I have joked with people before that I will probably be Catholic by the time I’m thirty. It would break my mother’s heart; it would scandalize a church in which I am respected as a teacher and play an active role in assorted ministries. I doubt it would shock or even anger my pastors, both friends who understand that seeking after truth often means leaving a place full of truth for a place full of still more truth. Because Abram is called out of Ur to Cana. It’s not that God wasn’t in Ur (if He weren’t, how could He speak to Abram?), and it’s not that Abram couldn’t worship God in Ur (if that’s the case, holy cow, American Jews, you are in the wrong place!); it’s that God calls us to Him in the fullness of truth. It is why one goes from agnosticism to theism – because theism is true – and from theism to monotheism – because only models with one god offer cogent descriptions of observed phenomena – and from monotheism to the Abrahamic religions and from there to Christianity, which C.S. Lewis describes as a great hall off which there are many doors, and it is our duty to choose the door wherein this mere Christianity (haha, it’s like he titled his book that!) will be fully realized in a denomination.
One makes a journey from places of truth (it is proper to doubt, for man is fallible, so start at agnosticism) to places of greater truth still, at least if one is seeking what is true. So whither goest I?
I was speaking with a friend the other day who is working on a middle grade fantasy series taking place in the future, on Earth, wherein elements from fantastic realms are bridged to a world only tangentially recognizable as our own, being geopolitically and politically transformed as the world tends to do over ages and most specifically with the advent of Magic. Magic he pitches as a charism, and like all gifts it can be used either powerfully and to glory or in privation poorly. So of course the good magic users have some analogue to followers of The Way. He has been trying for some time to define the organization or relationship between localized Magiciers and the broader, global Magical community – members in local communities and how they relate to Magic users elsewhere in the world. If you’re not ecclesiastically minded, you may not recognize this as a means by which to model his ideas of church polity. It led to an extended discussion on the nature of hierarchy for magical users. To wit, I’ll copy and paste from our instant messaging log:
Me: I would be inclined to agree if the largest Christian denomination in the world weren’t publicly known as a top-down organization with small communities working their way into one overarching structure.
Him: Which denomination?
Me: The Catholics. People don’t think of the Catholic Church as that building on the corner. It is the entire system. Parishes part of diocese part of archdiocese all under the Holy See.
Him: Well yes, but again: religious ceremonies, fancy titles, et cetera. Also, no real hierarchal structure in the global community.
Me: Too bad; there should be.
Him: I disagree, for the same reason I’m against big government.
Me: Hierarchy is biblical.
Him: The Bible doesn’t codify the hierarchy.
Me: No, but it clearly has a hierarchy both in Old and New Testaments.
Him: I would argue that in both cases, it’s largely localized. Even with the high priests in the OT and such, Israel is a fairly small nation. And in the NT, hierarchy there too seems mostly localized, with the exception of Paul speaking with the Jerusalem branch’s leaders about doctrine. I really don’t see a precedent for hierarchy beyond the local level.
Me: And the fact that Paul, John, James, Jude and Peter all wrote letters to churches with clear teaching authority.
Him: Okay, but from those letters you can also see that their word wasn’t necessarily law. Their teaching authority was respected, but it wasn’t all-powerful. The individual churches were free to make their own decisions at the local level. And there wasn’t even a unifying document until the Bible was canonized.
Me: The Bible wasn’t canonized out of the ether. The books were chosen for very particular reasons: you’ll notice every New Testament book has explicit quotes and references to the Old Testament, establishing each as part of the continuity of God’s covenant with the Jews. Those letters were copied and circulated from congregation to congregation; they were teaching documents in the wide church before they were books of the Bible; each author derived apostolic authority either by being direct disciples (Matthew, Paul, Peter, John) or by virtue of their teaching lineage (Jude, Luke, Mark).
And then I thought to myself I sound like a Catholic. And maybe, honestly, that’s for the better. The Lutheran Church, Missouri Synod would tell you that models of ecclesiastic governance (church polity) is adiaphora – really a fancy way of saying structure doesn’t matter. But I find this utterly baffling for a few reasons:
- The Lutheran Church attempts to source the Bible as its sole authority (sola scriptura, baby), and a means for “doing church” is outlined in both Old and New Testaments. In the Old Testament, of course, the Law establishes the priesthood for Aaron and his sons, and these Levites have no land of their own, but rather have local temples and synagogues throughout the lands of the other eleven tribes, and there is a chief priest in Jerusalem who serves as the intercessor for all of Israel and the head of the Hebraic faith community opposite judges and eventually kings who maintained political and secular duties.
