Transcription
Are Protestant churches valid churches with a valid Eucharist? The non-Protestant traditions generally say no, though there's a lot of nuances we'll need to work through here. And the rationale for that has to do with apostolic succession, which we're going to define and work through in this video. And I want to argue for the validity of Protestant churches and Eucharists in Protestant contexts. We'll go in three steps: framing historical evidence, then a final theological appeal, which is summing up everything and the most important part of this video.
For non-Protestant viewers, please know that I submit this argument respectfully and hoping to maintain friendship even knowing we will likely disagree. Before diving in, let's approach and clarify the issue before us with a case study that can make it vivid and kind of show the cash value at the street level of this topic. And this is something I've referenced in my previous video, "Why Protestant is More Catholic." It comes out of my book as well.
Suppose the gospel comes to a remote village through the advance of the internet. People read the Gospel of John. Eventually, they get the rest of the New Testament, then the rest of the scriptures, and they come to believe in Jesus. They embrace the gospel message. They are baptized in the name of the Trinity. The witch doctors in their community lose their power. The sorcerers burn their magic books. The demons leave the village. The sick are healed in the name of Jesus Christ. Practices like slavery and polygamy gradually cease through the gospel's influence. Eventually, they spread the gospel to other villages. They translate the scripture into their language. They elect their own overseers who preside over worship services during which they recite the Apostles' Creed, sing, pray, read the scriptures, and celebrate the Eucharist. Question: Is it a church? And does such an entity have a valid Eucharist?
Now, the appeal, by the way, that I made in that previous video I mentioned is not an appeal to emotion, but we're looking at the criteria of the New Testament, like fruit in Matthew 7, exorcisms in Mark 9, and so forth. Now, most Protestants, for most Protestants, this is a no-brainer. It's like, well, of course, why wouldn't it be a church, right? But the non-Protestant traditions generally say no to valid Eucharist. And you'll find a range of language and nuances here, but the answer is more negative than positive. Let's work through this just a little bit here.
In my videos, I try to strike the right balance between popularization and accuracy, which can be challenging. Most of the things I say here, you'll find exceptions to. But let's give some general categories, even knowing some people can now nitpick. The Roman Catholic Church recognizes the validity of churches that have apostolic succession from their vantage point, like Eastern Orthodox, Oriental Orthodox, and Assyrian Church of the East, and a few others. But it uses the language of ecclesial communities for Protestant churches, so they're not churches in the full sense, though there's some Christian realities in some way. But they don't have a valid Eucharist, and that is true from the Catholic perspective even for the Anglicans because their episcopal succession, episcopal means having to do with bishops, is considered null and void. I'm going to do another video sometime on that specific issue, Catholic perception of Anglican Eucharists, but here we're painting more generally.
But let's be clear also, the Roman Catholic Church is much more ecumenical than some other groups, and it recognizes the reality of all Trinitarian baptisms are valid. There are genuine Christians and Christian realities outside of, you know, in Protestant churches, for example, even if they say no to the Eucharist in, say, an Anglican church or my own Reformed church or something like that. Just trying to be descriptive here and accurate.
The historic Eastern Orthodox position on valid Eucharists was addressed in the confession of Dositheus: "This mystery of the sacred Eucharist can be performed by none other except only by an Orthodox priest who has received his priesthood from an Orthodox and canonical bishop in accordance with the teaching of the Eastern Church." However, the Eastern Orthodox tradition is less dogmatically defined. It's less hierarchical. It's more mystical. And so, you'll find a mixture of views today among Eastern Orthodox theologians. You can ask around, you'll hear different things about, say, a Roman Catholic Eucharist, you'll hear different things. But Protestant Eucharists are pretty consistently viewed as null and void. Among the Eastern Orthodox, baptisms in a Protestant context would be more complicated. Some Eastern Orthodox groups accept Trinitarian baptisms via chrismation. Others, in certain jurisdictions, they will require rebaptism. I remember when I was in Athens a while back, we were talking about this, and sometimes it'll vary case by case. All of this is very complicated. You can find exceptions to most of these rules too, like there's odd little odd things in history. You'll even find precedent for Anglican priests who become Eastern Orthodox to be only vested rather than ordained. And this is a big discussion and so forth. If you want an interesting overview of the relationship of Anglican and Orthodox Christians, this chapter in this book is really interesting.
