When my wife and I returned home from Together for the Gospel we brought with us a very large stack of books. In fact, since we were both registered for and attended the conference, we had two identical stacks. I’ve given a few of the duplicates away, some of them to our pastor. One of those was The Church and the Surprising Offense of God’s Love: Reintroducing the Doctrines of Church Membership and Discipline by Jonathan Leeman of Capitol Hill Baptist Church and 9Marks. A few Sundays ago, Pastor reported to me that he had begun reading the book, was enjoying it and finding it very interesting, and had I read it? No, I had not yet. I was told that I should, and so now I am.
I have thus far only read the introduction, and I am hooked. Rather than a compartmentalized manual on biblical church membership and discipline, Leeman’s thesis begins with Theology Proper, or the doctrine of God. Our doctrine of the church is only as good as our doctrine of God. He writes:
What we need, I believe, is a truly systematic theology of church membership and discipline. We need to consider how the practices of local church membership and discipline fit into the larger matters of God’s love, God’s judgment, God’s authority, and the gospel. when thinking or writing about the church, it’s easy to err in one direction by sidelining questions of polity. it’s also easy to err in the other direction by quickly jumping to our favorite proof-texts about elders and deacons, the Lord’s Supper, or church discipline, but doing so in a way that doesn’t carefully consider the larger theological context.
A proper doctrine of the church should be informed by everything else we know about God, his love, and his plan of salvation. It should reflect everything we know about God’s love and holiness; about humanity as created in God’s image but fallen into guilt and corruption; about Christ’s sinless life, sacrificial death, victorious resurrection, and the imputation of his own righteousness to sinners; and about life beneath his inaugurated rule through repentance and faith.
. . .
Theologian John Webster captures the spirit of what I’m getting at when he says, “A doctrine of the church is only as good as the doctrine of God which underlies it.” You will understand what or who the church is if you understand who God is. The same relationship abides between our doctrine of the gospel and our doctrine of the church. Webster also writes, “It is . . . an especial concern for evangelical ecclesiology to demonstrate not only that the church is a necessary implicate of the gospel but also that the gospel and church exist in a strict and irreversible order, one in which the gospel precedes and the church follows.” In other words, you will only understand what or who the church is if you first understand what God’s gospel is.—Jonathan Leeman, The Church and the Surprising Offense of God’s Love, (Crossway, 2010), 17–18.
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