The Heart of the Problem!
Will the Bad Guys Please Stand up?
We now address the reasons as to why churches are so different from the way in which Jesus had the apostles establish them, and examine the main historical influences which overruled the authority of the New Testament and became the Christian Church's ultimate authority. The contents of this section will amaze you!
We really have a big question before us now, don't we? After all, if what I am saying is in accordance with the New Testament - and as I have demonstrated, no scholar of note would suggest it isn't - then why are churches set up so completely differently from how the apostles established them to be? And not just churches today either, or even churches at certain epochs of history, it's churches from virtually the first century and the death of the apostles onwards. We must understand what caused the changes, and why; although it isn't actually a what at all, but rather a question of who! So allow me to introduce you to the Early Church Fathers.
This term is generally used by church historians to refer to the men who were the most influential of the leaders amongst Christian churches for the first two or three centuries after the original apostles died. It was these guys who held the fort against heresy and false teachings concerning the very nature and means of salvation, and some of them did so at the cost of being eventually martyred. They defended and preserved the truth of the deity of both Jesus and the Holy Spirit, and through their leadership and influence the Christian gospel was preserved and propagated at a time when it was arguably at it's most vulnerable.
In this respect they were quite clearly the good guys, so why am I labeling them the bad guys in regards to the issue of what churches ought to be like? Well, it's because they threw a spanner in the works and messed that side of things up really quite appallingly. They introduced teachings and practices that not only didn't conform to the New Testament, but actually went directly against it, and with a vengeance too!
We must understand as well though that, unlike ourselves today, they didn't have the New Testament to tuck under their arms and constantly refer to. They couldn't give people systematic teaching from the entire Word of God because they didn't have the entire Word of God from which to have a systematic understanding themselves, let alone pass on to others. Throughout the years that they led churches and taught and discipled new converts, the New Testament only existed - though in it's entirety - in the form of various letters and documents spread out all over the place. Only in the third and fourth centuries could it be said to have been compiled into one volume, and therefore available in the way we understand today. That was a very great handicap for them, and I reckon they did pretty well considering.
We must, however, be somewhat more strident in our censure of those leaders who followed on from them once the New Testament was fully compiled and available. They should have seen how far the church had departed in it's set up and practice from what the Lord had originally intended and made clear in His Word, and they should have made the appropriate changes. We will be seeing why this was such a hard thing for them to do, but they should nevertheless have given final place to the teaching of Jesus and His apostles in the New Testament, and not, as they did, to the Early Church Fathers. Rather than test the legacy of the Fathers in the light of the Word of God, they argued instead that you could only really understand the New Testament properly in the light of the teaching of the Fathers, and that they were the key to understanding it. This is the outrageous error of judgement that has haunted the Christian Church ever since. Here we have the mistake, and a mistake of almost unimaginable significance and import, that changed the way things should have been virtually beyond recognition.
So come with me on a journey through some of the developing teachings and practices of men who loved the Lord and suffered greatly for Him, but who nevertheless got some of the most important New Testament truths about the Christian Church totally and utterly wrong. We are not here dealing with what one might think of as sideways steps, or with small and unimportant moves away from what should have been. No! We are rather going to see a wholesale departure from biblical truth, and one which resulted in churches not merely being different from what Jesus wanted, but virtually the opposite, the very antithesis, of what He had intended!
We come now to the heart of the problem - the error and false teaching concerning the Christian Church handed down to us by the Early Church Fathers!
The Early Church Fathers - The Heart of the Problem!
He was one of the early leaders of the church in Rome. He wrote a letter to the Corinthian Church, as Paul had once done, about AD 95, and we shall be having a look at it. He died in AD 100.
Ignatius - Bishop of Antioch.
He wrote 7 letters to different churches, some of which we will refer to, whilst traveling to Rome to be eventually martyred around AD 110.
This guy wasn't a church leader in quite the same way some of the others were, but was rather an apologist and philosopher, the C S Lewis of his day, so to speak. He was martyred in Rome around AD 165.
Irenaeus studied under Polycarp, the famous Bishop of Smyrna, and himself became Bishop of Lyons in France in AD 177.
We here have another apologist/philosopher, and he was converted in AD 193. His many writings date from AD 196-212. He lived in Carthage in Africa.
He lived in the same place as Tertullian but some years later. He became a Christian in AD 246 and was made Bishop there within two years.
We are going to concentrate on various of their wrong teachings, but must start with a detailed look at what was their first and most serious one. I tend to think of it as being what I call their foundational error, the seed-bed, so to speak, from which other false teachings and practices inevitably grew and flourished. The fact is that the Early Church Fathers developed an increasingly wrong understanding of the nature of the government and leadership of the Christian Church, and it was this that led to the eventual redefining and transformation of the very nature of the Christian Church itself.