The Oriental Orthodox and the Assyrian Church of the East generally take a similar view of the nullity of Protestant Eucharists, but those traditions are less, they're harder to nail down. They're smaller, they have less dogmatic teaching, and they've been less focused on criticizing others. And so you can just find a little more variation there. These Eastern traditions are a little, you'll often find language like, even in Eastern Orthodoxy, like, "We know where a valid sacrament is, but we wouldn't presume to say where it isn't." You'll sometimes hear that. So I'm not trying to say there's a one-size-fits-all answer here. You also have these splinter groups in the West like the Polish National Catholic Church and the Old Catholic churches that are more generous toward Protestant Eucharists. Acknowledging all the exceptions, and there are more as well, the general non-Protestant view is the village church doesn't have a valid Eucharist. That's certainly true for the Roman Catholics and the Eastern Orthodox. So the question is, why is that? And the answer has to do with apostolic succession.
Now, the basic idea of apostolic succession is that there's an unbroken line of bishops extending back from the present day to the apostles. But in its fuller and more technical expressions, apostolic succession usually involves five tenets:
1. The office of bishop is distinct from the office of presbyter by divine right.
2. It is the office of bishop specifically which is the successor of the apostle.
3. Bishops have regional jurisdiction within a larger network, so each bishop is not just a local pastor but has authority over a diocese.
4. Valid episcopal succession subsists through the laying on of hands from one bishop to another.
5. Here's where it plays out in terms of the case study I gave: Apart from valid apostolic succession, there is normally no valid ordained ministry or holy orders, and thus no valid Eucharist.
Now, there is a kind of apostolic succession that is affirmed by some Protestant groups, especially among the Anglicans, some Lutherans, Moravians, and Neo-Hussites. But apostolic succession is usually not interpreted as restrictively within these groups. For example, in the Anglican tradition, you can find people like Richard Hooker, a wonderful theologian, who thinks that the episcopate has apostolic roots and enjoys divine approval, but is not strictly by divine law. So, there's a real difference between an apostolic succession that serves the well-being of the church versus an apostolic succession that constitutes the being of the church. And the issue we're exploring here in this video is not whether episcopal church government is ancient or wise, but whether it is necessary for a valid Eucharist. In other words, does the village church feast on Christ in the full sense of that sacrament?
And the vast majority of Protestants reject apostolic succession in this more technical sense. Of course, we don't reject the general idea that there are successors of the apostles, that the apostles' ministry succeeds to the post-apostolic church, and the apostles appointed offices within the church to carry on that succession and so forth. That's very clear from the New Testament, and as we'll work through from the First Epistle of Clement, chapter 44, we'll come back to the First Epistle of Clement later. It's very clear. So, the debate is not over: Did the apostles set up offices to succeed them? We all agree on that. The issue is this more specific way of construing the nature of that succession with those five tenets above.
So we would say that that system slowly evolves. What we would say, most Protestants, is the New Testament clearly has apostolic appointment of church offices, a continuity of ministry, and the laying on of hands. But it doesn't have a distinction between presbyter and bishop by divine right, bishops specifically as the successors of the apostles, and sacramental validity depending on the lineage from one bishop to another. And our claim is that people often read later developments back onto the early and New Testament data. For example, in the New Testament, if you just look at the purpose of laying on of hands, it's often very explicit in the text, or sometimes it's not defined at all. But people will read later ideas back onto it. Or people will look at things like the replacement of Judas in Acts 1 as though that were apostolic succession in its later definition. But of course, apostle to apostle is not the same as apostle to bishop. Apostolic replacement is not apostolic succession.
But the broad question before us here can be clarified, just like we're trying to frame this. This is not a matter of church government. This is not a matter of whether it's okay to have bishops. This is a question of where you find a valid Eucharist, and basically where you find valid churches. Now, why do most Protestants reject apostolic succession in this more technical sense? Essentially, we think it's not itself apostolic, and we think the biblical and historical evidence is pretty strong against the idea that the apostles could have recognized this more technical system with these five tenets. We think you can pretty clearly trace it out as it's developing throughout the early church.
