Transcript

Welcome back to Shameless Popery!

I'm Joe Heschmeyer.

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 sometimes called church polity.

So the question—there are a lot of different possible answers to it—but broadly speaking, we could phrase the question like this: In the local Church, do you have a three-tiered structure of governance?

Do 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, terminologically, I know some people watching this are saying we don't call our middle tier elders; we call them presbyters, or we call them priests.

All of that is coming from the same root.

The Greek word for elder, presbyteros, is where we get the word presbyter.

That becomes prester in slangy vulgar Latin, and from prester, it becomes priest.

There are 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—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, at the city level, should there be one bishop running that, as you'll see among Catholics, Orthodox, and Anglicans?

Or should there be a co-ruling presbytery?

This is where 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 biblical evidence?

I want to actually start here with Todd Friel being asked this question.

Now, I know some of you really don't like Todd Friel.

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.

So, 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?

Right?

So here he is: there's a little bit of wiggle room that is in the Bible because there isn't a ton of clear direction about how a church should be led.

But I do believe there is enough clarity.

So, one of the things that should immediately jump out if you try to answer this question biblically is that there is no place in the Bible that just says, Okay, you're building a church from scratch; here are all of the offices.

Presbyter and bishop mean the same thing; they mean different things.

That question is just never directly answered.

We see both terms used, but we're never told that they're the same or different offices.

There are plenty of other things that are kind of referred to in passing, and we're 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.

Here, I point to the fact that the offices in question are bishop, which just means overseer; presbyter, which means elder; and deacon, which means servant.

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 diakonos in the sense of servant, not in the sense of deacon.

Likewise, in Ephesians 3, verse 7, St. Paul says that he himself was made a minister or a deacon.

In 1 Timothy 4, 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.

Then, controversially, in Romans 16, he refers to a woman named Phoebe as a deacon or deaconess, or minister, or servant—the diakonos.

So the question is: Are any of those people deacons, or is something else being said there?

The general read of those passages—I know especially the last one is controversial—but the general read for 2,000 years has been that none of those are intended to refer to the office of deacon; it's 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 a deacon, 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 6, 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.

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 that the words are sometimes used in a confusing and sometimes even potentially misleading sort of way.

Let's talk about presbyter now because in 1 Peter 5, St. Peter, who unambiguously is an apostle, exhorts the elders while declaring himself a fellow elder—simply presbyteros.

He's obviously doing this for rhetorical effect, like he's getting down on their level and saying, Hey, you know, as co-workers, 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 presbyter.

But we know he's more than that.

In 1 Timothy, now, 1 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 1 Timothy 5, my point there is that the mere fact that a term is used doesn't immediately solve the question we're asking.

We're not asking about the usage of episcopos, presbyteros, diakonos; we're asking whether the office of bishop, elders, deacons, or bishop, presbyters, deacons, or bishop, priests, deacons—however you want to describe that three-fold office—we're asking if that three-fold 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 Friel 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 the 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 right, and if the people writing to them are their 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 U.S. 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.

You have passages 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 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 right.

When there are things that the Church is getting wrong—like 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, right?

They're handling, especially Paul, this is true of him—he's handling questions as they come up.

So if people are getting the question of the Church right, there's no need to write a treatise on the nature of the Church and what the offices look like because that part's not in dispute.

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 that rather than this being kind of our ability to go in different directions because 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.

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.

Paul instructed Timothy to put elders in place in every Church, not one guy making decisions for everybody.

I don't see—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 to 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.

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 twelve apostles, those aren't the twelve 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 of things right.

He gets right, for instance, that there is no mandate for a democracy in the New Testament.

Like, 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 you know 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, Friel'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 it.

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 1:5, what passage we're going to 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 1 Timothy 3 about the office of bishop.

He talks about the criteria of a bishop.

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 deacon is just elders and deacons.

The other view is going to say, Well, it's striking that he says deacons in the plural but a bishop in the 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.

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 in different passages in the New Testament.

