§ 134. First Theorem.—There is in the Christian Church a public Ministry of the Word, as a definite office committed to men under fixed forms; and from this proceeds all organization of the Church.

Conf. Aug. v.: ‘For the obtaining of this faith, the ministry of teaching the Gospel … was instituted by God; even as by the Word and Sacraments, as by instruments, the Holy Spirit is given; who worketh faith, where and when He pleaseth.’ xiv. ‘Concerning Church Government they teach that no man should publicly in the Church teach or preach or administer the Sacraments without a regular call.’—Conf. Saxon. (p. 196 Tw.): Agimus autem gratias Deo … quod … conservavit publicum ministerium et honestos congressus, qui ipse etiam distinxit quaedam tempora,—Expos. simpl. xviii.: Deus ad colligendam vel constituendam sibi ecclesiam eandemque gubernandam et conservandam semper usus est ministris… . Nemo autem honorem ministerii ecclesiastici usurpare sibi … debet. Vocentur et eligantur electione ecclesiastica et legitima ministri ecclesiae… . Eligantur autem … homines idonei, etc.—Conf. Helv. xv.: Atque hanc ob causam ministros ecclesiae cooperarios esse Dei fatemur, per quos ille cognitionem sui et peccatorum remissionem administret, homines ad se convertat erigat consoletur … ita tamen ut efficaciam in his omnem Deo, ministerium ministris adscribamus.—Conf. Gall. xxix.: Credimus veram ecclesiam gubernari debere ea disciplina, quam Dominus noster Jesus Christus sancivit, ita videlicet ut in ea sint pastores presbyteri et diaconi, ut doctrinae puritas retineatur, vitia cohibeantur, pauperibus consulatur et sacri coetus habeantur.—Conf. Angl. xxiii.: Non licet cuiquam sumere sibi munus publice praedicandi … nisi prius fuerit legitime vocatus et missus. 1. If in our inquiry as to the origin of this public Ministry we go back to the commission given by Christ to the Apostles,⁸ we find that this commission was chiefly directed to those without; for any instance of a Ministry internal to the Church might be taken as coming under the more general and indeterminate ministry.⁹ The internal, however, grew out of the external, for the newly converted required steady teaching and admonition; so that the internal was included in Christ’s commission as the natural prolongation of the external. It was the Apostles themselves, however, who proposed a division of this internal Ministry and left it to the whole body to transfer the ministry of serving tables to others;¹⁰ thus the teaching office became something entrusted to the Apostles by the community, just as the community had formerly transferred both offices combined to the new member of the Twelve. Thus both offices have been perpetuated in the Church as the main branches of the public Ministry, for it is self-evident that the diaconate can be a Church office only if it be a supplying of the Word; that is, if it be an expression and manifestation of Christian brotherly love in act. But the triple division, however construed, is arbitrary; in essence it must reduce to that double division between teaching and serving tables which really rests on the fact that the gifts requisite for the one task are as nearly as possible independent of those which constitute qualifications for the other. Indeed, from the first, women have always taken part in the public service of tables,¹¹ but have always been excluded from the public discharge of the office of teaching.

2. No individual or small group of individuals can represent Christ: all the more must we regard this transference of offices as deriving solely from the whole body, and the formation of the clergy into a self-contained and self-propagating corporation has no Scriptural basis of any kind. When it is a case of propagation, Scripture signalizes only two points—determination of the qualities requisite for the performance of the task, and selection from among those who are known to be so qualified. Here, then, there remains a wide freedom of choice in assigning different tasks to different people, without infringement of the principle that it is the whole body that organizes the discharge of its functions and distributes these amongst its members. Such distribution is impossible without a definite fixing of objects and an exact delimitation of the area within which each is to function. It must be decided what is transferable and what is not; we therefore indirectly subsume the indeterminate ministry under organization, so as to soften the contrast between the two; as is also done when temporary associations of more closely related individuals are formed, from time to time, in the interest of what has not been transferred. But even the Ministry of the Word can never be transferred in so exclusive a sense that self-communication of the same kind could not take place between individuals apart from the public Ministry; this would be to lord it over conscience¹² and quench the Spirit.¹³ From the transference there arise two sorts of relationship—that of each needy soul to a variety of communicators as determined by his peculiar needs and their methods, and that of each communicator to various receptive souls with reference to some definite need and within the area assigned to him. It is—if we think of a great continuous mass of Christian life—through these two relationships taken together that churches are delimited and separated; each as an area in which there are present all the gifts needed for the promotion of Christian life, and in which all the transferable tasks are advantageously distributed. The ramification of Church offices, as well as the forms under which they are transferred, may be very different; and the theory of such matters belongs to Practical Theology. Here we need only say in general terms that they are good in proportion as, on the one hand, the distribution takes place, and is recognized, as the act of the whole body directly or indirectly; and as, on the other, the most spiritual Ministry of all—namely, the ordered presentation of the Word of God—keeps its place as the mid-point, from which all radiates out and to which all is in relation.