Now, I've argued for that more fully elsewhere. Let me just highlight one or two of the most important points of this that often come up in this discussion before I make my theological appeal in this video. Almost all scholars do, by the way, recognize a development here. The debate is about the nature of that development. And you can see, I mean, I reference the scholarship because I find that some people on the internet try to discredit me as though I'm a liar or they'll impugn my scholarship, but they do so when I'm saying fairly standard things. You know, I could say something like, "Christopher Columbus sailed across the Atlantic Ocean," and then people are going to say he's a liar, and I'm like, you know, you can just Google that. So, I cite scholarship to show this is not unique to Gavin Ortlund. This is just a pretty common interpretation of the data you find across different traditions. Sometimes, similarly, from a hundred years ago to today, the scholarship is still pretty consistent in the broad contours.
Here's how the Roman Catholic scholar Francis Sullivan opens his whole book on this topic: "The question whether the episcopate is of divine institution continues to divide the churches. Even though Christian scholars from both sides agree that one does not find the three-fold structure of ministry with a bishop in each local church assisted by presbyters and deacons in the New Testament, they agree rather that this, that the historic episcopate was the result of a development in the post-New Testament period from the local leadership of a college of presbyters who were sometimes called bishops to the leadership of a single bishop. Scholars differ on the details, such as how soon the church of Rome was led by a single bishop, but hardly any doubt that the church of Rome was still led by a group of presbyters for at least a part of the second century."
Now, by the way, you can still believe in apostolic succession and still believe in the episcopate and hold to some kind of developmental model. And I think that's how most people would argue for it today. Here's how the Roman Catholic scholar Raymond Brown puts it: "The affirmation that the episcopate was divinely established or established by Christ himself can be defended in the nuanced sense that the episcopate gradually emerged in a church that stemmed from Christ, and that this emergence was, in the eyes of faith, guided by the Holy Spirit."
There are exceptions, okay? But even the exceptions in the scholarship don't generally support the idea of apostolic succession. So, for example, Alistair Stewart's book thinks that bishops and presbyters were distinct from the beginning, but he doesn't think the bishops were successors of the apostles, he doesn't think they oversaw presbyters, he doesn't think they had regional jurisdiction. He says we don't know how they were ordained and so forth. And the reason why people so frequently take this view is that there's a lot of evidence for this. If you look at the New Testament, for example, it really looks like the general picture is two offices and a plurality of leadership in each church. That seems pretty consistent from the book of Acts and the epistles of the New Testament. And where you have individuals exercising authority, they really don't look like a bishop at all. A lot of times it'll be an apostle or something like that. And in fact, this is not just a matter of terminology. So, you know, whatever the terms are called, sometimes there's just non-technical words used like "leaders" in Hebrews 13, but every church seems like it has a plurality of leaders. The only real exception would be James and the church of Jerusalem. Even Titus and Timothy are not really bishops; they're more itinerant in their role. The general church structure looks like two offices, plurality of leadership.
And one of the clearest ways I think you see this, again, not going exhaustively like I've tried to elsewhere, but a couple of summative points to give you the top-level idea, would be the qualifications lists. So in the New Testament, we have qualifications lists for offices. And for example, in 1 Timothy 3 for overseers and for presbyters in Titus 1. And what you notice is that these qualifications lists are unmistakably parallel and use the terms interchangeably. So you can see on screen, for example, in Titus 1, I've emboldened the key terms here: "The appeal is appoint elders if they are above reproach, for an overseer must be above reproach." And the word "for" at the beginning of verse 7 indicates we're not talking about two different offices here. For example, if I said, "Elect a mayor who's been to college, for a city governor must be educated," no one would say, "Oh, he's talking about two different offices." Because the logical connector word "for" shows that you're using two different terms for the same office. And this can be pretty clearly corroborated, I think, from various texts in the New Testament. Acts 20, for example, Paul summons the elders of Ephesus, and then he calls them overseers. And this is pretty, you know, 1 Peter 5 and lots of other texts like this.
