Work With No Harvest

And the new heretics must not congratulate themselves on this either — that they say they do not share communion with idolaters. There are adulterers and swindlers among them, and by the apostle’s own word such men are held guilty of the crime of idolatry: “Know this, and understand it: no one who is sexually immoral, no one impure, no one greedy — and that guilt is idolatry — has any inheritance in the kingdom of Christ and of God.” And again: “So put to death the parts of you that belong to the earth. Strip off sexual immorality, impurity, evil craving, and greed, which is the service of idols. It is for these that the wrath of God comes.” [a]

For our bodies are members of Christ, and each of us is a temple of God. So anyone who violates God’s temple by adultery violates God; and anyone who, by sinning, does the devil’s will is serving demons and idols. Evil deeds do not come from the Holy Spirit. They come at the prompting of the adversary, and the cravings born of the unclean spirit force people to act against God and to obey the devil.

See, then, where their own argument lands them. They say that one man is polluted by another man’s sin. They insist — on nothing more than their own assertion — that the idolatry of the guilty man crosses over to a man who is not guilty. Then by their own rule they cannot be cleared of idolatry themselves, since the apostle’s proof makes it plain that the adulterers and swindlers they do share communion with are idolaters.

With us it is otherwise. The principle of truth agrees with our faith and with the rule that God’s own preaching has laid down: each person is held fast in his own sin, and no one can be made guilty for another. The Lord warns us of it ahead of time: “The righteousness of the righteous will be upon him, and the wickedness of the wicked will be upon him.” And again: “Fathers will not die for their children, and children will not die for their fathers. Each will die in his own sin.”

We read this and we keep it, and so this is certainly what we think: no one is to be shut out from the fruit of making amends, or from the hope of peace. From the faith of the divine Scriptures we know — God himself is their author, and it is God who urges it in them — both that sinners are called back to repentance, and that pardon and mercy are not refused to those who repent.

And what a mockery this is, played on brothers who have been misled! What an empty trick on mourners, wretched people with their wits gone! What a useless, profitless tradition this heretical teaching sets up — to urge a man on to the repentance that makes amends, and then to take the cure away from the amends he makes; to say to our brothers: “Mourn and shed tears, groan day and night, work hard and work often at the washing away and the cleansing of your sin — but when all of it is done, you will die outside the church. You will do everything that peace requires, and none of the peace you are looking for will you receive.” [k]

Who would not perish on the spot? Who would not fall away out of sheer hopelessness? Who would not turn his mind away from any thought of mourning at all? Do you think a farmer could keep working if you said to him, “Plow the field with every skill you have, and stay at the work without slacking — but you will reap no harvest, you will press no wine, you will get nothing from your olive grove, and you will pick no fruit from the trees”? Or if you were pressing a man to own a ship and put it to use, and said, “Buy your material from the best woods, brother; frame your keel with the strongest and choicest oak; work at the rudder, the ropes, and the sails, so that the ship is built and fitted out — and then, once you have done it, you will never see anything come of her working or her voyages”?

This is to close up the way of grief and repentance and cut it off. All through Scripture the Lord God soothes those who turn back to him and repent; and here repentance itself is taken away by a hardness and cruelty of ours that cuts off the fruit repentance bears. But if we find that no one ought to be held back from repenting, and that peace can be granted by his priests to those who beg and plead for the Lord’s mercy — since he is merciful and loving — then the groaning of those who mourn is to be let in, and the fruit of repentance is not to be denied to those who grieve. [m]

And because in the place of the departed there is no confession, and none can be made there, those who have repented with their whole heart and have asked for peace ought to be received inside the church and kept there for the Lord. He will certainly be the judge, when he comes to his church, of the people he finds inside it. But apostates and deserters, adversaries and enemies, men who lay the church of Christ waste — these cannot be admitted to the peace of the church, as the apostle shows, even if they have been killed for his name outside the church, since they have kept neither the unity of the Spirit nor the unity of the church.

These few things out of many I have run through as briefly as I could for now, dearest brother, so as to meet what you asked of me, and to bind you closer and closer to the fellowship of our college and our body. But if the chance and the means of coming to us should arise, we will be able to talk everything over more fully together, and to weigh at greater length, and to better effect, the things that make for a healthy agreement. I wish you well always, dearest brother, with all my heart. [p]