Controversial Divinity
IN this large volume of 573 pages eleven scholars, under the general direction of the Bishop of Oxford, have set forth the Anglo- Catholic view of episcopacy and its place in the development of the Christian ministry. Bishop Lightfoot's famous dissertation, first published in 1868, and the composite volume The Early History of the Church and the Ministry (1918) were dispassionate surveys of all the evidence available at the time of publication. The present volume is a sustained, elaborate and occasionally diverting piece of controversial divinity. The writers have been alarmed by certain tendencies in the movement towards the union of the Churches, and in this large Tract for the Times seek to guard the Church against the dangers of hasty and imprudent action. The weakness of controversial divinity is a tendency towards special pleading. It has to be stated plainly that, of the essays in this book, only that of the Rev. T. M. Parker on feudal episcopacy is wholly free from this defect. For instance, on p. z68, the writer of 3 John is taken as representing the apostolic authority, though he describes himself only as the presbyter, and Diotrephes is described as " the local mon-episcopos," though there is nothing in the Epistle to make this identification certain. It is just possible that this view of the situation is correct ; but it is clear that con- clusions cannot be more certain than the least certain of the steps in the argument on which they are based. I find that in my copy I have put question marks in the margin against hundreds of passages. In 'many places, I have written in No, where the statement of the evidence seems to me imperfect, or the deductions from it illegiti- mate. Occasionally, this is replaced by the sharper Oh! of astonish- ment. These are no more than the reactions of a single student, who happens to have had occasion in the last fifteen years to work over the whole field covered by this book, though with infinitely less learning than the Bishop of Oxford's team of learned con- tributors ; but I think that the experience of other students may be the same as mine. It would have been a convenience for the ordinary reader if this book could have been printed in four types, to mark the distinction between what is certain, what is probable inference, what is not unreasonable -conjecture, and what is pure fantasy. The danger is that the conclusions of these scliplars may be regarded and quoted as a definitive statement of the findings of modern scholarship on the history of the Christian ministry. This they are not ; they represent an able, sincere and one-sided attempt to make sense of perplexing and sometimes con- tradictory evidence. Some years will have to be allowed for the theological world to consider these findings and to judge of the extent to which they can be accepted as firmly established.
Having said so much by way of criticism, I must make it clear
kat with the main thesis of these writers I find myself in close greement. For years we have tended to stultify ourselves by " con- tion about the name of the episcopate." But this is not really e central question ; that concerns the fate of the apostolate. Calvin the view that the apostolate was a temporary ordinance, and !that, with the death of the last of the twelve apostles, the apostolate died out of the Church. In this I believe that Calvin was wrong. When the last of the original twelve died, the Church, by a brilliant adaptation, carried out in circumstances still almost wholly obscure to us, combined the itinerant ministry of the apostle with the head- ship of the local presbytery, thus preserving the ministry of the apostle, and bringing into existence mon-episcopacy, the headship of one bishop over one Church. I believe that in this the Church was rightly guided by the Spirit of God, that the abandonment of episcopacy in the sixteenth century by some Christian bodies was a grave mistake, and that the fulness of ministry can be restored, not by the acceptance of-Anglican episcopacy in its curious twentieth- century form, but by the recovery of the apostolic ministry, as it was coming into shape in the early years of the second century.
Going as far as I do with the writers of this book, I have to ask myself why I find myself in disagreement with almost every one of their practical conclusions. The point of division seems to be clearly brought out on p. 3o by the Bishop of Oxford :
Priority, theological if not Listorical, must be assigned either to the ministry or to the Church ; one must be derivative from another. . . . There is a sense . . . in which the writers of this book, if forced into this dilemma, would find themselves obliged to assign independence and therefore priority to the ministry.
If faced with this dilemma, the majority of Anglicans would, I think, come down unhesitatingly on the side of the independence and priority of the Church. The Church is constituted by the Word of God, and within that Church the ministry acts as an organ A the body. The two are really inseparable, except in thought ; but, if they must be separated, it is the ministry which depends on the Church and not the Church which depends on the ministry. It does not seem to me probable that those who take in this matter, as I do, the High Church view, will find themselves able to accept all the conclusions of the contributors to this book.
STEPHEN NEILL.
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