Ordinary Authority, the Apostolic Priesthood, Orthodox Anglicanism and Women’s Ordination

 

The incident of a couple of weeks ago in which Fr. Calvin Robinson, having been invited to address the Mere Anglicanism conference hosted by an ACNA parish in the United States on the subject of how critical theory is contrary to the Gospel and was disinvited from the final panel because in his talk he highlighted feminism’s role in the development of Cultural Marxism and criticized women’s ordination, is still generating much discussion.   Fr. Robinson, if you are unfamiliar with him, is an outspoken conservative Christian commentator from the United Kingdom.   He was denied ordination in the Church of England a few years ago, for his conservative views, but was ordained a deacon in the Free Church of England (the British counterpart to the American Reformed Episcopal Church, it separated from the Church of England in the nineteenth century in protest over the Oxford Movement) then later a priest in the Nordic Catholic Church (a group that left the Lutheran Church of Norway to join the Old Catholics, i.e., the formerly Roman Catholic Churches that rejected Vatican I).   He also had a show on GB News until they dropped him last year in a spasm of political correctness.   The ACNA is the Anglican Church in North America which was founded about fifteen years ago by parishes that separated from the Episcopal Church in the United States and the Anglican Church of Canada (up here the parishes associated with the ACNA go by the name Anglican Network in Canada, ANiC) over the increasing influence of the alphabet soup lobby in the mainline bodies (as seen in same-sex blessings/marriages).   It is recognized by and in full communion with the orthodox provinces of the Anglican Communion (the Global South provinces) although not with the Church of England, the Anglican Church of Canada or the Episcopal Church, the three most apostate Churches within the Anglican Communion.   Parts of the ACNA practice women’s ordination, other parts do not.   The aforementioned Reformed Episcopal Church, for example, which joined the ACNA when it was formed although it had already been separated from the Episcopal Church for over a century, does not.   This the REC has in common with other Anglican jurisdictions that left the Episcopal Church over its apostasy prior to the alphabet soup crisis, such as those which left when James Parker Dees declared the Episcopal Church apostate in 1963 over liberalism as manifested in her refusal to discipline Bishop Pike when he abandoned the faith entirely (the low church Anglican Orthodox Church and the high church Orthodox Anglican Church, originally a single communion) and, rather obviously, those who signed the St. Louis Affirmation of 1977 which declared the Episcopal Church and the Anglican Church of Canada to have apostatized from Christ’s One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church by introducing women’s ordination (called the Continuing Anglican Churches or the Anglican Continuum in the stricter sense, the broader sense of these terms also includes the REC, AOC, OAC, and other smaller groups that left prior to St. Louis, these were intended to be a single body by the Concerned Churchman of St. Louis who, interestingly enough, called the body they so envisioned the Anglican Church in North America).  (1)  The ACNA calls its policy of allowing different dioceses and parishes to have different viewpoints and practices on the matter of women’s ordination by the expression “dual integrities”.      

 

I don’t have much to add to the discussion of the incident itself.   I rather wish to answer an argument that Dr. Bruce Atkinson has posted in several places.   One of those places is the comments section on Dr. David W. Virtue’s article on the Robinson/Mere Anglicanism affair and it is this version, should there be any differences between this and the versions he has posted elsewhere, to which I shall be responding.    Dr. Atkinson is a psychologist and a founding member of the ACNA.

 

His first section under the heading “On WO” reads:

 

1) The New Testament does not discuss the issue of the sacramental ordination of clergy at all, neither male nor female. What became the tradition of clericalism (a ruling and elite priesthood order) only developed after the Apostles had passed. The closest the NT gets to supporting this is where Paul mentions roles of overseer, elder, and deacon (servant) and a few times he or elders prayed and laid hands on disciples for specific tasks. Hardly the same as what later became the sacrament of ordination. And Jesus was against such a ruling privileged priesthood as evidenced in Mark 10:42-44 and Matthew 23:5-12, and as also evidenced by Peter’s view of the priesthood as being of ALL believers (1 Peter 2:4-5, 9).

 

As I have pointed out many times in the past a case against a distinct priesthood within the Church cannot be made from St. Peter’s remarks about the universal priesthood of all believers.   This is because there was a universal priesthood under both Covenants.   In the book of Exodus, the Israelites, having been led by Moses out of Egypt, arrived at the wilderness of Sinai in the nineteenth chapter.   At the beginning of this chapter, the LORD, speaking to Moses out of the mountain, tells him to tell the Israelites “And ye shall be unto me a kingdom of priests, and an holy nation.” (v 6).   This clearly did not preclude the establishment of a more specific priesthood, the Levitical priesthood, within national Israel.   St. Peter, by joining the expressions “royal priesthood” and “holy nation” in 1 Peter 2:9 alludes back to this Old Testament passage.   Since the original did not preclude a more specific priesthood, neither can the New Testament allusion.   Especially since St. Paul speaks of his ministerial work in terms of just such a priesthood.   In Romans 15:16 he writes:

 

That I should be the minister of Jesus Christ to the Gentiles, ministering the gospel of God, that the offering up of the Gentiles might be acceptable, being sanctified by the Holy Ghost.