"The high priest has been given his own special services, the priests have been assigned their own place, and the Levites have their special ministrations enjoined on them. The layman is bound by the ordinances of the laity."
"Your REVEREND presbytery is tuned to the Bishop as strings to a lyre...Let us be careful not to resist the Bishop, that through our submission to the Bishop we may belong to God...We should regard the Bishop as the Lord Himself..."
"I advise you to always act in godly concord with the Bishop, presiding as the counterpart of God, and the presbyters as the counterpart of the council of the Apostles...As the Lord did nothing without the Father, either by Himself or by means of the Apostles, so you must do nothing without the Bishop and the presbyters."
"...respect the Bishop as the counterpart of the Father, and the presbyters as the council of God and the college of the Apostles: without those no church is recognized."
"Let no-one do anything that pertains to the church apart from the Bishop...it is not permitted to baptize or hold a love-feast independently of the Bishop. But whatever he approves, that is also well pleasing to God."
"The supreme priest (that is the Bishop) has the right of conferring baptism: after him the presbyters and deacons, but only with the Bishop's authority. Otherwise the laity also have the right...how much more is the discipline of reverence and humility incumbent upon laymen (since it also befits their superiors)...It would be idle for us to suppose that what is forbidden to PRIESTS is allowed to the laity. The distinction between the order of clergy and the people has been established by the authority of the Church."
Ninety more years have passed and we now have a full-blown priesthood under a Bishop with the priests being seen as the superiors of the mere laity, and the Bishop being regarded as supreme. These guys now claim the authority to sanction their own system and are, in effect, beyond question or challenge.
Cyprian - Bishop of Carthage AD 250.
"If Christ Jesus our Lord and God is Himself the High Priest of God the Father, and first offered Himself as a sacrifice to the Father, and commanded this to be done in remembrance of Himself, then assuredly the priest acts truly in Christ's place when he reproduces what Christ did, and he then offers a true and complete sacrifice to God the Father, if he begins to offer as he sees Christ Himself has offered."
What was to eventually become the full-blown Catholic Mass is here in germinal form as early as AD 250. The supremacy of the Bishop eventually gave way to an even more complex priestly hierarchy culminating in the Bishop of Bishops, the Pope!
And so we see how the Early Church Fathers took the Christian Church from being a proliferation of little localized extended families and made it instead into a worldwide hierarchical religious corporation. It is quite evident too how this first error, what I've called their foundational one, made it inevitable that more were soon to follow. Their wrong teaching about the nature of the leadership and government of the church gave leaders, now Priests and Bishops, such authority that whatever else they ended up teaching was accepted virtually automatically. It was indeed a seed-bed in which grew other plants of error and deception to which we will turn our attention in the next article.
A question arises here though, and it is simply this: How on earth did they get away with it? We here have people who redefined and changed the very nature and essence of the Christian Church, and turned it into something utterly foreign to, and totally at variance with, the teaching of Jesus and the apostles. So just how do you do something that monumentally and seriously mistaken and get away with it? The answer is that they claimed to have a theological justification for it, and introduced a concept that came to be known as the doctrine of the Apostolic Succession.
"The Apostles have received the gospel for us from the Lord Jesus Christ. Christ was sent forth by God and the Apostles by Christ. Both these appointments were made in an orderly way according to the will of God...The Apostles appointed the first-fruits of their labors to be bishops and deacons for those who would believe."
We remind ourselves here as well that, by bishop, the apostles and the Fathers meant completely different things. To the apostles it was simply one of the words used to describe the function of an elder (pastor or shepherd), whilst to the Fathers it was denoted a high ranking position in an ecclesiastical and organizational hierarchy.
"By knowledge of the truth we mean: the teaching of the Apostles: the order of the church as established from the earliest times throughout the world: the distinctive stamp of the Body of Christ preserved through the episcopal (bishops) succession: for to the Bishops the Apostles committed the care of the church which is in each place, which has come down to our time, safeguarded without any written documents."
"Therefore we should be careful to observe and keep the procedure we received from the Divine Tradition, and from the practice of the Apostles which is kept among us."
The argument basically goes like this: God sent Jesus and Jesus sent the apostles; therefore the apostles were divinely inspired and authoritative. (Thus far the argument is sound and in keeping with the Word of God.) The apostles then sent the leaders who came after them (i.e. the Fathers), therefore the Fathers were inspired just like the apostles. And that, of course, didn't necessarily follow in the slightest. God's plan was to eventually have a written record of the teaching of Jesus and the apostles, the New Testament, as the yardstick for what was inspired and true, not the teaching of the Early Church Fathers.
