Thomas M. Lindsay · 10 of 17

Chapter VI. The Fall of the Prophetic Ministry and the Conservative Revolt. · Part 1

The prophetic ministry of the apostolic and immediately sub-apostolic times passed away in the course of the second century, and its overthrow was a much greater alteration of the organization of the churches than the institution of a three-fold ministry, important as that was. The difference may be seen from two extracts. “Every prophet,” says the oldest ecclesiastical manual, “who speaketh in the Spirit, ye shall neither try nor judge; for every sin shall be forgiven, but that sin shall not be forgiven.” That comes from a time when the prophetic ministry was the great controlling power. “Wretched men,” says Irenaeus, “who wish to be false prophets . . . holding aloof from the communion of the brethren”; and the test of being in communion with the brethren is “to obey the elders who are in the Church.” That comes from the end of our period.

The change between the time when the prophet was not to be judged, but to be obeyed, and when disobedience to his commands was believed to be “an unpardonable sin”; and the time when the test of a true prophet was obedience to the office-bearers of the local church, whose superior he had once been, amounted to a revolution. It was so, and the overthrow of the supremacy of the prophetic ministry rent the Church in twain.

It was inevitable. The more close and firm the organization of the local churches became the less room remained for the exercise of the prophetic ministry, which in the nature of things claimed at once freedom for itself and the power of ruling in some indefinite way over the churches which admitted its exercise among them. A careful examination of the scanty records of the second century reveals that the early prophetic ministry was active within the churches down till the Montanist revolt, and that in the churches which shared in that movement it was continued, and its place within the Church became accentuated. It is also possible to show in what way the office-bearers of the local churches could gradually come to take the place of the prophetic ministry, and how with the great body of Christians this could be done naturally and without any strong feeling that there was a real breach with the past.

In St. Paul’s summary of the gifts which the Spirit bestows, and which when manifested within a community of Christians make it a Church, it can be seen that all these gifts may be divided into two classes—those which enable their possessors to edify the brethren by speaking the word of God, and those which fit them for serving the community in many practical ways. Two of these practical gifts, “pilotings” (κυβερνήσεις) and “aids” (ἀντιλήψεις) foreshadow in the abstract the concrete offices of overseer and servant; and from them the office-bearers of the local churches derive their origin. The task of edifying by speech belonged primarily to the first class of gifted persons, and the work of edifying by wise counsels and all manner of brotherly services belonged to the two branches of the second class out of which the local office-bearers developed. Edification by the Word of God was the most important need of the churches; and if the “gifted” apostles, prophets and teachers failed any community their services had to be supplied somehow.

The Didache shows us the transition stage, and explains how this need was supplied in an ordinary way when the extraordinary means failed. “Appoint, therefore, for yourselves bishops and deacons worthy of the Lord, men that are meek and are not covetous, upright and proved; for they also render you the service of the prophets and teachers. Therefore neglect them not, for they are your honoured ones, together with the prophets and teachers.” These words in italics show us at once the point of junction between the prophetic and the local ministry, and indicate how the latter could fulfil the duties of the former. They also reveal the possibility of the abolition of the prophetic ministry as a permanent part of the organization (to use the word in its widest sense) of the local churches. When the wave of spiritual enthusiasm and illumination which came with the earliest proclamation of the Gospel had somewhat spent itself, there was need to supply through the ordinary office-bearers of the churches that exhortation and instruction which in the earliest times had been left to the inspiration of those gifted with the power of speaking the Word of God. Hence the Didache counsels the community to select men for its office-bearers in the knowledge that they may be called upon to supply this need. But when once the local churches began to have their spiritual needs satisfied within their own circle and the bands of association grew stronger, it is easy to imagine that the power of the office-bearers grew strong enough to withstand the members of the prophetic ministry unless the prophets were content to take a secondary place. The very fact that the office-bearers could “render the service of the prophets and teachers” inevitably tended to place them, the permanent officials of the local churches, permanently in the position of the exhorters, instructors, and leaders of the public worship of the communities. Hence, while we can trace the presence and the power of the prophetic ministry during a great part of the second century, we can also see that complaints against false prophets became more and more common, and that there was a tendency to make the test of true prophecy subordination on the part of the prophets to the control of the permanent office-bearers of the churches.

We can see that the transition from the time when the prophets were supreme to the days when they were expected, if true prophets, to be subordinate to or at least deferential towards the office-bearers of the community, was the more easily effected when we remember that it is highly probable that some men among those chosen to lead the brethren by their gifts of governing had also the power of exhortation and instruction. This was probably the case from the earliest times. The προϊστάμενοι of 1 Thessalonians v. 12, not only laboured among the brethren but “admonished”; and to “admonish” (νουθετεῖν) seems to imply more than mere leading. Whatever be the date of the Pastoral Epistles, it is clear that by the time they were written, the functions of instruction and leadership were conjoined; and few critics, even among those who dispute the Pauline authorship, will be inclined to place them as late as Harnack does. Then, as before remarked, those office-bearers who stand forth most clearly in these ancient times were almost all men who had the prophetic gift. We have already seen how the divine afflatus descended on Ignatius while he was preaching in Philadelphia, and made him cry forth words which the Spirit put in his mouth. The prophetic gift was to be found among the office-bearers of the local churches before the conflict of jurisdictions arose, and the office-bearers who possessed it had all the divine authority which was supposed to belong to the prophetic order.

All these circumstances have to be taken into account in attempting to describe the great change in the ministry which the second century witnessed; and the last-mentioned is useful in enabling us to see how, while the overthrow of the prophetic ministry was sufficient to provoke a disruption of the Church, it could nevertheless be accepted by the great mass of the Christian people.

We have no specific information in the documents of post-apostolic Christianity to tell us how and by what steps the great revolution was brought about; but the conditions and needs of the time enable us to put ourselves to some extent in the place of the men who carried out the change.

Several distinct sets of circumstances require to be kept in mind.

In the first place, the second century was a time of great fermentation in the world of intellectual paganism. In the east of Europe and among the Greek inhabitants of Asia Minor the old religions had lost almost all their real power. The same may be said of the people of Italy also, and especially of the more cultured classes of Rome. It is something pathetic to learn that the only one of the ancient Greek deities whose cult was still practised with something of the old reverence and fervour was Esculapius, the god of bodily health, and that he was called Soter, the Saviour, as if men had despaired of salvation of soul and could hope for no more than the health of the body. On the other hand, worships strange to Greek or Roman, coming from the far East, with painful initiations and purifications fur those who felt the power of sin or the fickleness of imperfection within them, and weird philosophies for the cultured, spread far and wide, counting their votaries by thousands and permeating all classes of society.

Among them were systems of cosmical speculation and mystic theosophy, curiously similar to what we find in Hinduism, and possessing that strange power of absorbing and assimilating religious ideas foreign to themselves, which is still such a feature of Oriental speculation. Votaries of these theosophies were attracted towards the doctrines of Christianity, caught at the Christian conceptions of redemption and of the Person of Christ, and tried to find room for them among the medley of their fantastic beliefs. They set redemption within the circle of their thoughts about the inherent evil in matter, and the Person of Christ found its place among the doctrines of emanation. Christianity attracted them as it still attracts cultivated Hindus. The Brahma Somaj, the Prathana Somaj, the Arya Somaj, strange attempts to absorb some features of Christianity into Hinduism in the nineteenth century, had their parallels in some of the Gnostic speculations of the earlier centuries.

Strange as it may seem to us, those weird speculations had an attraction for many cultivated persons who had embraced the Christian faith; for if the whole phenomenon of Gnosticism was, as it seems most likely to have been, a scheme of thought essentially pagan, trying to assimilate some leading Christian ideas, there were sides to the movement which show us men who were really Christians attempting to make use of these speculations as the metaphysical framework on which to stretch their Christian thoughts and to give them the shape of a rationalized theology. These metaphysics of “wonderland,” where the categories of Aristotle and the ideas of Plato assumed bodily shapes, married and begot a fantastic progeny, filled the intellectual atmosphere of the times, and were the air which thinkers breathed. The Church was face to face with the danger of seeing its historical verities dissolve into the shadowy shapes of a meta-physical mythology. For when Gnosticism entered into the Christian societies, and claimed to be a philosophical Christianity, the very life of the Church was threatened.

Nor were these the only difficulties of intellectual speculation which the Church of the second century had to face. We are apt to think that the apparent contradiction between an Almighty Maker of all things and the miseries of life is the peculiar property of our own age. That is not so. Men felt keenly the contrasts which trouble modern minds. They lived in a civilization as intellectually trained as our own. How could the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of Mercies and the God of all Love, inspire the Old Testament, where the Jews were ordered to exterminate their enemies and threaten and practise all kinds of cruelties? How can creation, groaning and travailing in pain, be the work of that God Who has manifested Himself in Jesus Christ? Nature is not merciful. It seems hard and pitiless. The mystery of pain broods over it and in it. History is full of battle and pestilence, of turmoil and misery.

Among men who had ideas like these Marcion was a leader. His solution of the problem was that the God of the Old Testament and the Creator of the Universe were very like each other and very unlike the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. The Being who had created scorpions and sent venimous creeping things into the world was not unlike the God Who had commanded the slaughter of the Amalekites and had inspired the imprecatory Psalms. An old world Count Tolstoy, Marcion said that Christ’s Christianity had nothing to do with any part of the Old Testament, nor with much of the New. The New Testament had indeed come from Jesus Christ, but it had been sadly corrupted by the votaries of the God who created the Universe. He constructed a Canon of Scripture for himself and for his disciples, and into his Scriptures no portion of the Old Testament was admitted, and from them much of the New was excluded. He went back to the Pauline Epistles, the earliest literary creations of the Christian inspiration, to seek in them the purest records of the teaching of that Saviour, Who, unheralded, as he thought, by any partial anticipations, had come suddenly to reveal to the world the hitherto absolutely unknown God of Love and Mercy. Marcion was a man of deep and genuine religious character, of an intensely practical nature, and without any tendency to speculation. He stood forth in that age of mixed faiths, of eclectic paganism and Gnostic Christianity, as a teacher who had mastered a clear and definite, if narrow, creed. His sincerity, his piety, his energy and his wonderful powers of organization, created not merely bands of devoted followers, but a church which, according to the ideas of those who belonged to it, was a reformation and a purification of the existing Christianity. Within it asceticism was practised in a manner hitherto unknown within Christianity. No married persons could ever rise to be more than catechumens, and members were required to abstain from all sexual relations; rigid laws about meats and drinks were laid down and enforced; martyrdom was to be welcomed, not shunned, and the hatred of the great mass of their fellow-Christians was an additional burden to be endured. Wherever Christianity had spread the followers of Marcion appeared, formed themselves into separate churches, with the same ceremonies of worship, the same ecclesiastical organization, or one very similar, the same, if not greater, strictness of moral living, and an intenser joy in martyrdom. The dogmatic unity of the Church, if it ever had been truly and thoroughly one, was broken. Other bodies of Christians, with separate organizations, appeared standing between the Marcionite and the parent churches, and pagans could sneer at a divided Christianity and ask the Christians which God, they who preached His Unity, really worshipped?

Can we wonder then, that in face of these anxieties the leaders of the Christian churches felt the need for a closer fellowship and a firmer grasp of what they believed to be the verities of the faith? Irenaeus voiced the clamant need of the Church. His rallying cry is familiar enough. It is one which has arisen always in such crises. It was practically this; “Back to the Christ of history: back to the fixed verities of the Christian faith.”

But how was it possible to get back to these fixed verities of the Christian faith, and by a path that all could tread? All the more important writings of the New Testament were already recognized as Scripture in the West, but the prevailing attitude of mind was towards allegorising, and the Epistle of Barnabas shows how unhistorical this mystical interpretation could become. If Barnabas could find a text and proof for the Cross and for Baptism in Psalm i. 3, the Gospels might be drawn upon for proofs as satisfactory for the Gnostic metaphysical mythology. Tertullian confesses as much, and naïvely remarks that he does not risk contradiction in saying that the Scriptures were “even arranged” by the will of God in such a manner as to furnish materials for heretics. The bent of the philosophy of the day was to dissolve facts into theories, and the Platonists in their expositions of Homer had taught orthodox Christian and Gnostic alike their elusive methods of exegesis. Then, apart from the impossibility of using a sound exegesis which yielded a common method of interpretation, the question of what was the canon of the New Testament Scripture was one of the matters in dispute between the organized Christian Church and those believers in Christ who were outside its pale. Marcion had a canon of his own, as we have already seen; the various Gnostics had theirs, not always the same—for what we call the apocryphal Gospels and Acts were received by many. Nor could an appeal be made to any short common creed. There was none as yet common to all Christendom, although what lies at the basis of the Apostles’ Creed was received throughout the Church and had become fixed in a form of words in the West. Various Gnostics had their creeds differing from each other, and to them they appealed. Disputes also existed about the true apostolic tradition whether Jesus had or had not entrusted His apostles with a secret doctrine in addition to what He openly taught, and whether that “secret teaching” had been communicated to any by the apostles, and if so to whom.

Amidst this medley of beliefs and assertions Irenaeus assured the faithful that it was easy to know what the simple and fixed verities of the Christian faith really were. They are everywhere the same. Ask Christians of the most different classes, whether cultured inhabitants of centres of civilization or nomade Scythians roaming over the steppes in waggons and unable to read or to write, and the answer will be everywhere the same. He describes what the answer will be, and gives a short string of sentences resembling the Apostles’ Creed. The Church, he says, though scattered throughout the world, preserves this creed, “as if it were some precious deposit in an excellent vessel” Varieties of language do not interfere with the meaning of the truths of the faith; “the churches which have been planted in Germany do not believe nor hand down anything different, nor do those in Gaul, nor those in the East, nor those in Egypt.” He declares that the sentences which he gives as containing the simple verities of the Christian belief can be proved to be what he has said, because there are in the Christian Church successive generations of men who go back to the time of the apostles who were the companions of Jesus. His argument is always: I know a man who knew a man who knew an apostle.

There are in the various churches scattered throughout the world successions of men who have been taught generation by generation what the fixed verities of the Christian faith are. In some of these churches the successions go back to the times of the primitive apostles themselves, who taught the first generation of believers. If questionings arise, if speculations trouble, if plain men are bewildered by the gorgeous phantasy of Gnostic theosophy or by the sincere if narrow logic of Marcion, if the canon of New Testament Scripture is doubtful or if the original documents have been tampered with, if the allegorising exegesis makes the whole of Scripture of doubtful interpretation, there is a common-sense remedy for all these evils and one which has been constantly used. Apply to the men who are in the best position for knowing what the apostles really taught, what words they used, and what meaning they attached to these words. “If there arise a dispute about any ordinary question among us, should we not have recourse to the most ancient churches with whom the apostles held constant intercourse, and learn from them what is certain and clear with regard to it it?” This is no new means of arriving at the truth, he urges. It is what is constantly done. There are believers in Christ who cannot read, who cannot make use of any written documents which the apostles have left, but who “have salvation written in their hearts by the Spirit, without paper or ink,” and who have received orally the ancient tradition, and have become very wise in doctrine, morals, and tenor of life.

Irenaeus proposed to give to this old and much used method of finding out what were the primary and fixed verities of the Christian faith the sanction of an ecclesiastical usage. Here we meet for the first time, outside the Roman Church, the thought of a succession from the apostles in the office-bearers of the local churches; but it is a very different thing from the “gigantic figment” of an Apostolic Succession which dominates the Anglican and is a law in the Roman Church of the present day. It is meant to be a simple and clear way to find out what the real faith of the Church is in a time of more than usual perplexity. This is evident from the application Irenaeus makes of his principle, and it is also clear from the manner in which Tertullian, who adopts the principle, illustrates the use to be made of it. “Run over the apostolic churches, in which the very chairs (cathedrae) of the apostles still guard their places (suis locis praesident), where their own unmutilated (authenticae) writings are read, uttering the voice and representing the face of each of them individually. Achaia is near you; you find Corinth. You are not far from Macedonia; you have Philippi; you have the Thessalonians. You are able to cross to Asia; you find Ephesus. You are close upon Italy: you have Rome.” In all these churches apostles once taught; to all these churches they sent epistles which are to this day read; their voices are still living there, and their very presence seems still to haunt them. From their days until now, such is the argument, men with the gifts of leadership and of wisdom had been office-bearers in these communities and in others founded, if not by apostles, by “apostolic men”; each generation had been carefully trained in the apostolic doctrine by their predecessors, and they were able to judge what the simple verities of the Christian faith were. What Irenaeus proposes is that the office-bearers who are in the succession are to be made the judges of what wholesome Christian teaching is. It is the fact of an uninterrupted succession of responsible men that is the natural and historical guarantee that the doctrines once transmitted to the fathers have been retained in the memory of the sons. For some generations it is probable that individual men had presided at the head of the Christian communities, and Irenaeus might have simply spoken of a succession of bishops, but he does not; it is the whole body of elders and bishops that Irenaeus has in view. This can be seen only when all his allusions to the matter are read. They will be found in the footnote.

Tertullian, who is twenty years later than Irenaeus, always speaks of successions of bishops or chief pastors. In both cases, however, the main thought is that there are in the various local churches actual successions of men who, because these successions go back to the actual times of the apostles, can be said to have known men who knew apostles or apostolic men, and who are therefore able to know what the apostles really meant to teach. With both writers the succession they speak of as a guarantee of the correctness of the Church’s creed and as a pledge of her dogmatic unity, is an historical succession, and the conception is a matter of fact and not of dogma.

Yet with both something is added to this purely historical conception of the succession. There is an addition, the thought somewhat indefinitely formulated that these men who are office-bearers in the succession have a charisma veritatis because of their official position. The thought is not very strongly dwelt on by Irenaeus; but it is present in one or two passages quoted in the note below, and in the second it is plain that whatever use he makes of it with reference to office-bearers what he has in his mind is the “gift” which in earlier days was exclusively associated with the prophetic ministry.

It is evident that this new official task of guaranteeing the true apostolic teaching, which is laid upon the office-bearers in general, and on the pastors or bishops in particular, must have had a very restraining effect upon the prophetic ministry, and on the unlimited freedom of exhortation which characterized the churches in the first century and in many decades of the second century. The office-bearers who were in the succession were now made the judges of what ought to be taught to the people in exhortation and in instruction; and they were therefore set in the position of judging all who undertook the function which was the peculiar work of the prophetic ministry. Besides, it was suggested that the peculiar veritatis charisma, the “gift” which gave them their unique and distinguished position, belonged to the office-bearers of the churches as well as the “gift” of government. The indications are that the suggestion of Irenaeus had been acted on long before he placed it on record. Whenever it came to be the accepted rule in the Church the revolution became an accomplished fact; and the men who had been supreme (the prophets), and whom to disobey had been accounted an unpardonable sin, became the servants of the office-bearers whose superiors they once had been.

The need for some authority to express the dogmatic unity of the Church, and the idea that this authority lay in the office-bearers of the churches, must have placed the prophetic ministry in an inferior position and tended to destroy it altogether. For though the position assigned to the heads of the churches meant practically that they were to be the judges of what the proper instruction was, and did not necessarily mean that they were in every case to take the instruction in their own hands, still that was bound to come out of the idea in the end. The office-bearers, and especially the bishops, would inevitably become the instructors as well as the judges of the instruction that was given.

Another set of circumstances working for the downfall of the prophetic ministry. The Rescript of the Emperor Hadrian to Minucius Fundanus, who was Proconsul of Asia sometime about 124 A.D., was rightly regarded by the Christians as the beginning of an era of comparative toleration. The character of the great Emperor, his curiosity, half cynical half hopeful, about all kinds of religious faiths, made them expect great things from him. Christian literature struck a bolder note. The writings of the apologists began to appear, who demanded on behalf of their brethren to be treated like their fellow-subjects, free to live, so long as they did not transgress against the laws of morality, under the shelter of the wide-spreading pax Romanorum. Christianity found a voice and demanded to be heard, pleading for the toleration which was granted to all other religions. The earliest of these writers was probably Quadratus. Aristides, Justin Martyr, Miltiades, Melito, Tatian, Athenagoras and others followed in succession. From our modern standpoint these documents are but feeble expositions of the Christian faith; Tertullian alone, with his lofty elevation of sentiment and his stern moral enthusiasm, seems to be an apologist for all time. But if these writings are looked upon, as they ought to be, in the light of pleas for some way of living quietly and peaceably under the imperial rule, they are very interesting documents. They almost invariably take the same line of argument. Christianity, they say, can have no quarrel with good government; its morals are purer than those of paganism, and are therefore a better protection to the State; Christians cannot pray to the Emperor, but they always pray for him; they are and they mean to be loyal citizens of the great commonwealth to which they belong. It is strange to observe an undertone of admiration for the imperial rule under which they live, and a conviction that all would be well if the emperors could only learn what Christianity really is, and to notice how they almost invariably distinguish the imperial ruler from those who persecute them. Tatian seems even to discern that there is a universal humane aim in the imperial rule, that it has proclaimed in some shadowy way the brotherhood of mankind, that there is a measure of resemblance between the empire and Christianity, and that the two ought to be allies and not foes. They all look forward to a possible accommodation between the imperial government and the Christian societies. Tertullian indeed pleads that the Christian churches ought to be allowed to enrol themselves as associations for practising a lawful religion.

But the more thoughtful and politic among the leaders of the Christian societies could not help seeing that if there was to be any accommodation with the empire there must be some change on the part of the Christian societies, and that Christians must to some extent change their habits of life if they were to mingle more freely with their fellow-men who were not Christians. In the earlier times Christianity was held to be a “mode of life,” to use the expression of Tatian; Christians were men and women who had little or nothing to do with this world; who were not to conform themselves to it in any way, and were not to mingle in its pursuits nor in its pleasures. They were little separate secluded societies, awaiting on the threshold the opening of the new heavens and the new earth. The earliest Christians were content with this, and asked for nothing more.