After wrestling with the question of leadership in the church and examining oft cited quotes from the early fathers, I felt it necessary to gravitate away from the view that the local church is completely autonomous and that leadership is something which merely arises out of personal giftedness and and local church elections. Clearly the early church did not function that way. A few summary thoughts:
1. The key role of the church leader is to defend, teach and preserve apostolic truth. Whatever authority he possesses is for that purpose and that purpose alone. Of course other responsibilities go with that key role, but the teaching of the apostles is the absolute foundation of every ministry, every program, every initiative. To fail on this point is to erode the stability of everything else.
2. Timothy was given a deposit of faith from Paul and was to commit that deposit of faith to "reliable men" who were able to teach others. He was to pass along (tradition) what he had received and those reliable men were to again pass along what they had received. So a concept of "tradition", passing along what had been received, exists in the New Testament and was clearly part of the role of leadership in the early centuries of the church.
3. A succession of bishops then, was something that was present and understood immediately after the death of the apostles. However, the key point, for Irenaeus, was that the summed total of all the bishops represented a consensus of doctrinal purity and and dramatic symbol of unity. He appealed to succession - this process of passing along the deposit of faith from one "reliable man" to the next - as evidence that Christianity was distinct from heresies which had sprung up in isolated places, false teachings with no connection to the apostles. Succession was not an end in itself or an infallible, magical, mechanical formula for preserving the church, rather it was a way of constructing an organism that was self correcting, a body that could remain healthy as a whole, even if a foreign agent invaded it.
4. For Vincent of Lerins in the fifth century, the consensus of the whole church represented a path to doctrinal purity and unity, essentially the same argument Ireneaus made. The consistency of teaching across geographical boundaries and over a significant period of time provided evidence that a particular understanding of apostolic teaching, embodied most reliably in the scriptures, but held by the church ever since, was correct, consistent, reliable, universal. Though many bishops had embraced the heresy of Arius, and individual Bishops had embraced other false notions, the whole body, in the end, proved healthy, consistent and true.
5. It is simply wrong, historically mistaken, to outright reject any concept of a continuity of church leadership as an aberration that was embraced by the Constantinian church or the medieval church as if such continuity had no place from the very beginning. Bishops are to be connected to each other, accountable to each other, accountable to the church of history. And the threefold office of Bishop, Presbyter and Deacon was essentially understood as the norm from the first century forward.
What then to make of the Evangelical traditions of today? The Reformers, in rejecting the authoritarian characteristic of the medieval episcopate, set in motion a deep suspicion of all authority. This was understandable. But in properly calling the church back to the canon of Scripture as the measuring rod of truth while rejecting the leadership structure of sixteen centuries, they inadvertently shifted the burden of leadership not only away from an out of control hierarchy, but also away from the consensus of the rest of church history. When this was coupled with the rationalism of the enlightenment, it paved the way for individualism to run away with the Protestant movement.
Thus in independent churches leadership no longer represents anything universal. Denominationalism, individualism, and unaccountability to the whole have fractured the witness of Christianity. Faith has become just an opinion, another entree on the smorgasborg of pluralism. Moral authority in the culture at large is, as a result, forfeited.
I wish to move back to the center, not to the other edge. Catholics and Orthodox point to the Bishops as having authority by virtue of the office they hold. Protestants point to the failures of many who have held the office to suggest that no such authority exists. But the role of the church leader is to preserve, teach, and pass along the apostolic faith with a singular voice. Focusing on the external office is not sufficient, neither is abandoning the office altogether.
The authority of the bishop comes not from democratic election, nor does it come from blind mechanical succession. It comes from speaking with the voice of the apostles in unity with the whole church. His authority comes not from himself, nor his denomination, nor mechanically from his predecessor, but from connection to the scriptural and apostolic life-blood of the universal church.
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