_If_ one can accept the premise that "God still speaks" with specific
guidance for specific situations, then the passage no longer has to be a
question as to whether we can bend God to our desires, but as to how the
church goes about carrying out God's desires in specific situations.
One of the dangers inherent in a working belief in ongoing guidance is
the evident finiteness and fallibility of each of us. For this reason,
in order to discern the will of God, we need constantly to be submitting
our understandings (whether abstract or particular) to other members of
the Christian (and for that matter, non-Christian) community. It is for
this purpose that one cannot rest with solo rebuking -- for that matter,
my rebuke may be wrong or "out of time." And certainly when it comes to
discipline (binding and loosing), no individual short of Christ himself
should have the gall to carry out that discipline on his or her own.
What this means for verses 18-19 is that the "authority" comes from the
"authorization" of hearing God's direction jointly, so that when we
exercise a discipline (or a freeing) we find that it is something that
was already set up in the heavenly realms -- i.e., what we bind on earth
will turn out already to have been bound in heaven, while what we loose
on earth will similarly turn out to have been loosed in heaven.
So what we have here is a dialectic, an interactive process, God
choosing to work through fallible human agents who, aware of their
fallibility, work together to discern his desire and carry it out --
with all the authority that being his agents gives them.
>From this point of view, vv. 18-19 do _not_ give the church the
authority "to bring every single person to repentance" simply because
the church is dependent first of all on God's disposing and only
secondarily on our own willingness to join forces with him.
Nonetheless, it remains a scary passage, because of the evident facility
with which even collegial leadership can go astray, and it remains
incumbent on every group to exercise discipline (as Carl has already
suggested) only with the gravest of humility.
Regards,
j.v.