3. Without this ordered public Ministry and the constitution of the churches that goes along with it, Christian communication would merely be isolated and sporadic in character, and to all appearance fortuitous. In fact, however, it would be impossible to avoid a confusing uncertainty, leading to a fruitless and self-consuming waste of varied forces, were the receptive soul with his needs not referred to definite communicators, and conversely were communicators with their gifts not referred to definite circles of the receptive. But even granting that in the power of the Spirit each gifted person were doing everything possible to employ his gifts for the common good, and similarly that each needy soul had discernment enough to try the spirits—in other words, that individuals left nothing undone that might be done, a state of matters only imperfectly realized by the very best distribution of forces—still, everything would rest on the stimulation of personal religious feeling and of individual sympathy. No true common consciousness, no living conviction of the identity of the one Spirit present in all, could arise thus. But without it there could be for us no recognition of the Holy Spirit in ourselves or any proper consciousness of the nature of our vital fellowship with Christ; to ensure that, we must be conscious of ourselves as members of His Body. Hence nothing but an utterly superficial view of Christianity will find it possible to reduce Christian fellowship to the area of domestic life and to silent, private relationships devoid of publicity. On the contrary, public gatherings for common confession and common edification are the principal thing, and the transference to certain persons of predominance and leadership in these gatherings is merely a side-issue. Indeed, so far as this point is concerned, a Church fellowship can be quite in the evangelical spirit which knows nothing of such transference, and concedes to every Christian the right of leadership.

§ 135. Second Theorem.—The public worship and service of the Church is in all its parts bound to the Word of God.

1. Even the isolated and informal communications of Christian people must, in so far as what they communicate is due to the Holy Spirit, be explanations and active manifestations of the Word of God. If the same is to be true of the public Ministry, not in the same fashion merely, but in a fashion peculiar to itself, it must be owing to the fact that this characteristic of being bound to the Word of God definitely enters into the form of public communication. As regards doctrine, this is secured in part directly by the individual expositions of religious truth being so arranged throughout as evidently to be interpretations of particular passages of Scripture; partly indirectly through the Creed, which is a brief compendium of doctrine based on Scripture, and which (assuming its scriptural character) ought to be controllingly present to every mind; by which, too, it ought always to be possible to have the doctrine tested. Both securities, however, must inevitably degenerate into empty forms, easily circumvented, unless the free and informal communication prevailing in the same circle of persons is itself scriptural. If it is not, the Creed will usually assert itself as the authentic sense of Scripture, so as to prevent any still wider divergence therefrom; but the result is an unevangelical worship of the letter, and the deeper penetration of Scripture is made impossible.

The same scriptural character is required of Christian poetry if its creations (although originally meant only for the individual) are to pass into public Church use. It comes out in one way in the psalmodic type of Christian verse, which, attaching itself as it does more or less loosely to paraphrastic translations of the Psalms in the style of the earliest Christian hymns, treats of particular passages and situations in Scripture. It comes out differently in the confessional type, which points back to the ecumenical Creeds and clothes the sum of common doctrine in poetic harmonies. The more Christian poetry departs from these two basal forms and represents purely individual aspects of the religious life, the more its influence is confined to small coteries.

Under the conception of public Ministry we have subsumed everything that is the act of the Christian body as such, and the demand for scripturalness must cover such acts too. Hence these active public communications also are seen to be bound to the Word of God; in part directly, since particular admonitions rest on definite exhortations contained in Scripture and seek to realize them, or are attached to scriptural models; in part indirectly, through the fixing of Church rules which, derived like the Creed from Scripture, seek to establish an order of Christian life in relation to public worship and service—an order to which all public active communication must be conformed, and from which it can be known which actions of the individual the Church acknowledges as its own, and which it does not.

2. Thus we can see how Confessions or Symbols and Church rules or Canons arise in the Church, not so much as standards by which to test the varied presentations of faith in word and act, as rather the more certainly to secure that the individual shall conform to the original utterances of the Spirit. But it by no means follows that in every age it is possible for them to correspond as perfectly to this ideal as in the period of their formation. That this is not the case is a consequence of the simple fact that they are always the work of the whole Church—using that word as embracing the antithesis used above—not merely of the spontaneous and communicative but also (at least indirectly) of the needy and receptive: and this not merely in the sense that while they originate with the communicative they yet owe their influence solely to the freely given recognition of the needy, but also because a diffused knowledge of the spiritual state of the needy—in other words, the special circumstances of the moment—was one motive in their production. Hence from the nature of the case every product of the kind falls short of its ideal, the reason being that the progress of the Church is faltering and that at every moment the effects of reactionary tendencies are a part of the situation. They have validity for us only with the reservation that their scriptural character must always be liable to scrutiny. Hence the public worship and service of the Church must always have attached to it a highly developed organization designed to keep up the expert interpretation of Scripture and to bring it to perfection by ceaseless industry. This need not mean that everywhere and in every age those who are charged with the public Ministry must form a special class within the Christian fellowship. On the contrary, our two theorems show that the ecclesiastical distinction, strongly marked as it may be in particular cases, between those who discharge the public Ministry and those to whom they minister is always subordinate on the one hand to the unity and identity of the Spirit in both, on the other to the fact that both are directly dependent on Scripture. This, as also the unfailing affinity between activities which are sporadic and informal and those officially assigned and ordered, means that the antithesis between the two types of member is an ever-decreasing one. If we further consider that on its critical side the normative use of Scripture must one day cease, the antithesis of the two types, in so far as personal, is lost in a direct assurance, common to both, as to the scriptural character both of the accepted doctrines and the canons of practice.

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Footnotes

1. 129, 2. ↩

2. Cf. § 115, 2 and § 116, 1. ↩

3. ↩

4. 1 Cor. 12⁸⁻¹⁰. 28⁻³⁰. ↩

5. Acts 1¹⁷. ↩

6. Acts 6². ↩

7. Eph. 4²⁹, 5¹⁹. ↩

8. Matt. 10⁶[?]. ↩

9. E.g. Matt. 18¹⁵⁻²⁰. ↩

10. Acts 6². ↩

11. 1 Tim. 5⁹⁻¹⁰, Luke 8³. ↩

12. 2 Cor. 1²⁴. ↩

13. 1 Thess. 5¹⁹. ↩