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 autho... Read more on Catholic.com