Baptists and Elders pt 2

By Mark Dever

part 1
Introduction

1. Elders in the Bible

A. Basic usage
B. The Question of Single vs. Plural]

part 2
2. Elders in History

A. Early Church
B. Reformation Recoveries
C. Baptist Elders in the Past
D. Current Influences in the Revival of Elders in Baptist Churches

II. Elders in History

A. Early Church

Development of the monarchical episcopate. If this universal practice was, in fact, the case in the early church, how and when did it change? That the immediate post-apostolic church changed both rapidly and radically, few Protestants would deny. In everything from the rise of infant baptism, to the efficacy of the sacraments, to the role of works in salvation, the centuries immediately after the departure of the last of Christ’s apostles saw rapid decay among the fledgling churches. It is no surprise that such changes should occur in matters of church organization and governance as well.

In the Didache (dating from the late first or the early second century) the only church officers are elders and deacons. But as early as the early second century, Ignatius would refer to a council of elders, called to give counsel to a chief pastor, or bishop. Ignatius uses the words presbyter (elder) and bishop distinctly. This separation is crucial for understanding the changes that went on in the church of the second and third centuries, as authority was centralized. By the middle of the second century, leading pastor/elders of churches in the urban centers that had first been evangelized seem to have become the informal arbiters of questions on orthodoxy. This development seemed to take place more slowly in some places than others. Egypt was notably slower in losing its more informal associations and de-centralized structures of authority. But generally, it seems, competent and noted pastors, like Ignatius of Antioch, were elders who were first among equals—perhaps as Timothy had been at Ephesus, or James at Jerusalem—but that function became an office, and that office seems to have grown in authority until the episcopate is understood to be a separate office from the eldership. Such bishops seemed to accrue authority not only in their own congregations, but throughout the area, and sometimes—in the case of the “metropolitan sees” that arose—over much wider regions. It was eventually one of these—the see of Rome—which became dissatisfied with the informality of its own authority over the other metropolitan bishops (Jerusalem, Antioch, Alexandria and, by the fourth century, Constantinople) and insisted on his exclusive preeminence. Thus, the full flowering of the move from congregational elder leadership to more centralizing authority was the claim of the Bishop of Rome to be the single arbiter of matters of truth in the faith.

One can see how in a day with vigorous church planting, rapid expansion, and notorious martyrdoms in certain central locations, the successors of certain noted pastors began naturally to acquire respect and even deference. Cyprian of Carthage, a century after Ignatius, closely links recognition of single, authoritative bishops with the unity of the church. Jerome, writing in the 4th century, admitted the identity of bishop and elder in the New Testament, but realized the historical need to commit oversight to one person. In the struggle to identify orthodoxy amidst a sea of heresies, one can understand the tendency to centralize and work to ensure conformity, and even uniformity. For more on this, see Cyprian’s famous On the Unity of the Catholic Church.[15] But I’m sure that Drs. Brand and Yarnell will deal with all of this both with greater competency and at more length in their presentations later today.

B. Reformation recoveries

Proceeding on historically, we find a great re-thinking at the time of the Reformation. With the assumption that Scripture is sufficient, the mere antiquity of traditions was no longer seen as sufficient for their continued practice. Rather, some word of Scripture, at least some intimation or implication was required as the searching gaze of the Reformers began to fall across the practices of their churches.

For early Anabaptists, Reformed, Congregationalists and Baptists throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, offices in the church were in a state of flux. Even some of the magisterial reformers began to recover the identity of bishop and elder. Realizing that there was no biblical basis for an episcopacy, though, was a destabilizing factor not only for the authority of Rome in western Europe, but also for the monarchs who had for centuries leaned upon the structures of the church for supplying everything from order to education to income. Thus, moves away from Episcopal structures at first were piecemeal.

