Rent-An-Excommunicator

Why do so few speak about excommunication anymore, especially given the presence of copious heretics in our midst, both the doctrinally suspicious and the politically sold out, bringing untold harm to church and community. From the “Guardian politics is the Gospel” numpties right through to the right-wing nationalists who wave around their self-stipulated orthodoxy about the Bible and atonement as if it were Nicene-Constantinopolitan (spoiler: it isn’t). Ironically, many of these dudes then slip dubious accounts of eternal subordination into their rhetoric and casually throw creedal terms under the bus (like, “he descended into hell”). Heretics! 

“Heresy,” it must immediately be understood, is not simply making “unbiblical claims”. This may be a common misapprehension, but it is an absurd notion when you give it more than a few minutes thought. Scripture plays a role, of course, but matters are more complex, which is why heresy is best understood as the rejection of conciliar and creedal claims. But this isn’t to suggest heresy is just about splitting theological hairs either; it pays attention to how heresy lands. So apartheid, for example, is a good example of heresy applied, just as much as dogmatic Arianism or, say, denial that the Holy Spirit should be worshipped etc. (contra “who with the Father and the Son is adored and glorified”). How should the church respond to obstinate and unrepentant heresy? Excommunicate? 

But Chris, surely we don’t need more divisions, more antagonism? Can’t we live and let live? Perhaps. Probably. But how has that strategy worked out for us? Besides, I want to write a tongue-in-cheek post! Let’s throw just a pinch of ressourcement into this potentially toxic blog and see what happens!

Aquinas on Excommunication

*Opens Aquinas’s Summa… Oh. My. Goodness

Saint Thomas Aquinas is probably the most important and, arguably, brilliant theologian in church history. And I say this as someone who loves Barth above all. But there are troubling claims in the Summa about excommunication. Incidentally, I don’t see this corker discussed by the “new” Thomists too much, namely those who write as though to exegete Thomas is thereby to write sound theology. They usually add a disclaimer of sorts, but that tends to boil down to “we’re just being biblical and doctrinally pure … like Thomas was”! Now if you are a Dominican, this is a tad more understandable, but it gets amusing when it’s the Baptists and other Protestants doing the same. More on that below. Anyway, here’s the passage on excommunication that caught my eye

“On their part [namely, heretics] there is sin, for which they deserve not only to be separated from the church by excommunication but also to be severed from the world by death … if a heretic is found still to be stubborn, the church, no longer hoping for his conversion, provides for the salvation of others by separating the heretic from the church by a sentence of excommunication and, further, gives him up to the secular authorities to be banished from the world by death” (I-II, q. 11, 3).

Not exactly your free-speech absolutist! There are some qualifiers to immediately add, as Frederick Christian Bauerschmidt annotates in his superb The Essential Summa Theologiae: A Reader and Commentary, namely:

“One should note the typical medieval division of labor: it is the church that judges whether or not someone is a heretic and imposes the penalty of excommunication, which
cuts one off from the sacramental life of the church; it is the civil authorities that impose and carry out the death penalty for the civil crime of heresy. Thomas holds that it is always wrong for the clergy to kill anyone …, and so it was not the role of the church to carry out executions. But because, in Thomas’s view, religio is a moral virtue that is a part of justice, the divisions caused by heresy undermine not only the church but society as a whole, and thus heresy is of concern to secular rulers and is fittingly punished by them. In order for modern readers to have some sense of the perceived danger of heresy for medieval people, it is important to appreciate how interwoven religious belief and social cohesion were in most traditional societies. In the medieval Christian West, the bonds of shared Christian faith were seen as crucial for the peace and well-being of society… Note that the justification for both excommunication and execution of heretics is the need to attend to the spiritual well-being of others” (199, italics mine).

But while these comments might blunt the force of an isolated quotation from Thomas in the hands of, say, an online keyboard warrior out to score points in the comments section of something on social media, let’s be honest: this isn’t even sugar to help the medicine go down, for the simple reason that the Roman Catholic Church holds to different views these days (see Dignitatis Humanae, the 1992 Catechism of the Catholic Church, etc). Let me sharpen the point by putting it like this. To all you Thomists out there of Protestant stripe, you need to know that Thomas would likely have thought it better if you were killed by the state (had you lived in his time, at least)! But I am getting ahead of my argument, and I want to steer deeper into the flippant.

The Sacrament of Excommunication

Cannot a case be made, at the very least in certain ecclesial circles, to consider excommunication a sacrament? Back to Aquinas, who thought that a sacrament be a visible sign of an invisible grace. First, a sacrament both signifies and causes grace. Second, they have been instituted by Christ. As an Anglican, I affirm this. Of course, Aquinas—and the Catholic Church—argue that there are only seven sacraments instituted by Christ. But on the basis of these two points, I see no reason not to include excommunication. It was instituted by Christ (Matthew 18), and it is a means of grace (certainly if we delete the medieval death penalty clause) as the RC church now recognises based on passages such as 1 Corinthians 5:5. Excommunication should not be understood as the expression of a “John Wayne script” of masculinity. It is redemptive for all involved, as can be read in the contemporary Catechism of the Catholic Church and in Book VI in their Canon Law. However, post-Council of Trent, it’s case closed for Catholics: seven sacraments only. We Anglicans have a little more flexibility, as do the Orthodox, and then there’s the “free” churches who are all making it up as they go along anyway!

The point: a new side-hustle idea

So, to my conclusion: for those troubled by the presence of the “unsound” in their midst (I've already got myself a list of names, from people who park like dumbasses to fully fledged heretics) I am, for a small fee, hiring myself out as a para-church non-denominational Excommunicator to deal with your heretic problem. It starts with a 30-day violence-free trial, but past 30 days you will be charged $500 per year and the optional violence upgrade (tick the “baseball bat” option) costs a further $70 per year.