Church Is Not a Mental Asylum

What this page is asking

The author of this site heard a sermon at an evangelical church and wrote down a passage from it. As he reports the words, the preacher said: “The church is a hospital for a short time. People get right and go. Church is not a mental asylum. No, it’s not a permanent place. You don’t check in forever. You get into the hospital and then come out quickly. … There’s a time to check in. There’s time to get healed and then come out and get on with your life.” Just before this, the author reports, the preacher had said that if someone or something is obstructing his “closeness to Christ,” he is going to “eliminate it,” and had rejected the objection that “you have to help everybody.”

The preacher is not named here, and nothing on this page depends on who he was. These are a few sentences from one sermon, written down by a listener. A preacher may say things more carefully on another day. The page tests the sentences. It does not judge the man.

The author set down a thesis to be tested: “The Church is a hospital for sinners who need care for their whole lives, not a short-stay clinic for people who recover quickly.” Historic Christianity, he wrote, has understood the Church as a community of sinners who need repentance, forgiveness, patience and care for life, and “the New Testament never gives the Church authority to decide that a struggling person’s time for receiving patience has run out.”

He also put the question in a form that can be checked: “Does the New Testament ever authorize the Church to decide that a troubled person’s period of receiving patience and care has expired? Put more sharply: does sanctification give the spiritually ‘healthy’ permission to stop bearing with the spiritually weak? If so, on what biblical basis does the Church tell the acceptable ‘hospital patient’ apart from the unacceptable long-term ‘mental asylum’ patient?”

That is the question this page works through. It reads the passages, counts the years, sets out the best case for the sermon in its own Part, and quotes each tradition from its own documents. It also checks the author’s brief, and in six places it corrects it.

Two positions, labelled so they can be told apart

Two accounts of what a church is are compared all the way through. They are given letters so that the page can refer to them without repeating a paragraph each time.

Position S is stated here in the sermon’s own terms. Part V gives it in its best form, with the texts a careful preacher could bring. Part X shows that it is not the stated teaching of any of the five traditions compared on this page.

What both positions agree on

So the disagreement is narrower than it sounds. Both positions want people well. They differ about what a church may do with the person who is not well yet, and has not been for a long time.

What the page concludes, stated up front

The prompt behind this page

Everything below was produced by giving the following brief to a frontier language model with web search, which assembled and checked the sources. It is published so you can run it yourself, change it, sharpen it, or reverse it and see what comes back. Three experiments are worth more than reading this page. First, reverse it: ask for the strongest case that the New Testament expects Christians to recover quickly, that long dependence on a church is a sign of something wrong, and that a pastor must protect his own walk with God from people who drain it. Second, narrow it: ask only for every place in the New Testament where a person is put out of a church, avoided or refused, with the reason given in each, and draw your own conclusion. Third, make it a test: paste in your own church’s membership covenant or discipline policy, with the names removed, and ask on what grounds it says a person’s care may end.

Write a detailed, source-first, interactive article, in British
English, for a general reader who is willing to work. Quote Scripture
from the Authorised Version. Date and attribute every other quotation:
give the work, the edition or translation, and the section. Verify
every quotation against a reliable published source; where a
quotation cannot be verified, cut it. Do not invent quotes. Do not
take verses out of context: where a text is being applied beyond what
it first addressed, say so.

  TITLE. Church Is Not a Mental Asylum

  THESIS TO TEST. The Church is a hospital for sinners who need care
  for their whole lives, not a short-stay clinic for people who
  recover quickly.

  OCCASION. A recent sermon at an evangelical church said: "The
  church is a hospital for a short time. People get right and go.
  Church is not a mental asylum. No, it's not a permanent place. You
  don't check in forever. You get into the hospital and then come out
  quickly. ... There's a time to check in. There's time to get healed
  and then come out and get on with your life." Just before this, the
  preacher said that if someone or something is obstructing his
  "closeness to Christ," he is going to "eliminate it." He rejected
  the objection that "you have to help everybody." Quote the passage
  as a listener's report. Do not name or identify anyone.

  CORE CLAIM. Historic Christianity has understood the Church as a
  community of sinners who need repentance, forgiveness, patience, and
  care for life. The New Testament never gives the Church authority to
  decide that a struggling person's time for receiving patience has
  run out.

  QUESTION. Does the New Testament ever authorize the Church to decide
  that a troubled person's period of receiving patience and care has
  expired? Put more sharply: does sanctification give the spiritually
  "healthy" permission to stop bearing with the spiritually weak? If
  so, on what biblical basis does the Church tell the acceptable
  "hospital patient" apart from the unacceptable long-term "mental
  asylum" patient?

  TWO POSITIONS, labelled and used consistently.
   L, THE LIFELONG (held): the Church is where sinners are under
      Christ's care for life; every member is a patient; nobody is
      put out for needing help too long; the only door out is for
      the unrepentant, and it stays open.
   S, THE SHORT STAY (under test): check in, get right, go; a person
      still needy after a reasonable time is in the wrong place; a
      leader may remove whoever obstructs his closeness to Christ.

  POINTS TO TEST.
   1. The hospital image comes from Jesus, and he puts no time limit
      on it (Mark 2:17). Ignatius called the Eucharist "the medicine
      of immortality" (To the Ephesians 20). Augustine preached
      Christ as the physician. Luther's Large Catechism calls the
      Supper a medicine for those who feel their weakness. Check each
      of these, and check where the image of a HOSPITAL first appears.
   2. Christ commands forgiveness that keeps going: Matthew 18:21-22;
      Luke 17:3-4. The command assumes people who fail repeatedly.
   3. Paul commands the strong to keep bearing with the weak: Romans
      15:1; Galatians 6:2; 1 Thessalonians 5:14; Romans 14:1. Is any
      of these given an expiry date?
   4. Christians are never fully discharged: 1 John 1:8; Matthew
      6:12; Luther's first thesis; simul iustus et peccator. If every
      member remains a patient, who decides which patients have
      stayed too long?
   5. Jesus spent his time with persistently broken people: the
      Gerasene man (Mark 5:1-20); the man ill thirty-eight years
      (John 5:5); the woman who bled twelve years (Mark 5:25-34);
      the bruised reed (Matthew 12:20; Isaiah 42:3). Peter failed
      repeatedly and was restored (Matthew 26:69-75; John 21:15-19;
      Galatians 2:11-14).
   6. Scripture does draw lines, but not on how long someone needs
      care. Discipline is for unrepentant sin (Matthew 18:15-17;
      1 Corinthians 5), and its aim is restoration (2 Corinthians
      2:5-8; Galatians 6:1). Scripture also calls believers to grow
      up (Hebrews 5:12-14), and pastors and congregations have real
      limits.
   7. Whether "eliminate it" applies to people Jesus' call to cut
      off one's own sin (Matthew 5:29-30). Check how the early
      Church read that saying.
   8. "Mental asylum" examined separately. Does the phrase recast
      persistent spiritual, emotional, behavioural or psychiatric
      struggle as a category of people the Church should stop
      accommodating? How may it land on members living with
      depression, addiction, trauma or long-term mental illness?
      What does it tell them about whether they belong? How does it
      square with a historic Christianity that stood for the weak
      and the sick?
   9. The historic Church's own decisions: the Novatianist schism
      and Nicaea; the image of the inn; the Rule of Benedict; Luther,
      Calvin, Sibbes, Bunyan, Bonhoeffer.
  10. The traditions, each from its own documents: Lutheran,
      Anglican, Catholic, Reformed and Baptist. Do not adjudicate
      between them. Let readers compare.

COUNTER-CASE. Its own Part. Present the strongest version of the
sermon's point fairly: that healing is the aim and Jesus sent the
healed home; that Hebrews rebukes believers who by this time ought to
be teachers; that some people must be avoided or put out; that
dependence can be unhealthy; that pastors are finite and Jesus
himself withdrew; and that Christ told us to cut off what makes us
stumble. Then ask whether those texts justify drawing the line on how
long someone has needed help, rather than on impenitence. Where the
evidence corrects the brief, say so in a marked box.

NAMING. No living individual named. A modern denomination or
organisation named only when quoted verbatim from its own published
statement. Deceased writers quoted only from dated published works.
Living scholars named only as authors of published research. Every
remark attributed to a pastor, member or pulpit, other than the
sermon passage, is composed for illustration and labelled as
composed.

EXCLUDED. Medical or psychiatric advice, and any clinical claim not
taken from published research. Deciding whether a condition is
spiritual, physical or both. Deciding between the traditions on what
the sacraments are. Advice on staying in or leaving a church.
Assessment of any actual church or preacher. Ground covered by
earlier dossiers (assurance, the judgement texts used on the weak,
the pulpit used against persons, moral perfection) is kept brief and
linked.

