1 Corinthians 5:4

4. In name… Christ This severance of the guilty from the Church is performed, 1.) By the divine authority of Christ; 2.) By the declaratory authority of the apostle; and 3.) By the executive authority of the collective Church, in whom the normal authority permanently resides after the miraculous apostolic authority is withdrawn.

When When ye and my spirit are gathered together.

This power of excommunication was first exercised by the Jewish Church. There was a “cutting off from the people,” as in Exodus 30:33; Exodus 30:38; Exodus 31:14; Leviticus 17:4; and there was an exclusion of the leprous from the camp, Leviticus 13:46; Numbers 12:14. So Christ commands that he who will not hear the Church becomes as a “heathen man and a publican;” that is, his Christian character and brotherhood are no longer to be recognised, and he is no longer of the Church but of the world.

In the primitive and persecuted Church, when men, “lapsed” through fear from Christianity became pagans, anathematized Christ, and sacrificed to idols, their apostasy had an awful aspect to the eyes of the faithful. The communion of the Church became unspeakably valuable, and excommunication from it a terror to the soul. And then, when Christianity became the religion of the State, this prerogative of excommunication became a weighty power in the hands of the hierarchy. The ecclesiastical ban pronounced upon the victim isolated him from society like a leper. It deprived him of all rights in court or in Church; made it criminal to pray with him, feed him, give him drink, or even speak to him. When the pope assumed this power, he could ban kings and absolve their subjects from all obedience to them as sovereigns, and all duty or kindness to them as persons. The most appalling form of excommunication was that of “bell, book, and candle.” By the solemn sound of the tolling bell the bishop and twelve priests, each with a lighted candle, marched in solemn procession, while the people assembled, to the cathedral. The bishop, attended by the twelve, sitting before the grand altar, read in solemn voice from the book to the congregation the most direful curses that language could frame; and when he had finished, the candles were at once dashed down, the bell recommenced to toll, and the people departed, filled with supernatural terror and an awful abhorrence of the victim accursed. According to Protestantism, excommunication being the means of securing the purity of the Church, is simply the severance of the guilty from the sacraments and from all membership of the Church.