 

The word “ministering” that is placed in bold in the above quotation is in St. Paul’s Greek “ἱερουργοῦντα” (hierourgounta).  This is the present, active, participle of ἱερουργέω (hierourgeo) which means “to officiate as a priest”, “to perform sacred rites”, “to sacrifice”.   It is formed by combining the basic Greek word for “priest” (St. Peter’s word for “priesthood” in 1 Pet. 2:9 is ἱεράτευμα, hierateuma) with the basic Greek word for “work”.   Indeed, the word λειτουργὸν (leitourgon) that is behind the noun “minister” earlier in the verse has connotations of this as well since the primary meaning of the word, “public servant” in the civic sense, clearly does not apply here.

 

That this sort of language is not more widely used of the Apostolic ministry in the New Testament is easily explainable.   The Old Testament priesthood was still functioning at the time.   The Book of Acts brings the history of the Church down to a few years prior to the destruction of the Temple.   SS Peter and Paul were both martyred prior to that event.   Most of the New Testament was written prior to that event.   To more promiscuously refer to the ministry of the Church as a priesthood would have invited confusion at that time.   That this did not prevent St. Paul from referring to it as such in this verse is explainable by a) the fact that his ministry was to the Gentiles as stated in this very verse and so unlikely to be confused with the priesthood of national Israel, and by b) the fact that this verse comes towards the end of an epistle in which it is preceded by an extended discussion of the differences between the two Covenants.

 

The very nature of the rite that the Lord commissioned the Apostolic ministry to perform in the Church necessitates that it be thought of as a priesthood.   There were three types of sacrifices (in terms of what was to be offered) the Levitical priesthood was commissioned to offer in the Old Testament.   There was the offering of animals, who were killed and their blood sprinkled, which was involved in any sacrifice having to do with sin and guilt.   These were a type of the Sacrifice of Jesus Christ and were forever fulfilled in Christ’s Sacrifice.   Then there were the offerings of grain/flour/cakes (meat/meal/grain offerings) and of wine (libations).   These three elements are also featured prominently in the Passover meal.   A covenant in the Old Testament would always be sealed by a sacrifice and concluded by both parties to the covenant eating the sacrifice together as a shared meal.   Jesus Christ offered Himself as the Sacrifice that sealed and established the Covenant of redemption from sin.   In instituting the Lord’s Supper, He took the bread and wine of the Passover, the other two elements offered by the old priesthood in sacrifice, and pronounced them to be His Body and Blood, making a way for God’s people to be perpetually sustained by the food of His One Sacrifice.   Just as baptism replaces circumcision as the rite of initiation under the New Covenant, so the Sacrament by which Christ’s One Sacrifice becomes the sustenance of the believers’ spiritual life takes the place of the sacrifices that looked forward to the One Sacrifice, and so the ministry commissioned to administer the Sacrament is a priesthood within the universal priesthood of the Church, as the Levitical priesthood was a priesthood within the universal priesthood of Israel.

 

Dr. Atkinson’s use of terms like “ruling”, “privileged” and “elite” to describe a priesthood within the universal priesthood of the Church is misleading.   The import of Mk 10:42-44 is not that the Church was not to have governors but that her governors were to govern in a spirit of humility.   Pressed to the extreme of hyper-Protestant anti-clericalism, Mk 10:42-44 would condemn St. Paul in defending his Apostolic authority in the Corinthian epistles and the early chapters of Galatians.   The Lord clearly set His Apostles as governors over His Church, just as clearly the need for structure and order in the Church did not die with the Apostles nor did they let their governance end or die with them.   Already in the New Testament we see them placing others in authority under themselves over local Churches as elders/presbyters, and already in the New Testament we see them commissioning others such as SS Timothy and Titus to exercise the same level of governing authority as themselves, including the authority to ordain elders/presbyters and deacons.   The term bishop (overseer/episkopos) would later be used as the title of the Apostles’ co-governors/successors.   In the New Testament this term is used either interchangeably with elder/presbyter or more likely for the presiding elder/presbyter in each locality.  When it is first unmistakably used for the co-governors/successors of the Apostles, in the epistles of St. Ignatius of Antioch, the description suggests that every presiding elder/presbyter was now what SS Timothy and Titus were in the New Testament.   The rapidity and earliness with which this usage became universal and the fact that it first appears in the writings of St. John’s direct disciples may indicate that St. John, the Apostle who survived the others by decades, had merged the two offices towards the end of his life and ministry.    However that may be, the thing traditionally designated by the term bishop, the person who has been given the ordinary authority (vide infra for explanation of this expression) of the Apostles to govern the Church and ordain presbyters and deacons, is clearly already established in the New Testament.   That the Lord’s instructions in Mk. 10:42-44 have not always been obeyed by those in authority in the Church is lamentable, although not, given the fallenness of human nature, very surprising, but the abuse of something does not invalidate the thing itself.  

 

Dr. Atkinson begins the second section of his argument by saying:

 

2) I will never ignore clear scriptural advice; like most members and clergy in ACNA, I am generally against women’s ordination above the level of deacon. What Paul clearly wrote to Timothy (1 Tim 2, cf. Titus 2:3-5) is that he did not allow women to have authority over men in his churches, but he did not condemn the practice nor was it ever called a ‘sin’ anywhere in the NT. He also wrote elsewhere about male headship in the family (1 Cor 11: 3-10, 1 Cor 14:33-35, Eph 5:22-23)

 

If someone in a position of authority were to say “I do not allow you to walk up to your neighbour, poke him in the eyes, tweak his nose, and pull his beard” would you interpret this as a non-condemnation of eye-poking, nose-tweaking and beard-pulling?

