On the Office of a Bishop
The Rev. Dr. Louis R.
Tarsitano
I. A Necessary Introduction
The Holy Scriptures, the Ancient Fathers, and the Ordinal
of our Church attest “these Orders of Ministers in Christ’s Church; Bishops, Priests,
and Deacons” (Preface to the Ordinal, 1662 BCP; 1928 BCP 529). Of the three,
the episcopate is the most dangerous, both to the men who serve as bishops and
to the people of the Church who are to be served by them in the Name of Christ.
This danger, however, is not inherent in the office. It
is not the result of some “failure” by Christ or the Holy Ghost to provide
adequately for the continuation of the Church. No work of God can be any less
than perfect, and the episcopate is a
work of God, absolutely necessary, and essential to the Church’s being one,
holy, catholic, and apostolic, as she is revealed in the Scriptures and
summarized in the Creeds.
The danger lies in ourselves, in the fallen humanity of
the members of the Church. Jesus Christ has truly redeemed us from our sin; but
until his Second Coming, the work of our sanctification in the Holy Ghost
continues, and our perfection in grace is not yet. We are a communion of
redeemed sinners united to the Godhead by the worthiness of Jesus Christ, and
not by our own.
We are tempted, however, every day of our lives, to think
that Christianity is about us, but even the glorious gift of our salvation is
only a means to an end, and that end is the glorification of God and his
goodness. Our calling to be the servants of God, singly and corporately, comes
necessarily with the gift of our lives in him, and our service is this: to
exhibit humbly in our lives the power of God’s grace. We are to be the living
parables of Christ, the repentant prodigal sons, the loving fathers, the wise
virgins, the fruitful fields, the patient workers, by which he proclaims the
The stained glass windows in our churches can be seen as
images of our calling. We are made a part of the very fabric of the Church by
Jesus Christ, through the members of his Body, but not made all of it or the
center of attention. Our purpose is to let through the light, while witnessing
to some truth of divinity or saintliness in particular.
It should be unsurprising, then, given what the
Scriptures reveal to us about ourselves, that our fallen human nature rebels
against such selflessness in the service of a divine order beyond our control.
There is no place for us in the Trinity, but only on our faces before God’s
throne. Even when we have admitted, “it is He that hath made us, and not we
ourselves,” we can become quite brutal in our efforts to make ourselves
anything we want to be, without
searching for the will of God that must
be.
We must make certain to discern, here, the difference
between polity and politics. Polity is order itself, and all good order
comes from God, including the divine polity of the Church that is revealed in
the Scriptures and open only to the slightest adaptations to times and places.
Politics, on the other hand, is the effort to manipulate a polity in the quest
for power. Where polity produces service, politics breeds tyranny. The Church’s
polity is the visible structure of our corporate service to God. Church
politics is the denial of that service, because it serves only the
ecclesiastical politician.
This last statement may seem horribly naive in our
political age, when the hunger for power is a besetting sin, but the prevalence
of a sin does not mean it is inevitable or that we cannot work by grace to
resist it. We may even tell ourselves in the Church that we hunger only for the
power to do good, but our resulting sins will be indistinguishable from those
of any other politicians, since power belongs by right to God alone.
This truth does not leave the Church enfeebled, however.
The power of God is mediated to his Church by Jesus Christ as the authority to act in his Name. But to
exercise authority, as the Centurion acknowledged, one must be under authority
as well. Authority is not a private
possession, but a delegation from another, to whom one must answer, for a
specified purpose, and where that purpose ends, so does any authority.
The same can be said of ministry, our representative continuation of the work of Jesus
Christ under the inspiration of the Holy Ghost, since ministry is the purpose
of authority. Move outside the limits of the will of the Father, revealed
through the Son and by the Holy Ghost, and there can be no authority or
ministry, but only self service. The Spirit-breathed Scriptures are the
absolute limits of authority, and the Gospel of Jesus Christ is the absolute
limit of ministry.
Thus, references to “my authority” or “my ministry,”
however well intentioned, miss the point of both. All faithful Christians
exercise authority and perform ministry according to their states of life and
callings, but they do so only on behalf of Christ and within the order of the
Church. The Lay Order and the three orders of ministers are subordinate to the
order of Jesus Christ’s Church, which is subordinate itself to the order of the
Blessed Trinity, so that in the end the Father may be all in all.
This ultimate witness to the Divine Order explains why
the Church cannot be democratic, but must be representative, however the details are worked out. Each of us
represents Christ to the other, according to God’s calling, and together we
represent him to the world. When we vote in the Church, we are not meant to
express ourselves, but to declare what we believe the mind of Christ to be,
based on prayer and the study of the Scriptures.
