Are Bishops Biblical?

Joe Heschmeyer examines the biblical evidence for bishops and the clerical hierarchy.

Transcription:

Joe:

Welcome back to Shamus. I’m Joe Hess Meyer. One of the reasons that there are so many denominations in Christianity is because of disagreements about the biblical teaching on the structure of the church. This is, so that’s called church polity. So the question, there’s a lot of different possible answers to it, but broadly speaking, we could say the question like this, in the local church, do you have a three-tiered structure of governance where you have bishops and then you have elders, and then you have deacons? Or do you just have a two-tiered structure of governance in which elders and bishops are the same thing? Now you’ll find variations on that. I don’t mean to suggest this is an exhaustive overview of all of the different ways you could read the biblical evidence. I do mean to suggest that these are two of the biggest camps, and if we can get this right, it’ll be really helpful.

So is a bishop in the Bible something different than an elder? Now, I know some people watching this are saying we don’t call our middle tier elders, we call them presbyters, where we call them priests. All of that is coming from the same, so the Greek word for elder precipice is where we get the word presbyter. That becomes prestor in slangy, vulgar Latin, and from pretor it becomes priest. There’s bigger theological issues that we could talk about there, whether we think of this as a priestly authority or not, but I’m going to actually leave that pretty consciously aside just to focus the question on do we have above that middle tier, whatever you call it, priest, presbyter elder? Is there an office above that of bishop or are elders and bishops the same thing? So should the church be run again at the local-ish level?

So one church per city, you’ll have a lot of evidence of that in the early church, so it’s a city level. Should there be one bishop running that, as you’ll see among Catholics, Orthodox Anglicans, or should there be a Coru Presbyter? This is Presbyterians obviously fall into this, but plenty of other Protestant denominations lean towards that. You’ll get variations on that as well. So that’s kind of the nature of the question. What do we see in terms of the biblical evidence? I want to actually start here with Todd Reel being asked this question. Now, I know some of you really don’t like Todd Reel. I’m going to agree with him in part and disagree with him in part, I thought this was a thoughtful answer and I wanted to engage with it. He’s going to start off by saying the Bible is a little less clear on this than you might imagine. What do we do with that? Here he is.

CLIP:

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, but I do believe there is enough.

Joe:

Great. So one of the things that should immediately jump out if you try to answer this question biblically is there is no place in the Bible that just says, okay, you’re building a church from scratch. Here’s all of the offices and bishop mean the same thing. They mean different things. That question is just never directly answered. We see both terms used. We’re never told if they’re the same or different office. There’s plenty of other things that are kind of referred to in passing and you were never just given instructions for how to build the church. I’m going to get into why that is in a second, but I want to actually agree in part, I think he comes to the wrong conclusion. I don’t think the lack of biblical puzzle putting together building block pieces is because God wanted to give us wiggle room to form different denominations.

I think it’s instead for a different reason. But before I get there, I want to double down on the fact that the New Testament is not as clear as people might like, and here I’d point to the fact that the offices in question are bishop, which just means overseer, presbyter, which means elder and deacon, which means servant. And what makes this complicated or more complicated is the fact that all three of those Greek words we hear bishop, presbyter, deacon and immediately think of church office, but overseer, elder and servant are all used in a variety of ways in the New Testament, not always referring to a church office at all. Here’s what I mean by that. Let’s start with Deacon. In Romans 15, St. Paul says that Christ became a deacon. He says Christ became a servant. Now, most English translations are going to say Christ became a servant because it seems pretty clear he’s not trying to say Jesus was only a deacon in the church.

He means deacon in the sense of servant, not in the sense of deacon. Likewise, in Ephesians three verse seven, St. Paul says that he himself was made a minister or a deacon in one Timothy four. He likewise says that Timothy, if he follows the instructions he’s been given will be a good minister, a good deacon of Christ Jesus, and then controversially in Romans 16, he refers to a woman named Phoebe as a deacon or deaconess or minister or servant deacon. And so the question is are any of those people deacons or is something else being said there? And the general read of those passages, I know especially the last one is controversial, but the general read for 2000 years has been none of those are intended to refer to. The office of deacon is referring to people being servants or ministers. Jesus is obviously not just a deacon in the church, he’s the head of the church.

Paul is not just a deacon, he’s an Apostle Timothy we’re going to look at, but he’s got the ability to lay down instructions for the elders. He’s clearly not deacons which are below elders. So all of those cases are ones where the word deacon is being used, but the office of deacon doesn’t appear to be in view. On the other hand, in Acts chapter six, you have what appears to be the calling of the first seven deacons, and this is how it’s long been understood. There are seven people who are called to serve at table to aid in the ministry of the apostles. But here’s the thing, even though these are pretty clearly seven deacons, they’re never actually called that in the text. So here you have the office of deacon, but not the word deacon. So I’m mentioning this because we’re not asking about the words we’re asking about the offices.

Are there two offices or three? And what makes it more confusing is the words are sometimes used in a confusing and sometimes even potentially misleading sort of way. Let’s talk about presbyter now because in one Peter five, St. Peter who unambiguously is an apostle exhorts, the elders while declaring himself a fellow elder simp Spiros, he’s obviously doing this for rhetorical effect. He’s getting down on their level and saying, Hey, as coworkers, like a boss, doing that sort of thing. But if you just took that at face value, well, it sounds like Peter’s declaring himself not an apostle, he’s just an elder. He’s just a preser, but we know he’s more than that in one Timothy. Now one Timothy is confusing because it actually uses the term presbyter to refer to elders, but it also uses it just to refer to old people. In one Timothy five, my point there is the mere fact that a term is used doesn’t immediately solve the question we’re asking, not about the usage of Episcopal.

We’re asking whether the office of bishop, elders, deacons or bishop, presbyters, deacons, bishop, priest, deacon, however you want to describe that threefold office. We’re asking if that threefold office is there, not if the words are just really clearly there because the words I think by any reasonable interpretation are sometimes kind of confusing. So let’s get back to that puzzle piece thing I said before because I think Todd freely is right, that Christ doesn’t give us any clear instructions and nowhere in the New Testament do we get any very clear instructions, but I think he’s wrong in his conclusion he draws from that. I don’t think this is to give us wiggle room. I don’t think this is to say go build your own denomination, do whatever you see fit. No, I think it’s because of an opposite reason. We’re not given building instructions to create the church because Jesus had already done that.