Luther declined to interfere with the distinct, extra-congregational role of the bishop in practice. He did, however, repeatedly emphasize that bishops and elders or pastors were all the same office in Scripture. He also wanted it recognized that the Bishop of Rome was a false prophet, and that therefore no bishop should be in communion with him. Furthermore, he denied the unique authority for the Bishop of Rome as the successor of Peter from Matthew 16 that Rome had long claimed. To Luther and his successors, as long as the office of bishop or pastor is recognized, other external aspects of church organization within congregations and between them, are understood to be matters appropriately settled by human law.

Calvin, being more zealously committed to the regulative principle, and less encumbered by inter-princely politics than Luther, pushed for even more normative definition in Scripture of church polity. Calvin, too, recovered the identity of the bishop and the elder, thus removing the level of authorities above and apart from the local church. His careful scholarship in the early patristic period is rehearsed in Book IV, chapter 4 of the Institutes. Calvin said that “In each city these [elders] chose one of their number whom they specially gave the title ‘bishop’ in order that dissensions might not arise (as commonly happens) from equality of rank. . . . The ancients themselves admit that this was introduced by human agreement to meet the need of the times.”[16]

Calvin’s concern was to have ministers of the Word in each congregation. These ministers were those described in the New Testament as elders or pastors. In Calvin’s own thinking, the “elders” were what would now be called “ruling elders” that is, non-ordained elders, with the teaching elders being called “ministers of the Word and the Sacraments.” The Reformed churches in Geneva, Germany, the Netherlands and Scotland developed a series of inter-locking courts which would settle disputes of doctrine and discipline between congregations and foster the unity of the churches in an area with a reformed magistrate.

Anabaptist polity was fluid. They were “radically de-centralized,” as James Stayer has recently put it, “most of them making exclusivist claims and condemning the other [groups of Anabaptists]”[17]. Various offices (including that of elders) proliferated among them. In the 1529 Discipline of the Believers; How a Christian is to Live, we find this statement: “The elders [Vorsteher] and preachers chosen for the brotherhood shall with zeal look after the needs of the poor, and with zeal in the Lord according to the command of the Lord extend what is needed for the sake of and instead of the brotherhood.”[18] A basic pattern of delegated leadership within a congregational pattern emerged.

In the Reformation period, then, a return to ancient patterns followed an affirmation of the sufficiency of Scripture. The non-ordained church-members began to be given more responsibility. Congregational election of officers was widely recovered among Protestants. And at the same time, there was a recovery of the plural eldership, among the Reformed groups and some Anabaptists. The Church of Scotland was reformed through the preaching of John Knox and others, and established the office of elder in the churches there. In England, the Presbyterians, the Congregationalists, and the Baptists also recovered the office from the New Testament. And it is to them—the Baptists—that we now turn.

C. Baptist Elders in the past

“It’s not Baptist” said the older lady, objecting to my advocating the adoption of elders in Baptist churches. She wasn’t strictly correct. I understand what she meant—in the churches she had been used to in the second half of the twentieth century, she hadn’t seen or even heard of such a thing. But other Baptists had.

We’ve already mentioned the use of the word “elder” in Baptist statements of faith from the past. But was that simply a word which was synonymous with our modern pastor, or even senior pastor? Did Baptists in the past understand that the New Testament recognized a plurality of leaders called “elders” in one local congregation?[19] Let me present a sampling for you.

Throughout the 17th century in England, Baptists had affirmed the office of elder. In 1697, Benjamin Keach wrote of “Bishops, Overseers, or Elders” clearly implying that these New Testament offices were one.[20] Keach presents it as essential that a church has one or more pastors, but not that it have a plurality of them. He rejects the Presbyterian practice of having a separate group of ruling elders who do not teach, saying that if that practice was in the Apostolic church, it was only temporary, because we have neither their qualifications nor their duties laid out in the New Testament.[21]

