Audio only:
Joe explains the disagreements between Christians on Church governance, and explores how the Bible and the Early Church thought the Church should be governed.
Transcript:
Joe:
Welcome back to Shameless Popery. I’m Joe Heschmeyer, and a great disagreement between Christian denominations is on the question of how the church ought to be structured. Now all sides are going to appeal to the Bible to support their positions, but of course they can’t all be right. Catholics and Orthodox have a clear answer. The Bishop is in charge of his diocese, but Protestants don’t seem to have one straightforward answer to this, but instead have several disagreements and different answers that they offer.
CLIP:
So it’s either Episcopal, Presbyterian or congregational led by one person, led by the team, or led by the crowd.
Joe:
As Stephen Cowen points out in the book, who Runs the Church, it’s on this question rather than any question of theology that we chiefly find the major schisms within the history of Protestantism, between Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Congregationalists, and even Baptists. Now, that might sound surprising, but if you think about it, the question of church authority is inherently a church dividing topic. We cannot be in the same church body if we can’t agree on the basics of how that body is governed or organized, just who’s in charge. Now, Protestants broadly have three major answers to this question. Either local churches are to be governed by a single bishop or by a plurality of elders, or the congregation itself is ultimately in charge. But do any of these look anything like the early Christian Church and do any of these accurately reflect what the Bible teaches? Before we look at that evidence, I want to say thank you to another Christian community, my supporters over on shameless joe.com.
It’s a beautiful community of both Catholics and Protestants striving to follow after Jesus Christ. And it’s not just that members get ad free episodes or have access to weekly live stream q and as, actually two hours a week for those at the $10 a month level, it’s sometimes they’ll answer one another’s questions before I even have a chance to. Don’t believe me. Check it out for yourself over@shamelessjoe.com. But now let’s look at some less United communities of Christians. Like I mentioned, Protestants probably give three different answers to the question of how the church is to be run. Lutherans and Anglicans basically agree with Catholics. The local diocese is governed by one person, a single bishop who is in aided by his priests and deacons.
CLIP:
Why do we have bishops, pastors and deacons? Why are they necessary? Article five of the Augsburg confession, one of our Lutheran confessions says, it’s so that we may obtain this faith. The office of preaching the gospel and administering the sacraments was instituted by our Lord,
Joe:
But Presbyterians are going to say no. The church is really supposed to be governed by a body of elders, not a single bishop, because bishops and elders are really just the same thing.
CLIP:
Presbyterian is kind of a strange word. We just kind of take it for granted in our parlance, but what it means is elder or rule by elders
Joe:
And congregationalists on the other hand are going to say, well, actually elders don’t rule. They only have advisory authority when it comes to matters of doctrine, the congregations themselves are the ones in charge.
CLIP:
It is the congregation then who has the authority of command on matters of discipline and doctrine.
The elders or pastors, it’s the same. They’re used interchangeably. Those words have the responsibility to teach, to guide, but that’s it. We’re not the church. The church, the congregation is the church. So we teach and we guide, but the church has to follow and the church can choose not to follow.
Joe:
So why is it that faithful Christians cannot agree on what the church looks like from the Bible? Well, part of the issue is that the Bible never actually provides a blueprint for what the church is supposed to look like. And this is a point worth stressing because many of the people arguing for their own view of church governance speak as if someone merely reading the Bible carefully and praying on it is necessarily going to agree with them about church governance.
CLIP:
Now, how do we discern what Jesus wants? We have the Bible. It seems to make sense, doesn’t it? I don’t believe you have some special revelation telling you anything, but if you don’t come through the Bible, you don’t know what Jesus has said and he’s the head of the church. So you go from there and then it’s the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit in his people sat down and they just read over the Bible and they take it in and we make decisions, and that’s what we’re going to see here. First, Jesus is the head. Second, the only ordained officers in the church are pastors and deacons.
Joe:
But is it really true that somebody just taking scripture alone is going to come away with the idea that there are exactly two offices in the church, pastor and deacon? After all, there are several passages that talk about bishops, elders, deacons, but also apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors, teachers, miracle workers, healers, helpers, administrators, and people who speak in tongues. Now, which of those are offices and which ones just happen to be spiritual gifts that individuals might have? Which of those are permanent and which ones are specific to the first century for that matter? Which of them are different things and which ones are just different names for the same role or for the same office? The Bible never answers those questions no matter how many times you reread the different passages. And that is precisely how you end up with things like the megachurch Bethel claiming that there are actually five tiers to church ministry and that churches are supposed to still be run by apostles and prophets.
CLIP:
Fivefold ministry talks about how the churches led by apostles, prophets, evangel evangelists, pastors and
Teachers evangel. Yeah,
That’s in one passage and then another one, there’s just three of them are mentioned.
Please give me one scripture in which the Bible is clear that apostles and prophets would pass away or no longer be needed or anything close to like we don’t need them anymore after the first century or after any length of time.
Joe:
In contrast, some other Protestants will admit, the Bible does not ever give us a blueprint, but they’ll argue on the basis of this that this means we’ve got some wiggle room to kind of come up with our own models of what the church ought to look like.
CLIP:
Now, most people think, well, let’s just look at the Bible and see what the Bible has to say. Well, Jesus said almost nothing about church governance. There wasn’t really a church until Pentecost, which was 50 days after the resurrection. So we don’t get any help from him on this one.
Let’s be clear. There is no biblical verse that explicitly teaches what polity we are to follow. The New Testament gives an incomplete picture on polity, which is one of the reasons why we have such liberty and prudence on the subject, and we can disagree and have a discussion like this tonight.
There’s a little bit of wiggle room that is in the Bible because there isn’t a ton of clear directions about how a church should be led.
Joe:
But here’s the problem with viewing this as an area of wiggle room or liberty. The whole point of secondary issues is that they’re the kind of things that Christians can freely disagree with one another about without dividing the church. But as we’ve seen disagreeing about the structures of the church will divide the church necessarily quite possibly no other issue in the history of Christianity has led to more schisms or in fighting. And so the scriptura appears simply powerless to resolve these church dividing disputes. So the biblical blueprint model doesn’t work because the Bible doesn’t give us a blueprint, and the biblical liberty model doesn’t work because it leads to endless schisms. So I’ll ask again, why is it that faithful Christians cannot figure out what the church looks like from the Bible because they were never meant to do so? It’s striking, but most of the apostles never actually wrote books of the New Testament.
What they did do instead was set up local churches. Now, this chronology matters because by the time that any of the New Testament books are written, the church already existed. People knew what it was and they knew how it was structured. St. Luke can just refer to the church in acts and refer to its leaders without having to define what those different roles and offices are. Similarly, St Paul can write to the church of God, which is at Corinth, or he can refer to the churches in Macedonia because he knows there are already local churches in all of these places, and people know what that looks like and what that means. The New Testament does not create the church rather under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. The church, the church’s leaders are the ones who create the books of the New Testament and they’re writing to individuals within the church or to specific local churches.
So the idea of a Bible church in which you start with the Bible and try to use it as a blueprint to build the church gets things backwards. Biblically, what we have is not a Bible church, but a church Bible. And notice also that when the New Testament talks about the church leadership isn’t treated as an area for creativity or for experimentation, the father sends Jesus and Jesus sends the apostles and the apostles go around establishing each local church and appointing in them men who will lead and laying upon them. We see Paul and Barnabas, for instance, appointing elders in every church, and we see the apostles laying hands on the first deacons to ordain them and so forth. And the early Christians were perfectly aware of all of this writing. Sometime before the year 100 St. Clement of Rome talks about church governance, not as something Christians have liberty to experiment with or tinker with, but as a divinely instituted order flowing from the Father to the Son, to the apostles to the bishops, and he compares it to the divinely instituted order of high priest, priest and Levite in the Old Testament.
So both the biblical blueprint and the biblical liberty views of church governance are mostly wrong in some pretty important ways. There was a clear structure for what a church ought to look like, but it’s one taken for granted in the New Testament and never spelled out directly. This is one of the reasons that we have to take seriously the writings of the earliest Christians. After all, these were the people who knew what the apostolic church looked like, not because they’d read about it, but because they lived it and lived in it. And when we look at what the church is founded by the apostles actually looked like historically, we find that they all looked the same. They were all governed by a single bishop who was then assisted by elders later called priests and by deacons. This is so universal, in fact, that the bishop of Antioch, Saint Ignatius right in only a few years after the death of the last Apostle can say that if you don’t have this structure, you aren’t a real church.