INTERACTIVES. A priors quiz. A sort of things said in a church by
which position is speaking. A sort of New Testament people by whether
they knew they were sick. A time limit the reader sets, showing which
of the Gospels' patients it would have excluded. A sort of cases by
Paul's three treatments. A sort of the exclusion texts by the reason
given. A sort of sayings by who wanted someone sent away. A point at
which the reader would have discharged Peter. A guess-the-source quiz
on the Church and its sick. A tradition-by-tradition comparison. An
objection drill the reader answers in his own words first. A
diagnostic for a congregation.

OUTPUT: a single self-contained interactive HTML page, professional
and readable, light theme by default with a dark switch, stating the
question at the top, publishing this prompt in full, repeating the
key points in prominent boxes for readers who skim, explaining every
technical term in a box where it is used, and giving the reader
something to do in every major section. Also produce a plain-English
quick version of about fifteen minutes with three short exercises,
and a Simple English version with no exercises.

The page you are reading is the output of that brief after the sources were checked. Where a quotation could not be verified against a published source, it was cut. Six things qualified the brief. Jesus said “physician,” and the hospital came later. There were no hospitals in Galilee. The picture of the Church as a hospital is the Church’s own, from the fourth century, and the older picture is an inn. “Seventy-seven times” is one of two translations. The Authorised Version has “seventy times seven.” The Large Catechism’s “soothing medicine” is a later English rendering. The 1921 translation used on this site reads “a pure, wholesome, comforting remedy.” The eye and the hand have been applied to people before. Chrysostom and Augustine both read the saying that way, of friends who lead us into sin, so the preacher’s move has an ancestry and has to be answered on its merits. The New Testament does count time once, and count warnings once. Hebrews says “for the time ye ought to be teachers,” and Titus says to reject a factious man “after the first and second admonition.” Neither is about a person who needs help. And the Gerasene man is not a psychiatric case history. The Gospels call his condition possession, and Matthew elsewhere lists the possessed and the “lunatick” as different people. The page uses him as the Gospels do: as a man his neighbours had given up on.

What do you currently think?

Ten questions. Each has a determinate answer, and you can check every one yourself in Part XIV. Answer them before reading and lock them in. They come back in Part XIII with the sources beside them.

What follows

Four sentences from a sermon

Start with the passage and take it apart. It contains four separate claims.

The first and fourth are sound. So everything turns on the second and third: whether Scripture puts a clock on a person’s need, and whether a needy person can be the thing a Christian is told to cut off.

What the sermon gets right

It should be said before the testing begins that the preacher was not making this up out of nothing. Jesus asked a man who had been ill for thirty-eight years, “Wilt thou be made whole?” (John 5:6), and the question assumes that a person can settle into being ill. The writer to the Hebrews is impatient with his readers: “for the time ye ought to be teachers” (5:12). Paul tells the Thessalonians that “if any would not work, neither should he eat” (2 Thessalonians 3:10). And every pastor knows the member who comes back each week with the same trouble and takes none of the advice.

There is also a kind of church the sermon may have had in view: one where nothing is expected of anyone and nobody changes. That is a failure too. A hospital that never treats anybody is not being kind.

The page grants all of this. Its question is what follows. The sermon’s answer is that the patient’s time runs out. Part V gives that answer its best texts.

The image the sermon accepts

Notice that the preacher does not reject the picture of the church as a hospital. He uses it. His quarrel is with the length of the stay. He sets a hospital, where people come and go, against a “mental asylum,” where they stay. In his picture the first is what a church should be and the second is what it must not become.

That makes the question a precise one. If the church is a hospital, who is the physician, who are the patients, and who signs the discharge papers?

The same member, answered twice

Here is how the two positions sound when a member comes to a pastor’s study for the fortieth time. Both pastors are tired, and both want her well.

Both pastors admit a limit. The first treats his own limit as the end of her place in the church. The second treats it as a reason to bring in more help. That difference runs through the rest of the page.

Try it: which position is speaking?

Eight things that might be said in a church. All are composed by this page. Sort each by which account of the church it assumes. Two could be said by either.

0 of 8 sorted

The physician at the table

The author’s brief says that the hospital image comes from Jesus. It nearly does, and the difference is worth having.

Where he said it

Jesus had just called a tax collector named Levi to follow him. Luke says that “Levi made him a great feast in his own house: and there was a great company of publicans and of others that sat down with them” (5:29). Tax collectors worked for the occupying power and were assumed to be on the take. The scribes and Pharisees did not address Jesus. They went to his disciples: “How is it that he eateth and drinketh with publicans and sinners?” (Mark 2:16).

The saying about the physician is his answer. So it is first of all an explanation of where he is sitting. A doctor is found among the sick. If you want to know why he is at this table, with these people, for this long, that is why.

Three things follow from the setting.

It is about him, and it sets no term. He does not say how long a physician stays with a patient. Matthew’s version adds a line from the prophet Hosea: “But go ye and learn what that meaneth, I will have mercy, and not sacrifice” (9:13). The people he sends away to learn something are the objectors.

The “whole” are not a real class. Luke says elsewhere that Jesus told a parable “unto certain which trusted in themselves that they were righteous, and despised others” (18:9). Those are the “whole” of the saying. They are not well. They are the patients who do not know it. When the risen Christ speaks to the church at Laodicea he says the same: “thou sayest, I am rich, and increased with goods, and have need of nothing; and knowest not that thou art wretched, and miserable, and poor, and blind, and naked” (Revelation 3:17).

So the saying does not divide the sick from the well. It divides those who know from those who do not. That matters for the sermon, because Position S needs a class of people who have been discharged and are now entitled to find the remaining patients a burden. The saying does not supply one.

When the Church became the surgery

The best-known early statement of it comes from John Chrysostom, preaching at Antioch in about 387. In the third of his homilies on repentance he urges people who have sinned to come into the church and not stay away for shame, and he gives this as the reason:

ἰατρεῖον γάρ ἐστιν ἐνταῦθα, οὐ δικαστήριον: “For this place is a physician’s surgery, not a court of law. It does not demand an account of sins. It grants the forgiveness of sins.”

John Chrysostom, De paenitentia (On Repentance), Homily 3, c. 387; Greek text in Migne, Patrologia Graeca 49. The English is this page’s own rendering of the Greek. A full translation is in On Repentance and Almsgiving, trans. Gus George Christo (Catholic University of America Press, 1998).

The Greek word is iatreion, the place where a physician (iatros) works. Chrysostom’s contrast is not between a short stay and a long one. It is between a place you come to be treated and a place you come to be tried. He is trying to get people to come back more often.

Luther’s patient

The Reformation kept the image and sharpened it. Lecturing on Romans at Wittenberg in 1515 and 1516, before anyone outside the university had heard of him, Martin Luther described the Christian like this:

… the saints at the same time as they are righteous are also sinners; righteous because they believe in Christ, whose righteousness covers them and is imputed to them, but sinners because they do not fulfill the Law, are not without concupiscence, and are like sick men under the care of a physician; they are sick in fact but healthy in hope and in the fact that they are beginning to be healthy, that is, they are “being healed.” They are people for whom the worst possible thing is the presumption that they are healthy, because they suffer a worse relapse.

Martin Luther, Lectures on Romans (1515–16), on Romans 4:7. Luther’s Works, vol. 25 (Concordia, 1972). On the same pages he compares Christ to the Samaritan who brings the half-dead man to the inn, and says the Christian is “at the same time both a sinner and righteous man; a sinner in fact, but a righteous man by sure imputation and promise of God” (p. 260).

Luther’s last sentence is the one to keep. In his account the dangerous patient is not the one who has been ill a long time. It is the one who has decided that he is well.

Try it: who knows he is sick?

Eight people speak in the New Testament. For each, decide whether the speaker knows he is a patient or thinks he is whole. One name appears twice.

0 of 8 sorted

Thirty and eight years

The sermon’s key word is “quickly.” So the first thing to look at is whether the Gospels keep time, and what they do with it when they do.

The Gospels count the years

They do keep time, more often than a reader might expect. Ancient narrative is usually sparing with detail. The evangelists go out of their way to say how long.

Three things stand out. First, the length is never held against the patient. Nobody is told he should have been well by now. Second, when someone does object to a long-term case, the objection is about procedure. The ruler of the synagogue says, “There are six days in which men ought to work: in them therefore come and be healed, and not on the sabbath day” (Luke 13:14). He has a system, and she is outside its hours. Jesus calls him a hypocrite and turns the number round. Eighteen years is his reason for not making her wait another day. Third, the long cases are the ones other people had stopped helping. The man at the pool has nobody. The woman has spent everything on doctors. The man in the tombs has broken every chain.

One thing in these stories does happen fast, and it should be said plainly. The cures are sudden. Of the bent woman Luke says, “immediately she was made straight” (13:13). But the speed is Jesus’ doing. The patient’s part was the eighteen years. Nobody in the Gospels is told to hurry up and recover.

There is one moment when Jesus himself sounds as if his patience is at an end. A father brings a boy the disciples could not help, and Jesus says: “O faithless and perverse generation, how long shall I be with you, and suffer you?” The sentence does not stop there. It goes on: “Bring thy son hither” (Luke 9:41). He asks how long, and in the same breath he sends for the boy.

