Elections
In the previous article (The Tidings, Sept 2015) we considered the office of Deacons, among others. Here we firstly look at the mode of elections. In the first Century after Christ, there was not a rigid hierarchy, as in the apostate church that superseded it and that has continued in that way through the ages, in which the “clergy” and “laity” were separated, and the latter had no say in anything. It was not like that at all. There was plenty of flexibility in the way the offices were operated, and as we have already seen, there were men like Stephen and Philip and the Apostle Paul himself, who exercised more than one of these functions.
Paul could say, “I thank my God, I speak with tongues more than ye all: Yet in the church I had rather speak five words with my understanding, that by my voice I might teach others also, than ten thousand words in an unknown tongue” (1 Cor 14:18-19). So Paul had the gift of tongues, but was careful in its use.
Another point which emerges is that the election of serving brethren is not only a sensible arrangement but a scriptural one. I used to think, and I was brought up to believe, that the apostles more or less dictated everything, but I think we can see sufficiently in the Acts of the Apostles to know that the church itself, the body of believers, was a responsible body, and not just dumb, driven sheep. They were expected to exercise their judgment, and they were expected to be able to appoint the right men for the right job.
The recording brother, as I have suggested, would generally have the oversight and care of the local ecclesia, and answer to the New Testament “bishop”, who was probably in charge of all the house churches of the city, which together formed the “ecclesia”, as in the “ecclesia at Rome”. The arranging brethren would answer to the eldership, jointly responsible at local level, with a collective responsibility for leading the ecclesia in God’s ways. The deacons, for which we have no special office in our present day organization, remind us of the importance of this kind of work, the “serving” jobs in the ecclesias; and also suggest the possibility that we might open our doors a little wider to the services of our sisters who perhaps are not being used enough. (In our organizations, probably not as much as they were in New Testament times). The prophets would correspond in some way to the speaking brethren, though they are not now specially endowed with a gift of prophecy. At the present time, through the word of God, and perhaps with the help of His Spirit, men are still able to expound to us the word of God, and we should be thankful for that.
Evangelists? Who would they be today? Preachers going from place to place. Inter-ecclesial bringers of the message. Unattached, as they seem to have been in New Testament times, to any particular ecclesia. Perhaps we could think of our Bible Mission workers, out there far away, taking the word of God from place to place; or those who give their time to Bible campaign work. This is more the kind of work, as I see it, that the evangelists would do.
The whole church
And finally, and most importantly, I want to come to the office of the whole church, on whom and for whom the work was carried out. Paul says: “For we are labourers together with God: ye are God’s building. According to the grace of God which is given unto me, as a wise masterbuilder, I have laid the foundation, and another buildeth thereon. But let every man take heed how he buildeth thereupon. For other foundation can no man lay than that is laid, which is Jesus Christ” (1 Cor 3:9-11).
I want you to notice especially that Paul is not saying that all the church were the “labourers together with God.” They were not all to be evangelists; they were not all to be prophets; certainly not all to be apostles. They were “the field.” They were “the building.” He is not saying you are all laborers together with God. He is saying we, the Apostles, and the workers appointed by the church, are the laborers together with God, and you — the Church — are “God’s building.” You are the people being worked on. You are God’s field, tilled by our Apostles. So he said, in paraphrase, “Let every man be careful how he carried on this work, because on the day of judgment his work will be seen for what it is worth, by what it has produced,” in those for whom it has been carried on.
The beauty and grandeur of the church is to be seen not in the men in the limelight, who are doing the prominent work. The real test, the Apostle says, is what is happening in the body of the ecclesia. That is where “the gold and silver and the precious stones” are to be seen. That is also where “the wood, hay and stubble” will become visible in the Day of Judgment. I am suggesting therefore, that we should not try to be “all chiefs and no Indians.” That was not the way it was organized in New Testament times. There were those who had responsibility. There were those, and many of them, having different kinds of functions to perform in the church. But for the body of the believers, their function was to be good Christians; to allow the work of the Apostles and prophets, and evangelists, and teachers and pastors; the influence and power of the word of God; to so work in them that they would be faithful men and women, who could hold up their heads in the day of judgment, and the Apostles could take delight in them.
