The transmission of Ecclesial Authority

Whatever the polity of any local church, ministerial spiritual authority (particularly pastoral and teaching authority) generally exhibits three main dimensions. There is first the inward call from ‘above’, from the Holy Spirit (say). Second, there is the local congregational element, which may recognise and confirm the call in the candidate. In some cases the congregational ‘call’ may have come first. Third there is the magisterium, which tests a vocation, and if satisfied ordains a candidate to an order.

In the real process of appointing to ministerial order and in an actual pastoral post, all three dimensions will almost certainly be present. It is rare that an episcopal figure or the equivalent in non-episcopal churches would act alone. The long process of enquiry, taking references, interview, selection, and training, means that many people have say in the actual birthing of any individual ministry.

This applies whether a Diocese ‘elects’ its bishop, e.g. Anglican Church in Australia, is appointed by a partially elected commission with state input (as in England), or whether it is the college of Cardinals electing the Bishop of Rome.

His authority operates collegially, both locally with his assistant bishops, and priests (presbyters), and wider than the local, through his consultation with his fellow bishops. Bishops do not arrive on the local church scene from a sealed cage of doctrinal purity, so that their mere presentation in oversight to a group of local Christians somehow guarantees the continuity of ‘the faith’. Real bishops emanate from the ‘laos’, the people of God. They are known for their gifts, stances and opinions over a wide area of territory and time before they are consecrated and appointed. There is nothing inimical to having an Episcopal Church, and a ‘spiritual’ church.

Even from this short sketch, it is easy to see that the bishop, as elected representative of a wider group of presbyters, does begin to be the sign of the local church on the wider scene. Nevertheless, the church, through its several interacting processes of ministerial calling and appointment of presbyters and bishops, in consultation with the whole people of God, is perfectly capable of transmitting the truth of the Gospel diachronically down through time. However, this is not in itself an argument for bishops as the esse of the church.

There still remains the lurking question of how other forms of church government and their senior posts relate to traditional episcopacy. For example when the Ten Propositions and Covenant for Unity were being debated, the issue arose of the status of United Reformed Church Moderators. Were they equivalent to Anglican bishops in terms of oversight? Would they mind, if they were later designated ‘bishops’ in a future united church? Similar considerations were applied to Methodist District

Chairmen. These points were not merely semantic, nor simply a matter of task comparison. A Methodist District Chair and a URC Moderator might be perceived as of a similar ‘rank’ to an Anglican bishop, yet Moderators and Chairs are elected to office for a fixed term of years, and cease to hold the ‘rank’ when they go out of office. This procedure reflects a familiar New Testament exegesis of ‘presbyters’ being the senior ministers whilst ‘episcope’ implied a ‘first among equals’ presbyter. Nevertheless, Anglicans regard the episcopate as a third order of ministry (as do the Roman Catholics and Orthodox), which a person still retains even when ceasing to hold office. (The doctrine of the indelibility of orders.). But is there evidence that a threefold order of ministry emerged smoothly in the sub-apostolic age? If the answer is taken as affirmative, then what do we know of the process by which the New Testament ministries metamorphosed into it? The Anglican–Orthodox report summarises the process thus:

In the New Testament the local churches never appear without episcope, or oversight, the ministry of care rooted in the Gospel…. There is scholarly debate regarding the early forms of episcope…. At the beginning of the second century the Ignatian epistles provide the first unequivocal evidence of the three distinct but cohering ministries of bishop, presbyter, and deacon, of which the bishop provides episcope….Historically it is safe to conclude that the apostles did not hand on a fixed ministerial structure to a college of bishops as part of a clearly defined threefold order.. The picture is one of gradual development from an episcope always present, into a pattern of one bishop in each local church, who functioned at a local level, without any centralised control.’ (Anglican Communion 2006: 59,60. Paras. 3,4).

The Didache (Staniforth 1968:225f) has an interesting passage, which sheds some light into the twilight zone of the sub-apostlic era. Staniforth, in his introductory note, says that the Didache fitted into the period when ‘travelling missioners’ were still the chief officers of the Church and bishops had not yet become distinguished from presbyters. The text of the Didache refers particularly to the issue of testing the genuineness of these travelling apostles and prophets. The advice is very much a matter of observing behaviour to see if it matched profession. The evidence is that

there was clearly a phenomenon of travelling apostles and prophets, who had a prima- facie authority; but that there were also counterfeits who should not simply be taken at face value and given food and money. Two days was the maximum allowed stay of an individual prophet in a locality. Although the issue is the true/false visitor, yet the Didache suggests that they had authority if genuine: ‘…should be welcomed as the Lord.’(: 233)

What might be assumed is that by the end of the second century the authority of the itinerant ‘apostle’ had largely passed from the creative initiatory mission phase to the established local phase; the presbyters. It may well have been that this pattern was indeed the Holy Spirit’s intention as the norm of church government. What may be described as the collegial authority of the bishops (first ecumenical councils) was demonstrated early on in church history and may well have had roots in the Council of Jerusalem (Acts 15). It could well be that this was the pattern of government, discerned by spiritual pragmatism, that was clearly emerging by the middle to end of the second century. It gained acceptance as pragmatically normal, without looking for any theory to justify it.