Try it: set the time limit

Position S says the stay should be short, and does not say how short. Choose a limit yourself. The list shows which of the people in the table would already have been told to go by the time Jesus reached them.

The durations are the ones the text gives. For the boy, the blind man and the lame man the page has used the least the words allow. “Long time” has been entered as more than a year.

Not everyone was healed, and nobody was blamed

The clock runs on for the apostles too. Paul had what he called “a thorn in the flesh.” “For this thing I besought the Lord thrice, that it might depart from me. And he said unto me, My grace is sufficient for thee: for my strength is made perfect in weakness” (2 Corinthians 12:8–9). It stayed. He tells Timothy to take “a little wine for thy stomach’s sake and thine often infirmities” (1 Timothy 5:23), and writes without embarrassment, “Trophimus have I left at Miletum sick” (2 Timothy 4:20). He reminds the Galatians that he first came to them ill, and thanks them for how they took it: “my temptation which was in my flesh ye despised not, nor rejected; but received me” (Galatians 4:14).

So the New Testament’s own leaders include a man with a condition that was never cured, a young pastor who was often unwell, and a colleague left behind sick. Dossier 44 looks at these cases from the side of healing. Here they matter for a simpler reason. If the church is a place where you “get healed and then come out,” the apostle Paul never came out.

Forgiveness is counted in seventies

The same is true of sin, which is the illness the physician saying is actually about.

Then came Peter to him, and said, Lord, how oft shall my brother sin against me, and I forgive him? till seven times? Jesus saith unto him, I say not unto thee, Until seven times: but, Until seventy times seven.

Matthew 18:21–22

Peter is asking for a number. He wants to know where the limit is, and seven was a generous guess. The answer is a number nobody could keep count of. Luke records a version that makes the pace clearer still: “if he trespass against thee seven times in a day, and seven times in a day turn again to thee, saying, I repent; thou shalt forgive him” (17:4). That is a brother who has said “I repent” six times since breakfast. The apostles’ reply shows that they understood what was being asked of them: “Lord, Increase our faith” (17:5).

Then Jesus tells a story, and it is worth noticing who in it loses his place. A servant owes a king an impossible sum. He falls down and says, “Lord, have patience with me” (Matthew 18:26), and is forgiven everything. He goes out and finds a man who owes him a little. The second man uses the same words: “Have patience with me” (18:29). “And he would not.” The king sends for him. In the whole of this chapter, which is the New Testament’s chapter on church discipline, the one person who is handed over is the man who was shown patience and then decided that someone else’s time was up.

Nobody is discharged

The brief’s fourth point is that no Christian is ever fully discharged. The texts say so plainly. “If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us” (1 John 1:8). John writes “we,” and he is writing to believers. In the prayer Jesus taught, two requests stand side by side: “Give us this day our daily bread. And forgive us our debts” (Matthew 6:11–12). A disciple asks for forgiveness as often as he asks for food. Paul, late in his life, says of himself: “Not as though I had already attained, either were already perfect: but I follow after” (Philippians 3:12).

Luther made this the first sentence of the Reformation. The first of the Ninety-Five Theses (1517) reads: “When our Lord and Master Jesus Christ said, ‘Repent,’ he willed the entire life of believers to be one of repentance” (Luther’s Works 31:25). Twenty years later he wrote it into his church’s confession: “in Christians this repentance continues until death, because, through the entire life it contends with sin remaining in the flesh” (Smalcald Articles III.III, §40, 1537; Triglot Concordia, 1921). And in 1521 he described the whole Christian life in terms the sermon’s picture cannot hold:

This life, therefore, is not righteousness, but growth in righteousness, not health, but healing, not being, but becoming, not rest, but exercise. We are not yet what we shall be, but we are growing toward it. The process is not yet finished, but it is going on. This is not the end, but it is the road.

Martin Luther, Defense and Explanation of All the Articles (1521). Luther’s Works, vol. 32 (Fortress, 1958), p. 24.

Three patients, one instruction

The author’s sharper question was this: does sanctification give the spiritually healthy permission to stop bearing with the spiritually weak? Paul addresses the strong directly, more than once, and it is possible to see what he tells them.

One verse, four verbs

The verse at the head of this Part is the nearest thing in the New Testament to a ward round. Paul names three kinds of member and gives a different treatment for each. Then he gives one instruction that covers them all.

Look at how the treatments are matched. Only the first group is warned, and they are the ones who are out of line by choice. The discouraged are comforted. The weak are supported, and the Greek verb means to hold on to someone. Then: be patient toward all, the unruly included.

A church that gives the first treatment to the second and third kind of patient has misread the prescription. Telling a small-souled person that her time is up is a warning. Paul orders comfort.

What the strong owe

Paul’s other instructions to the strong all run the same way.

We then that are strong ought to bear the infirmities of the weak, and not to please ourselves.

Romans 15:1

“Ought” here is the Greek word for owing a debt. And “bear” is the verb for carrying a load: the same verb John uses when he says that Jesus went out “bearing his cross” (19:17). Paul has just spent a chapter on the “weak in the faith,” whom the church is to “receive” (14:1), and he ends the section: “receive ye one another, as Christ also received us” (15:7). The measure of how the strong treat the weak is how Christ treated the strong.

Brethren, if a man be overtaken in a fault, ye which are spiritual, restore such an one in the spirit of meekness; considering thyself, lest thou also be tempted. Bear ye one another’s burdens, and so fulfil the law of Christ.

Galatians 6:1–2

This is addressed to “ye which are spiritual,” which is exactly the class Position S has in mind. Their task is to restore. And they are told to do it while watching themselves, “lest thou also be tempted.” The carer is reminded in mid-sentence that he is a patient.

A few verses later Paul writes, “For every man shall bear his own burden” (6:5), and the sermon could fairly quote it. The two verses use different Greek words. The first is a crushing weight. The second is a soldier’s pack, the load each person is expected to shoulder. So Paul says both: everyone carries his own pack, and when a weight comes down on someone that he cannot carry, the others get under it. Part V comes back to this.

“Necessary”

Paul goes further than requiring tolerance. Writing to Corinth about the church as a body, he says:

And the eye cannot say unto the hand, I have no need of thee: nor again the head to the feet, I have no need of you. Nay, much more those members of the body, which seem to be more feeble, are necessary.

1 Corinthians 12:21–22

He does not say the feeble members are to be put up with. He says the body cannot do without them. Earlier in the same letter he had warned the strong what it means to damage one: “when ye sin so against the brethren, and wound their weak conscience, ye sin against Christ” (8:12).

None of these commands has a date on it. Paul does not say “bear the infirmities of the weak for a season,” or “support the weak until it becomes a drain.” And when he gives the reason for patience he gives himself as the example: “for this cause I obtained mercy, that in me first Jesus Christ might shew forth all longsuffering, for a pattern to them which should hereafter believe” (1 Timothy 1:16). The standard for the church’s patience is the patience Christ needed with Paul.

Try it: which treatment?

Eight members of a congregation, all composed by this page. For each, choose which of Paul’s three treatments the verse prescribes.

0 of 8 sorted

The case for the sermon

The author asked for the strongest version of the sermon’s point to be put fairly. This Part does that. A careful preacher who wanted to defend Position S would not rest it on a tired afternoon. He would bring texts, and there are six lines of argument open to him. Each is stated here as strongly as the page can state it, and then answered.

1 · “Healing is the aim, and the healed were sent home”

The case. Jesus did not keep a ward. He healed people and sent them away. “Rise, take up thy bed, and walk” (John 5:8). “Go in peace, and be whole of thy plague” (Mark 5:34). “Go, and sin no more” (John 8:11). The plainest instance is the man from the tombs. Once he was “clothed, and in his right mind,” he “prayed him that he might be with him. Howbeit Jesus suffered him not, but saith unto him, Go home to thy friends” (Mark 5:18–19). He asked to stay, and was told to go and get on with his life. That is very nearly the sermon’s sentence.

The answer. All of that is in the text, and Position L has to take it in. Three things can be said. First, look at where the healed are sent. The man from the tombs is sent “home to thy friends,” with a job: “tell them how great things the Lord hath done for thee.” He is not being sent out of the people of God. He is being sent into it. The man from Bethesda is next seen “in the temple,” and Jesus goes and finds him there to speak to him again (John 5:14). In these stories the gathered people of God is where a healed person goes. It is not what he leaves.

Second, being cured of an illness is not the same as being finished as a sinner. The man at Bethesda is told, “sin no more.” The warning is given because he still can.

Third, this is the place to admit that the hospital picture has limits, and the limit cuts against both sides. The New Testament’s own pictures of the church are a household, a body and a flock. Nobody is discharged from a family for having been in it too long. If the hospital image makes the church sound like somewhere a person should hope to leave, the image has been pushed too far. The oldest form of it, as Part IX will show, is an inn where the wounded stay until the Samaritan returns.