Finally consider the words of Paul after he had reviewed the various offices and gifts in the Church: “Covet earnestly the best gifts” (1 Cor 12:31). So there is nothing wrong with aspiring to have some ecclesial office. There is nothing wrong with wanting to have a part in the more active forms of the work. “If any man desireth the office of a bishop, he desireth a good thing” (1 Tim 3:1). But remember that “a bishop must be blameless, the husband of one wife, well reported of for good deeds” and so on. Let him always remember the qualifications that go with the office to which he aspires; but the most important thing is what follows.
“Now eagerly desire the greater gifts. And yet I will show you the most excellent way. If I speak in the tongues of men or of angels, but do not have love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give all I possess to the poor and give over my body to hardship that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing. Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth… For we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when completeness comes, what is in part disappears. When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me. For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known. And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love” (1Cor 12:31 – 13:13 NIV).
These are not offices in the ecclesia. They are fruits of God’s work in our lives. So we don’t want to become a community of office holders, and least of all of office seekers. What we want to become is a group of men and women holding the most important office of all, that of being true disciples of Jesus, and examples of the believers, in word and conversation and godliness.
The doctrine of the church: what it taught and what it emphasized
I think the first thing we ought to say in beginning this study is that we do sometimes, and frequently, in fact, attach to the word doctrine a meaning that is not necessarily there in the New Testament. We have given the word a “technical” meaning, and it has come to be synonymous with “dogma.” We accept doctrine as the basic facts of our religion, the dogmatic statements on which our Christadelphian faith is founded, whereas, in fact, the word “doctrine” in New Testament language really means “teaching” — any kind of formulated teaching; and it includes, and indeed more frequently refers to, moral teaching, as well as “dogmatic” doctrine. So that Paul writing both to Timothy and Titus uses the word in the context of his ethical teaching. “Speak thou the things which become sound doctrine, that the aged men be sober, grave” (Titus 2:1-2), and goes on to describe the kind of people, the kind of characters, that they should be. And it is more often in this sense that the word doctrine is used in the New Testament.
However, for our present purpose in studying the doctrine of the church, we are thinking more particularly of its dogma; of those things which were axiomatic to the faith of the first century ecclesia. We notice first of all that Jesus preached everywhere in Galilee and Judea “the gospel of the kingdom of God.” Mark tells us in the opening of his gospel that “in those days Jesus came into Galilee preaching the gospel of the kingdom and saying, Repent ye, for the kingdom of God is at hand” (Matt 3:1-2). The political background of the phrase “the kingdom of God” is not very clearly evident in the teaching of Jesus.
Although it is the background, and although the Messianic hope, and the Messianic promises, and the prophecies of the Old Testament Scriptures are the roots out of which his message grew, yet Jesus’ teaching, as recorded by the gospel writers, the preaching of the Lord Jesus as we have it on record, was much more concerned with the way into the Kingdom, than with the Kingdom itself. Men’s behavior and attitudes were the things that Jesus talked most about, as any cursory reading of the gospels will make clear. He preached the “sovereignty” of God, which is a phrase used by many of the new versions for the phrase “the kingdom of God.” That is to say, the kingdom of God in the sense in which we see it in the gospels, is the sovereignty of God in men’s lives now, as a preparation for an inheritance in the sovereignty of God when it shall be manifested in the earth in the Kingdom age.
There are, of course, references to the political aspect of the kingdom in some of the parables; and there are quite clear warnings of its sudden advent, when he is talking privately to his disciples, warning them to be ready for his coming, and for the advent of the Kingdom, when it is to be manifested in the earth; but always the teaching of Jesus revolves round the present duty of service, faithfulness and love as a preparation for an inheritance in the kingdom. The nearest we get in the gospels to any clear definition of what we might call “dogmatic faith” is in the famous declaration of Peter when Jesus said: “Whom do men say that I the Son of Man am?” (Matt 16.15), and Peter steps forward and says, “You are the Christ, the son of the living God.” Jesus saw this as such an important declaration that he said: “Flesh and blood hath not revealed this unto you, Peter, but my Father that is in heaven has made known this wonderful truth to you.”