An election, then, is our joint statement, within the
limits of the faith and polity of the Church, of whom we believe God has called
to an office with its particular authority and ministry. And in the case of the
selection of deacons, priests, and bishops, we are also saying that we believe
a man has been called to a state of life that is separated from the ordinary business
of the world and dedicated to the administration of grace and the fostering of
true godliness among us.
At no time are all these considerations more important
than when we elect a bishop. First of all, it is easy to take our
responsibility as electors too lightly, destroying a man by placing him where
God has not called him to be, and in the process wounding the life of our local
Church and its witness. Second, we may be tempted to underestimate the value of
spiritual considerations in favor of what are usually called “practical
matters,” such as finances, church politics, or balancing constituencies. But
as Christians we possess no constituency except Jesus Christ; church politics
are always wrong; and the Lord provides if we do his will. Over thirty years of
church work have taught me that nothing
is ever as practical as trying to do the will of God unabashedly, and I have
watched two generations of “practical men” despoil the Church and move on.
I have made this long preamble because any discussion of
the office of the bishop must begin with a discussion of the Church and the
purpose of elections. Whoever is elected to be our ordinary, or if no one is at
this time, we are testing vocations rather than expressing our fondness for
this or that man. Or at least we ought to be, since a bishop is the picture of
the kind of Church those who elect him hope to become.
The present state of the Episcopal Church serves as a
cautionary example. That group, scarcely a church any longer, became what it
elected its bishops to be: worldly, intrusively managerial, fashionable, ruled
by sentiment, partisan, and careless of the truth of the Faith. We must do
better for the sake of Christ, and for the sake of those who have made so many
sacrifices to provide us with a diocese and a Church.
II. The Office of a Bishop
The Second Office of Instruction tells us:
The office of a
Bishop is, to be a chief pastor in the Church; to confer Holy Orders; and to
administer Confirmation (1928 BCP 294).
As is the case with all of the Prayer Book’s teaching, we
are expected to examine this definition in detail. For example, unlike the
“catechism” of the 1979 “prayer book” of the Episcopal Church, our definition
of the bishop is based on his office
and not on his “ministry.” The choice of the word office (“a duty or duties appointed by authority”) limits each
bishop’s authority and ministry to whatever responsibilities Christ delivered
to the Apostles and their successors. Apart from Christ and the order of
bishops, a particular bishop, whatever his title, abilities, or the sincerity
of his theories, is only a disobedient servant and liable to the discipline
appointed for unworthy ministers in Article XXVI (1928 BCP 608).
The Church clearly intends, by defining the bishop in terms
of his office, to teach that a bishop is answerable for the performance of his
duties: to Christ; to his fellow bishops, both in the whole Church and
especially in his province’s college or house of bishops; and to the members of
the Church, according to the covenants (the Constitution and Canons) they have
established with God for his service and their own governance.
The Prayer Book’s summary, then, of the bishop’s office
or duties is “to be a chief pastor in the Church.” A pastor is literally “a shepherd,” someone charged with feeding the
flock of Jesus Christ, the Good Shepherd who gives his life for the sheep (John
The explicit charge that bishops be shepherds was given
to St. Peter, when Christ commanded him to feed his lambs and his sheep (John
21:15-17), but St. Peter understood that this commandment was not for him alone
and did not give him the ownership of the sheep, since “sheep” are a frequent
Biblical image of the people who belong to God (e.g., Ps. 23).
The sheep remain Christ’s, and the bishop is only
Christ’s representative shepherd, as St. Peter confesses when he calls our Lord
“the Shepherd and Bishop” of our souls (1 Peter
Verily, verily,
I say unto thee, When thou wast young, thou girdedst thyself, and walkedst
whither thou wouldest: but when thou shalt be old, thou shalt stretch forth thy
hands, and another shall gird thee, and carry thee whither thou wouldest not (John
This is a sentence of death, a call to martyrdom, rather
than an invitation to power over others, since the bishop is to give his entire
life to serving the interests of others. He must be, as God will give him the
grace, the visible embodiment of the life of the resurrected Lord in his
Church, as much in his private life as in his public life. As chief pastor, he
must be a pastor to all of the other pastors who are placed in his charge by
the Church, aiding them in fulfilling their pastoral office and in living their
Christian lives both in their parishes and in their homes. He must protect all
the sheep from the wolves of false doctrine, faithlessness, doubt, envy,
hatred, and strife. He must bind up the wounded, not to make them invalids
dependent on himself, but to send them on their way whole and intact.