In the 18th century, Benjamin Griffith wrote in favor of ruling elders distinct from the pastors or teaching elders.[22] He cited Exodus 18, Deut. 1, I Tim. 5:17, I Cor. 12:28 and Rom. 12:8 as his basis for this. The ruling elder’s distinction from the teaching elder’s position is shown by the fact that he would have to be ordained should he shift to becoming a teaching elder. Griffith’s practice of having such ruling elders was common in the Philadelphia Baptist Association in the eighteenth century. In this practice, however, Griffith and his contemporaries were disagreeing with their English counterparts of the previous decades.[23] The Charleston Association’s 1774 Summary of Church Discipline ignores any idea of a separate group of ruling elders, but affirms the fact that in the New Testament, ministers of the gospel are “frequently called elders, bishops, pastors and teachers.” The Summary also implies that there is sometimes within one local congregation a “presbytery.”[24]

In the 19th century, Samuel Jones of the Philadelphia Association wrote that “Concerning the divine right of the office of ruling elders there has been considerable doubt and much disputation.” Jones then goes on to summarize the arguments for and against, essentially conceding that Benjamin Griffith’s defense of ruling elders was weak, but arguing that the office is beneficial and not forbidden, and therefore that congregations are free to keep it if they find it a useful office to assist the pastor.[25]

Turning to the South, W. B. Johnson of South Carolina, and the first president of the Southern Baptist Convention wrote of the New Testament churches that “each church had a plurality of elders.”[26] “A plurality in the bishopric is of great importance for mutual counsel and aid, that the government and edification of the flock may be promoted in the best manner.”[27] For several pages of his book, The Gospel Developed, Johnson goes on delineating the duties and benefits of a plurality of elders in a local congregation.[28]

J. L. Reynolds, pastor of the Second Baptist Church of Richmond, Virginia, wrote in 1849 that “the apostolic churches seem, in general, to have had a plurality of elders as well as deacons.”[29] Nevertheless, he maintained that “the number of officers, whether elders or deacons, necessary to the completeness of a church, is not determined in Scripture. This must be decided by the circumstances of the case, of which the party interested is the most competent judge.”[30] Reynolds competently and carefully dissected the arguments in favor of a distinct class of ruling elders.[31] And Reynolds has a whole chapter defending the interchangeability of the terms “bishop” and “elder”.

William Williams, one of the founding faculty of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary wrote in 1874 that “In most, if not all the apostolic churches, there was a plurality of elders.”[32] Williams went on to speculate that this was perhaps the case because Christians could only meet in small groups and therefore each smaller group needed an elder to instruct them. He suggests that such a plurality of elders was only due to the circumstances of the time, and need not be a continuing requirement for churches. Williams also disagrees with any idea of a separate office of ruling elder. He places the plurality of elders in the same category as deaconesses, the holy kiss, the frequency of the Lord’s Supper—all now to be left up to the “pious discretion of the churches.”[33]

I could go on. C. H. Spurgeon had a plurality of elders at the Metropolitan Tabernacle in London.[34] J. L. Burrows, (pastor of FBC Richmond for 20 years, and chairman of the Foreign Mission Board for 6 years) in his book What Baptists Believe [1888] (p. 12, 16) wrote that “Elders and deacons are the only officers [Christ] has instituted,” (p. 14). It is indisputable that by the beginning of the twentieth century, Baptists had either had or at least advocated elders—and often even a plurality of elders—in local churches, and that they had done so for centuries.

A. H. Strong, president of Rochester Theological Seminary, and author of his influential 1907 Systematic Theology perhaps summarizes the positions most Baptists in America seemed to hold at the beginning of the twentieth century: “In certain of the N.T. churches there appears to have been a plurality of elders . . . . There is, however, no evidence that the number of elders was uniform, or that the plurality which frequently existed was due to any other cause than the size of the churches for which these elders cared. The N. T. example, while it permits the multiplication of assistant pastors according to need, does not require a plural eldership in every case. . . . There are indications, moreover, that, at least in certain churches, the pastor was one, while the deacons were more than one, in number.”[35]

D. Current Influences in the Revival of Elders in Baptist Churches

Why in the latter part of the twentieth century, and even among Southern Baptists, has this office of elder begun to be revived? I have no extensive research for the comments that are to follow on this point, other than anecdotal experiences, and my own reasoning and reflecting. ‘Why?’s are not only difficult questions for historians to answer; even for those living in the midst of change, causation is often difficult to discern. I have been an elder at a Baptist church in England, and have preached in Baptist churches in South Africa with elders. But here in America, what is causing the re-evaluation that is indisputably going on?