If Christ is the fulfillment of the covenant with the Jews, then his priesthood is derived by right of Jewish Law. He could not be the Messiah without conforming to the Law and the Prophets. Ergo, Christ as High Priest is systematically necessary to lead the spiritual nation. In the New Testament, Christ calls the Twelve and commissions the Seventy, and in Acts, the church establishes financial overseers and elders. In Paul’s letters, he describes modes of authority and qualifications for bishops (episkopos, overseers). Yet the Lutherans with all this Scripture will say “Nope, there’s not a clear teaching in the Bible.” This is demonstrably false.
- The Bible is translated through the just authority of the Church, which is the Body of Christ, and the Spirit leads into all truth (c.f. Acts 1). Why do I as a Lutheran believe the Bible teaches infant baptism but Baptists do not? We are both reading the Bible, so we have the same text, but different conclusions. What’s up with that? Simply put, Lutheranism has exhaustive theological documents that define what it is to be Lutheran, and easily summed up in The Book of Concord, containing the Confession of Augsburg, Luther’s Small Catechism, the Smalcald Articles and On the Powers and Primacy of the Pope. To be Lutheran, you hold to these creedal statements, because that’s what Lutheran means – that you adhere to Martin Luther’s theology.
Why is it not merely being descended from Luther that defines Lutheranism? Why, pray tell, is there the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America and the Lutheran Church, Missouri Synod? The fact is that there are disputes in theology, and the LCMS would argue (rightly) that its doctrinal statements hold more with classical Lutheranism than the ELCA. More importantly, our disagreements comes in the interpretation of Scripture. Why not just give everyone a Bible and not teach them a thing; surely this is all it takes of Christian education because Scripture alone is the teaching element. No, it took Stephen talking to the Ethiopian eunuch to explain the Scriptures to him. The Church holds the Scriptures and submits to them, but keeps their truth in wisdom.
- Christ is the divine logos, and all truth is summed up in God eternal (fancy schmancy theology that I can talk about in another post). But the Son is in submission to the Father. God gives us a model of hierarchy without power abuse. All logic naturally entails structure. There is a schema for something so droll and beautiful as calculus. This entire universe is built, from the smallest quanta to the most expansive galaxy, in relation to and submission to the laws that govern them and to each other. That a star’s mass causes gravity defines order. Structure structure structure, inside and out. It is beautiful, isn’t it, the mechanics of an atom? They are beautiful, aren’t they, the twinkling of stars?
“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” —that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
- Luther was able to appeal to the pope and be presented to the Curia for the very fact that it has this hierarchy of authoritative teaching, that the theological errors propounded by those in submission to Rome could be corrected. Luther, in fact, welcomed it, and asked that if there were any place he was in error that he would be corrected of it. Now despite launching the Counter-Reformation some years later, the Roman Catholic institution – instead of correcting the issues in Luther’s day – excommunicated Luther, asking him to hold not to Scripture, reason and conscience, but submit solely to men as a matter of faith. (The Church today proclaims fideism to be a heresy, as God is knowable through natural means, not merely through the teachings of the Magisterium.)
To whom do we appeal for theological error in the Missouri Synod? Who has such teaching authority to correct others’ errors? The answer is no one. The Lutheran Church can say you are wrong, and can even strip you of its blessing, but as long as you are actively interpreting Scripture, you can simply say “This is what I got out of the Bible.”
In short, sola scriptura that doesn’t function in the context of confession is broken. Now we believe in one holy catholic and apostolic church, where teaching authority is derived from the lineage of the apostles. To that end, of course Scripture should be normative because it is the extant writings of the apostles. We can compare what the Bishop of Jerusalem says versus what James says, what the Bishop of Antioch says versus what Paul says, what the Church says versus what Jesus says. The Bible therefore assumes headship as the source of our modern faith preserved in and by the Church. This sets the Bible in its place of authority, being the revealed truth of God, useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness without making it an idol in place of Christ in whom all authority rests. Would Christianity cease being true – would Jesus have never existed, would his life, death and resurrection be undone – with the vanishing of every Bible on the planet? Of course not. Even if something is never written about, it can still have happened. The vast majority of my daily life you never read about, but I assure you that certain things happened this morning and this afternoon. Truth is not solely vested in a book; rather, the book describes what is true.
Indeed, Paul writes in that book (and more specifically in his letter to the Romans) that God is “revealed by nature;” in his speech at the Areopagus of Athens (Mars Hill), Paul quotes not Isaiah or Kings or Psalms, but an Athenian poet, and the building of an “altar to an unknown god” gives him cause to “make that god known” to the gathered masses. So God who is Truth complete, who is Love perfect, who is Beauty eternal, does not sit in contradiction of more specific truth, for all truth is contained in Him who is omnipresent. Indeed, the vast expanse of existence being rooted in Him who is Being (I Am, no?) demands that all in the universe be consistent. The entire foundation of modern science is driven by a rational, consistent God who exists substantially on His own in union with His creation.