And he must do all these things “in the Church.” A bishop
must be a churchman, not a partisan of some sort of “churchmanship,” but a
lover of the whole Church, with all her history and all her local traditions
and expressions of faith in Jesus Christ. He may have preferences of his own,
certainly; but his task is not to conform the Church to his preferences, but to
the image of Jesus Christ.
He is not to transform the local Church into a
“denomination,” excluding any of the faithful on the basis of human “distinctives.”
Instead, he is to teach the local Church that he serves that they are simply a jurisdiction (“a place where God’s law
is taught”) within the one holy, catholic, and apostolic
To be a true churchman, the bishop must be law abiding.
As the ordinary of a diocese, he is
responsible for maintaining order according to the Scriptures and the canon law
of the Church. He cannot do this, if he will not be obedient himself, for his
every effort to maintain the law will be seen as mere hypocrisy. While God’s
law is unchangeable, the human law of the Church may be amended, but only according
to the provisions of the law itself, and not by episcopal whim or fiat.
A beautiful summary of the bishop’s pastoral duties can
be found in the opening words of George Herbert’s A Priest to the Temple: “A pastor is the deputy of Christ for the
reducing of man to the obedience of God.” All of the separate duties of a
bishop must come down to this: the holiness of his own life, as a good example,
and the holiness of the lives of those who have been placed in his spiritual
charge. Holiness is the chief business of the Church, since holiness gives
honor to God and is the primary means of evangelism. The holiness of the Church
is the visible evidence the Holy Ghost gives of his presence in her life, and
the particular holiness of each member is the raw material the Holy Ghost uses
to build the Church. The Holy Ghost makes converts: invisibly by quickening
souls, visibly by making us holy.
A bishop’s temptation is to love being a bishop for its
own sake, perhaps as a validation of his person or “career” in the ministry,
perhaps from a love of pomp and a desire to reduce men to obedience to himself.
This temptation is magnified by the thoughtless modern jargon that calls a
bishop “the chief liturgical officer” or “the CEO of the diocesan corporation.”
For the sake of charity, we must avoid making bishops of men who appear
unprepared or unlikely to resist so grave a temptation, remembering the ancient
wisdom of
For a bishop, as
saith Augustine, is a name of labour, and not of honour; because he would have
that man to understand himself to be no bishop, which will seek to have
preeminence, and not to profit others (Part II).
The requirement of “profit for others” for true
episcopacy explains the Prayer Book’s remarkably short list of tasks for a
chief pastor: “to confer Holy Orders; and to administer Confirmation” (BCP
294). One can see, undoubtedly, that the Prayer Book’s definitions of deacon,
priest, and bishop are meant to be cumulative, so that the work of the deacon
is contained in that of the priest, and the work of the priest is contained in
the work of the Bishop. But one should also see in the Prayer Book definitions
that the basis of these “orders of ministers” is Confirmation.
In a breathtakingly compact form, our Anglican Church is
teaching the biblical and catholic truth that the Church is a New Israel in
Christ, and that the order of the Church is not a human invention for the
management of her people (see Isaiah 49:3; Rev. 21:2). Our order, including our
orders of ministers, is a gift from God, as
Unto him that
loved us, and washed us from our sins in his own blood, and hath made us kings
and priests unto God and his Father; to him be glory and dominion for ever and
ever. Amen (Rev. 1:5-6).
In the old
Our modern difficulty in understanding all this comes
from the odd notion that equality of dignity must also mean sameness, or that
everyone gets to do as he pleases. But the Christian Israel is only “new” in
the Old Israel’s fulfillment in Christ. The underlying structure of order,
which is God-given, remains the same. Along with dignity comes always a
particular vocation, and every Christian must search the will of God, and not
his or her own will, for the call to a particular service or office.
Dathan and Korah forgot this truth and asserted their
dignity apart from God’s calling: the earth swallowed them and their followers
(Numbers 16). In contrast to this picture of division, we have this New
Testament picture of unity and order, based on the same underlying will of God:
But unto every one
of us is given grace according to the measure of the gift of Christ. And he
gave some, apostles; and some, prophets; and some, evangelists; and some,
pastors and teachers; For the perfecting of the
saints, for the work of the ministry, for the edifying of the body of Christ: Till we all come in the unity of the faith, and of
the knowledge of the Son of God, unto a perfect man, unto the measure of the
stature of the fulness of Christ: That we henceforth be no more children, tossed to and fro, and carried
about with every wind of doctrine, by the sleight of men, and cunning craftiness, whereby they lie in wait to deceive; But speaking the truth in love, may grow up into him
in all things, which is the head, even Christ:
From whom the whole body fitly joined together and
compacted by that which every joint supplieth, according to the effectual
working in the measure of every part, maketh increase of the body unto the
edifying of itself in love (Ephesians 4:7,11-16).