For instance, Jesus says, Many are called, but few are 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 few are 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 theologies.

Well, likewise, when we're talking about the Church, it's not a good enough argument to say sometimes episcopos and presbyteros 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, there are 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?

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—listen to the way that, well, 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 3 of chapter 1, 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 in Ephesus who have teaching authority, and then Timothy has the role of enforcing orthodoxy, making sure nobody is preaching heresy.

There are several chapters; chapter 2 is about prayer, chapter 3 is about what to look for in a bishop or in deacons, and then chapter 4, after giving a bunch of commands, he says, Command and teach these things.

So he's got an authority of command, an authority of teaching, and he says, Let no one despise your youth.

So notice he's not a presbyteros in the literal sense of an older man; he's not an elder in that sense, but he is in the position that he is commanding elders.

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.

1 Timothy 4, verse 14 says 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 are two ways of reading that passage.

One way is that this is a charismatic gift; they laid hands on him, and they started speaking in tongues, that sort of thing is happening.

The other reading—and I think the older and stronger reading—is that 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 1 Timothy 4:14 is given by the fellow elders.

In 2 Timothy 1, 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 1 Timothy, now we're up to 1 Timothy 5. In 1 Timothy 5, 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 two biblical passages.

One of them very clearly states, The laborer deserves his wages.

The other one may be less clear to us: You shall not muzzle an 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.

Strikingly, apparently the purse 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 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 co-ruling 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's adjudicating when charges are brought against them.

He's the one whom 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 verses 21 to 22, he's reminded not to be hasty in 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 in 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 this 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?

Like, 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, this is just one Church—this is just Ephesus.

Let's jump over to Crete, the isle of Crete, and there we find a very similar situation with Titus.

As you can read in the letter to Titus, St. Paul tells him that he left him in Crete, quote, that you might amend what was defective and appoint elders in every town as I directed you, end quote.

So again, he has the power to decide who does and doesn't get appointed.

It's not grassroots; it's not bottom-up.

It's Titus going around the island figuring out in every town who should be the elders in that town.

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 2 and into 3, at the very end of chapter 2 and into chapter 3, he says, Declare, St. Paul says to him, declare these things; exhort and reprove with all authority.

So he's being set up in a position of authority.

He's told to exhort and reprove with all authority and not to let others just disregard him and his authority.

He's not just presented as a good model; you know, 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.

In Titus 3:10 to 11, he says, As for a man who is 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 are seven churches that are mentioned in Revelation.

John is traditionally understood to be already in exile at this time on the isle of Patmos, which is just off the coast of modern-day Turkey.

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 2, verse 1, it says, To the angel of the church in Ephesus write.

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 100s, been identified with Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John—the four Gospels.

There's a lot of stuff going on, which understandably causes a lot of Christians to 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 Hemmer, a disciple of D.A. Carson, has a book called The Letters to the Seven Churches of Asia and Their Local Settings.

Hemmer, who is 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 just as bishops.

Those are the two common views, Hemmer says.

But he also mentions three additional views.

So view number three is that the angels are just personifications of the churches.

Number four, that they're literally human messengers.

Or number five, we kind of shrug our shoulders and say it's too hard to tell.

So the five candidates for how we read Revelation 2 and 3 are that these are seven letters being written, or seven admonitions, encouragements, 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 just can't determine a clear meaning.

Let's work through this list.

I think we can cross off some of these candidates.

In the context of the Book of Revelation, at the end of Revelation 1, right before this bit in Revelation 2 and 3, there's an image of seven stars and seven golden lampstands.

Revelation 1:20 explains this image: the seven stars are the angels of the seven churches, and the seven lampstands are the seven churches.

So again, there's 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 are two different images used, and they're clearly distinguished as two different symbolically represented groups in Revelation 1:20. So we can take that third option off the list: they're not the churches themselves; the churches are the lampstands, not the stars.

We can also take, it seems to me, the first option off the list—that these are literally writings to angels.

