I think there are three aspects in this section. One is the forgiveness of sins, which we see in verses 5-11 concerning someone who had been guilty of great sin. Whoever the man was and whatever the nature of the offense, there clearly needed to be discipline. You have to make clear that sinful conduct is incompatible with Christian profession. Such discipline needed to happen, and if that kind of spiritual discipline is not carried out in the church, Paul was going to have to come with his apostolic authority and see that it was done.
Up until recent times some commentators have held that the person mentioned here in 2 Corinthians 2 is the same man mentioned in 1 Corinthians 5 who was guilty of incest. The case for discipline was strongly made in Paul’s first epistle and now we see that the effect of the discipline was achieved. The man had since repented of his sin, and now Paul is telling the church to lovingly bring him back into the fellowship.
Today, it is hard to find that view accepted by the majority of commentators. For some of them, their argument is that it is incompatible that Paul could speak in such strong disciplinary language in the first letter, and, now in the second letter, change his tone completely and speak of showing love and restoring this man as openly as he does. Some of these modern interpreters of 2 Corinthians have dug back into antiquity and have found the one example of somebody who did not think along the lines of what was then the majority opinion, but in a way more or less compatible with modern thought.
Tertullian thought that the offense that is dealt with in 2 Corinthians 2 must have been something much less serious than the matter of incest mentioned in the first letter because, according to Tertullian, it would be impossible for Paul to be as open as he was. The problem, however, is that Tertullian was influenced by a wrong theology that there are a number of sins which cannot be forgiven, one of which was incest. Thus, for Tertullian Paul could not actually be speaking of restoration in 2 Corinthians 2 concerning the incident of 1 Corinthians 5.
The problem with this kind of thinking is that it is precisely people who are guilty of sins like that who need to hear the Gospel, repent of their sin, be assured of God’s forgiveness, and be brought into the fellowship of the church. And in my opinion, there is no compelling reason for not regarding the case of restoration in 2 Corinthians with the case of incest in Paul’s first epistle. If that is true, then we have an example of what discipline is meant to accomplish in the church. As a matter of fact, that is the way Paul talked about it in 1 Corinthians. Paul told the church to “hand this man over to Satan, so that the sinful nature may be destroyed and his spirit saved on the day of the Lord” (5:5).
Paul knew that sin destroys, and you must not act as if it does not matter and that within the fellowship of the church it is alright to do these things. Instead, you must point out that it does matter and that it is incompatible with one’s Christian profession. You must exercise discipline for that reason, so that if the person really is a believer in Christ, he will repent and be rescued. And that is what happened for this man in Corinth.
It is ironic how poor we are at that point, on both sides. On the one side, the church is weak when it refuses to discipline, acting as if righteousness does not matter, and that the commands of Jesus Christ are somehow optional. Or, on the other side, we treat sin so harshly that when a person is disciplined, we rule them out of the kingdom entirely and cease to pray for them. And even if they repent years later, we can hardly bring ourselves to receive a person like that back into Christian fellowship. Both of those approaches are wrong. Instead of saying, “Well, here’s a sin too great to be forgiven,” we ought to pray for repentance and that the one who has sinned might be restored, both to fellowship with God and to the fellowship of his Christian brothers and sisters. When such repentance and restoration take place, that is one of the greatest things that can possibly happen.
