Transcript

Welcome back to Shameless Potpourri.

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 something that's called church polity.

So the question, there's a lot of different possible answers to it, but broadly speaking, we could say the question like this.

In the local church, do you have a three-tiered structure of governance, where you have bishops and then you have elders and then you have deacons?

Or do you just have a two-tiered structure of governance in which elders and bishops are the same thing?

Now, you'll find variations on that.

I don't mean to suggest this is an exhaustive overview of all of the different ways you could read the biblical evidence.

I do mean to suggest that these are two of the biggest, uh, 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.

So the Greek word, uh, for elder, presbus, is where we get the word presbyter, that becomes prester in slangy, vulgar Latin, and from prester, it becomes priest.

There's bigger theological issues that we could talk about there, whether we think of this as a priestly authority or not.

But I'm gonna actually leave that pretty consciously aside just to focus the question on do we have above that middle tier, whatever you call it, priest, presbyter, elder, is there an office above that of bishop or are elders and bishops the same thing?

So should the church be run, again, at the local-ish level, so one church per city, uh, 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, Anglicans, or should there be a co-ruling presbytery?

This is Presbyterians, obviously, fall into this, but plenty of other Protestant denominations lean towards that.

You'll get variations on that as well.

So that's kind of the nature of the question.

What do we see in terms of biblical evidence?

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

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

I'm gonna 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 gonna 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 directions about how a church should be led, but I do believe there is enough.

Great.

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

Here's all of the offices.

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

That question is just never directly answered.

We see both terms used.

We're never told if they're the same or different office.

Uh, there's 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 gonna get into why that is in a second.

But I wanna 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 wanna double down on the fact that the New Testament is not as clear as people might like.

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

And what makes this complicated or more complicated is the fact that all three of those Greek words, we hear bishop, presbyter, deacon, and immediately think of church office.

But overseer, elder, and servant are all used in a variety of ways in the New Testament, not always referring to a church office at all.

Here's what I mean by that.

Let's start with deacon.

In Romans 15, St. Paul says that Christ became a deacon.

He says Christ became a servant.

Now, most English translations are gonna 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 3:7, St. Paul says that he himself was made a, a minister or a deacon.

In First 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.

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

And so the question is, are any of those people deacons or is something else being s- said there?

And the general read of those passages, I know especially the last one is controversial, but the general read for 2,000 years has been 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 gonna look at, but he's got the ability to lay down instructions for the elders.

He's clearly not deacons, which are below elders.

So all of those cases are ones where the word deacon is being used, but the office of deacon doesn't appear to be in view.

On the other hand, in Acts chapter 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, uh, to serve at table, to aid in the ministry of the apostles.

But here's the thing.

Even though these are pretty clearly seven deacons, they're never actually called that in the text.

So here you have the office of deacon, but not the word deacon.

So I'm mentioning this because we're not asking about the words.

We're asking about the offices.

Are there two offices or three?

And what makes it more confusing is the words are sometimes used in a confusing and sometimes even potentially misleading sort of way.

Let's talk about presbyter now.

Because in First Peter Five, St. Peter, who un- unambiguously is an apostle, exhorts the elders while declaring himself a fellow elder, ʿanē presbuteros.

He's obviously doing this for rhetorical effect.

Like he's, uh, he's getting down on their level and saying, Hey, you know, as coworkers, like a boss doing that, 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 First Timothy, now First Timothy's confusing 'cause it actually uses the term presbyter to refer to elders.

But it also uses it just to refer to old people in First Timothy Five.

My point there is, the mere fact that a term is used doesn't immediately solve the question.

We're asking not about the usage of episkopos, presbuteros, diakonos.

We're asking whether the office of bishop, elders, deacons, or bishop, presbyters, deacons, bishop, priests, deacon, however you wanna describe that, that threefold office.

We're asking if that threefold office is there, not if the words are just really clearly there.

Because the words, I think by any reasonable interpretation, are sometimes kinda confusing.

So let's get back to that puzzle piece thing I said before.

Because I think Todd Freely's right, that Christ doesn't give us any clear instructions and nowhere in the New Testament do we get any very clear instructions.

But I think he's wrong in his conclusion he draws from that.

I don't think this is to give us wiggle room.

I don't think this is to say, Go build your own denomination, do whatever you see fit.

No, I think it's because of an opposite reason.

We're not given building instructions to create the church because Jesus had already done that.

