By Bishops Rent Asunder - Part II

One thing that comes across in reading White's 'Case' is that he maintains the moderate, 18th century, view of Episcopacy, and his thoughts can be summarized under three heads:

1. Bishops were of Apostolic Institution and had developed late in the New Testament period.
2. They were fundamental to a properly ordered church, but in an emergency ordination by Presbyters could be tolerated.
3. He defined their role more in terms of 'supervising presbyters' than 'successors of the Apostles.'

White's views were not quite as Latitudinarian as some others in what might be described as the Low Church party because he goes half way to meeting High Church claims, and does not treat the Episcopate as a civil institution. He treats it rather as an ancient institution which the Church of England and her daughters had received from the first century of the Church's history. It is also quite clear that he does not envision American bishops as being 'Lord bishops' in the English sense. His job description for them is more in the order of a supervising presbyter who keeps and eye on the clergy in his district, ordains, and chairs the local Convention. White, as a son of the colonial Church, does not attach much importance to confirmation. His own practice seems to have changed over his almost fifty years as Bishop of the Protestant Episcopal Church in Pennsylvania. In the early days, he seems to have confirmed such as came to him for the purpose, and later in his career he did make a tour of Western Pennsylvania, but there is little record of his going out of his way to travel the diocese confirming. This is partly because, like most early bishops, he had a day-job - in his case, being the rector of the joint Parishes of Philadelphia.

The High Church party in the late 18th century did not have the same obsessiveness about bishops that would develop under the Tractarians. George Prettyman-Tomline (1750-1827) who served successively as Bishop of Lincoln, then of Winchester, agreed with White that bishops were of Apostolic origin, and were fundamental to a well-ordered Church, but he put more emphasis on the fact that between the first and the end of the third century, the Canons of the Church increasingly placed the bishop at the centre of the ministerial system. Yet for all that, Tomline does not automatically regard foreign orders as invalid, but rather irregular or incomplete. This notion of Episcopacy carried over into the nineteenth century among the Old High Churchmen, and it was a factor behind their support of the Anglo-Prussia Jerusalem Bishopric. However, as the nineteenth century progressed, extravagant claims on the part of episcopacy were increasingly made by Tractarians, and their Ritualist successors, whilst Evangelicals tended to start talking about the parity of ministers, and that Episcopacy was a purely human institution with dark rumblings that it did not originate in New Testament times. As usual, the High got higher, the Low got lower, and they both made themselves ridiculous in the process!

New Testament Evidence
It has to be said that no complete picture of the Church's ministry appears from the New Testament. The Acts of the Apostles starts with the Apostles as the only ministers of the Church in the first few chapters. Then the seven, later described as deacons, are added in Acts 6: 1 - 6. Later in Acts (14:23), Paul and Barnabas are recorded as having 'ordained them elders in every church,' which, when couple to various references to 'elders' [presbyters] and 'deacons' in the Epistles, suggests that a local ministry of deacons and elders, under the supervision of the Apostles had become normative by the mid-40s AD. On occasion, the New Testament text refers to overseers [bishops] but the context demands that on most occasions we accept this as a synonym for presbyter. However, by the 60sAD it is evident that the ministries of presbyter and bishop are beginning to divide as the Church passes into a second and third generation of existence. Paul seems to set his seal of approval on this process in his letters to Timothy and Titus, but I think it is almost as big a mistake to claim that Episcopacy is 'de jure divino' as it is Presbyterianism, or congregationalism, as no modern form of Church government is precisely that of the New Testament, nor, realistically, can it be, as, to fall back on a point made in the Thirty-nine Articles,

"It is not necessary that Traditions and Ceremonies be in all places one, or utterly like; for at all times they have been divers, and may be changed according to the diversity of countries, times, and men's manners, so that nothing be ordained against God's Word."

Tomline's "Elements of Christian Theology" [Volume II, pp. 371 - 405] whilst commentating on the Twenty-Third Article devotes a good deal of time and space to this historical development of the Episcopate as a distinct office - basically between 60AD and 130AD - and its acquisition of an exclusive right to ordain which had occured by the late-200s, at least a generation before the Council of Nicaea. He also gives some attention to local adaptions of episcopacy, but, given the state of historical science c.1800, these are not extensive, however it is quite clear that he understood that there had been a process of historical development.

Unfortunately, the development of Episcopacy in the United States since the 1840s has tended to ignore the cautious approach adopted by Anglicans from the 16th to the early 19th century. Tractarians did not hesitate to make exclusivist claims that unchurched anyone who did not live under an Episcopal system. They took with an unusual degree of literalness Ignatius of Antioch's comment, 'where the bishop is, there is the Church' and in the process began to accumulate many of the trapping of the mediaeval episcopate which earlier generations of Episcopalians had ignored. However, in terms of 'dress sense' the theatrical version of the Episcopate remained confined to the Midwestern Biretta Belt until well into the 20th century, and it is only post-WW2, as the process of the Episcopal Church becoming 'high, wide, and theologically half-an-inch deep' was well underway that anything other than rochet and chimere was seen on the majority of bishops. This caution was well-advised in the American context where there is still a lingering suspicion of monarchy and mediaevalism. However, behind the scenes a subtle shift had occurred in the balance of power between bishops, standing committees, and diocesan conventions.

[Next - Part 3 - The Balance of Power]