACC’s response has largely been to assert that given MAiD’s legality, all the church can do is nonjudgmentally accompany the dying and occasionally call for increased safeguards. What is taken for granted here is that the church cannot authoritatively call its members to a different form of living than secular society does, a distinctively Christian one. The laws and mores of progressive Canadian society are to govern Canadian churches too, and the role of the church is just to provide some Jesus-shaped accompaniment as people live the lives the broader culture tells them they can. CWOB seems to be an expression of a similar idea, that it really isn’t the job of the church to guide its people to living in a way distinct from the laws and mores of center-left progressive societies, at least not in a way that involves consequences for unrepented sins which aren’t also already socially sanctioned or legally condemned. What we have is Erastianism without establishment, a church ceding authority over the moral life of its members to a culture that, if historically deeply formed by Christianity, is increasingly uninterested in or even suspicious of it. And I think this is a real problem.

Now, I hope that I am not succumbing to what Erastus described as an “excommunicatory fever.” I want the church to be grounded in the free grace of Christ, proclaimed as a gift to all. I affirm a mixed-body ecclesiology and worry about any attempts to restrict the visible church to just the elect. I think the relatively low bar to entry in mainline churches is generally a good thing (though does have risks and drawbacks). I’m not saying that we need a body of elders with excommunicatory power in every parish or indeed that any one specific way of ordering church discipline is demanded in Scripture (I am, after all, an Anglican).

However, I do think that we can’t quite make sense of the Christian church without some form of discipline, if not as a mark of the church (I embrace a two-mark ecclesiology of Word and Sacrament) then as flowing from those marks. I don’t think we are fully living as the body of Christ without the church embracing its duty to call people to holy living, reprove sin, and (when necessary, for their own good and that the community) bar serious offenders from participation in the sacrament. Whether or not it was ever appropriate for much of this to be done by the magistrate in ages past,³ we certainly cannot count on the magistrate to do it now. If indeed, as we are often told, the church must embrace its ‘post-Constantinian era’, part of doing so requires allowing the church to authoritatively regulate our collective moral lives, since we cannot expect the state or broader culture to do so in a Christian way.

I don’t have a clear sense of how to do this well. I have hope that the Pietists and others who sought renewal within broader ecclesial contexts they viewed as lax and worldly might provide useful examples for us for creating and modelling a gentle but real moral and spiritual discipline in churches that have largely forgotten such practices. But what I am clear about, and what I hope this Substack’s long romp through sixteenth century disciplinary disputes has made clear, is that CWOB must be rejected not just narrowly in terms of sacramental practice, but also in terms of its assumption that the church has no right or authority to govern the life of its members as it seeks to nourish them towards eternal life in Christ Jesus.

1. It is a conceptually possible position that baptism or even Christian commitment are not necessary to receive the sacrament and yet the minister can bar people from communion for certain offences. However, in practice the embrace of CWOB and the rejection of any fencing of the table seem to go together. Indeed, as mentioned above, one of the most common arguments for CWOB is that ‘Jesus doesn’t turn anyone away’, which would be rather hard to square with any form of eucharistic discipline.

2. Although, of course, Erastus would still maintain that exclusion from the sacrament is not an acceptable means of exercising such discipline.

3. I confess that I am a rather thoroughgoing adiaphorist in the question of church-magistrate relations. I tend to think that the position that establishment as such is obviously wicked and unchristian in every circumstance is somewhat difficult to maintain without a Trail-of-Blood-style ecclesiology which sees the (visible) church as practically extinct between Constantine and, say, the Waldensians. I also think that this view often underestimates the genuine and mostly positive transformation of European culture worked by established Christianity (thus Tom Holland’s Dominion) and is rather hard to square with the example of the Old Testament. On the other hand, most of the people in North America now who like to talk about the necessity or desirability of establishment seem to me to be selectively appropriating premodern political theology and mixing it with nineteenth century blood and soil nationalism for quasi-fascist ends. More broadly, the risk of confusing Christianity and the commonwealth has historically been a very real one in the contexts of established churches. And, of course, I have no interest in denying or excusing the wickedness committed by many historic church leaders. For me, it is ultimately a question of prudential reasoning, and I would be content to function as a minister in somewhere like the Church of England where establishment remains, or in the unestablished Episcopal Church or Anglican Church of Canada.