A Bishop? Isn’t that *gasp* ‘Catholic’?

St. Paul wrote to St. Timothy: “This is a faithful saying: If a man desires the position of a bishop, he desires a good work.” (1 Tim. 3:1 NKJV) Now, I would submit that these words aren’t really all that hard to understand—unless someone has made up their mind to reject them in advance. St. Paul declares this little axiom (“desiring the position of a bishop = desiring a good work”) in fairly clear terms. And then the holy apostle actually goes ahead and describes who should be entrusted with this office. This certainly implies that the holy apostle actually intended for men to be called to this office.

And St. Paul said even more when he wrote to St. Titus, declaring that a bishop must be “holding fast the faithful word as he has been taught, that he may be able, by sound doctrine, both to exhort and convict those who contradict. For there are many insubordinate, both idle talkers and deceivers, especially those of the circumcision, whose mouths must be stopped, who subvert whole households, teaching things which they ought not, for the sake of dishonest gain.” (Titus 1:9–11) So let’s recap:

According to St. Paul:
(1) If you desire to be a bishop, you desire a good work.
(2) There is a biblical definition of who should be called to this good
work.
(3) The men who hold this office hold fast the Word and therefore
silence those who are insubordinate, idle talkers, and deceivers.

Now, that little word “insubordinate” really gives the Spenerites the vapors. Who are the insubordinate? Well, someone is “insubordinate” who is “not subordinate to authority.” But the insubordinate, idle talkers and deceivers don’t want to acknowledge that there is any authority (well, except for themselves). And so they have turned a God-given word and office—Bishop/Episcopé—into a term for reviling. Oh, they’ll put up with any manner of legalistic tyranny as long as they have regular plebiscites to reaffirm a tyrant who tells them what they want to hear and panders to their “priesthood,” while he pitches the Bible out the window. Call the tyrant a “president” and degrade the Bride of Christ with the revolting spectacle of their party spirit, and the insubordinate are tickled pink (or they would be pink, if that color wasn’t so dangerously close to Episcopal Purple!). But the stubborn fact that Holy Scripture says positive things about the Episcopate reduces the insubordinate and idle talkers to howling at the moon.

And yet, Martin Luther’s “Table of Duties” in the Small Catechism first speaks of the duties of “Bishops, Pastors and Preachers” and cites the very passages from 1 Timothy and Titus to which I have referred above. And, even more traumatizing for the delicate ears of the idle talkers, Luther then wrote of “What Duties Hearers Owe Their Bishops.” Oh, the scandal!

The Reformers understood that the abuses of the Romanists should not overthrow the “good work” which they had often corrupted. Thus we read in Apology XXVIII: “Besides, we have declared in the Confession what power the Gospel ascribes to bishops. Those who are now bishops do not perform the duties of bishops according to the Gospel”—please note that this clearly teaches that there are, therefore, duties of bishops according to the Gospel—“although indeed they may be bishops according to canonical polity, which we do not censure.” (§12) So… even the man-made “canonical polity” is not censured by Confessional Lutherans.

But the Apology of the Augsburg Confessions goes even further, and defines what a ‘Scriptural bishop’ is: “But we are speaking of a bishop according to the Gospel. And the ancient division of power into ‘power of the order’ and ‘power of jurisdiction’ is pleasing to us. Therefore the bishop has the power of the order, i.e. the ministry of the Word and sacraments; he also has the power of jurisdiction, i.e. the authority to excommunicate those guilty of open crimes, and again to absolve them if they are converted and seek absolution. Nor indeed have they power tyrannical, i.e. without law; or regal, i.e. above law; but they have a fixed command and a fixed Word of God, according to which they ought to teach, and according to which they ought to exercise their jurisdiction.” (§13–14)

These responsibilities of Word, Sacraments, and “Jurisdiction” are common to all whom the Lord of the Church has called to the office of the holy ministry. (See, for example, Treatise §74, and Treatise §61). But the Church of the Augsburg Confession retained ‘Bishops’ in the narrow—by then, long traditional—canonical sense of the term for the sake of good order, in some places calling them “Bishops” (in Scandinavia, for example) and in other places “Superintendents” (Martin Chemnitz being an outstanding examples of a Superintendent of Christ’s Church.)

Why do the idle talkers and insubordinate rail against the “Bishops”? Because they take issue with the calling of the entire office of the holy ministry. They make a bugbear of the bishop as the camel’s nose of infiltration against the real target: the office of Word, Sacraments … and Jurisdiction.

More on this topic again later…