2 · “By this time you ought to be teachers”

The case. This is the sermon’s best text, because it does what the brief says the New Testament never does: it counts time. “For the time ye ought to be teachers.” The readers have been Christians long enough, and they are still on milk. Paul says the same to Corinth: “I have fed you with milk, and not with meat: for hitherto ye were not able to bear it, neither yet now are ye able” (1 Corinthians 3:2). And to Ephesus: “That we henceforth be no more children” (4:14). Growth is expected, the clock is running, and staying a baby is a fault.

The answer. Read on and see what each writer does next. The writer to the Hebrews has just told his readers they cannot take strong meat. He then gives it to them: the chapters that follow contain the hardest teaching in the letter. Before he does, he says: “But, beloved, we are persuaded better things of you” (6:9). He names their fault, which is being “dull of hearing” (5:11) and in danger of becoming “slothful” (6:12). Then he carries on as their teacher. Paul tells the Corinthians they are not yet able, and writes them thirteen more chapters, and then another letter.

So elapsed time does matter. It raises what may be expected of a person, and it justifies a rebuke. What it never does in these passages is end the teaching. Nobody is put out of the nursery for staying too long.

It also matters who is being rebuked. The fault in Hebrews is laziness, which puts these readers among Paul’s “unruly” and not among his fainthearted. For the second group the same letter has a different word: “Wherefore lift up the hands which hang down, and the feeble knees; And make straight paths for your feet, lest that which is lame be turned out of the way; but let it rather be healed” (12:12–13). The lame are not to be turned out of the way.

3 · “Some people must be avoided”

The case. The New Testament is not endlessly accommodating. “A man that is an heretick after the first and second admonition reject” (Titus 3:10). “Mark them which cause divisions and offences … and avoid them” (Romans 16:17). “Withdraw yourselves from every brother that walketh disorderly” (2 Thessalonians 3:6). “Put away from among yourselves that wicked person” (1 Corinthians 5:13). “From such turn away” (2 Timothy 3:5). A church that can never tell anyone to go is not following Paul.

The answer. Agreed, and Position L holds this too. The question is on what ground. Part VI goes through these texts one at a time and asks of each what the person had done. The short answer is that every one of them names conduct: refusing to repent, teaching falsehood, splitting the church, refusing to work. Not one names a person who is struggling, wants help, and has needed it for a long time.

4 · “Dependence can be a trap”

The case. Some people do not want to get better. Jesus’ question to the man at the pool, “Wilt thou be made whole?”, was a real question. Help that asks nothing of a person can keep him helpless. Paul saw it at Thessalonica and was blunt: “if any would not work, neither should he eat” (2 Thessalonians 3:10). “Every man shall bear his own burden” (Galatians 6:5). A pastor who goes on indefinitely absorbing someone’s demands may be doing him harm.

The answer. This is true, and any experienced pastor or doctor would say so. Paul’s treatment for it is on the list in Part IV: warn the unruly. But notice three things about how he applies it. It is for those who “would not,” and the church has to tell them apart from those who cannot. He tells such people what to do: “that with quietness they work, and eat their own bread” (3:12). And in the same paragraph he tells everyone else, “be not weary in well doing,” and says of the offender, “count him not as an enemy, but admonish him as a brother” (3:13, 15). Even the member who is taking advantage is still called a brother. The one thing Paul does not say is that such a person’s time in the church has expired.

The difficulty is real: it is often hard to tell “will not” from “cannot.” A person with severe depression can look, from outside, exactly like a person who is not trying. That uncertainty is a reason for the fourth verb, “be patient toward all.” It is not a reason to treat everyone as the first kind of case.

5 · “A pastor is finite, and Jesus himself withdrew”

The case. “You have to help everybody” is not a biblical rule. At Capernaum the disciples found Jesus praying alone and said, “All men seek for thee.” He answered, “Let us go into the next towns” (Mark 1:37–38), and left with people still waiting. At the pool of Bethesda lay “a great multitude of impotent folk” (John 5:3), and he healed one. He told his disciples, “Come ye yourselves apart into a desert place, and rest a while: for there were many coming and going, and they had no leisure so much as to eat” (Mark 6:31). Moses said, “I am not able to bear all this people alone” (Numbers 11:14). His father-in-law told him, “Thou wilt surely wear away, both thou, and this people that is with thee” (Exodus 18:18). A pastor who burns out helps nobody.

The answer. Every word of this is granted, and it corrects a careless version of Position L. No single Christian is told to carry everyone. The preacher was right to reject that. But look at what was done in each case. Jethro told Moses to appoint “rulers of thousands, and rulers of hundreds, rulers of fifties, and rulers of tens,” so that “they shall bear the burden with thee” (Exodus 18:21–22). When Moses complained to God, God gave him seventy elders (Numbers 11:16–17). When the widows in Jerusalem were being neglected and the apostles could not do everything, they chose seven more men (Acts 6:1–3).

Three times the load is too much for the carer. Three times the answer is more carers. In none of them is the answer fewer patients. Nobody tells the Israelites to stop bringing their cases, or the widows to stop needing bread. Part VII returns to this.

6 · “Christ told us to cut off what makes us stumble”

The case. “If thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out, and cast it from thee” (Matthew 5:29). “Let us lay aside every weight” (Hebrews 12:1). “Evil communications corrupt good manners” (1 Corinthians 15:33). A Christian is told to be ruthless with whatever comes between him and Christ, and sometimes what comes between is a person.

The answer. This is the argument behind “eliminate it,” and it has a longer history than the brief allowed. It gets a Part to itself.

Try it: what comes next?

Eight hard sentences, most of them quoted in the case above. For each, decide what the writer or speaker does in the lines that follow. The answers are in the text.

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Where Scripture draws the line

The New Testament does describe a door out of the church. This Part looks at who goes through it, why, and what happens to the door afterwards.

Jesus’ procedure

Moreover if thy brother shall trespass against thee, go and tell him his fault between thee and him alone: if he shall hear thee, thou hast gained thy brother. But if he will not hear thee, then take with thee one or two more, that in the mouth of two or three witnesses every word may be established. And if he shall neglect to hear them, tell it unto the church: but if he neglect to hear the church, let him be unto thee as an heathen man and a publican.

Matthew 18:15–17

Four things about this. It starts with a wrong done. “If thy brother shall trespass.” The process is for sin. It is not for weakness, slowness or need. The aim is stated in the first step. “Thou hast gained thy brother.” He is given three chances to listen, each with more people present. And what finally puts him out is one thing, said three times: “if he will not hear,” “if he shall neglect to hear,” “if he neglect to hear the church.” A man is not excluded for how badly or how often he sinned. He is excluded because, having been told, he will not listen.

Even then, consider the phrase. He is to be “as an heathen man and a publican.” Matthew, who records it, had been a publican. Part II described how Jesus treated publicans: he ate with them and called them. The excluded man goes back to being someone the church is trying to win.

The setting matters as well. The verses immediately before are about not despising “one of these little ones” and about the shepherd who leaves ninety-nine sheep to look for one (18:10–14). The verses immediately after are Peter’s question about seven times, and the story of the servant who would not be patient. The discipline passage has mercy on both sides of it.

Paul’s hardest case

At Corinth a man was living with his father’s wife, “such fornication as is not so much as named among the Gentiles,” and the church was proud of its tolerance: “ye are puffed up, and have not rather mourned” (1 Corinthians 5:1–2). Paul is severe: “put away from among yourselves that wicked person” (5:13). He widens it: the church is not to keep company with “any man that is called a brother” who is “a fornicator, or covetous, or an idolater, or a railer, or a drunkard, or an extortioner” (5:11).

That is a list of things people go on doing. Each word describes a practice someone is living in. And the purpose is given: “that the spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord Jesus” (5:5). Even the severest sentence in Paul’s letters is passed for the man’s good.

Then, in the second letter, comes the passage at the head of this Part. A man the church had punished is now sorry, and Paul is worried that they will not stop. “Sufficient to such a man is this punishment.” They are to forgive him and comfort him, “lest perhaps such a one should be swallowed up with overmuch sorrow. Wherefore I beseech you that ye would confirm your love toward him” (2 Corinthians 2:7–8).

Whether this is the same man as in 1 Corinthians 5 has been argued since Tertullian, early in the third century. Many modern scholars think it is someone else, who had wronged Paul personally. The point here does not depend on it. Either way this is Paul’s instruction about a man the church has disciplined and who has repented.

So there is a time limit in these chapters after all. It is on the punishment. Paul’s word is “sufficient”: that is enough now. In the New Testament the thing that expires is the discipline. The patience does not.