Once it was eventually realized that this New Testament, this written record of the teaching of Jesus and the apostles, was at variance with the way things had turned out under the Fathers, the decision should have been made to make the necessary changes to anything that didn't square with it. Everything should have been tested by, and in the light of, this newly and wonderfully available inspired document containing all that they needed to know. But things didn't quite work out that way. Instead, the then leaders of the religious organization that was the Christian Church decided that the New Testament was rather to be interpreted in the light of the teaching of the Early Church Fathers. And I wonder if here we have the reason why the blatantly right course of action to take, testing everything by the New Testament, proved too difficult for them. I wonder if the fact of the matter is simply that the power, prestige, and authority vested in the position church leaders were by then so used to exercising was just too much for them to give up. Could it be that the corrupting influence of that power had just gone too deep for too long? I rather think so! Ironically, all the dangers the teaching of the New Testament concerning leaders was designed to help avoid, happened. None of the safety features built in to the specifications given in the Word of God were there to come into play, for the specifications were now changed beyond recognition, and the accidents happened and the damage was done again and again and again. Against all the counsel of the teaching of Jesus and the apostles too much power was given to individuals, and the result was inevitably the emergence of spiritual pride and arrogance, the perfect climate in which deception and error naturally flourish. Church leadership, a function of servant hood, was transformed into a position, and one of spiritual prestige and hierarchical power to boot!
Let's remind ourselves again how the apostles (and they got their ideas straight from Jesus Himself) understood church leadership. They set churches up to be led, consensually wherever possible, by plural, male, co-equal, non-hierarchical, home grown elders, referred to also as bishops or overseers, and pastors or shepherds. They performed a function without holding a position, and did so within the context of a small group of believers sharing their lives together as an extended family, meeting in each others homes. The Early Church Fathers could not have actually got it more wrong, and the challenge for us today is to actually start getting it right again.
Let's be clear too that although priesthood and clericalism are the extreme form of all this, it is not only churches that practice leadership by priesthood which are in error. The essence of the wrong teaching introduced by the Fathers was hierarchy and institutionalism, priesthood just happened to be the form it took. Whether you have the Catholics and Anglicans at one end of the spectrum, or Baptists and Pentecostals at the other with churches led by a 'Pastor' or 'Minister' who is not only imported and in charge, but usually titled and referred to as Rev. So and So, the error is exactly the same. The nature of the church, with all the unbiblical rigmarole of led services and religious buildings, and all the trappings of institutionalism, is still fundamentally and wrongly changed. Indeed, many so-called 'house churches' with their 'pyramid structures' and 'senior elders', all considered to be under the authority of some hierarchically positioned 'apostle', are still just another variation on the same old erroneous theme. As we will see again and again, the issue is not actually how far down the wrong road any church is regarding these things, it's that any church is on the wrong road in the first place. It's the right road we need to be on, and nothing less will do. Whether it's Priest, Pastor or Senior Elder, or whatever other variations there might be, it's still not what the New Testament teaches and is the traditions of men making void the Word of God.
Can you see the problem? It sums up everything I'm saying! If you are committed to both the teaching of the Bible and the Early Church Fathers, which do you go by should you find they don't agree? (And no scholar would claim that they do agree, they very blatantly do not.) I say we should go by the New Testament. For the last 1900 years the Christian Church has been saying we should go by the Early Church Fathers. What do you say?
"The name Lord's Supper, though legitimately derived from 1 Corinthians 11:20, is not there applied to the sacrament itself, but to the Love Feast or Agape, a meal commemorating the Last Supper, and not yet separated from the Eucharist when St. Paul wrote."
"Of official Christian priests we must honestly admit that there is in the New Testament not the faintest whisper."
Under heading for "Bishop (Overseer):"
"Lit: an overseer...". Note: Presbuteros, an elder, is another term for the same person as bishop or overseer."
"...this was the service committed to elders (overseers or bishops)..."
So I rest my case! None of this is merely my own interpretation of the Bible. This is what the scholars are fully agreed on because it is what the Bible unmistakably shows us. Incredible though it may seem, there is no dispute among scholars as to how churches were established, or how they operated and functioned. I could fill books with similar quotes from many other equally eminent experts. The apostles quite simply set churches up to be the same, and this apostolic blueprint, this shape that churches in the New Testament took, was uniform. You don't have to take my word on it, just read the Bible and check it out with the scholars.
So why are things not like this any more? Why is it virtually impossible to find a church like those we see in the pages of the New Testament? If the apostles did things a certain way when it came to planting churches, then why do Christians almost universally do it differently, and for pretty much the last 1900 years as well?