So if the early Christians are getting the question of church and if the people writing to them are there leaders in the church like the apostles and they’re writing to churches that are already built and established and know what it means to be the church, then you don’t have to give them building instructions because it’s already been built. For instance, in the US Constitution, you have building instructions for the three tiers of the federal government, the executive branch, the legislative branch, the judicial branch. What you don’t have are any descriptions or even references to state governors. State governors at the time were well established. You didn’t need to include them in the constitution because they already existed. So I would suggest that’s what’s going on here, that you have pastors like Matthew 18 in which in the case of a brother who sins against you after you and one or two others confront him.

If he refuses to listen to you, you tell it to the church. Jesus presupposes, you know what that means? His original hearers apparently did because then we’re told if he refuses to listen even to the church, let him be to you as a gentile and a tax collector. So this is some kind of visible church that has the ability to excommunicate and Jesus takes for granted that his listeners know what that means and what that looks like and how it handles things like disputes that arise. Likewise, St. Paul can say to Timothy, we’re going to get back to this past or this book a lot that if he’s delayed, Timothy can know how to behave in the household of God, which is the church of the living God, the pillar and bulwark of the truth. In other words, I think all of this points to the fact that the early church was getting the question of church when there are things that the church is getting wrong, the early Christians are getting wrong, I should say, when there are times where the early Christians are fighting about something, then the apostles step in, they settle disputes, they discuss controversies and everything else, but they tend to discuss problems that arise when they arise.

They don’t just lay out a systematic theology they’re handling, especially Paul, this is true of he’s handling questions as they come up. And so if people are getting the question of the church, there’s no need to write a treatise on the nature of the church and what the offices look like because that’s part’s not in dispute, right? You write about the things that are controversial and that’s true of the apostles as much as it is today. So I mentioned that at the outset to say rather than this being our ability to go in different directions, Jesus gave us wiggle room. I think that completely misreads the evidence. The New Testament is written to people who are already members of the church. And so what we should do is figure out what the church meant to those people because the fact that there’s not a New Testament corrective seems to be a confirmation that things are going well because if they’re getting the church wrong, it’s weird that nobody’s telling them they’re getting it wrong. Okay, let’s go back to Friel

CLIP:

Paul, instructed Timothy put elders in place in every church, not one guy making decisions for everybody. I really don’t see any sort of democracy system for a church. I think that’s more of our 21st century mindset that we, the people make decisions. I don’t see us being given that right in the Bible. Instead, I see that Paul instructs Timothy put a number of elders who are more spiritually mature than anybody else in the congregation and they make decisions for them because they presumably know better than the body.

Joe:

So again, I want to agree in part and disagree in part, I don’t think it’s true that the presbyters are automatically the most knowledgeable or holiest people in the body. For one, this is apparently a male only office, and I’m not ready to say the holiest person in every local church is going to be a man. I also don’t think the holiest person in every context is going to be the leader. That’s not how Christian leadership often works. If you were to look at the 12 apostles, those aren’t the 12 holiest followers of Jesus. If you were to tell me Judas Iscariot on the one hand and Mary of Bethany on the other, one of them is called to a position of leadership. One isn’t, but it’s not the one who’s holier. So I think that part is a misreading, but I think he gets a couple things right.

He gets right for instance that there is no mandate for a democracy in the New Testament. We have this bias that democracy is the best and we want to impose democracy upon Christianity. That’s just not the biblical model. Jesus could have come and preached the Democratic people’s republic of God. I mean democracy had already been tried in Greece before the time of Christ, and he’s God, he knew about democracy, but he doesn’t. He comes and proclaims the kingdom of God and it’s pretty striking from the calling of the apostles forward that there’s top down leadership. It’s not democratic. Now, reel’s making a strange reference to Paul telling Timothy to appoint elders in every town. That passage doesn’t exist in the New Testament. I don’t mean that to be mean. I’m trying to figure out what his reference is to, and I think he might be blending together three or four different passages.

So here’s my best attempt to unpack. I think if you unpack what he’s trying to say, he’s making a decent argument for a two tiered structure. I think that argument is going to be wrong, but I want to make sure I understand it right. In Acts 14, Paul and Barnabas appoint elders in every church with prayer and fasting committing them to the Lord in whom they believed. So notice it’s top down leadership. Paul and Barnabas are going around appointing elders in Titus one five. What passage around and get back to Paul tells Titus not Timothy to appoint elders in every town as he directed him. That’s what I think he might be referencing, but there are plenty of references that Paul has to Timothy as well about elders. He also has a passage in one Timothy three about the office of Bishop, and he talks about the criteria of a bishop, and I’ll get into that in a second because he mentions what you should look for in a bishop and then what you should look for in deacons.

Now, people who say bishops and elders are the same thing are going to say Aha. He doesn’t mention elders. So clearly Bishop and deacons is just elders and deacons. The other view is going to say, well, it’s striking that he says deacons plural it, but a bishops singular. But I think there’s another way of cracking this nut because remember, we’re not debating the words. We’re debating the offices, and it’s possible that the offices get called things a little more loosely in the early church. So for instance, if we were talking about the idea of divine election, that word for election or calling is used in different ways and different passages in the New Testament, for instance, Jesus says many are called but fewer chosen. Well, clearly that’s not the same use of calling as when St. Paul talks about divine election because then he wouldn’t say fewer chosen.

He’d say everyone who is called is chosen. But to make sense of that, you can’t just look at the words. You have to look at the context and the theology. Well, likewise, when we’re talking about the church, it’s not a good enough argument to say sometimes Episcopals and presbyteral are used in a way that seems interchangeable. We don’t know for sure, but it might be the better question is do we see three tiers or not? So here, Paul is talking to Timothy about the church in Ephesus. So let’s just zoom into Ephesus real quick. Clearly of deacons, there are also clearly elders because they’re going to get mentioned a lot. And the question we have is, is there anybody above the level of elder? And to answer that question, I would say pay close attention to what Paul says because there’s a candidate for that who’s almost so obvious we can overlook him.

It’s almost like when you’re counting people in the room and you forget to count yourself. Well, in this case, the person we can forget about is the person he’s talking to, which isn’t us. It’s Timothy. And so Timothy listened to the way that just listen to the instructions that St. Paul gives to Timothy about what his role is in the church of Ephesus. He begins in verse three of chapter one, telling him to remain at Ephesus that you may charge certain persons not to teach any different doctrine. So you’ve got people in the church and Ephesus who have teaching authority, and then Timothy has the role of enforcing orthodoxy, making sure nobody is preaching heresy. There’s then several chapters. Chapter two is about prayer. Chapter three is about what to look for in a bishop or in deacons. And then chapter four, after giving a bunch of commands, he says, command and teach these things.