Let me suggest two factors which were present regardless of the controversy in the SBC, and three others which have resulted from the controversy, and which may, in part, explain this otherwise surprising sudden surge of interest in this ancient office.

The first reason that I would suggest is that the idea of elders in local churches has prominent advocates and proponents from outside our Southern Baptist constituency. John MacArthur, pastor of Grace Community Church in Sun Valley, California, has for many years practiced and advocated having a plurality of elders lead his congregation. He is himself one of those elders. He has published a variety of things that touch on this, but perhaps most widely used is his little 1984 32-page booklet Answering The Key Questions about Elders. In 1991, John Piper, pastor of Bethlehem Baptist Church, a Baptist General Conference church in Minneapolis, Minnesota also led his church to adopt a plural elder model of leadership, and has also written a 63-page booklet on this, Biblical Eldership (1999).

Even more broadly, Wayne Grudem’s popular 1994 Systematic Theology used in many of our seminaries states clearly that “there is quite a consistent pattern of plural elders as the main governing group in the New Testament churches.”[36] His conclusions are that “First, no passage suggests that any church, no matter how small, had only one elder. The consistent New Testament pattern is a plurality of elders ‘in every church’ (Acts 14:23) . . . . Second, we do not see a diversity of forms of government in the New Testament church, but a unified and consistent pattern in which every church had elders governing it and keeping watch over it (Acts 20:28; Heb. 13:17; I Peter 5:2-3).”[37] I should just add that when Grudem wrote this he was a member of a Southern Baptist church in Chicago with elders. Since its completion in 1985, Millard Erickson’s Christian Theology has been perhaps the most widely used textbook in Southern Baptist seminaries, and in many other evangelical schools. At its publication in the mid-1980’s, there had been few systematic theologies that gained wide usage published since Louis Berkhof’s Dutch Reformed work in the 1930’s. In Erickson’s section on the church, he carefully lays out Episcopalian, Presbyterian and Congregational polities, showing strengths and weaknesses. He gingerly advocates Congregationalism, though not with the vigor of such defenses by earlier divine-right Congregationalists like John Owen and Thomas Goodwin, nor even of the milder variety which inhabited the south in the 19th century—like W. B. Johnson and J. L. Reynolds. He also makes two qualifying statements that a more Presbyterian form of government will probably be needed either where the congregation becomes very large, or is filled with those who are more immature as Christians.

The second reason that I would suggest is more internal and pragmatic. There is and has been for some time, I think, a frustration with current structures in our congregations. Many of our churches have the sense that things are simply not working. Some churches led by a single pastor suffer under an authoritarian rule that is too much like the Gentile leadership Jesus forbade among us in Mark 10:42. Other times, young pastors have gone into churches and found them ossified, effectively ruled by either deacons, a nominating committee, a personnel committee, or some other group which has no Biblical standard of maturity in understanding and teaching the Scriptures. And for those churches where our congregational heritage is still valued, it is valued too often as an expression of a wrong, anti-Christian individualism, rather than as part of the corporate responsibility we will bear before the Lord. Furthermore, where baptismal and membership ages plunge lower than driver’s licenses, middle school or even pre-school, and where church membership (even of adults) requires nothing other than a one-time decision—no regular attendance, nor even communication—it cannot be surprising that meetings of members for church business become more and more ineffective. As I hope we will hear John Hammett explain tomorrow morning, “many Baptist churches have strayed so far from regenerate membership that they are incapable of responsible church government at the present time.”[38] Congregationalism fades as membership expectations evaporate.

