Steps Toward the Papal System

Steps Toward the Papal System

During the course of the second century the departure from the divine instructions given by the apostles developed into a still more highly organized system. Regard was had to the opinions of church leaders and to matters of convenience, rather than to the Word of God and apostolic teaching. The various countries where churches had been formed were divided into ecclesiastical “provinces,” which were called dioceses. The rural churches were maintained under the supervision of city bishops, who claimed the right to appoint the various officebearers. These included an additional order of district bishops for the supervision of the subdivisions of the provinces. Thus there came into being a distinct class of ecclesiastics between the controlling city bishops and the presbyters. They were subordinate to the former, but exercised authority over the latter.

The multiplication of offices only tended to enhance the unscriptural distinction which had arisen between officiating priests and those who were regarded as the nonpriestly laity. This was nothing but Judaism foisted upon Christianity. While the New Testament speaks of elders and deacons, it contains not a hint about such an ecclesiastical caste as a set of priests acting between God and members of the churches. On the contrary, such a system is a complete contravention of the divine will. The apostles taught that believers are constituted into a “holy priesthood to offer up spiritual sacrifices, acceptable to God through Jesus Christ” (1 Pet. 2:5). They are all “a royal priesthood” (v. 9), “a kingdom of priests” (Rev. 1:6).

A further step toward the erection of the papal structure was the establishment of church councils or synods, for each of which, naturally, a president became necessary. What gave rise to these was the increase of controversies upon matters of doctrine and discipline. Had the churches adhered from the first to the faith committed to them by the apostles, and thus followed the teaching of the Word of God, each church acting under its own divinely appointed elders, in simple dependence upon the guidance and power of the Spirit of God, such difficulties would have found a more or less ready solution, or at least would have been confined to the particular church where trouble had arisen. Adherence to the Word of truth receives the ready aid of the Holy Spirit in instruction and correction. But matters had gone too far for any general return to the faith. Human counsels had prevailed in bringing about the single minister system, and consequently human counsels continued to guide the successive steps of declension from the will of God. Where the prerogatives of the Spirit of God are ignored one or other of two things must follow, disintegration or humanly devised systematization, each being lawlessness in the eyes of God. Human expedients ever fail to accomplish divine purposes.

When once the clerical system had become dominant, appeals in cases of controversy were inevitably made to ecclesiastical councils, consisting of the leading clerics in the provinces. The function of president was usually discharged by the bishop of the chief city of the province, who thus received the designation of the Metropolitan Bishop, a title which eventually he retained in permanency, that is to say, apart from the functioning of any particular council. This increasing assumption of spiritual authority met with keen resistance on the part of the presbyters. Hence arose the struggle between Episcopalianism and Presbyterianism.

The process of declension from the principles of the Word of God was temporarily retarded by the series of fierce persecutions which transpired at intervals during the second and third centuries and terminated in a.d. 313. Church testimony was indeed maintained and revived, not merely in spite of, but even by means of the purifying power of divine chastisement. “The gates of Hades” could not prevail against the Church. The bush that Moses saw was not consumed with the burning; God’s Israel still remains His people. So God’s true Church can never be extinguished. Spiritual Babylon is doomed to destruction, but never the Church of Christ.

Faithful companies of believers continued in one place or another through all the vicissitudes of those times, whether of calm or storm. But the counteracting effects of periodic persecution failed to arrest permanently the general tendency to departure along the lines which we are considering. The cessation of oppression witnessed the recrudescence of the evil. There were indeed two potent influences from which it received a mighty impetus, the one external, the other internal; the former that of Imperial patronage, the latter the desire for worldly aggrandizement. These were to one another largely as cause and effect. They combined to bring about the almost universal introduction of heathen elements and practices into the churches, which produced the corruptness of the fully developed religious system of later times.

If the unscriptural ministerial organization was successful to some degree in preventing division, it failed to resist the soul-withering effects of worldliness. On the contrary, the priestly assumption of the clergy fostered it. The churches must forsooth rival the earthly glory of pagan religions. It would not do for the Church to suffer the contempt of the heathen. Let the churches erect ornate places of worship, temples which should at least compare favorably with heathen fanes and outstrip them if possible in worldly grandeur! Idolatrous priests had ever held favor at court and obtained the patronage of men of high rank. Let the bishops be received on equal terms that the dignity of the Church may be maintained in the eyes of the world! Alas for the Church when it joins hands with the world! Far better the humble, saintly, Spirit-guided worship of the catacombs! Far better the deep and holy spiritual joy that springs up under the pressure of the world’s hatred! “It is enough for the disciple that he be as his Master, and the servant as his Lord” (Matt. 10:25). The world rejected and persecuted Him and they would do the same to His followers. “But all these things,” He said, “they will do unto you for My Name’s sake, because they know not Him that sent Me” (John 15:21). Identification with Christ will produce the world’s contempt as long as the present age lasts. The god of this world ever stirs up its malice against those who prove faithful to the Lord. This is their glory. It carries with it the joyous certainty of eternal reward.

The skill of the evil one is unceasingly expended in attempting to allure the saints from their allegiance to the Lord, and to court the friendship of the world; so it was in the days when persecution gave place to ease and prosperity, when the hiss of the serpent was succeeded by his flattery. Association with the world always saps the spiritual vitality of the believer. Here is the testimony of Cyprian, bishop of Carthage, who lived from a.d. 200 to 258: “Forgetting what believers did in the times of the apostles, and what they should always be doing, Christians labored, with insatiable desire, to increase their earthly possessions.”

But the influence of the world is traceable not merely to the changed attitude of the emperors or of the political world under them in any given locality. Behind all this lay the beginnings of departure from the divine counsels, in the establishment of the system of clerisy and humanly devised institutions in place of that divinely appointed, simple order of “elders in every church,” a plan so admirably suited to every phase and condition of Church life and testimony.