Now, you can argue that's not, that doesn't make the opposing view dead in the water. You can deal with this data and argue for development, argue for different terms. People do this. But what you can't argue is that the distinction between presbyter and bishop that became later, that came later in church history, is grounded in the New Testament text itself. And what I, the reason I wanted to mention that especially from Titus 1 there, is just to talk a little bit about the First Epistle of Clement, because I think you find the same kind of logic here. For example, note what comes just a bit after the passage I cited earlier: "There be strife on account of the office of the episcopate." This is from chapter 44, where you find the same kind of terms. This reads a lot like Titus 1 or Acts 20. "Our sin will not be small if we eject from the episcopate those who have blamelessly and holy fulfilled its duties." You've got to love these ancient translations. You've got to use a word like "holy" sometime in your life. "Blessed are those presbyters who..." and then it describes them. And this feels kind of like the mayor and then city governor, right? The flow of thought doesn't really make sense if Clement were talking about two different offices and suddenly he switches from talking about one office to the other; that disrupts the argument that he's making.
Furthermore, just two chapters earlier, Clement has a chapter typically entitled "The Order of Ministers in the Church." And here he identifies two offices as established by the apostles. So again, we all agree in apostolic succession on in the general sense that the apostles appointed offices for their ministry to succeed through. But Clement identifies these two offices established by the apostles as bishops and deacons. And you can see the purple sentence I put here at the end, or I put it in purple at the end of this passage. That's a quotation from the Septuagint of Isaiah 60:17. So Clement even thinks the establishment of these two particular offices is the fulfillment of scripture. And then throughout this letter, the leadership of the church in Corinth is consistently referred to in the plural. You see that in chapter 47, for example. The whole occasion for this letter is the removal of these church leaders, and Clement is rebuking them and calling them back to submit to their presbyters. The quote you see now on screen is from chapter 57. I'll try to get that citation right by the time this video goes out. And so people can make efforts to reconcile this data with later developments, but read on its own terms, you would never get the idea of bishops and presbyters as distinct from this letter. And that is why Roman Catholic scholars typically acknowledge that Clement's letter suggests a plurality of leadership in churches like Corinth and Rome at this time.
So when you combine the First Epistle of Clement along with the Didache, which is further supportive testimony for a two-office view, what emerges is that all the first-century evidence, both New Testament and extrabiblical, fits with the picture we're suggesting here, where you get the first testimony of the emergence of a clear distinction between the office of bishop and presbyter is in the letters of Ignatius. He has an extremely exalted view of the role of bishops. He sees them as central to church unity, necessary for Eucharist to be obeyed. They're like in the position of God. For example, let me give an example of this. Basically, he says, "Follow the bishop even as Christ does the Father." He has the very clear throughout his letters, the three offices: bishop, presbyter, deacon. And here, note the last sentence: "where it's a proper Eucharist which is administered either by the bishop or by one to whom he has entrusted it."
Now, this is where your people are going to start to appeal to apostolic succession. But I'd like to point out a couple of things. First of all, we have to ask the question, what does the word "bishop" mean for Ignatius? Again, the later developments get read back into the earlier data. Ignatius himself does not articulate apostolic succession in this later technical and sacramental sense, and his language does not require that reading. For example, he nowhere speaks of bishops as the successors of the apostles rather than presbyters. In fact, he instead identifies the presbyters as in the place of the assembly of the apostles. He also characterizes bishops as having a congregational rather than a diocesan jurisdiction. So, Ignatius is best interpreted as the first witness to the emergence of this office of bishop as a distinct third office in its earliest phase. And then it's just rumbling along from there and further developing from there. That's a reasonable historical judgment. And so, you know, I'm not alone in that.
Here's a pathway of summarizing it from ecclesiasticalhistory.org. I'm only citing this text because it's really clearly worded and you see the points there. But that is representative of common scholarly view, like J.B. Lightfoot, Henry Chadwick, lots of people read Ignatius like this. "These bishops are not diocesan and they are not the unique successors of the apostles. Those are later ideas after Ignatius." There are also scholarly arguments that Ignatius is impossible or difficult to reconcile with later Catholic theology, for example, at the Council of Trent concerning the priestly ministry of the church. That's another issue I at least want to alert your attention to. You can see this article on screen if you want to chase that down. My point is, if you define the word bishop, what emerges is Ignatius is the first step in a process of development, and you can watch as it unfolds.
By the time you get to the end of the second century in the writings of church leaders like Irenaeus and Tertullian, you have a very clear articulation of a succession of office. And this is the seeds of what will become that full-blown apostolic succession proper. Those five tenets I gave. Irenaeus and Tertullian are in a very polemical context. They're striving to protect orthodoxy over and against Gnostic groups and other heretical groups. And for them, succession of office functions as a public historical criterion for this transmission of the Christian faith as a whole. But it does not yet amount to a theory of sacramental transmission of grace necessary for a valid Eucharist. And even here, you've got lots of wrinkles. For example, Irenaeus will speak of the presbyters also as the successors of the apostles.
But what happens is, over the course of these early centuries, this general idea of a succession of ministry from the apostles to bishops tightens into the notion of a transmission of the spiritual grace necessary for a valid Eucharist through the laying on of hands, one bishop to another. And you see that sort of crystallizing as you go from the second to the fourth century. A lot of people argue that the first time you are going to get this widely accepted and articulated as such is around the fourth century. In his classic study on the topic, Arthur Headlam describes apostolic succession in this full-blown sense and basically says, "I've read everything earlier." He's talking about the second and third-century testimonies in this quote. "I believe he's saying I don't see that idea there." Now, people are opposing Headlam. They're saying, "No, no, no, the idea is implicit in the second and third-century data," and that's the debate. But nobody can deny there's a kind of development in this conception as you're going forward with increasing clarity and, as I say, crystallization. That's a good word. I try to use these words like accretion. I use this word. I'm trying to help people understand the gradual nature of this, the organic nature of this, the understandable nature of this. People sometimes have a very naive view of how the church develops from one time to another.
If you want to understand that there's going to be development of offices and the emergence of new offices, just look at the later developments. Look at the scholarly debates about when you have an archbishop proper, fourth century, fifth century, sixth century. And this time you see changes in these upper offices like this. And no one, no one freaks out about this and acts like, you know, it's a crazy idea that there'd be development like that. We're seeing earlier development in these early centuries. And this explains, by the way, a lot of the church order texts. So manuals of disciplinary and liturgical rules for the church where surprisingly late in the patristic era, the bishops are elected by their entire congregation. In the Canons of Hippolytus and the Apostolic Constitutions, for example, depending on when you date those, now that can be reconciled with apostolic succession, but it bears witness to this organic unfolding of church leadership that is originally embedded within the local congregation.
And of course, the key figure that helps us interpret all of this is Jerome, who is just explicit and emphatic on this point. And because people try to evade him, I have a whole video just on Jerome showing his relevance to this debate. It's just amazing. He works through all the relevant texts like Titus 1, for example, and his proposal simply accords with the historical data we have from the time in question. So that's the basic historical sketch. I am not being exhaustive. I've covered some of the other things like, say, Polycarp and the Shepherd and other things and other. But I'm trying to hit some of the highlights to try to paint a sketch for people because the key point here is going to be the third section of the video, my theological appeal.
In light of the fact that this stricter conception of apostolic succession is the result of a slow development, on what grounds can we reject the validity of the Eucharist of the village church in that initial scenario? We can appreciate that Irenaeus and Tertullian are trying to fight off Gnostics and other heretical groups in their own context by appealing to a succession of office. But we are in a very different context today. Let me give a few comments, and this is a very simple appeal that I'm going to make for the validity of Protestant churches and Eucharists in Protestant contexts. Here's the essential rationale I would put forward: To know what a valid church is, we must consider Christ himself because the church is the mystical body of Christ in this world. We see the work of Christ and his gospel through the church. And one of the implications of this, by the way, will be paying attention to the teaching of Christ for how he expects us to discern his work. That's why I mentioned exorcisms in Mark 9 and fruit in Matthew 7 and Matthew 12, and where Jesus is basically accosting the disciples for saying, "Don't stop the people casting out demons in my name. Whoever is not against us is for us." Something like this is going to help us explain why we are going to make a distinction between an Anglican parish and a Mormon church. All love to my Mormon viewers, but just sheer theological accuracy requires us to recognize that your beliefs are totally different from ours concerning God, creation, Jesus, salvation, the most fundamental points of doctrine we see differently. But Protestant churches possess and honor and spread throughout this world the fundamental tenets of the Christian religion.