So if the early Christians are getting the question of church 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 US Constitution, you have building instructions for the three tiers of the federal government, the executive branch, the legislative branch, the judicial branch.

What you don't have are any descriptions or even references to state governors.

State governors at the time were well-established.

You didn't need to include them in the Constitution because they already existed.

So I would suggest that's what's going on here, that you have 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 gonna get back to this pas- or this book a lot, that if he's delayed, Timothy can know how to behave in the household of God, which is the Church of the living God, the pillar and bulwark of the truth.

In other words, I think all of this points to the fact that the early church was getting the question of church 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, like, 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, he's handling questions as they come up.

And 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, right?

Like you, you'd write about the things that are controversial.

And that's true of the apostles as much as it is today.

So I mention that at the outset to say rather than this being kind of our ability to go in different directions 'cause Jesus gave us wiggle room, I think that completely misreads the evidence.

The New Testament is written to people who are already members of the church.

And so what we should do is figure out what the church meant to those people, because the fact that there's not a New Testament corrective seems to be a confirmation that things are going well.

Because if they're getting the church wrong, it's weird that nobody's telling them they're getting it wrong.

Okay, let's go back to Freel.

Paul instructed Timothy, 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, I, I don't see us being given that right in the Bible.

Instead, I see that Paul instructs Timothy put a number of elders who are more spiritually mature than anybody else in the congregation, and they make decisions for them because they presumably know better than the body.

So again, I wanna 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.

M- For one, this is apparently a male-only office.

And I'm not ready to say the holiest person in every local church is gonna be a man.I also don't think the holiest person in every context is gonna be the leader.

That's not how Christian leadership often works.

If you were to look at the 12 apostles, those aren't the 12 holiest followers of Jesus.

If you were to tell me Judas Iscariot on the one hand and Mary of Bethany on the other, one of them is called to a position of leadership, one isn't, but it's not the one who's holier.

So I think that part is a misreading.

But I think he gets a couple things right.

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

Like, we have this bias that democracy is the best and we wanna impose democracy upon Christianity.

Um, 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, Freel's making a, 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, 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.

'Cause 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 gonna be wrong, but I wanna make sure I understand it right.

In Acts 14, Paul and Barnabas appoint elders in every church, uh, 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 gonna get back to, Paul tells Titus, not Timothy, uh, 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, uh, about elders.

He also has a passage in First Timothy 3 about the office of bishop, and he talks about the criteria of a bishop.

And it's, I'll get into that in a second.

'Cause 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 gonna say, Aha, he doesn't mention elders.

So clearly, bishop and deacon is just elders and deacons.

The other view is gonna say, Well, it's striking that he says deacons plural, but a bishop singular.

But I think there's another way of cracking this nut, 'cause remember, we're not debating the words, we're debating the offices.

And it's possible that the offices get called things a little more loosely in the early church.

So for instance, if we were talking about the idea of divine election, that word for election or calling is used in different ways 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 theology.

Well, likewise, when we're talking about the church, it's not a good enough argument to say sometimes episkopos and presbuteros 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 have deacons.

There are also clearly elders, 'cause they're gonna get mentioned a lot.

And the question we have is, is there anybody above the level of elder?

And to answer that question, I would say pay close attention to what Paul says, because there's a, a candidate for that who's almost so obvious we can overlook him.

It's almost like, uh, 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, w- 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 three of chapter one telling him to, Remain at Ephesus, that you may charge certain persons not to teach any different doctrine.

So you've got people in the church in Ephesus who have teaching authority, and then Timothy has the role of enforcing orthodoxy, making sure nobody is preaching heresy.

There's then several chapters.

Ch- Chapter Two is about prayer.

Chapter Three is about what to look for in a bishop or in deacons.

And then chapter four, after giving a bunch of commands, he says, Command and teach these things.

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

So notice he's not a presbuteros in the literal sense of an older man.

He's not an elder in that sense, but he is in the p- position that he is commanding elders.

And additionally, he's told to attend to the public reading of scripture, to preaching, and to teaching.

So he has a proclamation of the word authority.

In the next verse, Paul says something that has been hotly debated.

First Timothy 4:14, Paul tells him, Do not neglect the gift you have, which was given you by prophetic utterance when the elders laid their hands upon you.

Now, there's two ways of reading that passage.

One way is this is a charismatic gift.

They laid hands on them and they started speaking in tongues, that sort of thing is happening.