The other texts

The remaining texts can be read in a few minutes, and the exercise below asks you to sort them. In each the reader is told what the person did. At Thessalonica: “if any man obey not our word by this epistle, note that man, and have no company with him, that he may be ashamed. Yet count him not as an enemy, but admonish him as a brother” (2 Thessalonians 3:14–15). At Rome: those “which cause divisions and offences contrary to the doctrine which ye have learned” (Romans 16:17). In John’s second letter: a travelling teacher who does “bring not this doctrine” (verse 10). In Paul’s first letter to Timothy: two men who “concerning faith have made shipwreck,” handed over “that they may learn not to blaspheme” (1:19–20). The purpose clause is there again: that they may learn.

Try it: what was the reason?

Seven texts in which the New Testament tells a church to put someone out, avoid him or refuse him. For each, choose the reason the text itself gives.

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The man condemned for putting people out

There is one more text, and it reverses the usual picture. The apostle John writes to a friend about a local church leader:

I wrote unto the church: but Diotrephes, who loveth to have the preeminence among them, receiveth us not. Wherefore, if I come, I will remember his deeds which he doeth, prating against us with malicious words: and not content therewith, neither doth he himself receive the brethren, and forbiddeth them that would, and casteth them out of the church.

3 John 9–10

The New Testament names very few individuals as examples of how not to run a church. This one is a leader who would not receive people, stopped others from receiving them, and cast them out. No false teaching is charged against him. His fault is that he decided who could stay. Dossier 06 and Dossier 37 look at him more closely.

Jesus’ parable of the wheat and the tares belongs beside this. The servants see weeds in the field and are eager: “Wilt thou then that we go and gather them up?” The master says, “Nay; lest while ye gather up the tares, ye root up also the wheat with them. Let both grow together until the harvest” (Matthew 13:28–30). Jesus says the field is “the world” (13:38), so the parable is not directly about church membership. But since Augustine the Church has heard in it a warning to itself: people who set about clearing out the ones who should not be there cannot tell as well as they think, and pull up wheat.

Discipline and discharge, side by side

“Eliminate it”

Just before the passage about the hospital, the author reports, the preacher said that if someone or something is obstructing his closeness to Christ he is going to eliminate it. The brief asks whether that takes a saying Jesus spoke about a man’s own sin and applies it to other people.

The saying

In the Sermon on the Mount Jesus has just said that a man who looks at a woman with lust has committed adultery in his heart. He goes on:

And if thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out, and cast it from thee: for it is profitable for thee that one of thy members should perish, and not that thy whole body should be cast into hell. And if thy right hand offend thee, cut it off, and cast it from thee.

Matthew 5:29–30. “Offend” in 1611 meant “cause to stumble.”

On the face of it this is about a man and himself. The eye is the one he looked with. The members are his own. The enemy is his own desire.

Which person?

In both Fathers the answer is the same. Chrysostom’s test is that the person “hurts your soul”: he is speaking in a passage about lust, of a relationship that is drawing a man into sin. Augustine’s friend is a counsellor in the things of God, and the danger is that he counsels wrongly and leads you astray. In each case the person to be cut off is a tempter. He is pulling you toward sin or error.

That is one kind of person. There is another kind who can also make a Christian life harder: the one who costs time, strength and sleep because he needs help and keeps needing it. The first kind is an occasion of sin. The second kind is an occasion of work.

The sermon’s sentence, as it was reported, comes with a rejection of the idea that “you have to help everybody,” and it is followed at once by the passage about checking out of the hospital. In that setting the obstruction looks like the second kind. Nothing in Chrysostom or Augustine extends the saying that far, and three things in the New Testament stand against it.

Jesus tells the saying twice

Matthew records the saying about cutting off a second time, in chapter 18. Look at what stands on either side of it.

The saying sits between a warning against making a weak believer stumble and a command not to despise one. If the hand to be cut off could be a weak believer who is a burden, the next verse would forbid what this one commands. It reads sensibly only if the thing to be cut off is whatever in me would lead me to harm them.

Paul uses the same picture, about people

Part IV quoted it already. When Paul describes church members as parts of a body, the eye and the hand come up again, and what he says is: “the eye cannot say unto the hand, I have no need of thee” (1 Corinthians 12:21). The apostle uses Jesus’ own images, turns them to the question of other members, and rules out the conclusion.

Where Christ says he is

The third point is the simplest. The preacher’s stated aim is closeness to Christ. In the scene of the last judgement Christ says where he was to be found: “I was sick, and ye visited me.” The righteous do not remember it. He explains: “Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.”

If that is so, a sick brother cannot be standing between a Christian and Christ. By Christ’s own account he is one of the places Christ is. Benedict wrote this into the rule that governed Western monasteries for a thousand years: “Before all things and above all things, care must be taken of the sick, so that they will be served as if they were Christ in person; for He Himself said, ‘I was sick, and you visited Me’” (Rule of St Benedict, chapter 36, c. 540; trans. Leonard J. Doyle, 1948).

The disciples kept trying to send people away

The wish to clear a space round Jesus is not new. The Gospels record his closest followers acting on it several times. A foreign woman follows them, calling out about her daughter: “Send her away; for she crieth after us” (Matthew 15:23). A crowd stays late: “Send the multitude away” (14:15). Parents bring children, and “his disciples rebuked those that brought them” (Mark 10:13). A blind beggar shouts, and “many charged him that he should hold his peace” (10:48).

Each time the people round Jesus think they are protecting him, and each time he overrules them. “They need not depart; give ye them to eat.” “Suffer the little children to come unto me, and forbid them not.” Mark says that when he saw the children being turned back “he was much displeased.”

Try it: who wanted them gone?

Ten sentences from the Gospels. For each, choose who is speaking or acting.

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“You don’t have to help everybody”: the Samaritan and the inn

Part V granted that this sentence is true of any one person. The parable most often quoted against it actually agrees. Read what the Samaritan does.

But a certain Samaritan, as he journeyed, came where he was: and when he saw him, he had compassion on him, And went to him, and bound up his wounds, pouring in oil and wine, and set him on his own beast, and brought him to an inn, and took care of him. And on the morrow when he departed, he took out two pence, and gave them to the host, and said unto him, Take care of him; and whatsoever thou spendest more, when I come again, I will repay thee.

Luke 10:33–35

He was on a journey, and the next morning he went on with it. He did not nurse the man back to health himself. He had limits and he kept to them. Jesus presents him as the model.

What he does with his limit is the point. He does not leave the man in the road, which is what the priest and the Levite did when they “passed by on the other side.” He takes him to a place that will keep him, hands him to someone whose work that is, pays, and leaves an open account: “whatsoever thou spendest more.” No date is set for the man to be out. The only term mentioned is the Samaritan’s own return.

So the parable has room for a helper who says, “I cannot stay.” It has no character who says, “You have been here long enough.” The helper has limits. The inn does not turn the man out.

The sentences in the first row are composed by this page for illustration.

When would you have discharged Peter?

The brief points out that Peter failed repeatedly and was restored each time. It is worth laying the failures out in order, because the New Testament is unusually frank about its leading apostle, and because the last of them comes much later than most readers remember.

Try it: choose the point

Ten moments in Peter’s life, in order. Suppose you were applying Position S, and had to decide when he had had long enough. Choose the point at which you would have told him his time was up. The page will show what came afterwards.

Choose a point. You can change your mind.

What the list shows

The denial is the failure everybody knows, and it was severe. Matthew says that the third time “began he to curse and to swear, saying, I know not the man” (26:74). He had been warned hours earlier, and had answered, “Though I should die with thee, yet will I not deny thee” (26:35). Jesus’ treatment of it is in the last chapter of John. He asks Peter three times, “lovest thou me?”, once for each denial, and each time gives him work: “Feed my lambs.” “Feed my sheep.” “Feed my sheep” (21:15–17). The restoration is a commission.

But the last entry is the one that bears on the sermon. Years after Pentecost and its three thousand baptisms, after the vision at Joppa and the house of Cornelius, Peter came to Antioch and ate with Gentile Christians. Then visitors arrived from Jerusalem, and “he withdrew and separated himself, fearing them which were of the circumcision” (Galatians 2:12). Paul “withstood him to the face, because he was to be blamed” (2:11). This was the leading apostle, in public, on a matter that touched the gospel, and by most reckonings it was fifteen years or more after the resurrection.

Position S speaks of getting right and going on with life. Peter’s record does not fit that shape. He got right and went wrong, several times, across decades, and the last recorded occasion is not the least serious. And the Church’s response at Antioch was not to remove him. It was to tell him, to his face, and keep him. In his own second letter, written later still, he refers to “our beloved brother Paul” (2 Peter 3:15).

The helper who was given up on

A second case shows the apostles themselves disagreeing about patience. On their first journey Paul and Barnabas took a young man called John Mark. Partway through, “John departing from them returned to Jerusalem” (Acts 13:13). When they planned a second journey, Barnabas wanted to take him again.

But Paul thought not good to take him with them, who departed from them from Pamphylia, and went not with them to the work. And the contention was so sharp between them, that they departed asunder one from the other: and so Barnabas took Mark, and sailed unto Cyprus.