The ancient Church applied this teaching in two main
ways: by valuing every Christian vocation, and by refusing to confuse one
Christian vocation with another. Those ancient Christians immunized themselves
against the folly of perverting “a royal priesthood of all believers in Christ”
into “a priesthood of every believer” by insisting that every vocation be
tested in the Church and confirmed by the Holy Ghost, according to the ancient
pattern of God’s
To the high
priest are given his special ministrations, a special place is reserved for the
priests, and special duties are imposed upon the levites, while the layman is
bound by the ordinances concerning the laity (Epistle to the Corinthians 40).
Here we find a nineteen-hundred-year-old description of
the Church identical with that found in our Prayer Book, saving only that
Clement makes explicit the comparison between “high priests, priests, and
levites” and “bishops, priests, and deacons.” There are, therefore, two main
“orders” within the Church: the Lay Order and the Clerical Order (subdivided
into three orders of ministers: bishops, priests, and deacons). The members of
the Clerical Order are not the only “ministers” or “authorities,” as anyone who
examines our Anglican polity, outlined in the Canons, will see at once. No, the
clergy, from the Greek word for
“chosen,” are simply those men who have been called by the Holy Ghost, and
approved by the testing of the Church, to minister grace on behalf of Christ in
the Church, and on behalf of the Church to minister adoration to Christ,
preaching his Gospel to the world.
Sometimes, too, we hear the bishop transformed from a
“chief pastor” into a “super minister” or a “one man church” by a misquotation
of St. Ignatius of
Avoid divisions
as the beginning of evils. All of you follow the bishop as Jesus Christ
followed the Father, and follow the presbytery [the priests] as the Apostles;
and respect the deacons as the commandment of God. Let no man perform anything
pertaining to the church without the bishop. Let that be considered a valid
Eucharist over which the bishop presides, or one to whom he commits it.
Wherever the bishop appears, there let the people be, just as wheresoever
Christ Jesus is, there is the Catholic Church. It is not permitted either to
baptize or hold a love-feast apart from the bishop. But whatever he may
approve, that is well-pleasing to God, that everything which you do may be
sound and valid (Epistle to the
Smyrnaeans, c. 8).
St. Ignatius is describing a Church whose members submit
one to another in the fear of God (Ephesians 5:21), honoring in a Christ-like
way those whom God has called to service, and a bishop who is truly what the
Greek word names him: an “over-seer.” The bishop does not claim all the
Church’s work or graces for himself. He over-sees the work of all the members
of the Church in their orders, protecting them from error and taking
responsibility for the soundness and validity of their actions. He knows that
the Catholic Church is wheresoever Jesus Christ is, so as a representative of
Christ he works to make certain that the people in his spiritual charge are
found with Jesus Christ.
The bishop, therefore, “administers Confirmation.” With
the outward sign of the laying on of hands, he administers the Holy Ghost to
those whose Christian vocation has been tested by their pastors, confirming
them as members of the Lay Order in their particular vocations, in what is
often called “the ordination of the Laity.” Upon men who have been called to
one of the three orders of ministers, after their vocations have been
satisfactorily tested by the Laity and his fellow pastors, the bishop “confers
Holy Orders,” again with the outward sign of the confirming and enabling work
of the Holy Ghost.
The bishop is not the “source” of holy orders: that is
the Blessed Trinity. He is, however, the visible, historic conduit of this
grace from God. He “confers” holy orders, which means literally that he “bears
them with” those bishops and ministers who have preceded him, with the bishop
who ordained him, with those he ordains, and with those who will follow him in
God’s unbroken ministry of grace. Just as the Bible’s history can be described
as a “river of life” flowing from God’s creation of Adam, through Adam’s
particular descendants to the human life of our Incarnate Lord, and flowing
from our Lord again into the particular lives of all the redeemed; so can the
apostolic succession be seen as the ceaseless flow of God’s grace, from the Father,
through the Son, and by the descent of the Holy Ghost upon the Apostles,
through those particular men and the men they chose to follow them in the
sacred ministry, through all the ministries of the Church, through all the
particular lives in the Church, to this moment and until the Second Coming, as
constantly administered by our bishops, who are called to make this flow of
grace visible by their ministry.
