The NXR Podcast - October 01, 2022


QUESTIONS - Is Shunning Biblical?

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Hosted by
Mentioned
DAILY TRUTH - Humanities Need For An Unchanging Standard of Morality DAILY TRUTH - All Christians Need a Shepherd

Episode Stats


Length

7 minutes

Words per minute

174.71

Word count

1,298

Sentence count

91

Harmful content

Hate speech

15

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode, we discuss the concept of "shunning" and how it relates to church discipline. Is this a biblical concept? Is this something that can be done corporately, or is it something that only happens in cults?

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
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00:00:23 Is shunning a biblical concept?
00:00:25 If so, what would be a biblical example of shunning?
00:00:28 Is it related to excommunication?
00:00:30 Okay, that's a great question.
00:00:32 Shunning is not the same that you would,
00:00:34 it is biblical, but it's not done by Christian churches
00:00:37 the same way that you would see it done
00:00:39 by certain cults, okay?
00:00:41 So even Matthew 18, church discipline
00:00:43 that ultimately culminates, if there's no repentance,
00:00:45 it culminates in excommunication.
00:00:48 Well, what does it say, right?
00:00:50 You go to your brother,
00:00:51 between you and him alone, privately.
00:00:53 If he listens, you want your brother over.
00:00:55 If not, bring one or two others along with you.
00:00:57 so that the testimony may be established upon the evidence of two or three witnesses.
00:01:03 And if he doesn't listen to them, you tell it to the church. If he doesn't listen even to the
00:01:07 church, then treat him as a tax collector or a Gentile. A tax collector or a Gentile is not an 0.99
00:01:13 untouchable. So it's not like in India with this class system and there's certain people that you 0.86
00:01:18 just can't even speak to. A Christian, without doing anything immoral, a Christian is permitted
00:01:26 by God to speak and even have some degree of relationship, even perhaps a certain degree 0.73
00:01:31 of friendship with a tax collector and a Gentile. Of course. What do you do with a tax collector 1.00
00:01:38 and a Gentile? You preach the gospel to them. You don't shun them entirely. It's not an all 1.00
00:01:44 encompassing shunning. So there is a shunning in the sense that we are no longer extending to this
00:01:50 individual Christian brotherhood. I'm no longer regarding you as a brother, but that doesn't
00:01:58 mean that I cannot treat you in some measure as a friend. Okay. Now I'm aware there are other texts.
00:02:04 That's Matthew 18. There are other texts. One is where the apostle Paul says, if anyone does not
00:02:09 take note of what I've written in this letter, have nothing more to do with him that he might
00:02:17 be ashamed. Now, that's a great shunning text. It's literally saying, have nothing to do with
00:02:25 him. And precisely for the goal of shaming him. So the apostle is literally commanding the church
00:02:32 to, in a joint effort, in a corporate effort, to ignore someone for the purpose of publicly
00:02:42 shaming them. But even then, it's out of love. It's so that the individual will come back into
00:02:49 the fold. And Paul actually goes further in that text and says, but do not regard him as an enemy,
00:02:55 but as a brother. And so this, I believe, is actually, if we're looking at the Matthew 18
00:03:02 process of go privately, then bring one or two others with you, then tell it to the church. And
00:03:07 if he doesn't listen to the church, then hand him over, treat him as a tax collector or a Gentile. 0.99
00:03:10 I think what Paul says about having nothing more to do with him, this would actually be 0.97
00:03:16 before excommunication.
00:03:18 It would be somewhere probably in between step two, the two or three going to the individual, 0.68
00:03:23 and the final step of treating him as a tax collector and a Gentile, that somewhere throughout
00:03:28 the church discipline process.
00:03:30 So not, this is how we now regard the individual after excommunication.
00:03:34 No, because the apostle Paul says, but do not treat him as an enemy, but warn him as
00:03:40 a brother. So you're still referring to the individual and regarding the individual as a
00:03:44 brother, which if the person has been excommunicated, now treated as a tax collector 0.81
00:03:48 and a Gentile, regarding him as a brother is precisely what you can't do. So I think the 0.96
00:03:54 Apostle Paul, even, and this is my point, I think the Apostle Paul actually, he doesn't just say
00:04:00 it's permissible, he actually commands and prescribes that Christians employ the art of 0.98
00:04:06 shunning even before excommunication. That's significant. The church corporately, and I think 1.00
00:04:15 it would probably most likely be, tell it to the church. And so it wouldn't even be after what I
00:04:20 said earlier, the two or three step, two or three now coming to the individual. It would be in
00:04:24 between telling it to the church and then him not listening even to the church and then treating 0.87
00:04:30 him as a tax collector Gentile. It would be in between those two steps. So the whole church, 0.79
00:04:35 right? We've been very slow, very patient. Others who are wise and discerning have been brought into
00:04:40 this, the one or two others. We've addressed this multiple times. There's been no repentance.
00:04:46 We are now bringing it to the church. And what we're not doing is we're not, the elders are not
00:04:51 telling the decision to excommunicate this individual to the church. No, we're telling
00:04:57 the situation, what's going on to the church, and there's now going to be an appointed time before
00:05:02 we excommunicate the individual for him to listen to the church. And during that time where he
00:05:08 should be listening to the church, one of the things that the church is going to do is have
00:05:13 nothing to do with him. Now, not nothing in a literal sense. The one thing that we are going
00:05:18 to have to do with him is calling him to repentance and praying for his repentance. But we're not
00:05:24 going to have anything to do with him relationally as far as we're just buddy-buddy and acting like
00:05:28 nothing's wrong. In that sense, we're shunning him. But not treating him as an enemy, he's still
00:05:34 regarded as a brother. We haven't gotten to the final step of handing him over. So all that being
00:05:39 said, to answer the question, yes, shunning is biblical. It's explicitly in the Bible.
00:05:45 Have nothing more to do with him that he might be ashamed. I think that's shunning. But it's for
00:05:52 loving purpose, not just love for the church and protecting its purity from the alleged sinner,
00:05:57 but also a love for the sinner, that he might come to repentance, that the Lord may use this
00:06:05 love as tough love to win the sinner over, to bring him back into the fold. So I think different
00:06:11 purposes than cults that shun and different methods than cults that shun. But does the
00:06:19 Christian church ever shun at all? Biblically, we would have to say yes. Wait, wait, wait, wait, 1.00
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