Acts 15:38–39

Two things should be said fairly. Paul was not putting Mark out of the church. He was declining to take an unreliable man on a dangerous mission, and a leader is entitled to judge who is fit for a task. That is a limit of the kind Part VII allowed. And Luke does not say which of them was right.

He does, in effect, record the result. Barnabas, whose name the apostles had given him and which means “the son of consolation” (Acts 4:36), took the young man who had failed and gave him another start. Some ten years later Paul writes to the Colossians: “Marcus, sister’s son to Barnabas, (touching whom ye received commandments: if he come unto you, receive him)” (4:10). And in the last letter we have from Paul, written from prison: “Take Mark, and bring him with thee: for he is profitable to me for the ministry” (2 Timothy 4:11). An old and steady tradition names this Mark as the writer of the second Gospel.

If Barnabas had agreed that Mark had had his chance, the man Paul ended by asking for would not have been there to ask for.

The bruised reed

Matthew gives a summary of how Jesus dealt with people like these. Great crowds followed him, “and he healed them all” (12:15), and Matthew says this fulfilled a line of Isaiah:

A bruised reed shall he not break, and smoking flax shall he not quench, till he send forth judgment unto victory.

Matthew 12:20, quoting Isaiah 42:3

A reed that has been bent is useless for anything a reed is used for, and the natural thing is to snap it off and cut another. “Smoking flax” is a lamp wick that has burned down until it gives more smoke than light, and the natural thing is to pinch it out. The prophecy says he does neither. And it sets a term, which is the only term in the passage: “till he send forth judgment unto victory.” He goes on not breaking it until the end.

The inn, until he comes again

The author’s core claim is historical as well as biblical: that historic Christianity has understood the Church as a company of sinners who need care for life. This Part checks that against the record. It also finds that the Church was once asked the sermon’s question formally, and gave an answer.

The older picture: an inn

Part VII read the parable of the Good Samaritan as a story about a helper with limits. From very early on Christians also read it as a story about Christ. Origen, preaching at Caesarea in the 230s, passes on an interpretation he says he had from one of the elders before him: the wounded man is Adam, the Samaritan is Christ, the inn that receives all comers is the Church, and the Samaritan’s promise to return is the second coming (Homilies on Luke 34; trans. Joseph T. Lienhard, 1996).

Augustine preached it the same way, more than once:

Let us be praying, as those who are wounded, for the physician; let us be carried into the inn to be healed. … He poured in oil and wine, He healed the wounds, He put him on his beast, He took him to the inn, He commended him to the innkeeper’s care. … Therefore, brethren, is the Church also, wherein the wounded is healed meanwhile, the traveller’s inn.

Augustine of Hippo, Tractates on the Gospel of John 41.13. Trans. John Gibb, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, First Series, vol. 7 (1888), as edited at New Advent.

Augustine counts himself among the wounded: “let us be carried.” And he uses the word “meanwhile.” The Church is where the wounded are being healed in the time between the Samaritan’s leaving and his coming back.

On this reading the question of how long a patient may stay has a definite answer. Nobody at the inn sets the date. The man who brought the patient said he would settle the account “when I come again.” Until then the innkeeper’s instruction is two words: “Take care of him.”

The medicine that is taken again and again

The brief cites three witnesses to the Church’s medical language. All three check out, one with a correction.

Ignatius of Antioch, on his way to execution about the year 110, told the Christians at Ephesus to come together “breaking one and the same bread, which is the medicine of immortality” (To the Ephesians 20; trans. Roberts and Donaldson). Augustine preached Christ as the physician so often that scholars have a name for the theme, Christus medicus, and the passage above is one instance. Luther, in the Large Catechism of 1529, wrote of the Lord’s Supper that a Christian should regard it as “a pure, wholesome, comforting remedy,” and told the anxious: “if you are heavy-laden and feel your weakness, then go joyfully to this Sacrament and obtain refreshment, consolation, and strength.” Of worthiness he said: “those alone are called unworthy who neither feel their infirmities nor wish to be considered sinners” (Part V; trans. Bente and Dau, Triglot Concordia, 1921).

Luther’s great opponents agreed with him here. Calvin called the Supper “medicine to the sick, comfort to the sinner, bounty to the poor” (Institutes IV.17.42, 1559). The Council of Trent said that Christ wished it to be received “as an antidote, whereby we may be freed from daily faults, and be preserved from mortal sins” (Session 13, chapter 2, 1551; trans. J. Waterworth, 1848).

There is an argument in the practice itself. The Lord’s Supper is repeated. Christians receive it weekly, monthly or quarterly for the whole of their lives. Nobody goes on prescribing a medicine to people who have been cured and sent home. A church that celebrates the Supper is treating its members as patients still under treatment each time it does so. Dossier 14 sets out who the churches have invited to it.

The question was put, and decided

In the year 250 the emperor Decius ordered everyone in the empire to sacrifice to the Roman gods. Many Christians did, or bought certificates saying they had. When the persecution eased, large numbers of them wanted to come back.

The Church divided over what to do with them. At Rome a learned presbyter named Novatian held that those who had denied Christ could never be restored to communion in this life. The church could urge them to repent, and must leave them to God. His followers formed their own congregations and took a name for themselves: katharoi, “the pure.” The other side, led by Cornelius at Rome and Cyprian at Carthage, held that the fallen were to be received back after a period of penance. That side prevailed.

Some seventy years later the first general council of the Church dealt with the Novatianists who wanted to rejoin. It let them in, on a condition:

Concerning those who call themselves Cathari, if they come over to the Catholic and Apostolic Church … it is before all things necessary that they should profess in writing that they will observe and follow the dogmas of the Catholic and Apostolic Church; in particular that they will communicate with persons who have been twice married, and with those who having lapsed in persecution have had a period [of penance] laid upon them, and a time [of restoration] fixed.

The Council of Nicaea (325), Canon 8. Trans. Henry R. Percival, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Second Series, vol. 14 (1900).

The council that wrote the Nicene Creed required the Pure to put in writing that they would share the Lord’s table with people who had fallen and been restored. Another canon of the same council says that “if any man be at the point of death, he must not be deprived of the last and most indispensable Viaticum” (Canon 13). Viaticum is communion given to the dying. Whatever discipline a person was under, he was not to die outside.

This is not the sermon’s case exactly. Novatian’s question was about grave sin, and the sermon’s is about how long someone takes to get well. But the principle the Church rejected is the one Position S needs: that the church is for those who have got right, and that those who have not belong outside it. When that principle appeared again with the Donatists in the fourth century, and among some of the radical groups of the sixteenth, it was rejected again. Calvin wrote of them: “Thinking there is no church where there is not complete purity and integrity of conduct, they … withdraw from a genuine church” (Institutes IV.1.13; trans. Henry Beveridge, 1845). The Church of England put it in its Articles: “the grant of repentance is not to be denied to such as fall into sin after Baptism,” and “they are to be condemned, which say, they can no more sin as long as they live here, or deny the place of forgiveness to such as truly repent” (Article XVI, 1571). Dossier 21 and Dossier 26 tell more of this history.

The pastor as physician

The same centuries produced handbooks for bishops, and they speak in the same terms. The Apostolic Constitutions, compiled in Syria about 380, addresses the bishop directly:

As a skilful and compassionate physician, heal all such as have wandered in the ways of sin. … Since you are therefore a physician of the Lord’s Church, provide remedies suitable to every patient’s case. … Bring again that which is driven away, that is, do not permit that which is in its sins, and is cast out by way of punishment, to continue excluded.

Apostolic Constitutions II.20, c. 380. Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 7 (1886), as edited at New Advent. The last sentence is expounding Ezekiel 34:4.

“Remedies suitable to every patient’s case” is Paul’s three treatments again. And the bishop is told not to let an excluded person “continue excluded.”

Benedict’s Rule, written in Italy about 540, gives a chapter to how the abbot is to treat a monk who has been excluded from the common life for a fault. It begins: “Let the Abbot be most solicitous in his concern for delinquent brethren, for ‘it is not the healthy but the sick who need a physician’” (chapter 27; trans. Leonard J. Doyle, 1948). He is to send wise older brothers to console the man in private.

In fairness, the next chapter of the Rule does allow a last resort. If a brother has been corrected again and again, punished, and prayed for by the whole community, and still will not amend, then “let the Abbot use the knife of amputation” (chapter 28). Benedict knew that some people have to go. His ground is the same as the New Testament’s. The brother who is sent away is the one who refuses every remedy. The brother who is slow to recover is not sent away.

From the Reformation on

Calvin called the visible Church the mother of believers, and a school: “For our weakness does not permit us to leave the school until we have spent our whole lives as scholars” (Institutes IV.1.4). A school of that kind has no leaving age.

Richard Sibbes, a Puritan preacher in London, published a book in 1630 on the verse about the bruised reed. In it he wrote:

The church of Christ is a common hospital, wherein all are in some measure sick of some spiritual disease or other, so all have occasion to exercise the spirit of wisdom and meekness.