So he’s got an authority of command and authority of teaching, and he says, let no one despise your youth. So notice he’s not a presbyter in the literal sense of an older man. He’s not an elder in that sense, but he is in the position that he’s commanding elders, and additionally, he’s told to attend to the public reading of scripture, to preaching and to teaching. So he has a proclamation of the word authority. In the next verse, Paul says something that has been hotly debated. First Timothy four verse 14, Paul tells him, do not neglect the gift you have which was given you by prophetic utterance when the elders laid their hands upon you. Now, there’s two ways of reading that passage. One way is this is a charismatic gift. They laid hands on them and they started speaking in tongues. That sort of thing is happening.

The other reading, and I think the older and stronger reading is this is a reference to his ordination as an elder himself, but there’s more because this is an ordination given by the other elders. The elders can’t ordain a bishop if bishops exist, but there’s a second laying on of hands that St. Paul refers to. Notice this one in first Timothy four 14 is given by the fellow elders in two Timothy one. St. Paul reminds him to rekindle the gift of God that is within you through the laying on of my hands. So the apostles weren’t just ordaining elders, they could also ordain bishops. This is a three tiered bishop argument. Now I realize some people are going to disagree with that, but we have what appear to be two different ordinations referenced in regards to Timothy. Now I’m going to just highlight that and I know some people are going to reject that because they reject the ordination theology.

That’s fine. Let’s look at the rest of the evidence. Getting back to one Timothy, now we’re now up to one Timothy five and one Timothy five. He says, let the elders who rule well be considered worthy of double honor. Now, this is a reference to them getting paid more, and this is very clear because he cites to two biblical passages, one of them very clearly, the laborer deserves his wages. The other one may be less clear to us. You shall not muzzle in ox while it’s treading out the grain. The idea there was that a farmer, if you’ve got an ox working in the field, it’s cruel to put a muzzle over its mouth where it can’t eat while it’s working. If it’s treading the grain, it should be allowed to eat the grain while it’s treading. So likewise, an elder should be able to make money while they’re serving in the kingdom of God and strikingly, apparently the Perth strings here are Timothy’s.

He’s the one deciding which ones he thinks are ruling well and are deserving of getting more money. That is a pretty significant authority, and it’s not what Timothy is shown as sharing with anybody else, but if that’s not enough, in verse 19, we’re told what he’s to do in terms of adjudicating justice against the elders. Never admit any charge against an elder except on the evidence of two or three witnesses. As for those who persist in sin, rebuke them in the presence of all. So the rest may stand in fear. I don’t see a way to read this and say Timothy is just one of the coru elders. He’s the one choosing who does and doesn’t get ordained. He’s the one choosing how much they’re getting paid. He’s the one who is adjudicating when charges are brought against them. He’s the one who is, the others are supposed to fear and respect his authority, even though he’s young, probably younger than them in many cases.

He’s given this public proclamation power and the ability to enforce orthodoxy to make sure people aren’t preaching false doctrine. Then in verse 21 to 22, he’s reminded not to be hasting, the laying on of hands and not to participate in another man’s sins. In other words, don’t ordain. Somebody you don’t know is going to be a quality elder. So he has the ability to do all of these things. He’s not just apparently another one of the elders. So if we ask the question in the church and Ephesus, there are deacons and above that there are elders, is there anyone above that? It seems to me that the biblical evidence is pretty unambiguous that there is. That’s Timothy that in Ephesus, the elders are accountable to Timothy in a way that they’re not accountable to anybody else and the way Timothy isn’t accountable to anybody else, at least at the local level, right?

We’re not talking about the global level, we’re not talking about the apostles here. We’re looking at the local church. Well, likewise. Now this is just one church. This is just Ephesus. Let’s jump over to Crete, the is Crete. And there we find a very similar situation with Titus. As you can read in the book here, the letter to Titus St. Paul tells him that he left him in Crete, that you might amend what was defective and appoint elders in every town as I directed you. So again, he has the power to decide who does and doesn’t get appointed. It’s not grassroots, not bottom up. It’s tightest going around the island, figuring out in every town who should be the elders in that town. And then he’s told as for you teach what? Befits sound doctrine. So he has a teaching authority to teach doctrine as well.

In Titus two, into the very end of two and into three, he said, declare St. Paul says to him, declare these things exhort and reprove with all authority. Let no one disregard you. Remind them to be submissive to rulers and authorities, to be obedient, to be ready for any honest work, to speak evil of no one, to avoid quarreling, to be gentle, and to show perfect courtesy toward all men. So he’s being set up in a position of authority. He’s told to exhort and approve with all authority and not to let others just disregard him and to disregard his authority. He’s not just presented as a good model. He’s not just coming in to say, this is my personal view. No, he is commanding and teaching with authority, and if he’s opposed, there are consequences for that. And Titus three, 10 to 11, as for men who’s factious after admonishing him once or twice, have nothing more to do with him, knowing that such a person is perverted and sinful, he is self condemned.

That’s pretty striking. So just as we saw in the church of Ephesus, above the level of deacon and elder, there is Timothy. Well, in the church in Crete above the level of deacon and elder, there’s Titus. Now, St. Paul never names this office. He never says, here’s what we’re going to call this role that Timothy and Titus serve in the local church where it’s one guy who’s in charge of administering everything and who even the elders are accountable to. But eventually, and it doesn’t take long, the early Christians clearly identify this with the office of Bishop. So again, those are two examples. They’re not alone. But here we go from the pretty straightforward writings of Paul to the much more mystical and hard to understand writings of St. John in the book of Revelation. So for a little bit of context here, there’s seven churches that are mentioned in Revelation.

John is traditionally understood is already an exile in this time on the is of Patmos. That’s just off of the coast of modern day Turkey and there are seven churches within the general vicinity within the general region, and he receives a revelation from God with instructions to those seven churches. But these instructions are given to him in this very curious way. So I’ll give you an example in Revelation two verse one, it says to the angel of the church an Ephesus, right? Okay, so he’s on paper being told to write a letter to an angel. Let’s acknowledge the weirdness of that. Let’s also acknowledge that there’s a lot of imagery used in the book of Revelation. So you have the four living beings who have traditionally going back to at least the one hundreds been identified with Matthew, mark, Luke, and John, the four gospels.