Basis of church doctrine
Now here is the basis of the doctrine of the church. It would be difficult to find a simpler affirmation of what the Christian dogma is than this declaration of Peter’s: “Thou art the Christ, the son of the living God.” There are three important truths contained in this statement. First, that the God that Jesus represented in his ministry on earth, the God that Christians have come to believe in, is the Living God revealed in the Scriptures to the Jewish people in Old Testament times. Thou are the Christ, the son of “the living God.” That God exists is the fundamental of Christian faith. That Jesus of Nazareth is the Son of God, is also clearly stated in this affirmation of faith. “Thou art the Christ, the son of the living God.” So that the second declaration of faith is that Jesus is the Son of God. And the third is, (and this was the remarkable revelation to which Jesus, I think, particularly referred, when he said that “flesh and blood hath not revealed this unto thee, but my Father which is in heaven”) that he was the Messiah and the Savior: “Thou art the Christ, the son of the living God” — the Messiah, as predicted in the Old Testament Scriptures. The Messiah, or Christ, for whom the Jewish people were taught to look by the study of these prophecies. “Upon this rock 1 will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it” (Matt 16:18).
So here are three basic Christian doctrines
- That God exists (and by inference that He is the God revealed to the nation of Israel, that He is “the God of Abraham Isaac and Jacob,” the God of the Old Testament, the living God);
- That Jesus is His Son;
- That this Jesus of Nazareth, the Son of God, is the Messiah, with all the implications contained in that phrase, the Messiah of Old Testament prophecy.
Now when we come over to Acts we get more development of doctrine than those three simple statements contained in Peter’s declaration in the Gospels. But still the doctrinal content in the preaching of the church, as it is revealed to us here, is very simple. I have done a fairly close study of the preaching of the Apostles as shown to us in Acts. We can read a lot into it, but if we take what is recorded, (and we may surely take it that the pith and substance of what the Apostles said is in their recorded speeches), the basic Christian dogmas that the Apostles preached are very simple statements. The Epistles, later on, developed more detailed expositions. There we have something more like the polemical Christianity with which we as Christadelphians are more familiar, the deeper more detailed arguments arising out of the basic preaching presented to us in the Acts of the Apostles.
It seems probable that the original apostolic preaching was quite simple, and that other more precise definitions were added later on, developed as it were to combat heresies that arose within the church and which are evident even in New Testament times. As we read through the Epistles we find “the mystery of iniquity” already working. We find men bringing in “damnable heresies” and things of that kind which had to be met, and it would seem that as the first century church developed, the simple basic preaching of the Acts was added to and developed in the Epistles, in order that the church might be instructed and that their understanding might be developed on the basis of the platform that had been truly laid in the early preaching of the Apostles. A little bit like the developing Statements of Faith in our own community. The primitive Christadelphian statement of faith was a fairly simple thing in Dr. Thomas’ day, for example, but as other ideas came along and brethren felt the need to resist this view or that view, they built into the statement more and more detail so that now we have a very complex statement of faith that has arisen out of the simplicity of the early statement, in order to try to safeguard the truths from being spoiled by the intrusion of wrong ideas.
The primitive preaching was very simple, but it was added to, understandably, and rightly, by the apostles in their expositions in the Epistles, so that the church should grow in knowledge. There was “the milk of the word” and there was “the meat” to which the Apostles were leading them on, and which gave us such wonderful expositions as Romans and Ephesians and Hebrews, these classic demonstrations of the way in which the simple faith can be expanded and developed in all sorts of ways, along all sorts of avenues, so that the germs of truth have many facets which are developed in the Epistles.
The Origin of the Organic World – Part One