Richard Sibbes, The Bruised Reed and Smoking Flax (1630), chapter 5 in modern editions.

“Common” means shared by everyone. Sibbes is not describing a hospital with some patients and some staff. In his picture the staff are patients.

John Bunyan, the Bedford tinker and pastor, usually counted a Baptist, put the same conviction into a story. In the second part of The Pilgrim’s Progress (1684) the travellers rescue a man called Mr Feeble-mind from a giant. His name comes from 1 Thessalonians 5:14. He thanks them and then declines to join them, because he will only hold them back: “I am a man of a weak and feeble mind, and shall be offended and made weak at that which others can bear.” Their guide, Great-heart, answers:

I have it in commission to comfort the feeble-minded, and to support the weak. You must needs go along with us; we will wait for you; we will lend you our help; we will deny ourselves of some things, both opinionative and practical, for your sake: we will not enter into doubtful disputations before you; we will be made all things to you, rather than you shall be left behind.

John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress, The Second Part (1684).

Mr Feeble-mind walks with them to the end of the book, along with Mr Ready-to-halt, who goes on crutches, and Mr Despondency and his daughter Much-afraid. They slow the company down. Bunyan plainly thinks that a company which would not be slowed down by them was not on the right road.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote Life Together in 1938, out of the life of a small illegal seminary in Germany. One sentence in it answers the sermon’s verb directly:

Every Christian community must realize that not only do the weak need the strong, but also that the strong cannot exist without the weak. The elimination of the weak is the death of the fellowship.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together (Gemeinsames Leben, written 1938, published 1939), chapter 4, “Ministry.” Trans. John W. Doberstein (Harper & Row, 1954). In chapter 5: “The pious fellowship permits no one to be a sinner.”

The record is not all gentle

It would be false to paint the historic Church as uniformly patient. The penance laid on the lapsed in the third and fourth centuries could last years. Rigorist movements recurred, and some of them were large. Congregations in several traditions have shunned people cruelly, and Part XI will come to what was done to the mentally ill in buildings with church names on them.

What can be said is narrower and firmer. Each time the question was put formally, whether the Church is only for those who have got right, the Church answered no. And the picture it kept returning to, from Origen to Bunyan, has every member inside it as a patient or a traveller, with no class of people who have finished.

Try it: who said it, and when?

Eight sentences about the Church and its sick, all quoted on this page. Match each to its source.

Five traditions in their own words

The brief’s claim is about “historic Christianity,” which is a large thing to speak for. So this Part puts the same four questions to five traditions and quotes each from its own confession, catechism, prayer book or law. The page does not decide between them where they differ. The reader can compare.

The sources are: for Lutherans, the Book of Concord (1580), in the 1921 Triglot translation; for Anglicans, the Book of Common Prayer (1662) and the Thirty-nine Articles (1571); for Catholics, the Catechism of the Catholic Church (1992), the Council of Trent (1551) and the Code of Canon Law (1983); for the Reformed, the Heidelberg Catechism (1563), the Westminster standards (1647–48) and Calvin’s Institutes (1559); for Baptists, the Second London Confession (1677) and John Bunyan.

Try it: ask each tradition the same question

Choose a question. The five answers appear side by side, each in the tradition’s own words.

What all five say

Where they divide

They disagree about a good deal that this page leaves alone. They differ on what the Lord’s Supper is, and so on what exactly the “medicine” does. They differ on who administers discipline: a bishop, a body of elders, or the whole congregation. They differ on whether a true believer can finally fall away. And Catholic and Orthodox Christians have a sacrament of confession that Protestants do not count as one. None of those differences touches the four points above.

“Not a mental asylum”

The brief asks for one phrase to be examined on its own, and it is right to. Most of a sermon is forgotten by Monday. A phrase like this one is carried home.

What the sentence does

The preacher may well have meant it as a figure of speech. He may have been thinking of a church where nobody changes, and reached for the strongest picture of a place people never leave. He may not have had mentally ill people in mind at all. The page does not know, and does not say otherwise.

But a sentence does things beyond what its speaker intends. This one makes two classes of patient. There are hospital patients, whose trouble is the kind that clears up, and who are welcome. And there are asylum patients, whose trouble is the kind that does not, and whom the church is “not” for. The brief asked on what biblical basis the Church could tell the two apart. Parts VI and X found the only basis Scripture and the traditions use for excluding anyone: refusal to repent. The sermon’s line runs somewhere else. It separates people by how long their trouble lasts and what kind of trouble it is.

The name it gives the second class is the name of the institution where people with mental illness were kept. Anyone in the room who has such an illness, or loves someone who has, will have known which side of the line they were being placed on.

Who was called mad

The New Testament records the charge of madness being made against four parties, and they are not the ones a reader might expect.

A family that goes out “to lay hold on” a relative because he is out of his mind is doing what families did before there were asylums. The Lord of the Church was, on one afternoon in Galilee, the person his relatives came to take away. A church that speaks of the mentally ill as people for whom it is not the place should remember who was once thought to belong among them.

People in the dark, kept in the book

Scripture also keeps a place for people whose minds have given way under what they carry, without calling them mad and without hurrying them.

Elijah, soon after his greatest victory, “went a day’s journey into the wilderness, and came and sat down under a juniper tree: and he requested for himself that he might die” (1 Kings 19:4). What follows is one of the gentlest passages in the Old Testament. An angel wakes him and says, “Arise and eat.” He eats and sleeps again. The angel comes a second time: “Arise and eat; because the journey is too great for thee” (19:7). He is fed twice and allowed to sleep, and nobody rebukes him or gives him a deadline.

Psalm 88 is the one psalm that never turns toward hope. Its last line is: “Lover and friend hast thou put far from me, and mine acquaintance into darkness.” It ends there. And Israel and the Church have kept it in their book of prayers ever since, to be said aloud by whoever needs it.

When Job’s friends first came to him, before they began to explain his suffering, “they sat down with him upon the ground seven days and seven nights, and none spake a word unto him: for they saw that his grief was very great” (Job 2:13). It is the best thing they do in the book. Dossier 16 is about what they did next.

What Christians built

The brief asks how the phrase squares with a historic Christianity that stood for the weak and the sick. The record has two sides, and both should be seen.

Now the other side. The oldest psychiatric institution in England began in 1247 as a priory of St Mary of Bethlehem. By about 1400 it was housing the insane. Its name, worn down by Londoners, gave English the word “bedlam,” and for part of its history visitors were admitted to look at the inmates. Christians chained the mentally ill, blamed them, and exorcised people who needed a doctor. A Christian name over the door guaranteed nothing.

So the fair statement is this. Christianity did not always do right by people who lost their minds. But the idea that such people are owed a refuge, that a town or a household or a house of prayer should take them in and keep them, came into Europe through the Church. Geel has been doing it for seven hundred years. When the sermon says the church is not a mental asylum, it sets aside one of the things Christians have most reason to be glad they built.

How long is “a short time”?

This page makes no medical claims of its own. Two findings from published research bear on the sermon’s time limit, and they are given here as their authors state them.

On depression: a review of the research concluded that “at least 50% of those who recover from a first episode of depression” have “one or more additional episodes in their lifetime” (Burcusa and Iacono, Clinical Psychology Review, 2007). On addiction: a much-cited paper in the Journal of the American Medical Association argued that drug dependence should be understood as “a chronic medical illness,” and found that relapse rates after treatment were similar to those for diabetes, high blood pressure and asthma (McLellan and others, 2000).

The World Health Organization’s current fact sheet says that “nearly 1 in every 7 people” in the world is living with a mental disorder. Whatever the figure in any one congregation, it is not nought.

These are conditions measured in years, and often in lifetimes, like Paul’s thorn. A rule that says “get healed and then come out” does not ask such people to do anything they can do. It tells them in advance that they are the wrong kind of patient.

What four listeners heard

The brief asks how the phrase may land. Here are four people who might have been in the room. All are composed.

None of these people will complain. That is how a sentence like this does its work. Nobody is asked to leave. Some people conclude for themselves that they should stop being a burden, and are missed a few months later, or not missed.

The research that exists suggests the fear is not imaginary. In an online survey of 293 Christians who had sought help from a church for a mental illness, most said they had been accepted, but “approximately 30% reported a negative interaction,” which included “abandonment by the church, equating mental illness with the work of demons, and suggesting that the mental disorder was the result of personal sin” (Stanford, Mental Health, Religion and Culture, 2007). A survey by an American church research body in 2014 found that 49 per cent of the pastors asked rarely or never spoke about mental illness from the front, while 65 per cent of the family members asked wanted their church to talk about it openly. Among the adults with an acute mental illness who took part, one in ten said they had changed churches because of how a church responded. These were not random samples, and they cannot say how common the experience is. They show that it happens.

Try it: when did the Church do this?