The other reading, and I think the older and stronger reading, is this is a reference to his ordination as an elder himself.But there's more, because this is an ordination given by the other elders.

The elders can't ordain a bishop, if bishops exist.

But there's a second laying on of hands that St. Paul refers to.

Notice this one in First Timothy 4:14 is given by the fellow elders.

In Second Timothy 1, St. Paul reminds them 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 gonna disagree with that.

But we have what appear to be two different ordinations referenced in regards to Timothy.

Now, I'm gonna just highlight that.

And I know some people are gonna reject that 'cause they reject the ordination theology.

That's fine.

Let's look at the rest of the evidence, getting back to First Timothy now.

We're now up to First Timothy 5. In First 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, uh, because he cites to two biblical passages.

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

The other one may be less clear to us, You shall not muzzle 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, a, an elder should be able to make money while they're serving in the Kingdom of God.

And 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 one Timothy is shown as sharing with anybody else.

But if that's not enough, in verse 19, we're told what he's to do in terms of j- 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.

Uh, he's the one who is adjudicating when charges are brought against them.

He's the one who is The others are supposed to fear and respect his authority, even though he's young, probably younger than them in many cases.

He's given this public proclamation power and the ability to enforce orthodoxy, to make sure people aren't preaching false doctrine.

Then in verse 21 to 22, uh, 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 gonna be a quality elder.

So he has the ability to do all of these things.

He's not just, apparently, uh, 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.

There's Timothy.

That in Ephesus, the elders are accountable to Timothy in a way that they're not accountable to anybody else, in 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, now .

Right?

This is just one church.

This is just Ephesus.

Let's jump over to Crete, the island of Crete.

And there we find a very similar situation with Titus, as you can read in the book or 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, uh, get appointed.

It's not grassroots, not bottom-up.

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

And then he's told, uh, As for you, teach what befits sound doctrine.

So he has a teaching authority to teach doctrine as well.

In Titus 2 and 3, at the very end of 2 and into 3, he said, Declare St. Paul says to him, Declare these things.

Exhort and reprove with all authority.

Let no one disregard you.

Remind them to be submissive to rulers and authorities, to be obedient, to be ready for any honest work, to speak evil of no one, to avoid quarreling, to be gentle, and to show perfect courtesy toward all men.

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

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

He's not just presented as a good model.

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 3:10-11, 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 gonna call this role that Timothy and Titus serve in the local church, where it's one guy who's in charge of administering, uh, everything and who the, 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, he's already in exile in this time, uh, on the Island of Patmos.

That's just off of the coast of modern day Turkey.

And there are seven churches within the general vicinity, within the general region.

And he receives a revelation from God, uh, 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 2:1 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 a lot of Christians 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 Hemer, a, I believe, disciple of D.A. Carson, has a book called The Letters to the Seven Churches of Asia and Their Local Settings.

And Hemer, uh, who's now deceased unfortunately, God rest his soul, uh, 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, uh, human representatives, typically this is bishops.

Uh, those are the two common views, Hemer says.

But he says there's three additional views.

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

Number four, that they're literally human messengers.

Or number five, m- like, just see w- who knows, that the term is used in some complex and elusive way or at different levels, so we cannot expect to assign it a lexical equivalent that tells the whole story.

So, the five candidates for how we read Revelation 2 and 3 are that these are seven letters being written or seven, you know, admonitions, encouragements, seven words, seven messages being written to, number one, literal heaven angels.

Number two, the seven bishops of the seven churches.

Number three, the churches themselves.

Number four, human messengers.

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

Let's work through this list, 'cause I think we can cross off some of these candidates.

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

And 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, 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's two different images used and they're clearly, in Revelation 1:20, distinguished as two different symbolically represented, uh, groups.

So, we can take that third option off the list.

They're not the churches themselves.

The churches are the stars.

Excuse me, the churches are the lampstands, not the stars and angels.

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

And in fact, I find this one kind of a strange one, because many of the people who identify this, like, many people don't wanna read this as, uh, letters to seven bishops of local churches, because they don't like the idea the early church had bishops in Biblical times and this was approved by Jesus.

And so they wanna 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.

Like, if you were to say, I'm gonna go write a letter to an angel, they would say, That's necromancy, well, even though it's clearly not, 'cause the angels aren't dead.

But, It's spiritism, it's something, it's a cult, it's, it's evil, it's bad.

