The Pastor: Where Did He Come From?
by Frank Viola
Attachment 2699
The Pastor.[1] He is the fundamental figure of the Protestant faith. He is the chief, cook, and bottle-washer of today’s Christianity. So prevailing is the Pastor in the minds of most Christians that he is better known, more highly praised, and more heavily relied upon than Jesus Christ Himself!
Remove the Pastor and modern Christianity collapses. Remove the Pastor and virtually every Protestant church would be thrown into a panic. Remove the Pastor and Protestantism as we know it dies. The Pastor is the dominating focal point, mainstay, and centerpiece of the modern church. He is the embodiment of Protestant Christianity.
But here is the profound irony. There is not a single verse in the entire NT that supports the existence of the modern day Pastor! He simply did not exist in the early church.
(Note that I am using the term “Pastor” throughout this booklet to depict the modern pastoral office and role. I am not speaking of the specific individuals who fill this role. By and large, those who serve in the office of Pastor are wonderful people. They are honorable, decent, and often gifted Christians who love God and have a zeal to serve His people. But it is the role they are fulfilling that both Scripture and church history are opposed to as this article will show.)[2]
...
Attachment 2700
The Birth of One-Bishop-Rule
Up until the second century, the church had no official leadership. In this regard, the first-century churches were an oddity indeed. They were religious groups without priest, temple, or sacrifice.[20] The Christians themselves led the church under Christ’s direct Headship.
Among the flock were the elders (shepherds or overseers). These men all stood on an equal footing. There was no hierarchy among them.[21]Also present were extra-local workers who planted churches. These were called “sent-ones” or apostles. But they did not take up residency in the churches for which they cared. Nor did they control them.[22] The vocabulary of NT leadership allows no pyramidal structures. It is rather a language of horizontal relationships that includes exemplary action.[23]
This was all true until Ignatius of Antioch (35-107) stepped on the stage. Ignatius was the first figure in church history to take the initial step down the slippery slope toward a single leader in the church. We can trace the origin of the modern Pastor and church hierarchy to him.
Ignatius elevated one of the elders above all the others. The elevated elder was now called “the bishop.” All the responsibilities that belonged to the college of elders were exercised by the bishop.[24]
...
According to Ignatius, the bishop has ultimate power and should be obeyed absolutely. Consider the following excerpts from his letters: “All of you follow the bishop as Jesus Christ follows the Father . . . No one is to do any church business without the bishop . . . Wherever the bishop appears, there let the people be . . . You yourselves must never act independently of your bishop and clergy.
You should look on your bishop as a type of the Father . . . Whatever he approves, that is pleasing to God . . . ”[26]
For Ignatius, the bishop stood in the place of God while the presbyters stood in the place of the twelve apostles.[27] It fell to the bishop alone to celebrate the Lord’s Supper, conduct baptisms, give counsel, discipline church members, approve marriages, and preach sermons.[28]
The elders sat with the bishop at the Lord’s Supper. But it was the bishop who presided over it. He took charge of leading public prayers and ministry.[29] Only in the most extreme cases could a so-called “layman” take the Lord’s Supper without the bishop present.[30] For the bishop, said Ignatius, must “preside” over the elements and distribute them.
To Ignatius’ mind, the bishop was the remedy for dispelling false doctrine and establishing church unity.[31] Ignatius believed that if the church would survive the onslaught of heresy, it had to develop a rigid power structure patterned after the centralized political structure of Rome.[32] Single-bishop-rule would rescue the church from heresy and internal strife.[33]
Historically this is known as the “monoepiscopate” or “the monarchical episcopacy.” It is the type of organization where the bishop is distinguished from the elders (the presbytery) and ranks above them.
At the time of Ignatius, the one-bishop-rule had not caught on in other regions.[34] But by the mid-second century, this model was firmly established in most churches.[35] By the end of the third century, it prevailed everywhere.[36]
The bishop eventually became the main administrator and distributor of the church’s wealth.[37] He was the man responsible for teaching the faith and knowing what Christianity was all about.[38] The congregation, once active, was now rendered deaf and mute. The saints merely watched the bishop perform.
In effect, the bishop became the solo Pastor of the church[39]—the professional in common worship.[40] He was seen as the spokesperson and head of the congregation. The one through whose hands ran all the threads of control. All of these roles made the bishop the forerunner of the modern Pastor.
http://blogs.reuters.com/unstructure...n-Adkisson.jpg
From Priest to Pastor
John Calvin did not like the word “priest” to refer to ministers.[172] He preferred the term “Pastor.”[173] In Calvin’s mind, “Pastor” was the highest word one could use for ministry. He liked it because the Bible referred to Jesus Christ, “the great Shepherd of the sheep” (Heb. 13:20).[174] Ironically, Calvin believed that he was restoring the NT bishop (episkopos) in the person of the Pastor![175]
...
Even so, the Reformers elevated the Pastor to be the functioning
head of the church. According to Calvin, “The pastoral office is necessary to preserve the church on earth in a greater way than the sun, food, and drink are necessary to nourish and sustain the present life.”[184]
The Reformers believed that the Pastor possessed Divine power and authority. He did not speak in his own name, but in the name of God. Calvin further reinforced the primacy of the Pastor by treating acts of contempt or ridicule toward the minister as serious public offenses.[185]
This should come as no surprise when you realize what Calvin took as his model for ministry.
He did not take the church of the apostolic age. Instead, he took as his pattern the one-bishop-rule of the second century![186] This was true for the other Reformers as well.[187]
The irony here is that John Calvin bemoaned the Roman Catholic church because it built its practices on “human inventions” rather than on the Bible.[188] But Calvin did the same thing! In this regard, Protestants are just as guilty as are Catholics. Both denominations base their practices on human tradition.
Like Calvin, Luther also made the Pastor a separate and exalted office. While he argued that the keys of the kingdom belonged to all believers, Luther confined their use to those who held offices in the church.[192] “We are all priests,” said Luther, “insofar as we are Christians, but those whom we call priests are ministers selected from our midst to act in our name, and their priesthood is our ministry.”[193]
Sadly, Luther believed that all are in the priesthood, but not all can exercise the priesthood.[194] This is sacerdotalism, pure and simple. Luther broke from the Catholic camp in that he rejected a sacrificing priesthood. But in its place, he believed that the ministry of God’s Word belonged to a special order.[195]
The following are characteristic statements made by Luther in his exaltation of the Pastor: “God speaks through the preacher . . . A Christian preacher is a minister of God who is set apart, yea, he is an angel of God, a very bishop sent by God, a savior of many people, a king and prince in the Kingdom of Christ . . . There is nothing more precious or nobler in the earth and in this life than a true, faithful parson or preacher.”[196]
Said Luther, “We should not permit our pastor to speak Christ’s words by himself as though he were speaking them for his own person; rather, he is the mouth of all of us and we all speak them with him in our hearts . . . It is a wonderful thing that the mouth of every pastor is the mouth of Christ, therefore you ought to listen to the pastor not as a man, but as God.”[197] You can hear the echoes of Ignatius ringing through the words of Luther.
These ideas corrupted Luther’s view of the church. He felt it was nothing more than a preaching station. “The Christian congregation,” said Luther, “never should assemble unless God’s Word is preached and prayer is made, no matter for how brief a time this may be.”[198] Luther believed that the church is simply a gathering of people who listen to preaching. For this reason, he called the church building a Mundhaus, which means a mouth or speech-house![199] He also made this statement: “The ears are the only organs of a Christian.”[200]
(
continued)