 

His third section, however, begins by saying:

 

3) However… the whole counsel of God provides some mitigating circumstances.

a) The fact that Jesus Himself elevated women (and their roles) above what was regarded as normative in His culture (women were virtual chattel, not even to be spoken to in the street) tells us a lot about the teleological direction we could expect to occur over time in the Kingdom of God by the revelation of scripture made evident by the Holy Spirit. Note Paul’s teaching in Galatians 3:24-29 where egalitarianism is taught as being part of our freedom in Christ versus the Jewish laws and culture. Despite Paul's admonition to Timothy about women's disqualification to have authority over men, Paul was not shy about allowing women to lead where his own welfare (and thus that of the gospel) was concerned (as seen in Romans 16:1-4).

 

This is a common argument but it is no less wrong for being common.   The fact that Jesus elevated women above what was normative in Jewish, and for that matter Roman, culture carries the exact opposite meaning to that which Dr. Atkinson attaches to it.   It makes it all that much more significant that Jesus did not include a woman among the Twelve.    Had He, by treating women as the human beings they are, intended to start the Church on a path that would lead towards women’s ordination He would not have allowed St. Paul to prohibit – his words to St. Timothy are stronger than a mere admonition – women from having authority over men in that way.

 

He continues:

 

b) The issue of Women’s Ordination (WO) is not at all the same as the homosexuality issue where there are absolutely no exceptions in either Old Testament or New Testament that this behavior is an egregious sin that will keep a person out of the Kingdom of God (e.g., 1 Cor 6:9). Rather, the role of women in God’s kingdom on earth has clearly had some exceptions in the Bible, where women have had authority without any divine judgment or criticism being revealed about it. The New Testament reveals that there were women deaconesses and women prophets in NT churches… without any criticism by Paul or other Apostles. And how far should we generalize Peter’s point that the Church consists of the “priesthood of ALL believers”? But I must emphasize that these scriptural exceptions to the rule (like Deborah the judge in the OT) were in fact exceptions.

Therefore, ACNA is not wrong to also have exceptions... but they must be kept relatively rare (to remain exceptions) and never to be turned into a general WO rule (as TEC and the Church of England have done).

 

The issue of Women’s Ordination is related to that of the homosexuality – actually the entire alphabet soup – issue.   I’ll return to that momentarily.   First, I would like to point out how Dr. Atkinson seriously misinterprets the significance of the Scriptural examples of women with authority to which he points.   These are not exceptions to the rule.   They are rather illustrations of a different rule.

 

As orthodox Christians, we believe that God is working in everything that goes on in the world.   We are not Deists who think that God started the world going, like someone winding up a clock, then left it to wind down on its own accord.    God brought Creation into existence ex nihilo and apart from His sustaining its existence it would slip back into nothingness.   The tree in your front lawn, God put there, through multiple different steps including the falling of the seed from which it originally grew, the natural process of growth that He put into the seed, the rain that He caused to fall, etc.   Everything that happens in nature, does so because God is working in and through it in this way.   God is not limited to working in this way.   If He had reason to do so, He could cause a tree to appear out of nowhere in your front lawn without going through all that preliminary motion.   If He did so, this is what we would call a miracle.   God does not work in this direct way unless He has special reason to do so.   His ordinary method of producing a tree in your front laws, is through the means of the seed, the growth, the rain, etc.   A miracle, in which He directly acts without means, is extraordinary.

 

The distinction just made can also be seen in those to whom God delegates authority.   In the Old Testament, God established the Levitical priesthood and the Davidic monarchy.   These were positions of authority that were passed on through the generations in an ordinary manner (David passed his throne to Solomon who passed it to Rehoboam, for example).   This type of authority corresponds to God’s working ordinarily through the means of nature.   There are other examples, however, of God raising up individuals to positions of leadership and authority that correspond to His working extraordinarily through miracles.   The judges are examples of these.   So are the prophets.   Each one was called by God as an individual and given special authority and power.   Since order is one of the more important purposes of structure and ordinary authority there are rules as to how that authority is transmitted.   God is not bound by such rules in raising people up to special authority any more than He is bound by the laws of nature when He performs miracles.   In the New Testament, Jesus gave to the Apostles both ordinary and extraordinary authority when He set them in governance over His Church.   The extraordinary power, such as infallibility when teaching the faith and writing Scripture, could not be passed on to others.   The ordinary authority that they exercised in settling controversies, ordaining presbyters and deacons, and basically governing the Church they passed on to those such as SS Timothy and Titus who succeeded them in governance.   St. Paul’s instructions to St. Timothy in regards to women belong to the rules governing ordinary authority and its transmission.   They do not bind God when it comes to raising up people with special or extraordinary authority like prophets.  

This distinction accounts for Deborah the judge and the prophetesses of both Testaments.    Remember that if someone claims to have received extraordinary authority directly from God, they are to be tested and tried by all the tests of the prophet in both Testaments.