There’s a lot of stuff going on which understandably a lot of Christians get very confused by the book of Revelation. So the question is, who are these seven angels of the seven churches that St. John is writing to? Colin Heimer, a, I believe disciple of DA Carson has a book called The Letters to the seven Churches of Asia in their local settings and Himer who’s now deceased, unfortunately, God rest his soul suggests there are basically five ways of reading this passage. Number one, we could view them as literally angels, heavenly guardians of the churches. Number two, human representatives, typically the is bishops. Those are the two common views. Humor says, but he says there’s three additional views. So view number three, that the angels are just personifications of the churches. Number four, that they’re literally human messengers or number five, who knows that the term is used in some complex and elusive way or at different levels. So we cannot expect to assign an Lexi equivalent that tells the whole story. So the five candidates for how we read Revelation two and three are that these are seven letters being written or seven admonitions encouragement, seven words, seven messages being written to number one literal heavenly angels. Number two, the seven bishops of the seven churches. Number three, the churches themselves. Number four, human messengers or number five, we kind of shrug our shoulders and say it’s too hard to tell.

Let’s work through this list. I think we can cross off some of these candidates in the context of the book of Revelation. Revelation one at the end of the end, that chapter right before this bit in Revelation two and three, there’s an image of seven stars and seven golden lampstands and Revelation one 20 explains this image. The seven stars are the angels of the seven churches, and the seven lampstands are the seven churches. So again, a lot of imagery, but you have the lampstands and you have the stars. The stars represent the angels of the churches and the lampstands represent the churches. So whatever the angels are, they are not the churches themselves because there’s two different images used and they’re clearly in Revelation one 20 distinguished as two different symbolically represented groups. So we can take that third option off the list. They’re not the churches themselves, the churches are the stars. Excuse me, the churches are the lamp stands, not the stars and angels.

We can also take, it seems to me the first one off the list that these are literally writings to angels, and in fact, I find this one kind of a strange one because many of the people who identify this, many people don’t want to read this as letters to seven bishops of local churches. They don’t like the idea the early church had bishops in biblical times and this was approved by Jesus, and so they want to say, no, no, no, these are literally angels, but many of the same people are not actually okay with someone today writing a letter to an angel. If you were to say, I’m going to go write a letter to an angel, they would say that’s necromancy. Even though it’s clearly not because the angels aren’t dead, but it’s spiritism, it’s something, it’s a cult. It’s evil, it’s bad. You’re not allowed to do that, that’s idolatry.

That’s broad brush here. What you often see from the same people who claim the revelation two to three is telling John he has to write letters to angels. So I just find that kind of curious, but I think we can make a stronger case and the stronger case would be the letters don’t make sense if they’re written literally to angels. So for example, in Revelation three, 14 to 16, the angel of the church of Latia is warned about his spiritual lukewarmness and Jesus says, I know your works. You’re neither cold nor hot whether you were cold or hot. So because you are lukewarm and neither cold nor hot, I will spew you out of my mouth. That would be a very strange thing to say to an angel. It’s very hard to imagine a spiritually lukewarm angel. It doesn’t make any sense if you understand the theology of angels.

They’re not just like lazying about. Moreover, you have in the Church of Smyrna, the angel of the church of Smyrna is being told, do not fear what you’re about to suffer. Behold the devil’s about to throw some of you into prison. Well, how are they going to throw? Who’s arresting an angel and why would an angel be afraid of being arrested? None of that makes sense. I would suggest revelation two to three doesn’t make sense if you read it as being written to literal angels. Likewise, I don’t think it makes a lot of sense to view it as being written to human messengers because you are basically shooting the messenger there. Almost literally you’re holding them accountable for the spiritual lukewarmness of the church. Well, they’re just a messenger. They aren’t. Why should they be condemned and rebuked for the failing of a church unless they have some kind of spiritual authority over that church?

So that leaves us with two candidates. Either we can’t say what it means or if we can, it’s about seven bishops of the seven churches. Now, is there a positive case to be made that these are seven bishops? The answer is yes, because even though the term angel, we normally refer to the spiritual beings, the word angel means messenger, and it’s used to refer also to the priests in the Old Testament. So for instance, in Hebrew, the word is Malik, and so the angel of the Lord, the maleic of the Lord, Genesis 16, nine is one of the ways you hear angels referred to. Well, in Malachi two, verse seven we’re told For the lips of a priest should guard knowledge and men should seek construction from his mouth. For he is the malick of the Lord of hosts, he’s the messenger, the angel of the Lord of hosts.

So because there’s this teaching authority associated with the priest in the Old Testament and with the bishop in the New Testament, they can be called messengers malick angels. That doesn’t mean that they have wings and our mental image of angels, but they’re literally messengers. Angel is a description of a job, and so as a maek, as an Anglos, as an angel, they are messengers. Likewise, in Ecclesiastes five when it talks about making rash fouls in the temple, you’re told to guard your steps when you go to the house of God and let not your mouth lead you into sin and do not say before the malick that it was a mistake. The malick there is not that there’s an angel you’re talking to, it’s the priest. Don’t go and make a promise in front of the priest as the angel of the Lord because you’re going to be bound to it and you wouldn’t be able to live it out.

So don’t rly do that. All that’s to say there seems to be a strong positive case to say the seven angels in revelation are the seven bishops of those seven churches, which points to the fact that it wasn’t just Ephesus and Crete, but also these seven churches in Asia Minor where we see one bishop per church. Now, humor doesn’t view things that way. In fact, he’s going to make the argument that we can really easily discard this theory. He thinks the two things that are easiest to say it’s not are bishops and human messengers. He says, those are the theories proposed we can most easily criticize. Now, that should raise at least a couple red flags, it seems to me because it’s such a popular view, but fine, let’s listen to his argument. He says, the individual could scarcely be held responsible for the character of the church.