In fact, I find this one kind of strange because many of the people who identify this, like many people, don't want to read this as letters to seven bishops of local churches because they don't like the idea that the early Church had bishops in biblical times and that this was approved by Jesus.

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 a broad brush here, but what you often see from the same people who claim that Revelation 2-3 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 that the letters don't make sense if they're written literally to angels.

For example, in Revelation 3:14-16, the angel of the church of Laodicea is warned about his spiritual lukewarmness.

Jesus says 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 lazing about.

Moreover, you have in the case of 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 is about to throw some of you into prison.

Well, how are they going to throw an angel?

Who's arresting an angel?

And why would an angel be afraid of being arrested?

None of that makes sense.

So I would suggest that Revelation 2-3 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're 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; 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.

For instance, in Hebrew, the word is malak.

The angel of the Lord, the malak of the Lord in Genesis 16:9, is one of the ways you hear angels referred to.

Well, in Malachi 2, verse 7, we're told, For the lips of a priest should guard knowledge, and men should seek instruction from his mouth, for he is the malak of the Lord of hosts.

He is 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, malaks, or angels.

That doesn't mean that they have wings or a mental image of angels, but they are literally messengers.

Angel is a description of a job.

And so, as a malak, as an angel, they are messengers.

Likewise, in Ecclesiastes 5, when it talks about making rash vows 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 malak that it was a mistake.

The malak 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 rashly 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, Hemmer 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 that can most easily be criticized.

Now, that should raise at least a couple of 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.

Like, this argument is just factually wrong.

In Hebrews 13:17, we're told to obey our leaders and submit to them, for they are keeping watch over your souls as men who will have to give account.

Like, it's right there: your leaders—and this is clearly talking about the leaders in the Church—they're keeping watch over your souls.

They're not political leaders; the leaders in the Church we are required to obey and submit to, and they're keeping watch over our souls as men who will have to give account.

If they lead poorly, they will face serious consequences.

So the idea that 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, but I mentioned Crete and Ephesus.

Ephesus is one of those seven churches in Asia Minor, so we already know one of those clearly has one bishop, one leader of that entire church that reports to him, 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 unambiguous evidence for the idea of episcopal authority.

There clearly is.

I'm not sure unambiguous is the standard that is going to be the best to argue for.

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 whom the other elders are accountable to, because we see that all around 1 Timothy.

So at least one of the seven churches of Revelation does 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.

They either are the seven angels or they aren't. You can't use the fact that there's not another passage to dismiss the theory; I mean, it just doesn't make sense.

All right, but then he acknowledges that it looms large for Ignatius 20 years later.

In other words, let me read that whole passage.

He says what he means there is when St. Ignatius is writing about the year 107 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: 1 Timothy, Revelation 2-3, and the writings of St. Ignatius to the Ephesians—all very early, 107 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 other way.

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 have 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 want 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 to 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 you know, just like with Friel finding wiggle room, you have this idea Morris presents that, like, oh, nobody's right; like there's no right answer to this question.

None of our churches are biblical in origin, and I think we can do better.

I think the evidence points to something clearly better.

One of the reasons I say that is an argument—or a couple of arguments—that Morris makes himself.

He says the same threefold ministry, which is the 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; this is true of the evidence outside of the New Testament from the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd centuries.

There are 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 and plausibly read them 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' point in the Evangelical Dictionary of Theology, and he's absolutely right.

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 of examples of that because I don't want to belabor it.

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, so 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 did 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 St. Ignatius.

Ignatius, who’s writing around 107, so maybe 20 years after the Book of Revelation, or maybe a little less than that, makes it incredibly clear that there’s a threefold structure of every Church.

He’s going to tell you that, and it’s not just that he’s going to say there’s a threefold structure; he’s going to give specifics.

For example, when he’s writing to the Church in Magnesia, he greets Damas, their most worthy bishop.

He greets your worthy presbyters, Bassus and Apollonius, and he greets his fellow servant, the deacon Sodius.

I mention 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.

So he’s not just talking about it as a theoretical idea; he’s saying it very concretely.

Contrast this with when people say the early Church just had a co-ruling panel of presbyter-bishops.

Ask them what Church and what were the names of the co-ruling elders, and they never have clear evidence of here are two guys who were co-ruling at the same time and acknowledged it.

The level of specificity you just heard in Ignatius' writing, where he names names and says here’s exactly who it is, you don’t have that from the people who are saying, “Oh no, no, it’s actually just a two-fold office.”

That is a pretty wild difference in the kind of evidentiary burden that Ignatius is presenting: unambiguous naming names, clear evidence, and the people who disagree with Ignatius are always just vaguely saying sometime, someplace, somewhere, somebody, but not really giving you any specifics.

And I mean, 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 revere 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 and 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 am persuaded that you are 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.

This is part of the DNA of a 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 conversations because Protestants will refer to the churches—like all these different denominations—and Catholics often have this uneasy feeling that they don't acknowledge what you have as a Church.

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 gathering however they want to.

Like, if you've got a Bible study at work, that's not a Church.

That's great; it's good, and we're not knocking it, but that's not what a Church is.

Church means something more than that, and one of the things it means is this threefold ministry of bishop, presbyter, and deacon.

That is coming from Ignatius of Antioch, believed to be a student of the disciple John, around 107. Now, Ignatius is only one among many, but because he’s so famous on this topic, because he’s so early, and 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, Oh, the fact that Ignatius is writing about it proves there’s a controversy.

I get that; I mean, I just used 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 in Ephesus—“I am persuaded that you are 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 is 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.

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 100s.

Most, if not all, of those records are gone now, but nevertheless, they refer to them; they talk about them.

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 2 Timothy, St. Paul warns Timothy that the time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching but will have itching ears, accumulating for themselves teachers to suit 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.

Like, the time is coming in the future, right?

When people are going to leave orthodoxy for heresy.

So one of the oldest arguments against heresy is antiquity—by just showing our teaching is older than yours, our Church is older than yours, and that’s a clear sign that you’re the people that St. Paul was warning about in 2 Timothy.

Because if you could show that you go back 2,000 years, that would be a pretty strong bit of evidence.

If you can’t do that, it looks like you’re the people he warned about when he said the time is coming, meaning in the future.

So if you’re holding on to a 2,000-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 2,000 years ago for them; it was like 100 years ago for them.

For instance, St. Irenaeus, writing about 180, makes this point very clearly in Against Heresies, Book 3. 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 of anything like what these heretics rave about.”

In other words, he’s saying, “Okay, everybody, this is in the 100s now.

You can look to your 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, a massive early Christian fraud, that every Church is lying about its own history—every local Church created by the apostles is lying about who its 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 Irenaeus who points this out; Tertullian, around the year 200, talks about it.

This is a great argument against heresy.

He says if any of these heresies or heretics are bold enough to plant themselves in the midst of the apostolic 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 unfold the roll 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, showing that, as Tertullian explains, their first bishop was someone who was either one of the apostles or an apostolic man—a man who continued 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.

He explains this is the manner in which the apostolic churches transmit their registers, and he gives examples like the Church of Smyrna, which records that Polycarp was placed there by John.

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.

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 100s are apparently lying.

We’ll get into that in a second.

And it’s not, again, just like one or two.

Margaret Miles, in The Word Made Flesh: A History of Christian Thought, points out that we have lists.

Most of the physical evidence is now gone because 98% of papyrus is believed to have been destroyed just because of conditions over the last 2,000 years.

But in places that are really warm and dry, papyrus has a better lifespan.

So in North Africa, one of the few places for which evidence exists, we still have lists of hundreds of 3rd-century bishops.

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 that could trace back who did found them and kind of 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, you know, might be a little town or 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 that by sometime in the 100s at the latest, every Christian that we find is part of a Church that has this threefold structure.

There may be some really radical fringe exceptions to that, but we clearly see across Christianity the bishop, presbyter, deacon structure in Jerusalem, in Rome, in the big towns, in the little towns—wherever we look, we find this same thing.

Moreover, they’re claiming that they didn’t just invent it; they’re claiming they got it from the apostles.

This suggests to me that there are three ways we could account for that evidence, and we’ll call them faithfulness, deviation, and free-for-all.

The faithful option is that the reason the churches all look the same in the 100s is because that’s what Jesus established.

That Jesus and the apostles established churches with a threefold structure when they were 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 and the apostles established a Church—or churches, I should say—with a different structure, like a two-fold one.

They wanted co-ruling presbyters, but then the early churches changed it one after another, after another—hundreds of examples—all of these churches rebelled against the thing that had been given by Jesus and the apostles in favor of having one bishop instead of co-ruling presbyters.

The third option is that it was kind of a free-for-all.

Jesus and the apostles didn’t set up any particular kind of structure.

This is, you know, very much the idea of wiggle room—there’s no right answer; everybody can just do their own thing because 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 the opposite theories—two and three—don’t seem plausible to me.

Like, when St. Ignatius is saying that you have to have the threefold structure to even be called a 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 what 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 in open rebellion against John and the other apostles.

We also just don’t see any evidence of that.

Here’s what I mean by that: Stagemann, 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 that in the early 100s, 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 100s—the latter form, monarchial episcopacy, i.e., 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 that the threefold model has won.

So that’s kind of striking; that seems to be either a view 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?

Like in the world of Protestantism, say, if you’re going to say everybody’s free to design a Church however they 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 two-fold structure; he wanted co-ruling presbyters and deacons—that’s it.

Number two, something happens—what, how, who knows?

Just something happens—which leads to number three: the Christians decide instead upon a three-fold 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.

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 and the apostles wanted co-ruling bishops—multiple bishops in a single Church—and yet somehow none of the early Christians seem 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, but that he actually had authority over the presbyters.

And that 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 and episcopos as interchangeable.”

You’re saying something much bigger and much stranger about history.

So that second step—the 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 two-fold 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 in Stagemann’s theory, he doesn’t even really spell out, at least in this presentation of the claim, kind of what that second step is.

They were just told, like, originally there were different models, and then one model won.

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.”

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, All right, 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 McGregor 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 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-leaning Baptists and Calvinist-leaning 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.

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 kinds of schisms.

McGregor then says, “Well, is it possible 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?”

Like, show me any of the faults.

Number one, give me the names of some of these co-ruling presbyters because you 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 existed in theory, but here it is in practice.

Here are 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 co-ruling leaders.

Number two, you could show here’s when they switched; here’s why.

Rather than just making up a story about maybe 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 exists because I would suggest the deviation theory and the free-for-all theory are fiction.

They’re just not true.

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.

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 things; 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, right?

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, so 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 is one flesh of our Lord Jesus Christ, one cup to show forth the unity of his blood, one altar, one bishop.

This is showing ultimately, I think he’s arguing, the oneness of God.

Just like we don’t believe in polytheism—the co-ruling 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 sort of the pragmatic thing, Friel, 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 spiritual authority.

So I want to give you this as kind of a final real clip that I’m largely going to agree with.

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 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.

The 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.

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 co-equal; 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 he 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 Christianity and Scripture, going all the way back to the Old Testament.

Like, remember, the Kingdom of God is what Jesus comes proclaiming.

In the Gospel of Mark, it opens up with Jesus saying, “Repent, and 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, like King David.

It wasn’t a co-ruling panel of elders of Israel.

It’s true there were elders, right?

Like 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 co-ruling elders; there’s always one person—whether it’s the high priest or the king, whatever context we’re dealing with, the judges in the Old Testament—there’s always someone who is ultimately spiritually responsible for what happens.

And as Todd Friel points out, this is the root of why we believe in male headship in 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.

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 questions 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 as a separate topic.

For Shameless Popery, I’m Joe Heschmeyer.

God bless you.