Pastor Steve Paulus

Patrology Part Three

The Development of Ecclesiastical Office and Pastoral Ministry

in the Church of the First Six Centuries

A Survey of Key Issues.

Ministry: Charisma or Office

Ministry as Charismatic gift in the NT

Ministry as an appointed office in the NT

Church Office in the Second and Third Centuries

Forms of Church Government in Post Reformation Confessions

I. Ministry: Charisma or Office?

When we speak of ministry in the church we address something viewed very differently by Catholics and Protestants. Yet both groups trace the origin of their beliefs about ministry to the Bible and the New Testament. Protestants with an emphasis on the priesthood of believers tend to de-emphasize the mediatory nature of the church's ministers. The councilor churches emphasize a greater clergy/laity distinction.

The goal of this course is to trace concepts of ministry to their biblical roots. Both the Old and New Testament concepts of ministry are examined, and then the development of church ministry roles are explored through the Patristic period of the Church.

Our primary areas of focus will be the NT concept of ministry; charismatic versus official authority in the church; ordination -- its meaning and rites; official position versus spiritual power; development of the clerus/laus dichotomy.

The course examines the sacral functions of church officers, e.g. aspects of the sacramental system; the nature of church office as experienced in the patristic church with special emphasis on the development of the major orders -- bishop, elder, deacon/ness; the establishment of various orders as reflected in written church traditions and canon law; and a brief survey of pastoral theology from the fourth century on.

One of our overarching questions will be, "Is ministry charismatic gift, official position, or both?" A second question will be, "How did the concept of ministry or church office develop through the patristic era?"

"In every culture and in all ages human society has known the tension between the position assigned to a man and the ability which the man's own inner resources allow him to display. The former endues all that he does with the force of law and of the commission which stands behind him; the latter bestows on him as a person immediate credibility, and is the convincing justification of his claims. Only rarely are these two things entirely divorced. The man of gifts claims a position commensurate with those gifts; the man with position is obliged to try to fill it. A disproportionate emphasis on one of these elements at the expense of the other usually indicates a strained and disturbed situation on the verge of conflict, and threatened from within either by revolution or by equally drastic reaction. I is a serious symptom -- especially in societies where high value is attached to office -- where there is nothing more by way of authority to which to appeal can be made than the givenness of the office as an institution and when the officeholder (to borrow a phrase from Lichtrenburg) invests his office with dignity only to the extent to which he himself is invested with the dignities of office. But even the man with particular 'gifts', and in that sense a special 'vocation', must acknowledge the prevailing order, or at least some higher order and norm, and be willing to serve it, if he is to win men's confidence and not merely to cause upheaval and destruction. The authority of office and the validity of personal endowment can become a danger to one another; but they also exercise mutual attraction and support.

This twofold law applies also in the sphere of religion."

(Hans Von Campenhausen, Ecclesiastical Authority and Spiritual Power in the Church of the First Three Centuries, p. 1).

A preliminary theory of the development of church office is proposed in the following outline from Kevin Giles:

1. An element of permanency

2. Some degree of recognition by the church.

3. A position somewhat apart from other members of the church

4. Payment for service.

5. Authorization. (Letters of commendation or specific commissioning, e.g. the laying on of hands.)

6. Establishment by law. (The securing of the position by ecclesiastical stature).

7. The sacralization of the position. (Priestly status given to the office bearer.)

(From Kevin Giles, Patterns of Ministry Among the First Christians, Melbourne, Australia: Collins Dove, 1989. p.17)

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