Let’s pause there. He doesn’t think it could be the bishop because the bishop could hardly be held responsible for the character of his church biblically. That’s just obviously wrong. Whatever you think about bishops in the early church, the idea that there are leaders in the church that have spiritual authority and accountability is absolutely explicit. This argument just is factually wrong. Hebrews 1317, where children will bear our leaders and submit to them for they’re keeping watch over your souls as men who will have to give account. It’s right there. Your leaders, and this is clearly talking with the leaders in the church. They’re keeping watch over your soul. They’re not political leaders. The leaders in the church we are required to obey and submit to them, and they’re keeping watch over our souls as men who will have to give account if they lead this badly, they will go to hell.

So the idea of the individual could scarcely be held responsible for the character of the church is obviously wrong. In the case of a bishop second, he says, there is no unambiguous evidence for the idea of Episcopal authority in the churches of the revelation. Well, I didn’t mention this before I mention Crete and Ephesus. Ephesus is one of those seven churches in Asia Minor. So we already know one of those that clearly has one bishop, one leader that the entire church reports to because Timothy had been in that role before. He may or may not be by the time the book of Revelation is written, but it’s just not true that of the seven churches in Revelation, there’s no ambiguous evidence for the idea of Episcopal authority. There clearly is, and also I’m not sure unambiguous is the standard that it’s going to be the best to argue for.

You can’t throw out because a lot of this stuff is not going to be unambiguous in any direction. You can’t throw out a theory just because you say, well, I don’t find the evidence unambiguous. There’s clearly decently good evidence that there’s a guy called Timothy who the other elders are accountable to because we see that all around one Timothy. So at least one of the seven churches revelation, we do have independent authority, but it also is kind of question begging to say, well, revelation can’t be about seven bishops because we don’t have any evidence that revelation is about seven bishops. Well, the evidence is right there or it isn’t. The seven angels are seven bishops or they aren’t. You can’t use the fact that there’s not another passage. I mean, it just doesn’t make sense. Alright? But then he acknowledges though it looms large for Ignatius 20 years later.

In other words, let me read that whole passage there. He says, there’s no unambiguous evidence for the idea of Episcopal authority in the churches of the Revelation, though it looms large and Ignatius 20 years later. What he means there is when Saint Ignatius is writing about the year 1 0 7 to the church in Ephesus, it’s very clear they have a bishop because he talks it’s very explicit. So you have three separate places, first Timothy Revelation two to three and the writings of Saint Ignatius to the Ephesians all very early 1 0 7 or earlier independent corroborations of the fact that the church in Ephesus has a single leader. So you can say, well, that’s 20 years later, but you don’t have evidence pointing the so all of the evidence points in the same direction that there is one bishop in Ephesus. So this is a nice segue then to saying, okay, did the earliest Christians have bishops?

Because look, remember if our read of the New Testament is correct, we have to say the earliest Christians got the question of church, right? Or we would’ve found some kind of New Testament instruction saying, don’t build your church that way, build it this way. And in fact, they weren’t even the ones who built it, the apostles were. So what do we find when we look at the earliest Christians? I’m going to turn here to the evangelical dictionary of theology, the second edition because in there Leon Morris says, A consideration of all of the evidence leads us with the conclusion that it is impossible to read back any of our modern systems into the apostolic age. If we are determined to shut our eyes to all that conflicts with our own system, we may find it there, but scarcely otherwise, that is a hopeless note. But just like with Frito finding wiggle room, you have this idea.

Morris presents it like, oh, nobody’s right. There’s no right answer to this question. None of our churches are biblical in origin, and I think we can do better, and I think the evidence points to something clearly better, and one of the reasons I say that is an argument or a couple arguments that Morris makes himself, he says, the same threefold ministry, which is one we saw before Bishop Presbyter, deacon is seen as universal throughout the early church as soon as there is sufficient evidence to show us the nature of the ministry. Let’s unpack what that means when you’re looking at the evidence from history. This is true of the New Testament evidence. It’s true of the evidence outside of the New Testament from the first, second, third century. There’s two categories of evidence. Number one, there’s ambiguous evidence. These are passages that could be read in multiple ways.

You could plausibly read them one way, plausibly read them in another way. The second type of evidence is clear evidence, unambiguous evidence, and whenever we find unambiguous evidence, it always points to the same threefold ministry. That’s Morris’s point in the evangelical dictionary of theology, and he’s absolutely right that we find wherever we look, either a picture too out of focus to know what it’s showing or a very clear picture of the threefold structure of the church. Bishop, presbyters, deacons, bishop, elders, deacons. I’m going to give just a couple examples of that because I don’t want to belabor because the question is, is this in the Bible and I want to just show one of the ways we can know it’s in the Bible is that the earliest Christians clearly had this model of church, and as I’m going to argue, you can’t account for that unless this is the biblical and apostolic model, but we’re going to get there.

I haven’t forgotten what the prompt is. I haven’t forgotten this is about the biblical evidence, but one of the ways we know what the Bible teaches is how do the earliest people understand it and then were they corrected for understanding it in that way? So on this score, one of the earliest people is the aforementioned Saint Ignatius who’s writing up again about 1 0 7, so maybe 20 years after the book of Revelation, maybe a little less than that, and by the time he’s writing, it’s incredibly clear that there’s a threefold structure of every church, and he’s going to tell you that it’s not just that he’s going to say there’s a threefold structure. He’s going to tell you specifics. For example, when he is writing to the church in magnesia, he greets Dames their most worthy bishop. He greets your worthy presbyters, BAAs and apollonius, and he greets his fellow servant, the deacon sodium.

I mentioned this because he’s naming names. He’s telling us exactly who the bishop two of the presbyters and a deacon are. Now, there may be more people, but we know there’s a threefold office because he’s not just talking about it as a theoretical idea. He’s seen very concretely contrast this when people say the early church just had a coru panel of presbyter bishops, ask them what church and what were the names of the coru elders? And they never have clear evidence of here are two guys who were coru at the same time and acknowledged it. The level of specificity you just heard in ignatius’s writing where he names names and says, here’s exactly who it is. You don’t have that on the people who are saying, oh, no, no, it’s actually just a twofold office. That is a pretty wild difference in evidentiary burden that Ignatius is presenting unambiguous naming names, clear evidence, and the people who disagree with Ignatius are always just vaguely saying sometimes someplace, somewhere, somebody but not really giving you any specifics.