 

This brings us back to the connection between the women’s ordination issue and the alphabet soup issue.   If God raises up a woman as a prophetess or otherwise gives her extraordinary authority that is one thing.   If the rules governing the transmission of ordinary authority in the Church are altered to allow for women’s ordination that is something entirely different.   When that happens it leads to further apostasy.   This is what has happened in the Episcopal Church, the Anglican Church of Canada and the Church of England.   That this further apostasy has taken the form of the affirmation of alphabet people, then same-sex blessings, then outright same-sex marriage, and most recently all the garbage that is preceded by the prefix trans is only to be expected.   When you set aside the rules laid down in Scripture for the transmission of the Apostolic ministry of the Church so as to ordain women you do so for a reason.    In this case you do so because you think the rules of Scripture (and tradition for that matter) are incompatible with some higher standard or ideal you are seeking to achieve.    To regard an ideal or standard as higher than the Word of God is itself a serious apostasy.   When the rule set aside is the prohibition against women in positions of ordinary authority, the ideal that is set above the Word of God, and thus made an idol, is the equality of the sexes.   The equality of the sexes, when treated with this exaggerated importance, becomes the interchangeability of the sexes.   If the sexes are treated as interchangeable when it comes to the priesthood/ministry the next step will be for them to be treated as interchangeable in other areas – such as in who one looks for as a mate and ultimately with which sex one identifies.

 

Of course we could also back the story up and point out that just as women’s ordination has led to the alphabet soup problems of today, so the path to women’s ordination was one the Church set upon when it took that first false step of breaking with the Catholic (in the Vincentian sense) consensus against artificial contraception in Resolution 15 of the 1930 Lambeth Conference which passed because supposedly conservative evangelicals failed to support the conservative Anglo-Catholics in their opposition to the Resolution (for the Biblical case against birth control, see Charles D. Provan’s The Bible and Birth Control, Zimmer Printing, 1989, for an interesting discussion, albeit from a Darwinian perspective, of why affordable, effective, contraception for females led, counter-intuitively, to the ramping up of the feminist demand for abortion and the skyrocketing of single-motherhood, see Dr. Lionel Tiger’s The Decline of Males, St. Martin’s Press, 1999).   That is, however, a topic for another time.

 

(1)    Lest you get the impression that the mainline Anglican Churches in England, Canada, and the United States are entirely apostate, I assure you there are orthodox parishes left in each.  On both sides of the pond, there are parishes within the mainline Anglican Communion that indicate their adherence to the full orthodoxy affirmed at St. Louis by affiliating with Forward in Faith or Forward in Faith North America.   In the Anglican Church of Canada there are parishes that indicate their ACNA type orthodoxy by affiliating with the Anglican Communion Alliance.   My own parish is one affiliated with the Anglican Communion Alliance and personally, while I disagree with separatism as a solution to apostasy, I could sign my full agreement with the Principles of Doctrine and Principles of Morality sections of the St. Louis Affirmation.  

The Ordinary and the Extraordinary

The distinction between the “ordinary” and the “extraordinary” is a recurring one in theology.   In moral theology this distinction is essential to the discussion of certain ethical dilemmas.   How far are we obligated to go in preserving the lives of those who are suffering and dying?  The orthodox answer is that we are obligated to make use of every ordinary means of preserving their lives available but are not under such an obligation when it comes to extraordinary means, such as those made available by modern medical technology.   Since giving people food and water is an ordinary means of preserving their lives, the practice of starving or dehydrating someone for the purpose of ending his suffering – and life – quicker is forbidden, but we are under no obligation to prolong his life and suffering, and possibly make the suffering worse, with questionable modern drugs, for the latter are extraordinary means.

 

Another example of this distinction, one that requires little in the way of explanation, is the distinction between God’s ordinary and extraordinary operations in the natural world.   The former are the processes that God put in place in the world when He created it and which, observed and put into formulaic statement by men, are what we know as the laws of science.   The latter are miracles.

 