And he is able to take for granted that his readers already know this and that they feel the same way. And Ignatius is right as Leon Morris points out in the evangelical dictionary of theology, the same threefold ministry that is one bishop with elders and deacons is seen as universal throughout the early church as soon as there is sufficient evidence to show us the nature of the ministry. Wherever we look in the east or the west, we find churches set up the exact same way as far back as we have clear evidence in the two hundreds. For instance, we have records of literally hundreds of churches, and each of them is headed by an individual bishop and EU writing in 180. And Tertullian at the start of the two hundreds speak as if every church founded by the apostles can trace their lineage, the lineage of each individual bishop from the time of the apostles down to their own time.
Now as I see it, there are really only three ways of accounting for all this evidence. Option one, the apostles left each church with liberty to choose its own form of governance, and they all happened to choose the same structure of being governed by one bishop. Does that sound plausible? Has Christian liberty ever worked out that way in history where everybody happened to choose the same thing, particularly the same form of government? More than that, we see from Clement and Ignatius. The dearly Christians didn’t think they had the liberty to choose some other form of government or to go against what was given to them by Christ through the Apostles. So what about option two? The apostles had a different blueprint for the churches, but every church then rebelled and chose the Episcopal instead. Now, if you think that the apostles went around setting up congregational churches or Presbyterian churches or whatever, you seem to have to affirm this second option, but this is even less plausible than the first one.
As Morris points out nowhere is there evidence of a violent struggle as it be natural if a divinely ordained congregationalism or presbyterianism were overthrown. So we’re to believe that all these people changed the very structure of their church and not one of them protested or even recorded that detail. So I think that leaves us with option three. The reason every church founded by an apostle looks the same is that this was the actual blueprint, so to speak. The apostles set up churches with a single man in church, quickly known as the bishop, who is then aided by multiple elders and deacons. Now, that doesn’t just match what we know from the early Christian evidence, it matches the biblical evidence as well. In fact, go all the way back to the Old Testament, and you see this pattern that God always leaves one man ultimately responsible from the time of Adam down to the patriarchs, the judges, the kings, the high priests, and so on.
And in the New Testament, the same picture emerges in acts. For instance, we find multiple apostles apparently living in Jerusalem, and yet there always seems to be one man left in charge first that St. Peter, and then after he leaves the city, it’s St. James. Similarly consider St. Paul’s writings to Timothy and Titus Paul coming in from the outside appoints Titus to govern the church and Crete with instructions to fix the local church and with the authority to single-handedly appoint elders. Paul tells him to teach what befits sound doctrine. And after giving him specific instructions, he concludes declare these things exhort and reprove with all authority. Let no one disregard you. So we know that in the Church of Crete, there’s one guy with the authority such that nobody in Crete can disregard him, and his name is Titus and Titus intern is answerable outside of the local church to apostles like Paul.
Now that doesn’t sound very much like either Congregationalism or Presbyterianism. Similarly, St. Paul appoints Timothy to lead the church in Ephesus, giving him instructions not only for how to treat his flock, but in what to look for in a bishop and in deacons, and how to handle accusations against elders. He even tells him that he is to charge certain persons not to teach any different doctrine. So this again looks like top-down leadership from a single guy, very much like a single bishop. And sure enough, the next time we see the governance of the church in Ephesus, it’s when Saint Ignatius mentions that the flock there is united around their bishop Onesimus. Now, as an aside, that might well be the same man who St. Paul wrote to Philemon to free from slavery. And Ignatius says Onesimus himself greatly commends their good order in God as they stayed united instead of dividing into different sects.
Now, that doesn’t look like the Christians of Ephesus have overthrown the structure of the church established by St. Paul. It looks instead like they’re treating it the exact same way they were meant to treat Timothy. So that’s the basic argument. You’ve got strong evidence from the Old Testament, the New Testament, and the witness of the early church, and it all points in the same direction toward local churches being run by a single bishop who’s then aided by presbyters and deacons. Now, granted, it’s not very convincing just to say, Hey, all the evidence is on my side. So if you want me to show you more of the evidence, you’re going to have to click on this video right here for Shameless Popery, I’m Joe Heschmeyer. God bless you,