Seven things done in the Church’s name for the sick in mind and body. Place each in its period.

0 of 7 sorted

Hospital or clinic?

The page has argued that a church may not put a term on its care for a member who still wants it, and has agreed that helpers wear out. So a congregation that wants to be the first kind of place needs to look at how it actually behaves. This Part offers some questions.

What a church with real limits can do

Ten statements about a congregation

Answer for the church you know best. Nothing is stored or sent anywhere, and the result is a prompt for thought and nothing more.

The quick cure

One more text belongs here, because it is about healing people fast. Jeremiah says of the prophets and priests of his day: “They have healed also the hurt of the daughter of my people slightly, saying, Peace, peace; when there is no peace” (6:14). The fault he names is the shallow cure: pronouncing people well because the healers want to be finished.

A church that expects its members to “get right and go” puts pressure on everyone in it to report that they are right. People learn what answer is wanted. The ones who can give it do, and the ones who cannot go quiet. That is how a congregation comes to look healthy while Luther’s warning from Part II comes true inside it: “the worst possible thing is the presumption that they are healthy.”

Your answers, revisited

Here are the ten questions you answered before reading, with what the sources say. If you skipped them, go back to the quiz, lock in your answers, and return.

Check it yourself

Twenty-two items. Nearly everything here is free and online. If you read only three, read the first three. If you do only one thing, do the last.

1. 1. Mark 2:13–17; Luke 5:27–32; Luke 15:1–7; Luke 18:9–14; Matthew 18 (the whole chapter). Read this first. Twenty minutes. The physician saying in its setting, and the discipline passage with what stands on either side of it.
2. 2. Romans 14:1–15:7; Galatians 6:1–10; 1 Thessalonians 5:12–15; 1 Corinthians 12:12–27. Read this first. Fifteen minutes. Everything Paul says to the strong about the weak. Look for a date.
3. 3. 1 Corinthians 5; 2 Corinthians 2:1–11; 2 Thessalonians 3:6–15; Titus 3:8–11; Romans 16:17–18; 2 John; 3 John. Read this first. Twenty minutes. Every passage about putting someone out or avoiding him. Write down, for each, what the person had done.
4. 4. John 5:1–15; Luke 13:10–17; Mark 5:1–34; Mark 9:14–29; John 9; Acts 3:1–10 and 4:22; Acts 9:32–35. Twenty-five minutes. The long cases. Note every number.
5. 5. Hebrews 5:11–6:12 and 12:12–13; 1 Corinthians 3:1–3; Ephesians 4:11–16. Ten minutes. The sermon’s best texts. Read past the rebuke to see what comes next.
6. 6. Matthew 5:27–30; Matthew 25:31–46; Luke 10:25–37; Exodus 18:13–26; Numbers 11:10–17; Acts 6:1–7. Twenty minutes. The eye and the hand, where Christ says he is found, and what was done each time a leader had too much to carry.
7. 7. Peter: Luke 5:1–11; Matthew 14:22–33; 16:13–23; 26:31–35, 69–75; John 21:15–19; Acts 2 and 10; Galatians 2:11–14; 2 Peter 3:15. Mark: Acts 13:13; 15:36–41; Colossians 4:10; 2 Timothy 4:11. Thirty minutes.
8. 8. Mark 3:20–35; John 10:19–21; Acts 26:24–25; Matthew 4:23–25; 1 Kings 19:1–8; Psalm 88; Job 2:11–13. Fifteen minutes. Who was called mad, and how Scripture treats people in the dark.
9. 9. John Chrysostom, De paenitentia, Homily 3. Greek in Migne, Patrologia Graeca 49. English in On Repentance and Almsgiving, trans. Gus George Christo, Fathers of the Church 96 (Catholic University of America Press, 1998). A library book. The sentence quoted in Part II is this page’s own rendering of the Greek, which is given beside it so that it can be checked.
10. 10. John Chrysostom, Homilies on Matthew 17; Augustine, On the Sermon on the Mount I.13; Augustine, Tractates on the Gospel of John 41. Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, First Series, vols 10, 6 and 7 (1888); free at New Advent, whose editors have modernised some of the wording. Thirty minutes. The first two are the Fathers on the eye and the hand.
11. 11. Origen, Homilies on Luke 34, trans. Joseph T. Lienhard, Fathers of the Church 94 (1996). A library book. This page summarises it and does not quote it. Ignatius, To the Ephesians 20; Jerome, Letter 77; Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration 43.63. Free at New Advent.
12. 12. The Council of Nicaea (325), Canons 8 and 13, trans. Henry R. Percival, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Second Series, vol. 14 (1900); free at New Advent. Apostolic Constitutions, Book II, chapters 12–24 and 41, Ante-Nicene Fathers vol. 7. Twenty minutes. For the Novatianist schism see Eusebius, Church History VI.43–46, and Cyprian, On the Lapsed.
13. 13. The Rule of St Benedict, chapters 27, 28 and 36, trans. Leonard J. Doyle (Liturgical Press, 1948); free at Project Gutenberg. Ten minutes. Read 27 and 28 together.
14. 14. Martin Luther, Lectures on Romans (1515–16), on Romans 4:7, Luther’s Works vol. 25 (Concordia, 1972), pp. 258–260; Defense and Explanation of All the Articles (1521), Luther’s Works vol. 32 (Fortress, 1958), p. 24; the Ninety-Five Theses (1517), thesis 1, Luther’s Works 31:25. Library books; the theses are free everywhere.
15. 15. The Book of Concord: Large Catechism (1529), Parts IV and V; Smalcald Articles (1537), Part III, Articles III and IX; Formula of Concord, Solid Declaration (1577), VII.68–71. Trans. F. Bente and W. H. T. Dau, Triglot Concordia (1921); free at bookofconcord.org. Thirty minutes.
16. 16. The Book of Common Prayer (1662): the General Confession at Morning Prayer; the Litany; the Holy Communion (the opening rubrics, the Comfortable Words, the Prayer of Humble Access). The Thirty-nine Articles (1571), XVI and XXXIII. Free at churchofengland.org. Twenty minutes.
17. 17. Catechism of the Catholic Church (1992), paragraphs 827 and 1420–1429; the Council of Trent, Session 13 (1551), chapter 2, trans. J. Waterworth (1848); Code of Canon Law (1983), canons 1312, 1341, 1347 and 1358, in the text of Book VI as revised in 2021. All free at vatican.va or in standard collections. Twenty minutes.
18. 18. The Heidelberg Catechism (1563), Questions 81, 85 and 114; the Westminster Confession (1647), chapters 13 and 30; the Westminster Larger Catechism (1648), Question 172; John Calvin, Institutes (1559), IV.1.4, IV.1.13–16 and IV.17.42, trans. Henry Beveridge (1845). All free online. Thirty minutes.
19. 19. The Second London Baptist Confession (1677, reissued 1689), chapters 15, 26 and 30. John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress, The Second Part (1684): the episode of Giant Slay-good and Mr Feeble-mind. Richard Sibbes, The Bruised Reed and Smoking Flax (1630). All free online. Sibbes is short, and worth reading whole.
20. 20. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together (1939), trans. John W. Doberstein (Harper & Row, 1954), chapters 4 and 5. In copyright; in most libraries. Two hours for the whole book.
21. 21. On the record and the research. Eugeen Roosens, Mental Patients in Town Life: Geel, Europe’s First Therapeutic Community (Sage, 1979). Samuel Tuke, Description of the Retreat (York, 1813). Matthew S. Stanford, “Demon or disorder: A survey of attitudes toward mental illness in the Christian church,” Mental Health, Religion and Culture 10, no. 5 (2007), pp. 445–449. Lifeway Research, Study of Acute Mental Illness and Christian Faith (2014). Stephanie L. Burcusa and William G. Iacono, “Risk for recurrence in depression,” Clinical Psychology Review 27, no. 8 (2007), pp. 959–985. A. Thomas McLellan and others, “Drug dependence, a chronic medical illness,” JAMA 284, no. 13 (2000), pp. 1689–1695. World Health Organization, fact sheet “Mental disorders,” as it stood in October 2026. The figures for Geel and the dates for Valencia and York are as given in standard reference works; check them before relying on them.
22. 22. Your own church’s documents, and one person. Do this one. Find your church’s membership covenant, constitution or discipline policy, and look for the grounds on which a person’s membership or care can end. Then think of one person in your congregation who has been struggling for a long time, and ask what this page would have you do on Sunday.

No living individual is named on this page as an example of anything; the sermon that prompted it is quoted as a listener reported it, without identifying its preacher or his church, and no judgement of any person is intended. Modern denominations and organisations are named only where they are quoted word for word from their own published statements or cited as the publishers of research. Apart from the authors of published research and translations, every individual quoted is deceased, or biblical, and is quoted from a dated, published source. Every remark attributed to a pastor, an elder, a member or a listener, and every person described, is composed by this page for illustration and does not describe any real person or congregation. This page is not medical advice.