The Radical Resurgence

In my previous essay, I mentioned the doctrine of the priesthood of all believers. Some readers may be thinking I am denying the need for leaders (elders/deacons) in a New Testament church. Nothing could be further from the truth.

But before we can consider the role of congregational leadership we must begin with a fundamental reality – the fact that in the New Testament church there are no priests. And there are no priests precisely because Jesus Himself is the one and only mediator between God and men. It was not until the advent of Christendom that people were needed who could serve as mediators. Simple believers could no longer approach this God of sacerdotal Christianity. As in the Old Testament economy, holy persons were now required who would themselves be able to offer holy sacrifices in holy places (now called “sanctuaries”). In the New Testament, the people (laos) themselves were the bearers of the sacred. Jesus had radically abolished the clergy-laity distinction of Judaism.

It seems to me that we must root out from our minds any acceptance of such a sacral view of the church. When I say that Jesus is against sacralism, I am not trying to say that He is against ministries such as preaching and teaching and leading. It was He, in fact, who gifted the church with the equipping ministry of pastor-teacher (Eph. 4:11). The trouble is that there is very little in the New Testament that would support the thesis that the church is to have a special class of Christians who rule over the church in the place of the Head.

Churches today have to make a choice to follow contemporary patterns of ecclesiology or use the early church as a model, as did the Dissenters of the sixteenth century.

Although they shared many theological concepts with the Protestant Reformers, the Dissenters parted company on several crucial points including the separation of church and state (the church must reject all ties with princes and magistrate), believers’ baptism (the church consists solely of voluntary members), and restoration rather than reformation (the only valid model of church life is the early church as revealed in the New Testament).

Because of these beliefs the Dissenters endured fierce repression. What sustained them was the reality of Christian community. They truly loved and cared for each other. Like the earliest Christians, they wanted to be known above all by their love, Christian works, and mutual support. Heinrich Bullinger, Zwingli’s successor in Zurich, criticized the Swiss Brethren for teaching that “every Christian is under duty before God to use from motives of love all his possessions to supply the necessities of life to any of his brethren.”

At the very heart of the dissenting churches was the practice of Christian love and community expressed in material support and concern for outsiders. So genuine and important was the reality of community that the severest penalty was exclusion from the fellowship.

Sharing Christ with One Another . . . Not Listening to a Pulpit Monologue

Jon Zens

Although I have problems with some of William Barclay’s views, the following observations on Paul’s teaching in 1 Corinthians 14, taken from his The Letters to the Corinthians [1], may be the best concise summary of the spirit of early church meetings that I have ever seen. I have added headings that are not in the original text, and will make several comments after Barclay’s excerpts.

Liberty, But Not Disorder

Paul comes near to the end of this section with some very practical advice. He is determined that anyone who possesses a gift should receive every chance to exercise that gift: but he is equally determined that the services of the Church should not thereby become a kind of competitive disorder. Only two or three are to exercise the gift of tongues, and then only if there is someone there to interpret. All have the gift of forth-telling truth. but again only two or three are to exercise it; and if someone in the congregation has the conviction that he has received a special message, the man who is speaking must give way to him and give him the opportunity to express it. The man who is speaking can perfectly well do so, and need not say that he is carried away by inspiration and cannot stop, because the preacher IS able to control his own spirit. There must be liberty but there must be no disorder. The God of peace must be worshipped in peace.

“To Each One Is Given The Manifestation Of The Spirit For The Common Good” (1 Cor.12:7)

Food For Thought from D. M. Lloyd-Jones

There is also this whole question of the exercise of gifts in the church. I mentioned our ex-Exclusive Brethren this morning and I did so deliberately in order that it might focus our attention on this particular point. Here are men who have come out of their bondage but are bewildered and confused; they do not know what to do. They have certain major difficulties, one of which is the so-called “one-man ministry.” We have our views about that, but I feel the time has come for us to examine even questions such as these. It does not mean that you necessarily abandon that ministry, but it does focus attention on this: are we giving members of the church an adequate opportunity to exercise their gifts? Are our churches corresponding to the life of the New Testament church? Or is there too much concentration in the hands of ministers and clergy?

You say, “We provide opportunity for the gifts of others in week-night activities.” But I still ask, “Do we manifest the freedom of the New Testament church?”

I had been reading The Wittenberg Door since the 1970s. In each issue they would carry an interview with someone of interest. In 1980 they traveled to San Jose, California, to talk with Juan Carlos Ortiz. This interview was selected to appear in The Door Interviews (Zondervan, 1989, pp. 183-190). What follows are excerpts from what Juan Carlos had to say. I believe his words are packed with insights that are just as important now as they were in 1980.  – Jon Zens

Door: You make a starting point in your book. You suggest that when we are talking about the significance of the Bible, in practice, evangelicals believe that God speaks, then the church, and then the Bible. Wouldn’t most evangelicals strongly disagree with that?

Ortiz: Sure they would. That viewpoint has upset many people, but they are only getting upset at themselves. Look at history. It was not the Bible that made the church; it was the church that made the Bible. It was not the Bible who chose the members of the church, but the members of the church who chose the canon of the Bible.