You're not allowed to do that.

That's idolatry.

That's broad brush here.

What you often see from the same people who claim that Revelation 2 to 3 is telling John he has to write letters to angels.

So, I just find that kinda curious, but I think we can make a stronger case.

And the stronger case would be, the letters don't make sense if they're written literally to angels.

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

Jesus says, I know your works.

You're neither cold nor hot.

Would that you were cold or hot.

So, because you are lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spew you out of my mouth.

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, like, lazing about.

Moreover, you have, uh, in the Church of Smyrna's case, the angel of the Church of Smyrna is being told, Do not fear what you're about to suffer.

Behold, the devil's about to throw some of you into prison.

Well, how are they gonna throw in Who's arresting an angel?

Who's And why would an angel be afraid of being arrested?

You know, like, what?

None of that makes sense.

So, I would suggest Revelation 2 to 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.

They aren't Why should they be, uh, 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, uh, to the priests in the Old Testament.

So for instance, in Hebrew, the word is malach.

And so the Angel of the Lord, the Malach of the Lord, Genesis 16:9, is one of the ways you, uh, hear angels referred to.

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

He's 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, malachs, angels.

That doesn't mean that they have, like, wings and, you know, our mental image of angels, but they are literally messengers.

Angel is a description of a job.

And so as a malach, as an angelos, as an angel, they are messengers.

Likewise, in Ecclesiastes 5, uh, 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 malach that it was a mistake.

The malach 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 can't live you're gonna, you're gonna be bound to it, and you wouldn't be able to live it out.

So don't rationally 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, Haemer doesn't view things that way.

In fact, he's gonna make the argument that we can really easily discard this theory.

He thinks that two things that are easiest to say it's not are bishops and human messengers.

He says those are the theories proposed we can most easily criticize.

Now, that should raise at least a couple 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.

Like, 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 just is factually wrong.

Hebrews 13:17, we're told to obey our leaders and submit to them for their 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 soul, they're not political leaders.

The leaders in the church, we are required to obey and submit to them, and they're keeping watch over our souls as men who will have to give account.

If they lead this badly, they will go to hell.

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.

I mentioned Crete and Ephesus.

Ephesus is one of those seven churches in Asia Minor.

So we already know one of those that clearly has one bishop, one, you know, leader that the entire church reports to, because Timothy had, 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, uh, there's n- no unambiguous evidence for the idea of episcopal authority.

There clearly is.

A- and also, I'm not sure unambiguous is the standard that is gonna be the best to, to argue for.

You can't throw out Because a lot of this stuff is not gonna be unambiguous in any direction.

You can't throw out a, a theory just 'cause you say, Well, I don't find the evidence unambiguous.

There's clearly decently good evidence that there's a guy called Timothy who the other elders are accountable to, because we see that all around First Timothy.

So, uh, at least one of the seven churches of Revelation, we do 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 where it isn't.

The seven angels are seven bishops or they aren't.

You can't use the fact that there's not another path.

Y- I mean, it just doesn't make sense.

All right.

But then he acknowledges, though it looms large for Ignatius 20 years later.

In other words, let me read that whole passage there.

There's, he says, There's no unambiguous evidence for the idea of episcopal authority in the churches of the Revelation, though it looms large in Ignatius 20 years later.

What he means there is when St. Ignatius is writing about the year 107 to the Church of Ephesus, it's very clear they have a bishop, because he talks I mean, it's very explicit.

So you have three separate places.

First Timothy, Revelation 2 to 3, and the writings of St. Ignatius to the Ephesians, all very early, 107 or earlier, independent corroborations of the fact that the Church of Ephesus has a single leader.

So you can say, well, that's 20 years later, but you don't have evidence pointing the other So 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 wayAnd in fact, they weren't even the ones who built it.

The apostles were.

So, do we, what do we find when we look at the earliest Christians?

I wanna turn here to the Evangelical Dictionary of Theology, the second edition.

'Cause in there, Leon Morris, uh, says, A consideration of all of the evidence leaves us with 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 the conflicts with our own system, we may find it there, but scarcely otherwise.

That is a hopeless note.

But, you know, just like with Friedel finding, like, 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, are biblical in origin.

And I think we can do better.

And I think the evidence points to something clearly better.

And one of the reasons I say that is, an argument, or a couple 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, it's true of the evidence outside of the New Testament from the first, second, third century, there's 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, plausibly read them in 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's point in Evangelical Dictionary of Theology, and he's absolutely right, that 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 gonna give just a couple examples of that 'cause I don't wanna belabor it, 'cause the question is, is this in the Bible?

And I wanna 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 gonna argue, you can't a- account for that unless this is the biblical and apostolic model.

But we're gonna get there.

So I, 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, who's writing again about 107.

So, maybe 20 years after the Book of Revelation, maybe a little less than that.

And by the time he's writing, it's incredibly clear that there's a threefold structure of every church.

And he's gonna tell you that.

And it's not just that he's gonna say there's a threefold structure.

He's gonna tell you specifics.

For example, when he's writing to the church in Magnesia, he greets Damas, their most worthy bishop, he greets, Your worthy presbyter Bassus and Apollonius, and he greets his fellow servant, the deacon Sotio.

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 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.

That, like 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 on the people who are saying, Oh, no, no.

It's actually just a twofold office.

That is a pretty wild difference and kinda evidentiary burden that Ignatius is presenting unambiguous, naming names, clear evidence, and the people who disagree with Ignatius are always just vaguely saying, Sometime, some place, somewhere, somebody, but not really giving you any specifics.

And I, I mean, you can easily see examples of this when you try to show the opposite case.

If that wasn't enough, Ignatius is gonna 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 reverence the deacons as an appointment of Jesus Christ and the bishop as Jesus Christ, who is the son of the Father, and the presbyter 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.

Concerning all this, I am persuaded that you're 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 they're trying.

This is part of the DNA of a true church.

If you don't have this, you don't have a church.

Like, this is one of the things that sometimes gets awkward in Catholic/Protestant conversation because Protestants will refer to the churches, like all these different denominations, and Catholics often have this uneasy like, We don't acknowledge what you have as a church.

And 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 gathered to go, gather however they wanna be.

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

That's great.

It's good.

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, deacon.

And that was coming from Ignatius of Antioch, believed to be a d- a student of the disciple John- in about 107.

Now, Ignatius is only one among many, but because he's so famous on this, because he's so early, because he's so prolific about this topic, I'm gonna leave the evidence largely there, except to say that you'll sometimes h- hear people claiming, like, Oh, the fact that Ignatius is writing about it proves there's a controversy.

And I get that.

I mean, I, I just use the opposite argument.

One of the reasons the New Testament doesn't write a lot about it, uh, 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 of Ephesus, Uh, 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 it's necessary for the nature of a church.

But he's not alone.

I wanna turn now to a, a little bit more, uh, first century evidence.

And this is the notion of bishop lists.

I'll explain what that means.

That 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 of all of those records are gone now, but nevertheless, they refer to them, they talk about them.

And so it's very clearly not just, We're trying a new thing, or, This is some late adaptation where everybody's doing their own thing.

But before I get there, let's explain why these lists matter.

In Second Timothy, St. Paul warns Timothy, The time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching.

But having engineers that will accumulate for themselves teachers to their own, 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, right?

Like, the time is coming in the future 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 Second 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, that looks like you're the people he warned about when the time is coming, meaning in the future.

So if you're holding onto 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.

So for instance, St. Irenaeus, written about 180, makes this point very clearly in Against Heresies, Book Three.

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, 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, can look to their churches, look, 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, 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, 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.

And Tertullian around the year 200, uh, 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, uh, and having existed at the time of the apostles, we can say, let them produce the original records of their churches.

Let them unroll Uh, excuse me, Let them unfold the role 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.

And showing, as Tertullian explains, that their first, uh, 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 gonna claim to be an apostolic church, they need one of those things.

And he explains, This is the manner in which the apostolic churches transmit their registers.

And he gives the examples, like the Church of Smyrna, which records that Polycarp was placed there by John.

And the Church of Rome, which makes claimant to have been ordained in like manner by Peter.

So my point there is, uh, 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 you says, In exactly the same way, the other churches likewise exhibit this.

So it's not just, like, one or two churches.

So 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, it's not just like one or two.

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

So most of the physical evidence is now gone because not, like 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, uh, lifespan.

And so in North Africa, one of the few places for which evidence exists, we still have lists of hundreds of third century bishops.

And 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 who could trace back who did found them and kinda where th- 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, it might be a little town, might be a very tiny, uh, 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, by some time in the 100s at the latest, every Christian that we find is part of a church that has this threefold structure.