It is also common for us to speak of the “ordinary means of grace”.   This expression contains the implied assumption that there are also “extraordinary means of grace” although these are rarely talked about.   A definition and a couple of other distinctions are necessary to understand this one.   Grace is God’s favour, freely bestowed by God as Sovereign Lord upon His creatures.   We distinguish between common grace and saving grace.   Common grace is God’s favour as freely bestowed upon all of His creatures alike.   It is what Jesus spoke of when He said that His Father sends the rain on the just and unjust alike (Matt. 5:45).   Saving grace is both a) the favour God showed to rebellious, sinful, human creatures by giving us His Son to be our Saviour and b) the favour to which sinners are restored by our Saviour, Jesus Christ, Who purchased that favour for us by His Suffering and Death on the Cross, in which favour our sins are taken away and forgiven, God credits us with righteousness, we are reconciled to God, adopted as His children, and rescued from the state of spiritual death and given everlasting life.    While we could speak of “means of grace” with regards to common grace as well as saving grace, we generally do not do so because every good gift from God in this life would qualify as such and so it is too broad of a concept to say much that is meaningful about it.   The means of grace, therefore, are the means of saving rather than common grace.    A second distinction needs to be made.   When we speak of the “means of grace” we can be referring either to a) the means by which we each receive the freely given grace of God, that is the means by which we each appropriate it to ourselves, or b) the means through which God works to bring His freely given saving favour, obtained for us by Christ, to us that we may so appropriate it.     The latter and not the former are what we refer to as the “ordinary means of grace”.   With regards to the former, the means by which we each appropriate the saving grace of God to ourselves, there is only one such means, and that is faith in Jesus Christ, believing the Gospel about Jesus, trusting Jesus as the Saviour proclaimed in the Gospel.  (1)  There is no distinction between ordinary and extraordinary means with regards to this because it is the only such means. (2)    The “ordinary means of grace”, therefore are the second kind of means of saving grace, the means whereby God brings His saving grace to us that we may appropriate it to ourselves by faith.   The Church, the spiritual covenant society established by Jesus Christ through His Apostles, should be identified as the first such means.   God did not establish Christianity as a solitary way of life to be lived out by individuals on their own but as a communal way of life to be lived out in the community of faith He provided for that purpose.   Therefore, He created the Church and tasked it with the job of bringing His saving grace to everyone in the world.   The Church’s performance of this task is called “preaching the Gospel”, although proclaiming might be a better word than “preaching” because “preaching” now has the connotation of “giving a sermon” and the concept of “preaching the Gospel” is not limited to that.   Indeed, every Ministry of the Church, through which the grace of God is brought to us is a form of “preaching the Gospel”.   This includes the Ministry of the Word – this includes both preaching in the colloquial sense of the term and teaching – and the Ministry of Sacrament – the administration of baptism, the ritual cleansing through which one becomes a member of the Church, and the Eucharist, the ceremonial representation of the death of Jesus Christ through which the Body and Blood of Jesus Christ, as broken and shed on the Cross, become the spiritual food that regularly sustains the life of the faithful.   All of these, and the Church’s ministry of formally proclaiming God’s forgiveness upon confession of sin, are the forms of preaching the Gospel that are called the “ordinary means of grace”.   They are called this to indicate that the ordinary way that God has appointed for people to receive His saving grace through faith and to be sustained in that faith and grace is through His Church and her Ministries.   The “extraordinary means of grace” would include any means God uses outside of these channels to bring people to faith in His grace through Jesus Christ.   For obvious reasons they cannot be enumerated in the same way as the ordinary means.   The distinction is very important, however, because it is essential for understanding how the “necessity” of the Church and her Ministries does not conflict with the New Testament emphasis on saving grace being freely given and received by faith.   The “necessity” is the general necessity attached to God’s appointed normal way of doing things, not the absolute necessity that would turn baptism, Communion, Church attendance, etc. into so many marks to be checked off rather than avenues of divine blessing and render the grace of God far less gracious and free.

 

The final example of the “ordinary” v “extraordinary” distinction that we shall look it pertains to the authority and power given by Jesus Christ to His Apostles.   This authority and power was of both types.    The ordinary authority and power that Jesus Christ bestowed upon His Apostles was the authority and power necessary for them to carry out their evangelistic commission from Him and to govern the Church, the spiritual society that He founded to be His Body and Spouse and the manifestation of His Kingdom in this world and over which He placed the Apostles as governors.   This ordinary authority and power, the Apostles passed on to the others whom they admitted to their College of Ecclesiastical Governors and remains with these, who have been called by the title bishop (overseer) since the first century, in the Church to this day.   The extraordinary authority and power that Jesus Christ bestowed upon His Apostles was a) the power to preach the Gospel by divine inspiration so that the message proclaimed and heard was the very Word of God (the sermons recorded in the Acts of the Apostles), b) in the case of select Apostles – from the original Twelve SS Matthew, Mark, John, Peter, Jude and James, if James the Just, Brother of the Lord was the same person as James the Lesser, directly commissioned by Christ to evangelize the Gentiles in the book of Acts in the case of St. Paul, or brought into the Apostolic ministry by the Twelve and St. Paul in cases of SS Mark, Luke, and James the Just if he was not the same person as James the Lesser – to write the very Word of God (the canon of the New Testament), and c) to perform the kind of miracles that served as proof that the Gospel they preached and the New Testament writings were the infallible Word of God.   This authority and power was not passed on to their successors.     It is vital to recognize this distinction.   The ordinary authority and power bestowed upon the Apostles was the authority and power inseparably attached to their office and commission, and therefore passed on along to others with that office and commission.   Extraordinary authority and power of the type described is never passed on from one person or another, but is directly given from God to individuals and while God can bestow extraordinary power and authority upon individuals of His Sovereign choosing any time He wishes, the purpose for which this specific extraordinary power and authority was bestowed was fulfilled with the completion of the New Testament canon and so will not be bestowed again.  

 

The failure to grasp this is the source of all sorts of confusion with regards to the nature of the authority vested in the Church and that vested in the Scriptures as the written Word of God.     For example, there is the confusion of those who claim that the authority of the Scriptures is derived from the authority given to the Church, by which they inevitably mean their particular Church, although it would not be true even if the Church meant were the actual Catholic Church, that is to say, every Church everywhere in organic continuity with the original Church in Jerusalem, under the governance of those in Apostolic succession, and confessing the ancient Creeds.   Some of these have even gone so far as to claim that their Church has the power to turn books that are not inherently inspired by God into authoritative Scripture. (3)   Obviously, however, the Scriptures being what the Church has always claimed them to be, that is the inspired (4) written Word of God - and the Church says that this is what they are because this is what they are, not the other way around - their infallible authority is derived from this fact and not from the authority of the Church.

