Who Do We Trust?: Church Hierarchy

We’re now about half way through this subsection of the series on authority in Christianity that focuses on what we might call ‘Tradition’. So far we’ve looked at official regulatory documents like creeds and canons and the more informal authority of important voices from the past. Today I’m going to look at a more immediate kind of authority about which different groups Christians differ quite a bit: the authority of the Church as represented by its leadership.

There is very strong evidence that a formal organizational structure emerged in the earliest days of Christianity. Jesus selected twelve men to be his closest disciples and empowered them to preach and minister with his authority (Matthew 10); later, he commissioned a larger group, known as the Seventy, to do the same (Luke 10). After Peter declares Jesus to be the Messiah — the God-anointed leader many Jews had been waiting for — Jesus gives him a special authority, saying: “I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven” (Matthew 16.19). A couple of chapters later, he (rather anachronistically) extends this same authority to the nascent Church itself:

‘If another member of the church sins against you, go and point out the fault when the two of you are alone. If the member listens to you, you have regained that one. But if you are not listened to, take one or two others along with you, so that every word may be confirmed by the evidence of two or three witnesses. If the member refuses to listen to them, tell it to the church; and if the offender refuses to listen even to the church, let such a one be to you as a Gentile and a tax-collector. Truly I tell you, whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven. Again, truly I tell you, if two of you agree on earth about anything you ask, it will be done for you by my Father in heaven. For where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them.’ (Matthew 18.15-20)

In the Acts of the Apostles we see not just the authority of figures like Paul and Peter at work in the communities in which they preached, but also the strong authority held by the Church in Jerusalem. Acts 15 even records an official Church Council gathered in Jerusalem to discern once and for all how to deal with the divisive question of to what extent Gentile Christians needed to accept Jewish religious traditions. And, in the Epistles we see the emergence of what appears to be a two-grade hierarchy within the local Church, with bishops (literally ‘overseers’) handling teaching and sacramental duties and deacons managing more practical and pastoral responsibilities (see 1 Timothy 3). (It seems the order of priest, or presbyter, may have originally been synonymous with that of bishop and emerged out of it as the Church grew and a single bishop could no longer effectively minister over all of the faithful under his charge.)

As the age of those who directly knew and bore witness to Jesus faded, the importance of the Church hierarchy only increased. Here’s one representative passage from a second-century letter:

It is proper, therefore, in every way to glorify Jesus Christ, who has glorified you, so that you, joined together in a united obedience and subject to the bishop and the council of presbyters, may be sanctified in every respect. … For Jesus Christ, our inseparable life, is the mind of the Father, just as the bishops appointed throughout the world are in the mind of Christ. (Ignatius, Epistle to the Ephesians 2.2)

We see here that already in the first decades of the second century — still less than a hundred years after the life of Christ — we have a teaching that equates obedience to one’s local bishop with obedience to God. This is authority indeed!

The ideal of the three orders of clergy left a big question open for how questions or controversies should be resolved if their reach went beyond the local church. As the Acts 15 story mentioned above shows, the earliest method the Church used to deal with this was the Church Council. This is the principle of catholicity at work. As political as the term has become over the centuries, ‘catholic’ at its most basic means ‘according to the whole’. The intent of its use within Christian authority was similar to the idea of the Rule of Faith: We are to believe what ‘all’ Christians, in ‘all’ places, and at ‘all’ times have believed. And the best way to discern this is to bring all of the bishops together in a council.

But again, people are people, and councils rarely resolved anything. For example, the Second Ecumenical Council of 381 (First Constantinople) was convened largely because the Council of 325 (Nicaea) had not successfully resolved the Arian controversy. Likewise, the results of the Third Ecumenical Council (Ephesus, 431) came close to prompting a schism within the Eastern Church, and precipitated the Fourth Council (Chalcedon, 451), which did prompt a lasting schism. Moreover, there were other councils in between these that could have been considered ‘ecumenical’ had their decisions not later been overturned. And, if we turn back to the question of the authority of the hierarchy, the whole thing is further put into question considering at Nicaea in 325 it was the theology of a ‘disobedient’ deacon, St. Athanasius of Alexandria, that carried the day. So we start to see the inherent problems in taking the authority of the hierarchy too far.