The definition of the office of a bishop in our Prayer Book
intends, therefore, that a bishop dedicate himself to the success of all the
members of the Church by lavishing on them every grace that God Almighty is
willing to grant. In a life that is nothing so much as a living prayer, the
bishop is to hunger for the peace and happiness of each person and each
congregation in his charge. He is to promote the spiritual victory of every
life he oversees, and especially to cherish the graces and virtues of those
fellow clergy to whom he represents the authority and ministry of Christ,
bearing their sorrows with them, in a love that is nothing less than a
perpetual Eucharist.
III. A Few Comments on
Qualifications
Given what the historic Catholic Church expects of a
bishop, and the weighty requirements of the Scriptures (see 1 Timothy 3:1-7),
some final comments on the qualifications of a man to be elected bishop are in
order.
A bishop ought to be a man of prayer and spiritual
discipline. Any pastor entrusted with the care of souls ought to dedicate, as a
part of his fixed plan for each day, at least two hours for prayer, and one or
two hours more for meditation and study in the Scriptures. An empty vessel can
provide nothing for anyone, and prayer and study are the means that God uses to
fill our lives with his grace. “Busy-ness” ought not to be used as an excuse
for neglecting prayer, since the ancient advice always boiled down to, “If you
are too busy to pray, pray more.” A bishop or any other pastor should also
keep, at the very least, the fasts of the Church and other calendar
disciplines; and he should resort to spiritual counsel himself, if he wishes to
counsel others.
A bishop ought to be an educated man who continues to
learn all his life. Again, some time should be set aside for study every day.
If he is to teach and preach as the authoritative voice of the Church, and if
he is to banish erroneous doctrines, he should be a trained theologian who
thinks theologically and approaches every issue or problem from the Scriptures
and the doctrine of the Church. He should also study the matters of the world,
not to be diverted by them, but to understand them and to apply the Gospel to
them. Whenever possible, he should be a man who has spent some years in a
theological school or seminary, not because such schools have any magic
properties of their own, but because the experience of the daily evaluation of
one’s thinking and positions by faculty members and fellow students is very
helpful in learning how to think, how to communicate with others, and how to
live in charity with those who disagree with us.
A bishop ought to be learned in the matters of the
Church. He should know the history, background, and rationale of canon law, as
well as the canon law itself. He should know the wide range of perfectly
permissible liturgical practices within our Church, what they mean, their
history, and how to perform them in a dignified manner. He should know the
Church’s moral theology, and the difference between the biblical morality that
builds up lives and the moralism that destroys lives by making them the
captives of fashion and opinion.
A bishop should be a man of integrity, who thoroughly
understands the Church’s standard of pastoral confidentiality, and be utterly
dedicated to maintaining that high standard at any cost. A bishop should
maintain a Christian household, faithful, cheerful, moderate, and hospitable.
If a bishop strives to keep order in his personal life, he will understand what
it costs others to maintain order in their lives, and he will be more merciful
in his dealings, since he will be less tempted to punish his own guilt in
others. If a bishop is married, he will find a Christian household almost
impossible without his wife’s support in her own complementary vocation.
A bishop should be a spiritual leader, and not fancy
himself a business manager, since the Church is a family, not a business.
Techniques and approaches that are morally permissible in secular business
enterprises, because they are based on money and power relationships, are
immoral in the setting of the Church, where brethren deal with brethren. If the
temporal affairs of the Church should outgrow the ability of the Bishop and
Standing Committee to exercise their canonical charge to manage them, then they
should jointly select some expert in management to assist them, reminding him
or her that they remain accountable to God for any final decisions to be made
and that the purpose of the Church is the spread of the Gospel, not profit.
A bishop should, however, be competent in ecclesiastical
administration, but only as a means to tranquillity in the Church, rather than
an end in itself. The business of a “father in God” is not to generate
paperwork.
A bishop should be an experienced pastor, with a pastor’s
heart. Preferably, he should have served as a curate or assistant, as well as
the rector of a parish, since service as a curate is a great teacher of what it
means to work under another’s authority and how to use authority sensibly in
turn.
He should also be, if at all possible, someone who has
made his life’s work the Church and been ”a partaker with the altar” (see 1
Cor.
Finally, there are those matters that are unquantifiable. A candidate for bishop ought not to be merely of “good report,” but whenever possible someone who is known to the Church electing him, and someone who knows and loves that Church. He ought to manifest, in whatever is his personal manner, a zeal for Christ and a zeal for souls. He ought to love the Scriptures as much as he loves his wife and children. He ought to dislike the hustle and bustle of “churchyness,” and yearn for the peace of God for all. He ought to be cheerfully willing to devote his life to the proposition that, if he has done his job well, an hour after his funeral, the Church should be completely capable of going on with her work as gracefully as ever without him.