For example, in Protestant churches, we find the worship of the true God, the Holy Trinity, the Father, the Son, and the Spirit. We can fairly say that the Father, the Son, and the Spirit are worshiped and adored because of Protestant churches. In Protestant churches, we celebrate the sacraments, and specifically those sacraments that are actually instituted by Christ himself: baptism and the Lord's Supper. We hold that the other alleged five sacraments are not sacraments proper. They're not instituted by Christ himself as means of grace in the New Covenant era. For example, in my video on penance, I discuss that neither the matter nor the form of penance is present in John 20:23. And again, it's a later development read back into the data. And I discuss other alleged sacraments like marriage and make the observation that that is not a New Covenant sign and seal of the gospel. That is a different institution, still a God-ordained institution, but a creation ordinance, not a sacrament proper. And so if Protestants are arraigned for not having seven sacraments, our reply would be, we are practicing those sacraments that are founded in the word of God and that were instituted by Christ himself. And if that sounds like an appeal to *sola scriptura*, consider that no human being, that I can find on planet Earth, taught seven sacraments not just in the first century, but in the first millennium of church history. And I've argued for that in this video.
In Protestant churches, thirdly, we find government based upon those offices that are actually clearly taught in the New Testament: bishops/presbyters on the one hand, and deacons on the other. And I've reviewed just a little bit of the data for that in this video and more in other contexts. But essentially, we would say Protestant churches have those offices that are founded in divine revelation rather than those that are valid but not necessary developments in subsequent history.
Most strikingly, I think we can say that the fruit of the gospel is found in Protestant contexts. The spread of the Christian religion throughout planet Earth is hugely advanced by Protestant churches, especially from the 18th century on. It's really unfortunate that words like Pietism and Evangelical are viewed negatively by some today because movements associated with these words have advanced Christianity so much. Study the Moravian missions sometime; just amazing. These groups, starting in the 18th century, carried Christianity everywhere from the Caribbean to Greenland. I should do a video on them sometime; it's fascinating. Protestants helped pioneer the very idea of sustained cross-cultural missions. I'm not saying there aren't other wonderful missionaries as well, but just looking at global Christianity today, we can't help but notice the colossal contribution of figures like William Carey, Adoniram Judson, and Hudson Taylor with their emphasis on Bible translation, indigenous leadership, long-term presence, and so forth. And the result is that huge portions of Christianity's growth in places like Sub-Saharan Africa, East Asia, parts of Latin America have occurred as the result of Protestant and evangelical missions. And this has contributed hugely to Christianity's growth from more of a Western religion to a truly global faith. Similarly, Protestant translators and Bible scholars have contributed hugely to the spread of the knowledge of the Bible, and in some cases even literacy itself, as a consequence of that, often in spite of persecution. See my video on William Tyndale for one particularly heroic effort in that regard.
Point is simple: Why deny that a Christian church is a fully valid church when it is worshiping the Christian God, translating and spreading the Christian scriptures, spreading and advancing Christian doctrine and Christian religion, advancing Christian sacraments, practicing Christian sacraments, governed by Christian offices, manifesting Christian spiritual gifts like speaking in tongues, practicing Christian exorcisms of demons, and so on and so forth? Think of the old duck test. This is an abductive, common-sensical kind of appeal. If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it's probably a duck. So we may say in this context: If it looks like a church, acts like a church, and spreads the fruit of a church, then it's probably a church. And if the challenge against us is, "But no, but you lack these other developments like how we interpret apostolic succession," the response to that is: Those developments, though valid in their own context as attending the growth of the church, are not of divine backing. To require them for every other context is to take human development and turn it into divine commandment. And when we do that, we unnecessarily divide and injure the church of Christ.
So this is my respectful argument for the validity of Protestant churches and Protestant sacraments like the Eucharist. Let me know what you think in the comments. Thanks for watching all the way to the end. If you watched all the way to the end, leave me a comment and let me know. And please know how much I appreciate that. May the Lord bless you.