And there may be some really, like, radical fringe, uh, exceptions to that.

But we clearly see across Christianity, bishop, presbyter, deacon, in Jerusalem, in Rome, in the big towns, in the little towns, wherever we look, we find this same thing.

And 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's three ways we could account for that evidence.

And we'll call them faithfulness, deviation, free-for-all.

The faithful option is 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're 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 twofold 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, pretty much the idea.

It's wiggle room.

There's no right answer.

Everybody can just do their own thing 'cause 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 Saint 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 Jesus and the apostles gave us.

Again, Ignatius is believed to be a disciple of the apostle John.

So it would be kinda striking if he was just in open rebellion from John and the other apostles.

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

Here's what I mean by that.

Uh, Stagaman, in his book Authority in the Church, says the following.

This is a striking kind of story, and it's just that I'm gonna 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 acting corporately and leadership by a single bishop.

In other words, he's claiming 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, monarchical 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, the threefold model has won.

So that's kinda striking.

I mean, that seems to be either a view of deviation or of a free-for-all, but it ends with a shocking kinda 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 gonna say everybody's free to design a church looking however you want, how often is that gonna lead to everyone designing churches that look the exact same?

Seemingly not.

But more broadly, on the problem with the deviation theory, you have to believe the following.

Number one, Jesus established a twofold structure.

He wanted co-ruling presbyters and deacons.

That's it.

Number two, something happens.

When, what, how?

Who knows?

Just something happens, which leads to number three, the Christians decide instead upon a threefold 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.

Like, that's what you have to Like, 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 seemed 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, 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 presbyteroi and episkopos as interchangeable.

You're, you're saying something much bigger and much stranger, uh, 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 structure of, the twofold structure was just too inefficient to do anything, that 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, you'll notice in Stegemann's theory, he doesn't even really spell out, at least in, in this presentation of the claim, kind of what that second step is.

We're just told that 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.

Like 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 gonna replace it with the Latin mass.

And from now on, uh, we're gonna have one bishop and he's gonna have the power to ordain and administer sacraments and do all this stuff.

In that theory, do you think the students are gonna just be like, Oh, okay, cool.

Let's just roll with it?

Of course not.

There's gonna 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.

Right?

Like, 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 gonna get rid of the model that I know Jesus and the apostles gave us and replace it with some new model where you, you a- and you alone are the boss, of course I'm not just gonna 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.

Uh, Michael McGuckian 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 pray for them because we know they're gonna have to keep account for how they're caring for our souls.

So our job is not to devine, like design some new form of church, some new structure of leadership.

So he says, The notion of a church choosing its church order, or i- 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.

Right?

Like, 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, that 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 kind of schisms.

McGuckian then says, Well, is it plausible to suggest 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 w- any of the following.

Number one, give me the names of some of these co-ruling presbyters 'cause, uh, w- you, we 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.

It, that kind of thing is, is pretty common among the three-tiered view.

We can say not just this is what had existed in theory, but here it is in practice, here are the names of the people.

So 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 that maybe this is 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, here were the people who opposed it.

None of that evidence existed because, I would suggest, the deviation theory and the free-for-all theory are fiction.

They're just not true.

That 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.

So some people are gonna make pragmatic arguments, some people are gonna 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, uh, can lead to bad things.

You could have a bad bishop.It's also true that if you have it run by a, a group of presbyters or elders, that you could also get a good-old-boy's club and you could have people who are unfair to the lead pastor or whoever, right?

Like, 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 gonna 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.

And this is showing ultimately, I think he's arguing, the oneness of God, that just like we don't believe in polytheism, uh, 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 the, sort of the pragmatic thing, Freel, 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, uh, one person having a spiritual authority.

So I wanna give you this as kind of a final Freel clip that I'm, I'm largely gonna 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, it can get to be 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.

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 gonna be lacking leadership and you're not gonna 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 were 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 wanna 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 Like, the Trinity is not like a three-headed monster.

There is clearly, uh, 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 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.

You know, 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, like, 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 Freel 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.

It, again, as of 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.

And 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, uh, 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 a question for another day.

If you find that interesting, please let me know in the comments below.

I'd be happy to do episodes on, you know, the papacy in the very earliest centuries of the Church and what was the role and authority of the Bishop of Rome, uh, 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 wanna handle that separate topic.

For Shameless Potpourri, I'm Joe Heschmair.

God bless you.