The de facto reality is that, if historical precedent is any indication, we are to follow he decisions of Councils of Bishops — unless we think they’re wrong. And, we are to submit to church leadership — unless our leaders are in the wrong. In other words, Church history suggests that these teachings on authority are helpful ideals that bring some semblance of order in the day-to-day, but are not ironclad rules that can be followed at all times.

Of course, even if Councils were a perfect tool for Church governance, it isn’t practical to gather all of the bishops together to deal with every issue. And so the Church also used a tool that we might call a regional appeal. In this case, a local bishop might refer a matter to the bishop of the closest major city. Often these relationships were longstanding and well-established, since a lot of missionary efforts were based out such major centres, which became ‘mother cities’ (the literal meaning of the word Metropolis) to the churches in the surrounding region. It seems the nature of these relationships evolved over time, from this initial more informal relationship based on natural respect, to the more defined and codified Church structures common for most of Christian history. In the West, things coalesced around Rome. The East, where there were more big, important cities, was more diffuse, and Alexandria, Jerusalem, Antioch, and Constantinople all became the formal heads of regional Churches, and their bishops became known as Patriarchs. With this basic difference, it’s no surprise that the East and West developed different understandings of how these Patriarchates should interact. While all accepted the ‘primacy’ of Rome, they understood what primacy meant differently: For the Eastern Churches, the Bishop Rome was to be something akin to the chairperson in a meeting — an important leader to be sure, but not one who had more real authority than other voting members. But for the West, Rome’s leadership was thought to be more like a CEO, or later, literally that of a king. This difference was one of the main drivers of East-West tension throughout the second half of the first millennium CE and the eventual schism towards the start of the second.

This (albeit oversimplified) history is important because we cannot talk about the authority of the Church hierarchy without commenting on its most extreme manifestation in Christianity, the Roman doctrines of papal supremacy and infallibility. This is not a blanket infallibility as some detractors assume, but even in its actual limited scope, it is still remarkable in its boldness. As codified at the First Vatican Council (1869), this states that the Bishop of Rome cannot err when, in the discharge of his office as Pope, he defines a theological or ethical doctrine that is to be held by the whole Church, so long as it does not contradict the teaching of Scripture and Tradition. Since this doctrine was officially defined, it has only been enacted once, in 1950, when Pope Pius XII proclaimed and defined the doctrine of the Assumption of Mary. (Other examples from before the formal definition at Vatican I include statements on the Beatific Vision (ca 1336), condemning Jansenism, a movement that, among other things, rejected free will (17th and 18th Cs), and the Immaculate Conception of Mary (1854).) No similar form of authority has emerged in any other branch of Christianity, so it stands out as uniquely extreme. And, as the history shows, neither this way of thinking about authority nor the understanding of Roman primacy on which it was based, were accepted by the rest of the Church, and it likely remains the greatest barrier to Christian unity.

So what might we say about all this? Here are some of the major themes that have become important for me when thinking about the authority of the Church hierarchy:

• Church hierarchies provide a natural and necessary order within communities. But, there’s often a disconnect these days between the vocation to leadership and the actual jobs associated with the roles. This sets no one up for success.
• Even in its most extreme forms, such as the doctrine of papal infallibility in the Church of Rome, the authority of Church hierarchies is always subordinate to other, greater authorities (in this specific example, namely Scripture and Tradition). This means that it is a relative, rather than absolute form of authority.
• The relative nature of this type of authority is also evidenced by the simple fact that everyone, whether in ancient times or today, is happy to uphold the authority of the Church hierarchy and its councils until one vehemently disagrees with their decisions. And I can’t say I’m upset by this. The danger of mindlessly following someone out of a value of obedience is greater than the danger of pushing back when needed.
• No one, no matter their role or vocation or duty, no matter their faithfulness, intelligence, or wisdom, is infallible, under any circumstances.