You can easily see examples of this when you try to show the opposite case if that wasn’t enough, Ignatius is going to make it very clear. This is not just, oh, we decided to try a new thing or everybody does their own thing. No, he actually says in like manner, let all reverence the deacons as an appointment of Jesus Christ and the bishop as Jesus Christ who is the son of the Father and the presbyters as the Sanhedrin of God, an assembly of the apostles. And then he says, apart from these meaning apart from the threefold office, there is no church considering all this. I’m persuaded that you’re of the same opinion. So he views the threefold office as absolutely necessary even for your church to be called a church. This is not one model among many. This is not some new experiment they’re trying.

This is part of the DNA of true church. If you don’t have this, you don’t have a church. This is one of the things that sometimes gets awkward in Catholic Protestant conversation because Protestants will refer to the churches like all these different domination and Catholics often have this uneasy. We don’t acknowledge what you have as a church, and it’s not to be a jerk. It’s because from the earliest days, Ignatius is saying the word church means something and it doesn’t just mean people gathered, gather however they want to be. If you’ve got a Bible study at work that’s not a church, that’s great, it’s good we’re not knocking it, but that’s not what a church is. Church means something more than that. And one of the things that means is this threefold ministry of Bishop Presbyter deacon, and that is coming from Ignatius of Antioch, believed to be a student of the disciple John in about 1 0 7.

Now, Ignatius is only one among many, but because he’s so famous on this, because he’s so early, because he’s so prolific about this topic, I’m going to leave the evidence largely there except to say that you’ll sometimes hear people claiming like, oh, the fact that Ignatius is writing about it proves there’s a controversy. And I get that. I mean, I just use the opposite argument. One of the reasons the New Testament doesn’t write a lot about it is that there wasn’t a controversy. So maybe Ignatius is writing this much about it because people are uneasy with the structure of the church, but he doesn’t actually say that at all. In fact, he says pretty clearly to the Ephesians here again, the church Ephesus, I’m persuaded that you’re of the same opinion. He doesn’t think there’s a controversy about this. He thinks the threefold structure is something they already believe in and already think it’s necessary for the nature of a church, but he’s not alone.

I want to turn now to a little bit more first century evidence, and this is the notion of bishop lists. I’ll explain what that means, that every local church kept track of who all of its bishops were back to the time of the apostles, and they would have written records of this in the 100th. Most of all of those records are gone now, but nevertheless, they refer to them, they talk about them. And so it’s very clearly not just we’re trying a new thing or this is some late adaptation or everybody’s doing their own thing. But before I get there, let’s explain why these lists matter. In second Timothy St. Paul warns Timothy, the time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching, but having issue years. They’ll accumulate for themselves teachers to set their own likings and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander into myths.

Now the thing to note there is that orthodoxy is older than heresy, right? The time is coming in the future when people are going to leave orthodoxy for heresy. So one of the oldest arguments against heresy is antiquity, but just showing our teaching is older than yours, our church is older than yours, and that’s a clear sign that you are the people that St. Paul was warned about in second Timothy because if you could show that you go back 2000 years, that would be a pretty strong bit of evidence. If you can’t do that, that looks like you’re the people he warned about when the time is coming, meaning in the future. So if you’re holding onto a 2000 year old version of Christianity, that’s a really good sign. If you’re not, that’s a really bad sign. That’s the argument in a nutshell. The early Christians make this argument not just, I mean obviously it wasn’t 2000 years ago for them it was like a hundred years ago for them.

So for instance, EU read in about 180 makes this point very clearly and against Heresy’s book three, he says, it is within the power of all therefore in every church who may wish to see the truth to contemplate clearly the tradition of the apostles manifested throughout the whole world, and we are in a position to reckon up those who were by the apostles instituted bishops in the churches. And then we’re adding the phrase to demonstrate because it’s implied in the Greek, and to demonstrate the succession of these men to our own times, those who neither taught nor knew anything like what these heretics rave about. In other words, he’s saying, okay, everybody, this is in the one hundreds now can look to their churches, go explore the history of your church if it goes back to the time of the apostles, and you can trace every bishop and see that these guys didn’t teach gnosticism, which is the heresy he’s combating in this case.

But notice he’s taking for granted that every local church keeps written records of who their bishops were going back to the time of the apostles, which suggests very strongly that the apostles created bishops because you’re left with two options, either one massive early Christian fraud, that every church is lying about its own history. Every local church created by the apostles is lying about who bishops were because actually bishops are very new or two, the reason they have such great records is because they’re telling the truth. And it’s not just RNAs who points this out and Churchillian around the year 200 talks about this is a great argument against heresy. He says, if any of these heresies or heretics are both enough to plant themselves in the midst of the oleic age claiming to have been handed down by the apostles and having existed at the time of the apostles, we can say let them produce the original records of their churches, let them unroll, let them unfold the role of their bishops running down in due succession from the beginning.

So in other words, they had literal physical records keeping track of who their bishops were in a written scroll and showing as Dr. Explains that their first bishop was someone who was either one of the apostles or an apostolic man, a man who continued to steadfast with the apostles. So an apostle or a faithful associate of the apostles, if they’re going to claim to be an apostolic church, they need one of those things. And he explains this is the manner in which the apostolic churches transmit their registers and he gives the examples like the Church of Smyrna, which records that Polycarp was placed there by John and the Church of Rome, which makes Clement to have been ordained in like manner by Peter. So my point there is you can find, if you go back through the ancient records of the churches, them claiming to have this unbroken lineage of bishops, but then he says in exactly the same way, the other churches likewise exhibit this, so it’s not just like one or two churches.

So you can’t say, oh, the Church of Rome made this up. You’d also have to say the Church of Ephesus and Smyrna and Jerusalem and fill in the blank, all of the early churches by the one hundreds are apparently lying. We’ll get into that in a second. And again, it’s not just like one or two Margaret Miles and the word made flesh a history of Christian thought points out that we have lists. So most of the physical evidence is now gone because 98% of papyrus believed to have been destroyed just because of conditions over the last 2000 years, but in places that are really warm and dry, papyrus has a better lifespan. And so in North Africa, one of the few places for which evidence exists, we still have lists of hundreds of third century bishops and she mentions every small town had a bishop. So when we’re talking about bishop lists, we’re not talking about one or two churches.

We’re talking about literally hundreds of churches, both those directly established by the apostles and apostolic men, the associates of the apostles, but also just little churches who could trace back who did found them and what their connection is to the broader story of church history. That’s a lot, and they all are ending up with the same thing with one bishop per diocese. In many cases, a very small church. It might be a little town, it might be a very tiny group of people. They still have one bishop running things. So let’s see where we are with the evidence and how we make sense of it. Hopefully Catholics, Protestants, Orthodox, everybody can agree by sometime in the one hundreds at the latest, every Christian that we find is part of a church that has this threefold structure, and there may be some really radical French exceptions to that, but we clearly see a cross Christianity, bishop, presbyter deacon in Jerusalem, in Rome, in the big towns and the little towns.

Wherever we look, we find this same thing. And moreover, they’re claiming that they didn’t just invent, they’re claiming they got it from the apostles. This suggests to me that there’s three ways we could account for that evidence and we’ll call them faithfulness, deviation free for all. The faithful option is the reason the churches all look the same in the one hundreds is because that’s what Jesus established, that Jesus and the apostles establish churches with a threefold structure when they’re going around ordaining people, the people they’re ordaining know this is the structure of the church, and so they faithfully preserve it. That’s the first option faithfulness. The second option is that the early Christians were rebellious. They’re deviating. Jesus in the apostles established a church or church is I should say, with a different structure, like a twofold one. They wanted coru presbyters, but then the early churches changed it one after another hundreds of examples.

All of these churches rebelled against the thing that’d been given by Jesus in the apostles in favor of having one bishop instead of coru presbyters. The third option is that it was kind of a free for all. Jesus in the apostles didn’t set up any particular kind of structure. This is very much the idea, it’s wiggle room. There’s no right answer. Everybody can just do their own thing. There’s no such thing as a biblical model of the church. And so they all just had this total liberty to do whatever they wanted and they all chose the same thing. Now, I would say at the opposite theories two and three don’t seem plausible to me when saying Ignatius is saying that you have to have the threefold structure to even be called the church. He doesn’t seem to view this as either an issue of Christian liberty. We can do whatever we want, nor does he seem to view this as an issue where we are choosing to do something different than Jesus and the apostles gave us, again, Ignatius is believed to be a disciple of the Apostle John. So it would be kind of striking if he was just an open rebellion from John and the other apostles. We also just don’t see any evidence of that. Here’s what I mean by that.

Staman in his book Authority in the Church says the following, this is a striking kind of story, and it’s just that I’m going to suggest a story. He says, in the second century, the structure of authority in the Christian Church underwent a profound alteration. At the beginning of the century, two forms of government existed side by side in the church leadership by a group of elders, I think corporately and leadership by a single bishop. In other words, he’s claiming in the early one hundreds, you have two different models. You’ve got a threefold model and you’ve got a twofold model. By the end of the same century, meaning the end of the one hundreds, the latter form, monarchical, episcopal IE governance of the local church by a single leader seems to have taken hold everywhere. So by the time we have clear evidence, we see everywhere we look, the threefold model has one.

So that’s kind of striking, and that seems to be either of you of deviation or of a free for all, but it ends with a shocking kind of uniformity. And I would suggest that’s not how a free for all ever looks. Right? In the world of Protestantism, say, if you’re going to say everybody’s free to design a church looking however you want, how often is that going to lead to everyone designing churches that look the exact same? Seemingly not, but more broadly on the problem of the deviation theory. You have to believe the following. Number one, Jesus established a twofold structure. He wanted coru, presbyters, and deacons. That’s it. Number two, something happens when how, who knows, just something happens, which leads to number three, the Christians decide instead upon a threefold structure, they want one bishop to rule them all. And number four, if we’re thinking about those bishop lists, they then apparently falsify their own history to cover up this change.

That’s what you have to, it’s not enough to say The way I read the New Testament, bishops and presbyters mean the same thing. You can believe that if you don’t have any knowledge of history, but if you have knowledge of history and you try to plug your belief into history, you come to some weird conclusions because you have to say, yes. Jesus in the apostles wanted coru bishops, multiple bishops in a single church, and yet somehow none of the early Christians seemed to have gotten that memo because they all thought there was only supposed to be one bishop in the church, that he wasn’t just a presbyter, that he actually had authority over the presbyters, and then if you chose a different model, you were rejecting the idea of what it was to be a church. That is a striking theory that’s a lot bigger than just, I read Presbyter, Roy and Episcopal as interchangeable.

You’re seeing something much bigger and much stranger about history, so that second step, something happens, you’ll find different people who have different theories about it. Oh, maybe it was gnosticism. Maybe it was the rise of some heresy. Maybe the structure of the twofold structure was just too inefficient to do anything. The Jesus and the apostles created a structure of government, in other words, that just didn’t work very well and couldn’t combat heresy very effectively. That’s a really strange second step, and so you’ll notice Inman’s theory doesn’t even really spell out, at least in this presentation of the claim. What that second step is, we were just told originally there were different models and then one model. One, why did it win? How did it win? But it’s bigger than that. I would suggest we’ve got really good reasons to believe that none of that happened.

Imagine you were to go into a Protestant university tomorrow and say, Hey, instead of having the normal Congregational Presbyterian, whatever worship service, we’re going to replace it with the Latin mass, and from now on we’re going to have one bishop and he’s going to have the power to ordain and administer sacraments and do all this stuff. Now, in that theory, do you think the students are going to just be like, oh, okay, cool, let’s just roll with it. Of course not. There’s going to be enormous pushback. That’d be the kind of thing that created enormous divides and in history when there were major changes in religion, it led to major divides. It led to numerous wars in the 16th century, so it’s pretty striking that for instance, Leon Morris says, nowhere is there evidence of a violent struggle as would be natural if a divinely ordained congregationalism or presbyterianism were overthrown, right?

It’s not just, I don’t like the direction you’re going. If I know it’s the first century, the early second century, whatever, the apostles are still a pretty fresh memory and you’re coming along and saying, we’re going to get rid of the model that I know Jesus and the apostles gave us and replace it with some new model where you alone are the boss. Of course, I’m not just going to take that sitting down, nobody would, no faithful Christian would just be like, alright, I guess we’re doing a new thing now. It’s a preposterous theory when you think about it. There would be enormous evidence of this, and Morris isn’t the only one who says this. Michael McGuckin said, the notion of a church choosing its church order is unheard of in Christian tradition until the 16th century with the Reformation in Switzerland. Let’s pause on that.

When you read the writings of the early Christians, they’re really clear that they don’t think this is an option. They think this is something they’ve been given by Christ and they have to obey. Whether you like having this form of governance or not is not relevant. That is not the question. Our job is to submit to our leaders and to pray for them because we know they’re going to have to keep account for how they’re caring for our souls. So our job is not to design some new form of church, some new structure of leadership. So he says The notion of a church choosing its church order in order is unheard of in Christian tradition until the 16th century with the Reformation in Switzerland, and then he says, the choice between Presbyteral and Episcopal government is church dividing to this day. There are plenty of Calvinist leading Baptists and Calvin leading Presbyterians, and they can’t be in one denomination because they don’t agree on the structure of the church.

There can be other reasons as well like the theology of baptism, but that is a big one built into the name of Presbyterian that if you don’t agree on the structure of the church, you can’t be one, and so you would expect to see tons of very prominent obvious kind of schisms. McGee then says, well, is it plausible to suggest that it would not have been equally divisive in the first decades of the church’s life and could have taken place without leaving any trace whatsoever? Show me any of the following. Number one, give me the names of some of these coru presbyters because we already have seen that the early churches could name their bishops back to the apostles. Ignatius was able to greet by name the local bishop. That kind of thing is pretty common among the three-tiered view. We can say not just this is what it existed in theory, but here it is in practice here the names of the people you could do number one, you could show me, here’s a very clear equally unambiguous two-tiered model in practice.

Here’s a church that has the two tiers and here are the names of the Coru leaders. Number two, you could show here’s when they switched. Here’s why. Rather than just making up a story that maybe this is what could have happened, show actual evidence that the two-tiered model became a three-tiered model because of this reason maybe in this year or around this time period, these were the major players involved. Here were the people who supported it. Here were the people who opposed it. None of that evidence existed because I would suggest the deviation theory and the free for all theory are fiction. They’re just not true that the reason the early Christians universally have a three-tiered system of governance is because they’re being faithful to the apostles. Why? Then that still leaves One final question, why would God want there to be one bishop? Ignatius gives one answer to that, so some people are going to make pragmatic arguments.

Some people are going to be worried about it from a level of corruption. I’m not super convinced in either direction. It is certainly true that having a church run by one bishop can lead to bad thing. You could have a bad bishop. It’s also true that if you have it run by a group of presbyters or elders, you could also get a good old boys club and you could have people who are unfair to the lead pastor or whoever. The fact that it’s a group of people as opposed to one, it’s not obviously clear to me that one of those is going to be more or less prone to corruption. I mean, the one time we see democracy in the Bible is people choosing Barabbas over Jesus. I don’t find the pragmatic arguments in either direction helpful or persuasive. Ignatius points to the oneness of the bishop as a sign of the oneness of the church.

He says, there should be one Eucharist as there’s one flesh of our Lord Jesus Christ, one cup to show forth the unity of his blood. One altar, one bishop, and this is showing ultimately I think he’s arguing the oneness of God, that just like we don’t believe in polytheism, that coru panel of Gods, our churches are monotheistic and they’re monarchical. They have one leader that ultimately represents the one God. Now, what I found really fascinating, even though he goes a little more into the sort of the pragmatic thing, Fri after laying out his argument for the two-tiered model seems to sort of intuit that there’s something to this based on everything else we see in scripture that points to one person having a spiritual authority. So I want give you this as kind of a final reel clip that I’m largely going to agree with.

CLIP:

Furthermore, having said that, while I do believe that there should be some sort of plurality of elders, nevertheless inside of that group of elders, I believe there should be an elder who is ultimately the leader. Now, it can get to be a little bit complicated at this point, but I think because of the Trinity Father, son, and Holy Spirit, we see the Father, the son submitting to the Father, the Holy Spirit submitting to the Father and the Son for the sake of order. We see that in government. We see that in schools. We see that in marriage. We see that in business. Same thing should be true for the body of elders, that if you do not have one person who has ultimately got, let’s just say more authority than the others, you’re going to be lacking leadership and you’re not going to be structured the way the Trinity operates and the way that every other realm operates.

Joe:

As I say, it’s kind of a blend here. Some of his arguments are more pragmatic. I’m not as interested in those. What I think is really interesting is the way he talks about the Trinity, and I want to expand on that even a little bit. That obviously Father, son and Holy Spirit, they’re equally worthy of glory and honor, and yet the first person is the first person of the Trinity. It’s not interchangeable. The son announces he’s here to do the will of his father, and so doesn’t, the Trinity is not like a three-headed monster. There is clearly what’s sometimes called a monarchy, even within the Trinity. There’s a way of understanding that properly where it’s not that the Father is more divine than the Son, but the son does the will of the Father. Nevertheless, that is biblical, that is sound. That is something the early Christians understood, but we also see that throughout scripture going all the way back to the Old Testament.

Remember, the kingdom of God is what Jesus comes proclaiming and the gospel of Mark. It opens up with Jesus saying, repentant believe the kingdom of God is at hand. Well, God had started to build a kingdom in Israel, and when he did that, he had one king, king David. It wasn’t a coru panel of elders of Israel. It’s true there were elders, right? The term elder is also one of the ways of describing the Sanhedrin and the kind of group that is around the high priest, but there is never just coru elders. There’s always one person, whether it’s the high priest or the king, whatever context we’re dealing with, the judges and the Old Testament, there’s always someone who is ultimately spiritually responsible for what happens, and as Todd frill points out, this is the root of why we believe in male headship and marriage, which is clearly spoken to in scripture, that there is someone who is ultimately accountable.

It’s not just a democracy with a 50 50 vote. Someone has to be responsible again, as with the Trinity, you don’t have to say, therefore the husband is better than the wife. It’s just that someone has to ultimately be responsible and accountable, and I would suggest we see this throughout the old and the New Testament. Now, this is going to tee up the question, well, did Jesus do that with the apostles? Did he choose one apostle and give him more authority than the other apostles had? Because this oneness that we see everywhere else is true as well with the apostles, but that is a question for a different day. I’ve purposely left aside two very much related questions. Number one, what did the Bishop of Rome look like during this period? And number two, did the earliest Christians have a papacy or what we would now call a papacy?

I’ve purposely left those aside because this is a long episode as it is, and those are a question for another day. If you find that interesting, please let me know in the comments below. I’d be happy to do episodes on the papacy in the very earliest centuries of the church, and what was the role and authority of the Bishop of Rome because you’ll find people who claim there wasn’t even a bishop of Rome until after the time of Ignatius. But I’ve purposely, like I said, left that aside in case you want to handle that separate topic for Shamus, Joe Hess Meyer. God bless you.