(Check your history of science and philosophy of science; material consistency is demanded by a faith in an unobserved Law that governs all things subordinate to it. Why ought the universe be so ordered? Why do we have hypotheses that might demand a certain outcome based on our previous observations? Falsifiability a priori assumes an immaterial truth about the universe, namely that all matter behaves in the same way. It is ordered. But, well, read up on the Is-Ought problem. Something’s mere state of being is not sufficient reason to believe that it should be that way. This might be why it was Roger Bacon who gave us the scientific method, why it was a Franciscan monk who gave us the basis of modern genetics, why a Jesuit priest gave us the Big Bang model of cosmology. (Or it might just all be coincidence because science demands and implies atheism, right?))
Anyway, I digress: on church polity, I observe that God gives us a model. He reveals it in the Old Testament, in the New Testament, and in Himself where the Son submits to the Father and through the Son other authorities are upheld by the Spirit. My friend didn’t want an “official” hierarchy, and struggled with instituting hierarchy. Hit it, copy and paste feature!
Him: I didn’t say that I have a problem with titles either. Just in globally official ones
Me: But we who learned of Christ through [the apostles’] teachings, writings, the lineage of the Church through time, derive our teaching authority from them. If we did not confess that Jesus that Paul taught, that if we do not believe in one baptism for the remission of sins, that if we do not believe as they believed, we are not confessing their faith in Christ, but rather a new faith apart from the Truth.
Now I understand the Bible doesn’t get nitpicky theological in some places, and so we are left to systematic theology, constructing from the teachings of the apostles as best we can the fullness of truth. Sometimes people will disagree on these finite details, but the substance of what is true – the eternal Truth, Beauty and Goodness of God, who is Truth and Love and Beauty in Himself – should underlie every understanding.
Him: Yes, but again, my disagreement with you is over the "official" part. I have absolutely no problem with the hierarchy part – which is why I’m somewhat annoyed. When I said "no real hierarchy in the global magic community", I figured you should know me well enough to know I mean "official hierarchy."
Me: So my simple question is "Should the church have hierarchy?" If the answer is "yes," then you need to figure out how to model that without having titles to make it official.
Let me phrase it this way: there is mutual submission of elders and/or deacons to pastors, and pastors submit to a head pastor. Then several head pastors get together and form a church network, and from among their group they elect a head head pastor, someone who can oversee this body and be responsible for the spiritual formation of the churches as a whole. All very democratic.
What do we call this head head pastor? Or, as far as titles go, why do we call any of them pastors or elders or deacons or teachers at all? I just think titles happen. That’s all. It’s natural. Even democracy fosters "official" titles. The Bible calls these head head pastors episkopoi. Today we call them bishops.
I just don’t know how your model doesn’t ultimately, followed to its logical end, become something very similar to the orthodox model.
Hierarchy is organic. Indeed, in the installation of a bishop in the Orthodox churches, the liturgy calls for the congregation to shout “Axios!” (Greek: “He is worthy!”) The assent of the congregation fosters and solidifies the oneness of the Church even as the authority is channeled from the bishopric right down to the family level. The Orthodox marriage liturgy is almost identical to the liturgy of ordination. In theory, at least this is how I’ve seen it linked theologically, it establishes man as the head of a household, and so man and wife as quasi-priests over their children. Thus in union they assume teaching authority outside the church proper.* So even there teaching/decisionmaking is divested downward, flowing from the authority of the church into the home, and the home in turn cries "axios" to the Church. It’s all very reciprocal.
*Aw yeah, turns out woman are totally supposed to be teachers and leaders and authorities in church. They’re just not supposed to be priests – another discussion for another time!
So anyway, as it turns out, hierarchy makes so much sense to me that alternative models of church governance seem untenable in the face of pragmatism, in the face of Scripture, in the face of nature, in the face of experience. But that’s not why I’m almost Catholic. Indeed, I can be Lutheran and still be a proponent of episcopal governance. I could even try to convince my incredibly German (read: stubborn traditionalist) synod to remodel their governance model to be more Scriptural while remaining Lutheran! That’s pretty cool, amirite? I am right.
But the Catholics have this model, and I believe that Christ commissions authorities, then even His headship is poured into spiritual leaders. So in a sense, why should I not submit to the Church? What is it that keeps me a Lutheran? I just decided that because this post got so long (read: this post is awesome!) that this is going to become a series. Congratulations, you just read a post thinking it would be about how I can’t swim the Tiber only to see me describe why I might swim the Tiber! I am such a jerk! See you next time.
The doG Chronicles 