Door: Your viewpoint sounds very Roman Catholic.

Ortiz: The only difference between Catholics and protestants is that the Catholics are honest and say it.

Door: Say what?

8.    Context and Content in  N.T. Preaching.

Having sought in vain for a particular concept of preaching to serve as a criterion for church and ministry, let us keep the word as a general label for the varieties of verbal ministry in N.T. times.

Only by guess and surmise do we construct a notion of what the early church services were like….. Apostles, elders, and teachers must all have preached in divers other ways, but without any hint that one kind of speech has priority.   Yet there is one genuine distinction. C.H. Dodd has demonstrated that when speaking  to non-Christians the early church did have a most specific message.  Here the “proclamation” spoke of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, followed by a summons to repent and believe.

It is clearly possible to distinguish from this those teaching processes in the church which presuppose the listener’s faith……it did make a difference to the N.T. preacher whether his listener was in the church or outside of it, a difference not only in tactics but in content.

Thus we have come upon a new dimension of definition, and a much more solid one – “proclamation” defined not by a specific office but by a specific listener, namely the unbeliever.   But this is clearly not what the Reformation meant, for the whole concern of Reformation theology  was to justify restructuring the organised church without shaking its foundations.  The Reformation retained infant baptism and state-coerced church membership, thus the distinction between believers and unbelievers, members and non-members could not become visible.  The true church had to be defined independent of its membership.  “The church is where the word is properly preached and the sacraments properly administered” is a criterion applying to the pastor and the synod, not the congregation or the Christian.

7.    The Centrality of Preaching.

Especially since the Reformation, the “proper preaching of the Word” has been central in definitions  of both the church and her ministry.  Just what the “Word” means and what the “proper” means have varied immensely from Luther to Calvin, and from Wesley to Barth, but formally the criterion has remained stable.

What we need to test here is not primarily whether the term “proclamation” is biblically derived, nor whether there should be “proclamation” in the church, but a much narrower question.  Is the word’s definition sufficiently objective and clear that anyone can use it and get the same  “measurement”?….

To move from the preachers of Acts to the teacher of James 3, or the teaching elder of the Pastorals, from Calvin to Finney to Billy Graham, and think one word covers that all, is simply to render  that word useless.

6.    Wellhausen’s  Children.

(The concept of multiple ministry) has not been one of the classic options in the inter-denominational arguments of the last four centuries…….Some of these are implicitly or explicitly arguments in favour of the abandonment of the multiplicity  in favour of the mono-pastoral pattern, and to these we turn first.

It is one of the commonly held beliefs of N.T. scholarship in recent years that one can discern within the documents of the N.T. literature itself the signs of a marked evolution in patterns of ministry.  In the young churches which arose directly out of the ministry of Paul, whose life we see reflected in his correspondence with them while they were still very young,  – for example, in the Corinthian letters – there was great spontaneity, even confusion, of enthusiasm and creativity, with a variety of “gifts” and “ministries” which  to our tastes would appear to be chaotic.  Paul did not deplore this enthusiasm (they say), but neither did he prescribe it.

4.    The Meaning of Ministry In the N.T.

The most striking general trait is what  we may call the multiplicity of the ministry. Under this label we gather three distinguishable  observations:

– The diversity of distinct ministries; that there are many, and the listing vary.

– Plurality. The fact that in some roles, notably the oversight of some congregations, several brethren together carried the same office.

– The universality of ministry: that “everyone has a gift” is said explicitly in 1 Cor. 7:7. 12:7; Eph. 4:7, and 1 Pet. 4:10, and implicitly in Rom.12:1.    Does this multiplicity have a  theological meaning?  The multiplicity of gifts assigned by the one Lord who fills all is thus itself an aspect of Christ’s saving work and of His rule from on high.

The “fullness of Christ” in Eph.4:13, or the “whole body working properly” of 4:16 is precisely the interrelation  of the ministries of 4:11,12 in line with the divine unity  of 4:3-6. ”Unity of the faith”, “mature humanity”, and “measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ” are not descriptions of a well-rounded Christian personality but of the divinely co-ordinated multiple ministry.

2.   Religion In The Old Testament.

The priesthood of Israel takes over most of the traits of the general religionist. The priest is qualified by heredity and initiation.  He presides over celebrations of the annual cycle and blesses the king.

In sum, in Israel the function of the religionist is present, accepted, used, but it is also filled with new meaning, relativised in value, and removed from the centre.

3.    The Vocabulary of Ministry In The New Testament.

 If we come to the N.T. with this “professional religionist” view of  ministry, asking, “What is said on this subject?” then we can add together some things which Paul said about himself as apostle, some things he wrote to Timothy and Titus about themselves, some other things he wrote  to them about bishops and deacons, some things Acts reports about the leaders in Jerusalem and Antioch, salt the mixture with some reminscences from the O.T, and come up with quite an impressive package as the “Biblical View of Ministry”.  But if we ask whether any of the N.T. literature makes the assumptions listed above: