Thomas M. Lindsay · 15 of 17

Chapter VII. Ministry Changing to Priesthood. · Part 3

The bishop was, therefore, according to Cyprian, the overseer of the brotherhood, the provost of the people, the pastor of the flock and the governor of the Church, and all these terms expressed the relations in which he, as supreme ruler, stood towards them. But he was more. He was also the representative of Christ and the priest of God.

According to Cyprian the bishop was the representative (antistes) of Christ in the community over which he ruled, and therefore he had the authority over that single congregation or church which our Lord possessed over the universal Church. He was the lord or viceroy over that portion of God’s heritage. But Christ had this position of authority over His people because He represented His people in the presence of God; because He was their High Priest; because He had offered for them His own Body and Blood. The bishop, therefore, as the representative of Christ, is the priest of God, who in the Eucharist offers to God the “Lord’s Passion,” and “truly discharges the office of Christ” when he imitates that which Christ did. “He offers a true and perfect sacrifice in the Church to God the Father, when he proceeds to offer it according to what he sees Christ Himself to have offered.” The bishop brings the people into actual communion with Christ in the Eucharist, and they are united to Him in drinking the wine which is His Blood; whilst to God the Father is again presented the offering once made to Him by Christ. The bishop was also the representative of Christ because he received those who were introduced into the Church by baptism. He was believed to bestow the Holy Spirit upon them in baptism and in the laying-on-of-hands. “They who are baptized in the Church,” says Cyprian, “are brought to the praepositi of the Church, and by our prayers and by the imposition of hands obtain the Holy Spirit.” Thus the Church is built up around him. He creates it in baptism; he brings the members into continual contact with their Lord in the Eucharist, now become a sacrifice in which the communicants, as in pagan rites, were united to the deity by partaking of the flesh of the victim and drinking the wine of the libation. So that, to quote Cyprian: “they are the Church who are a people united to the priest and the flock which adheres to their pastor . . . the bishop is in the Church, and the Church is in the bishop.” Above all, the bishop is the representative of Christ because he is the judge to whom belongs the power of punishing or remitting sins. This idea is continually before Cyprian. “They only who are set over the Church . . . can remit sins.” He quotes again and again Deut. xvii. 12: “The man that doeth presumptuously in not hearkening unto the priest that standeth to minister there before the Lord thy God, or to the judge, that man shall die.” He discourses on the sin of Israel in refusing obedience to the Priest Samuel. It is the authority of the priest that he has always in view.

But while the thought of implicit obedience to the bishop is foremost in his mind, the sacerdotal conception was not absent. He conceived that the bishops were a special priest-hood and had a special sacrifice to offer. This was a new thought in the Church of Christ. It was really introduced by Cyprian, and it requires a little explanation.

In Christianity we find from the beginning the thoughts of priest and of sacrifice. The two conceptions always go together, and whatever meaning is attached to the one determines that of the other. The idea of a sacrifice offered in the Christian congregation was continually present, and from the beginning it was intimately connected with the Eucharist. But the thoughts suggested by the words were always evangelical. It was believed that all Christians were priests before God, and that all had to do the priestly work of sacrificing. The sacrifices of the Church, the bloodless sacrifices predicted by the prophet Malachi, were the prayers, the praises, and the worship of the believers. The Holy Supper, which was the supreme part of the Christian worship, was a sacrifice because it was an act of worship, and because it combined, as no other act did, the prayers of all the worshippers and the gifts or oblations of bread and wine which were given by the worshippers and were used partly in the Holy Supper and partly to distribute among the poor. The idea of the priesthood of all believers was firmly rooted in the thoughts of the early Christians, even although the constant use of the Old Testament naturally led them from a very early period to draw some comparisons between the leaders of their public devotions and the priests and Levites of the Jewish Church. When they began to explain to themselves and to others what the sacraments of baptism and the Holy Supper were, it was almost inevitable that thoughts connected with those portions of pagan worship most nearly related to sacraments should come into their minds. Hence the pagan mysteries formed the outline of the picture which presented itself to their imaginations when they tried to describe what the sacraments meant. This inevitable habit could not fail to bring many superstitious conceptions round the sacraments, and many such did connect themselves with them. Notwithstanding this, the evangelical thought that the sacrifices of the New Covenant are the worship of the people, and that the priesthood is the whole worshipping congregation was always the ruling idea. The sacrifice in the Holy Supper was a sacrifice of prayer and thanksgiving, and the sacrificial act was the prayers and the thanksgivings of the worshippers. Apologists defended the lack of material sacrifices in the Christian religion, and Justin Martyr could say that “prayers and giving of thanks (eucharistia), when offered by worthy men, are the only perfect and well-pleasing sacrifices to God.”

But if the whole people were the priests, and if the main thought in priesthood was authority and supremacy in judging in all matters of rule and discipline, then the people, the congregation, were the rulers in the last resort. But this primitive conception did not suit the ideas which Cyprian, the Roman lawyer, had about the special omnipotence of the bishop, the representative of Christ in Heaven, as the local governor was of the Emperor in Rome. His thought was that the bishop was the priest, and that the people were not priests but those whom the priest introduced into the presence of God. The whole conception of Christian thought began to change, and the change dates from Cyprian and his influence.

The changes made by Cyprian in the early Christian ideas of sacrifice and priest can be best seen by comparing his language with that of Tertullian, his “master” in theology. In Tertullian we have the old ideas that the prayers of the Christian, public and private, are his sacrifices, and that all Christians are priests because they can offer sacrifices of prayer and thanks-giving well-pleasing to God. He calls the Holy Supper a sacrifice—which it is, a sacrifice of prayer and thanksgiving—but he never thinks of it as a sacrifice of a distinct and special kind to be carefully discriminated from the prayers of the people. On the other hand, Cyprian is very careful to distinguish between prayer and the Holy Supper in the sense that he never calls the one a sacrifice, while he invariably gives that name to the other. He never thinks of all the worshippers sacrificing; on the contrary, he is careful to distinguish between what the people and what the priests do in the sacrament—the people offer oblations, but the priest offers a sacrifice. There is, according to his idea, a specific sacrifice offered by a specific (not simply a ministering) priesthood in the Holy Supper. The sacrifice which is offered, is, as we have seen, the “Passion of the Lord, the Blood of Christ,” the “Divine Victim.” He was the first to suggest, for his language goes no further than suggestion, that the Holy Supper is a repetition of the agony and death of our Lord on the Cross—a thought never present to the mind of an earlier generation. The ministry has become, in his eyes, or is becoming, a mediating priesthood with power to offer for the people the great sacrifice of Jesus Christ.

His thought of priesthood also leads him to externalize, if the expression may be allowed, the whole thought of sorrow and repentance. In early times if Christians fell into sin, they were required to confess their sins publicly and to exhibit manifest signs of sorrow. These signs were not always stereotyped:—prayers accompanied by tears and groanings, fasting and giving the food thus saved to the poor, setting free a slave or slaves, abundant almsgiving. The penitents were required to perform some open act of self-denial to show that their sorrow was a real thing. Of course the tendency was to connect these signs of sorrow directly with the pardon which followed, and even Tertullian was accustomed to speak of such signs of sorrow as something well-pleasing to God, in the sense that God accepted them as meritorious and forgave on their account. Cyprian was the first to lay hold on this familiar practice of penitence, and use it as a means to establish the power of the bishop. His thought seems to have been that some special “good works” were needed to secure the pardon of God for sins committed after baptism, and that the good works must commend themselves to the bishop, who was the “priest of God” and the “representative of our Lord”—for with Cyprian priest and bishop are synonymous terms.

Thus the earlier idea of a Christian ministry was changed into the conception of a mediating priesthood. Behind the change of thought was the new conception of the authority of the clergy over the laity and of the bishop over all. In respect of their historical origin the ideas of the omnipotence of the bishop, of a succession from the apostles, and of a special and mediating priesthood, all hang together, and what made for the one made for the others. No sooner had they found entrance into the Christian Church than they were followed by a large influx of other allied ideas taken over from the paganism which lay around them.

This thought of apostolic succession which is to be found in Cyprian was very different from what is seen both in Irenaeus and in Tertullian. It was not a succession from the apostles but a succession of apostles. The historical matter-of-fact succession disappeared, and the conception became a creation of dogmatic imagination. The thought of succession from the apostles, in a line of office-bearers creating a vital connexion between the generations as they passed, was scarcely in Cyprian’s mind. Unless memory fails me, Cyprian only once alludes to it: “All chief rulers who by vicarious ordination succeed to the apostles.” For Cyprian’s thought is that the bishops do really represent, not the apostles, but Christ. As the apostles were the representatives of Christ to the first generation and received from Him power to forgive sins, so each succeeding generation possesses representatives of Christ, who have the same power to forgive sins. Hence the thought on which he lays so much stress, that bishops are directly appointed by God and not by man; the want of any deeper idea of ordination than a mere installation or orderly appointment to office; the belief that the gifts which bishops possess of government and power to forgive sins are more personal than official—all combine to make his conception that bishops are apostles endued with the very same powers that the twelve possessed directly from Jesus, something very different from what is commonly meant by apostolic succession in modern Christendom. He founds the divine appointment of bishops on the argument that since God cares even for sparrows much more must He directly control a matter of such importance as the appointments of bishops! He holds that bishops who are guilty of any heinous sin are ipso facto bishops no longer, and that their congregations ought to separate themselves from them and acknowledge neither their office nor their authority. The bishops in North Africa arrived at their decisions in the case of the lapsed “by the suggestion of the Holy Spirit and the admonition of the Lord, conveyed by many and manifest visions”—an inspiration which was personal and not official. All these things give a certain uniqueness to Cyprian’s theory of apostolic succession which is often forgotten. But whatever his theory was, his conviction remained, that the bishop was the autocrat over his congregation, and that where he was, there was the Church.

The real statesmanship of Cyprian was shown, not so much in his conception, theoretical and practical, of the episcopal office, as in his making use of the opportunity of the widespread crisis provoked by the question of the lapsed to sketch a polity which would give the thought of one universal Church of Christ a visible and tangible shape. His idea was not a new one. The conceptions of statesmen seldom are novelties. Councils had been held on ecclesiastical matters before Cyprian’s days. They were first held in Asia Minor in the times of the early Montanist movement, and had become somewhat common in Greece as early as the days of Tertullian. They were called to deliberate and settle not only the deeper questions of faith, but the ecclesiastical usages to be observed by the churches represented. The habit of holding these deliberative assemblies which did in some measure represent the churches of a district or province was widespread, and enabled churches lying within convenient distance from each other to become a confederation, having the same ecclesiastical usages and rules of Christian life.

What Cyprian did was to seize upon what he believed to be the principles underlying this practice and formulate them in such a way as to make visible and tangible the unity of the Catholic Church which was universally held to exist. The thought of the visible unity of the Church of Christ was as old as Christianity. St. Paul had dwelt on it in his epistles to the Ephesians and to the Colossians. Cyprian repeated it in his famous passage, felicitously rendered by Dr. Benson: “There is one Church which outspreads itself into a multitude (of churches), wider and wider in ever increasing fruitfulness, just as the sun has many rays but only one light, and a tree many branches yet only one heart, based in the clinging root; and, while many rills flow from one fountain-head, although a multiplicity of waters is seen streaming away in diverse directions from the bounty of its abundant overflow, yet unity is preserved in the head-spring.” That was the old old thought. Cyprian’s statesmanship was seen in the method he formulated for making this ideal unity something which could take visible shape in a polity which would produce an harmonious activity throughout all the parts. His practical thought was, that as each bishop sums up in himself the church over which he presides, the whole Church of Christ practically exists in the whole of the bishops, and the harmonious action of the whole Church can be expressed through the common action and agreement of all the bishops. This did not mean to him that every bishop was to think in the same way, or to pursue the same policy, or that there might not be very grave differences on very important, almost fundamental, matters; but it did mean that if they differed they were to agree to differ, and perhaps this last thought was the most important one practically. It is easy to be in accord when there are no differences to separate. Cyprian’s thought was that there could be and ought to be agreement amidst differences. He preserved intact the independence of every bishop. The man who stood forth as the eloquent spokesman of the unity of the one Church of Christ was the champion of the independence of the most insignificant bishop whose congregation might be the church of a hamlet. He was as magnanimous in his own conduct as in his thought. In the two great controversies in which he was engaged he showed himself able to subordinate his own feelings and cherished opinions to the wishes of others. The African bishops did not adopt Cyprian’s scheme for receiving back the repentant lapsed; they were much more lenient than he would have been if his opinion had prevailed. He felt strongly and spoke warmly on the question of the baptism of heretics, and carried his African colleagues with him; but when the majority of the Church was plainly against him he respected the decision, however he might dislike it. The case of Therapius shows how far he was prepared to go in respecting the independence of a colleague. He insisted again and again that one bishop cannot judge another, and that no one can judge a bishop but God, so strongly does he vindicate the independence of bishops and by implication of the churches over which they rule. The unanimity which he pleaded for among bishops was not one to be produced by force but by brotherly persuasion, it being always understood that Holy Scripture and the apostolic tradition were their guides.

If we may judge from some scattered allusions it is possible to see how Cyprian conceived that his scheme might work so as to produce a harmony not merely of bishops but of the whole Christian community throughout the world. If anything requiring deliberation arose, the first care of the bishop was to consult his elders and deacons, the deacons being the “eyes and ears of the bishop,” to let him know what the people thought. If there was any doubt about the opinion of the people then the question might be referred to a congregational meeting and deliberated upon by bishop, elders, deacons and people. Cyprian always shows the strongest desire to carry the people along with him. It is not certain whether their opinions were taken in any formal way at the councils held under the presidency of Cyprian at Carthage, but the Christian people of Carthage were always present at the councils. These meetings can hardly be called “representative,” as Dr. Benson calls them. An autocrat may do his best to consult the people and to carry them along with him. Yet he can scarcely be called their representative.

In fact Cyprian’s conception of the bishop as the direct representative, not of his congregation, but of Christ, endued with powers coming directly from God and in no sense from the Christian people, was precisely the reason why his conception of a polity to embody the whole Church has never proved a workable theory; and soon after Cyprian’s time it fell before another and very different conception with which Cyprian had no sympathy, and yet to which his own led when his thought of the autocracy of the bishop was applied to a wider field. We can see how his theory failed himself at his sorest need. He desired to carry his office-bearers with him. His first idea was to consult with the office-bearers, as was evidently the custom. When he began to doubt whether they would support him he turned to the laity. When he began to doubt whether the laity did not support the presbyters rather than himself, he not obscurely threatened them with the decisions of the neighbouring bishops; and in the end the consultation was not with his elders and deacons, and not with his people, but with the neighbouring bishops, in what was called the first council of Carthage, where the people of Carthage were undoubtedly present, though probably only as overawed assistants.

Another conception of how the universal and visible Church could make its ideal universality apparent to the eyes of men had been introduced before Cyprian’s days; it confronted himself during the second great controversy which he had to wage, and it triumphed in the West after his death. More than one bishop of Rome had put forward the idea that the unity of the Christian Church could only be made truly visible when all the Christian churches grouped themselves round the bishop who sat, it was said, in the chair of St. Peter, and whose congregation had its abode in the capital of the civilized world. They justified this claim ecclesiastically by quoting our Lord’s words to St. Peter, recorded in Matt. xvi., but its practical strength lay in the fact that they presided over the church in the city of Rome. So strong was Cyprian’s influence in the centuries after his death that Roman Catholic canonists felt the need of quoting him as the supporter of their claims for the primacy of the Roman See, and accordingly they have interpolated his De Unitate Ecclesiae in a manner almost beyond belief. Cyprian was the determined opponent of this theory of a primacy in Rome, and constituted himself, as has been said, the champion of the ecclesiastical parity of all bishops, however insignificant their positions might be, nor would he allow any distinction to be drawn between churches founded by actual apostles and those which had come into being in later times. He did concede a certain pre-eminence to Rome, partly on ecclesiastical grounds, and partly because of the greatness of the city. But he held that all bishops had equal ecclesiastical rights, and that the unity of the Church found expression in a united episcopate and not in the primacy of an episcopus episcoporum.

At the same time it was almost inevitable that Cyprian’s idea that the local church was constituted in the local bishop to such an extent that without obedience to him men could not belong to the Church at all, should lead to the conception that a united episcopate could only be truly united if all the bishops owed obedience to one bishop of bishops. A one-man theory of the local church could hardly fail to suggest or to support a one-man theory of the Church universal. The theory that the bishop owed his power, not to the influence of the Spirit of God working in and through the Christian community, but to something either given by God directly or transmitted in such a way as to be independent of the spiritual life of the membership and above it, could scarcely fail to suggest a transmission of unique prerogatives to the bishop who was supposed to occupy the chair of St. Peter. Men who insist on an episcopal gift of grace, “specific, exclusive, efficient,” coming from a source higher than the Holy Spirit working in and through the membership of the Church, may protest against the thought that their theories lead to the conception of a “bishop of bishops,” but the unsparing logic of history sweeps their protests aside.