 

The extraordinary authority and power given to the Apostles, therefore, can be seen in the end for which it was the means – the giving to the Church, an infallible Rule of Faith for the Gospel Covenant, in the New Testament Scriptures.      In these same infallible New Testament Scriptures we find the record of Jesus Christ’s commissioning His Apostles, placing them in authority over the Church, and bestowing upon them the ordinary authority and power they would pass on to those who would join them and follow them in the government of the Church.

 

Jesus Christ’s original commissioning of His Twelve Apostles is recorded by St. Matthew in the tenth chapter of his Gospel, by St. Mark in the fourth chapter of his Gospel, and St. Luke in the sixth chapter of his Gospel.   These were already Jesus’ disciples – St. John records how SS Peter, Andrew, Philip and Nathaniel had first come to know Jesus and become His private disciples shortly after His baptism, the other Evangelists record the more public calling of SS Peter, Andrew, John, James the Greater, and Matthew to follow Jesus after His public preaching ministry began with the arrest of John the Baptist.   By the time of the commission, the twelve were all among a much larger body of His disciples from which they were selected.  (5)  St. Luke records that He set them apart from His other disciples and gave them the title Apostle (6:13), SS Matthew and Mark record that He sent them throughout the Holy Land preaching the Gospel to the Israelites and that He gave them power to cast out demons and heal sicknesses.   The commission to preach was obviously an appointment that came with ordinary authority.   It is less obvious whether the power to cast out demons and heal sicknesses was ordinary or extraordinary.      The Gospel of Mark records that they healed the sick by anointing them with oil (Mk. 6:13).   The anointing of the sick is part of the ministry that the Apostles passed on to their successors and also to the order of presbyters that they established under their government in the Church (James 5:14).   Exorcism is also a ministry that has been passed down to subsequent bishops and the presbyters under them.   Therefore, it would appear that this initial power given with the first Apostolic commission, miraculous though it was, was also a case of ordinary power.   However, just as the commission would be greatly expanded before Jesus ascended back to heaven, so the Apostles’ power to cast out devils and heal would be expanded at Pentecost to the point where the Apostles, like their Master, even raised the dead (Acts 9, 20).

 

The expansion of the Apostles’ commission, after the Resurrection and before the Ascension, is recorded in the Synoptic Gospels and the book of Acts.   The original commission was limited to the Israelites - “Go not into the way of the Gentiles, and into any city of the Samaritans enter ye not.  But go rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel” (Matt. 10:5-6).   The expanded Commission – traditionally called the Great Commission – included the entire world – “Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost: Teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you: and, lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world.  Amen.” (Matt. 28:19-20 – see also Mark 16:15 and Acts 1:8).   The commission could not be expanded any further than that, of course.  

 

In between the original commissioning of the Apostles and the final Great Commission, Christ had given them other powers and authority.   After St. Peter’s confession of faith that He, Jesus, was “the Christ, the Son of the living God”, Jesus announced that He would build His Church “and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it” and told St. Peter that He would give him (“unto thee” – singular) the “keys of the kingdom of heaven”.  He later told the other Apostles that they would have this same power (18:18) and following the Resurrection He breathed on them, saying to them “Receive ye the Holy Ghost” and bestowed upon them (“ye” – plural) the power of the keys (Jn. 20:22-23).   This might seem like extraordinary power, especially if it is read in the extremely hyper-literal – and wrong - way of involving the arbitrary power to save and to damn others, but it is actually the ordinary authority to admit into the fellowship of the Church, exclude from such fellowship, and re-admit those formerly excluded, the authority essential to the governing of a society such as the Church.   As such, it has always been understood to have been passed on to those who were later admitted into the governance of the Church with the original Apostles – to all of them, not just the successor of St. Peter in one of the Churches he had presided over. (6)

 

On the evening of His betrayal, while keeping the Passover Seder with His Apostles, the Lord Jesus instituted the Sacrament of the Eucharist.   Each of the Synoptic Gospels records the event – St. John, who does not, provides an earlier extended discourse from Jesus in which its significance is explained at length.   He took the bread – the unleavened bread or matzot which was, of course, the only kind permitted at the “feast of unleavened bread” – and “gave thanks, and brake it, and gave unto them, saying, This is my body which is given for you: this do in remembrance of me.”  (Lk. 22:19)   After the supper, He took the cup and did the same saying “This cup is the new testament in my blood, which is shed for you.” (Lk. 22:20).   By doing this, Jesus established His Apostles as a new order of priests over His Church.   This does not conflict with the universal priesthood of all believers (1 Peter 2:4-5) any more than the establishment of the Levitical priesthood under the Aaronic high priesthood conflicted with Israel’s being a nation of priests (Ex. 19:6).   That this is clearly to be understood from the account of the institution of the Eucharist is evident from the nature of the Sacrament.   It takes bread and wine, the two kinds of sacrificial offerings from the Old Covenant that did not involve death and blood, and makes them the representatives of the Body and Blood of Jesus Christ, Whose death on the Cross was the final bloody Sacrifice, to which all the others had pointed, and the Only One which could effectively take sins away and propitiate the justice of God, and therefore the means whereby this Sacrifice could become a meal feeding the faithful of the New Covenant.   This takes the place under the New Covenant of the entire sacrificial system of the Old Covenant.   For this reason it is something that must be performed by someone with a priestly office and commission, as only such could offer sacrifices, and therefore the institution of the Eucharist is the bestowing of just such an office and commission on the Apostles.     Note that the New Testament, does not use the word ῐ̔ερεύς to describe the ministers of the Church, although, as just explained, it clearly tells of Christ bestowing such an office upon these ministers.   The Greek word that was used in the New Testament, however, as the title of the second order of ministry in the Church under the Apostles - πρεσβύτερος (presbyter – literally “elder”) would became the basis for the words, such as the English “priest”, that render the meaning of ῐ̔ερεύς in many languages, even when it is a priesthood other than the Christian that is being discussed.   The explanation for both of these things is probably that the New Testament was, with the exception of the Johannine writings, written while the Temple in Jerusalem was still standing and the Levitical priesthood was still performing their duties under the Old Testament.   The New Testament writers likely wished to avoid the potential confusion of referring to the two ministries with the same word.   At any rate, since St. Paul says that the Eucharist is to be celebrated until the Second Coming – “For as often as ye eat this bread, and drink this cup, ye do shew the Lord’s death till he come” (1 Cor. 11:26) – the priestly office and the authority attached to it, was the ordinary type that the Apostles passed down to their successors – and, in this case, as is evident from what was observed above about the etymology of priest, to the second order of ministry, the presbyters, that served under them.

 

The exact time at which the extraordinary powers, as opposed to the ordinary powers, were bestowed upon the Apostles is not explicitly spelled out in the New Testament, although it can be reasonably concluded that this occurred on the first Whitsunday (Christian Pentecost) when the Holy Ghost descended upon them in the upper room, they preached the Gospel to the assembled multitude and each heard in his own tongue, and St. Peter preached the sermon recorded in Acts 2 that brought about the conversion and baptism of about three thousand.   In the book of Acts, we find the Apostles exercising their ordinary authority of government to establish the two orders of ministry beneath their own.  The reasons for the establishing of the order of deacons are spelled out in detail in the sixth chapter of Acts, leading to the account of the first Christian martyrdom, that of one of the deacons St. Stephen.   The reasons for the establishment of the order of presbyters are not similarly spelled out, but SS Paul and Barnabas are described as ordaining them in the Churches they planted in the fourteenth chapter of Acts, and they are described as being part of the Jerusalem Council along with the Apostles in the fifteenth chapter.  By this point in time the Apostles had already begun expanding their own College.   Apart from St. Matthias’ having been chosen to take Judas Iscariot’s place, and St. Paul’s dramatic conversion and calling following the martyrdom of St. Stephen, St. Barnabas had been made an Apostle by the fourteenth chapter, probably around the time he was sent by the Church of Jerusalem to Antioch in the eleventh chapter.    In the Pastoral Epistles we find St. Paul’s instructions to Timothy and Titus, who had been admitted to the College (as evident from their having the power of ordination) and set over the Churches of Ephesus and Crete respectively.   This appears to have been during a time of terminological tradition.   SS Timothy and Titus are not described by the term Apostle as St. Barnabas had been in Acts, but the term bishop has not yet been appropriated for the members of the College and is still used interchangeably with presbyters for the lower order.   Their having specific jurisdiction over Ephesus and Crete is further evidence that the assigning of episcopal oversight to specific Churches was not something introduced after the era of the Apostles – earlier evidence, for this, of course, can be seen in the fact that St. James the Just had been made bishop of Jerusalem – as the position would later be called – before the Jerusalem Council, over which he presided as bishop of the Church hosting the Council.

 

Thus we see, how the ordinary authority and power which Jesus gave to His Apostles when setting them in government over His Church, survives in the Episcopal College to this day, whereas the extraordinary authority and power bestowed upon them at Pentecost, having served its purpose was not passed on, except in the form of the infallible Rule of Faith, the New Testament Scriptures, that it was given to produce.

 (1)   Often the New Testament links repentance to faith/believing in identifying the response the Gospel calls for, but the role of repentance in that response is different from the role of faith.   It is not repentance’s role to appropriate the grace of God, or to assist faith in so appropriating it, but to bring the sinner into the condition, one of brokenness and humility, in which the Holy Spirit, working through the Gospel, forms faith in the sinner’s heart.

(2)    Works of righteousness, justice and mercy play no role in appropriating the grace of God or in preparing the sinner’s heart to receive the grace of God by faith – and the mistake of thinking that they do is spiritually deadly because if someone thinks his own works play a role in obtaining God’s favour this will prevent him from placing his faith in Jesus Christ and His works rather than in his own.    The New Testament, especially the Pauline and Johannine writings, is quite clear on this.   Works are not the basis of grace, nor the means of receiving it, but are the fruit of grace in the Christian life.   Without intending to discount entirely the insights of E. P. Sanders, N. T. Wright, and the other “New Perspective on Paul” scholars, the works contrasted with faith in St. Paul’s writings cannot be merely the external, ceremonial, aspects of the Law that established Israel’s national distinctiveness from the Gentiles.   Certainly this is emphasized in some of St. Paul’s epistles – Ephesians, especially – but it would make absolute nonsense out of Romans 4:4-5 and Titus 3:5 to read the “works” and “works of righteousness” in them as ceremonial works.   Nor does it make sense to explain away the Pauline doctrine by saying that he was talking about “works of the law” not “works of love” as the entire difference between the two is eliminated if the latter are said to be conditions of salvation.   The difference is that “works of the law” are done in order to obtain God’s favour, whereas “works of love” are done out of the love for God that can only arise in a heart that has received God’s favour, purchased for him by Christ, freely through faith, in response to God’s own love (1 John 4:19, cf. verse 10).   The very concept of “works of love” or “faith working by love” is eliminated if “works of love” are made into conditions whereby we obtain God’s favour or remain in God’s favour.   The old debate about whether sola fide is a heresy or “the article upon which the Church stands or falls” can be truthfully answered either way depending upon the question to which it is offered as the answer.   If the question is something along the lines of “what does the Christian life consist of?” or “what duties and obligations are placed upon God’s people under the New Covenant”, then to answer with “faith alone” would indeed be rank heresy.   If the question is “how may I receive the saving grace of God which Jesus Christ has purchased for me on the Cross” then “faith alone” is the right answer and indeed the very fundamental article that the famous paraphrase of Dr. Luther makes it out to be.   Note there is no conflict between Jacobean and Pauline doctrine on this.   While many of the same terms – “justification”, “faith”, “works” – and illustrations – Abraham – can be found in Romans 4 and James 2, with two seemingly opposite conclusions, a word that is prominent in Romans 4 and therefore noticeable by its absence in James 2, is “grace”.   The justification that St. James the Just was talking about is not justification in the sight of God by His grace.   St. Paul, who wrote after St. James, and is therefore St. James’ interpreter rather than the other way around, explains this in the second verse of his fourth chapter.

(3)  Albert Pighius, in his Hierarchiae Ecclesiasticae Assertio (1545), Book III, chapter 3, made this absurd claim, for example.

(4)   Inspiration with regards to the Scriptures does not mean the same thing as inspiration with regards to great works of art, music, and literature.   When people speak of the latter as being inspired, they are – often unconsciously – evoking the concept of the Muses from Greco-Roman mythology.   Inspiration in this sense, never meant that Homer’s Iliad, for example, was the “word of Calliope”.   Inspiration with regards to the Holy Bible, is what St. Paul asserts in II Timothy 3:16 with the words πᾶσα γραφὴ θεόπνευστος (“all scripture is given by inspiration of God”).   The word θεόπνευστος means “breathed out by God”.  Oddly, it is translated by a word that if broken down by the meaning of its component parts would be in a way the opposite of this – “breathed in” as opposed to “breathed out”.   The more exact equivalent exspired, however, is not in common usage and would, due to its being a homophone of expired, be more problematic than inspired.   The point to be grasped is that inspiration with regards to the Scripture, means more than just the bringing out of the inner talent of the writer, it means that the words written are the words of God and not just of the human writer.

(5)  St. Luke in the tenth chapter of his Gospel also records Christ’s appointing seventy other disciples whom He sent out in pairs with a similar commission at a later date – there is no record of their commission and powers ever being expanded.   If the list of them attributed to St. Hippolytus of Rome is at all accurate then other figures who feature prominently alongside the Twelve in the Acts were among them.  St. Matthias, whom the Eleven chose by lot to take the place of Judas Iscariot, and the other candidate in the lot toss St. Joseph Barsabas (Justus), have always been considered to have been among the Seventy, a reasonable conclusion from Acts 1:21-23. The Eastern Church counts all of the Seventy as Apostles, others have suggested that they were the prophets referred to by St. Paul in 1 Corinthians 12:28 (“God hath set some in the church, first apostles, secondarily prophets…”)

(6)   Before going to Rome and leading the Church there, St. Peter had been the first bishop of the Church of Antioch.   If the keys were unique to St. Peter there is no logical reason why his successor at Antioch would not have as much claim to them – if not a better claim, seeing as St. Peter was at Antioch first – than his successor at Rome.   Note that the bishop of Antioch like the bishop of Rome was one of the three bishops (the other was the bishop of Alexandria) that the Council of Nicaea recognized in its sixth canon as having broad jurisdiction (larger than that of a metropolitan bishop), and one of the five (the three plus the bishop of Jerusalem and the bishop of Constantinople) who were the Patriarchs of the Pentarchy.   For most of the first millennium, to the extent that the Patriarch of Rome was regarded as having a place of priority over these others, it was a case of primum inter pares, the primacy arising out of Rome’s political status as the Imperial Capital, not out of the bishop’s status as the (second of two) successors of St. Peter.   On top of all of this, it is quite obvious that the Mother Church of all true Churches was not the Church of Rome, but the Church of Jerusalem whose first bishop was St. James the Just.   The exaggerated claims of the papacy are historical bunk, and it is quite clear from Matthew 18 and John 20, that the keys were given to all the Apostles, not just St. Peter, and thus are held collectively by all true bishops of all true Churches today.