There are also some echoes, some unintended results, of our own inerrancy controversy that have led to this re-evaluation of church government. The least important of these reasons would be the acceleration of the larger cultural trend to be less attached to particular denominations. Brand loyalty is down everywhere. Throughout much of the twentieth century, Southern Baptist pragmatism assumed such loyalty, rather than creating it or cultivating it. The disease in Zion that caused such unease in Zion led to a rupturing of the denominational womb that many Southern Baptists had lived in their entire lives. As a result of the intramural fighting, conservative Southern Baptists began looking outside the fold in a way their more liberal counterparts had done for decades. There they found a wide world that stretched from southern California megachurches to Chicago-based schools and publishers. Many of us in the 1970’s learned that we couldn’t depend on our BSU’s (mine had a woman as a minister, and denied the bodily resurrection). The books we would read from “our” people sorely disappointed us. So Dale Moody’s The Word of Truth served as a poor guard from liberal mainline Protestantism; instead it more often advocated its tenets. And the seminaries were untrustworthy—so John Hammett went to Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, and I went to Gordon-Conwell; others likely have similar stories.

All of this inter-traffic with broader evangelicalism was multiplied by the rise of the Bible churches, and Dallas Theological Seminary’s influence among conservatives. Gene Getz advocated a plurality of elders. In fact, I have a paper from the Conservative Baptist Association of Oregon from 1977 in which they attempt to address the growing problem of elders in Baptist churches, and they ascribe it entirely to the growth of the Bible churches. Other denominations, too, became more familiar to us. Though the churches of Christ and the Brethren had long had elders, we didn’t talk too much to them.

But Jay Adams, an Orthodox Presbyterian from Westminster Seminary spoke at our counseling conferences. By the 1970’s and 1980’s many of the fastest growing churches around us were—of all things—Presbyterian! The PCA had been born in 1973, and quickly began to raise questions about the old canard among some Baptists that Calvinism is anti-evangelistic. Now, thirty years later, PCA churches are full of former Southern Baptists, and it’s not because they’ve all been convinced of the validity of infant baptism! Many of those churches—even with their unbiblical infant baptism and confusing extra-congregational government—were out-evangelizing, out-teaching, and even out-disciplining our Southern Baptist congregations.

Through all of this, we were finding allies, those with whom we had more in common—even with Anglicans like John Stott and J. I. Packer—than we had with many of those whose salaries we paid to teach in our institutions. It naturally follows, then, that as fresh respect came to these outside voices, more consideration was given to their arguments and practices, and topics that we had not needed to discuss for a century or more once again became topics of conversation—like church government, and the role of elders. This thawing of inter-denominational conversation was new for many among the more conservative circles in the Southern Baptist Convention.

Another way the controversy in the convention opened up modern Southern Baptists to reconsider the role of elders in our churches was it forced us to reconsider our denominational identity, and an inevitable part of that included looking at our Baptist past. And what we found in our past, among many larger and more important issues—like inerrancy, confessions, Calvinism—were elders aplenty! I’m just about old enough to remember it. I can just remember that across from my grandmother in Kentucky lived an old, retired Southern Baptist minister who was referred to by the title of “elder.”

A final explanation for this renewed emphasis on elders is simply the renewed emphasis on the inerrancy of the Bible itself. It shouldn’t surprise us—indeed, it should encourage us—that in looking for us to come to the stalwart defense of the inerrancy of the Bible—to be willing to fight, and even fire over it—we would find that people would open the revered book, and begin studying it afresh, and asking questions about the plain meaning of texts. In the context of the loosened loyalties, and openness to redefinition, it really can’t be too great a surprise that if none of these other factors had obtained—outside influences, inner frustrations—we still might find ourselves scratching our heads today, staring at the Bible and saying, “why don’t we see elders in our churches like this?”

[15]For some of the earliest references see Henry Bettenson & Chris Maunder, eds., Documents of the Christian Church 3rd ed. (Oxford, 1999) 68-90. A classic study of this topic is Hans von Campenhausen, Ecclesiastical Authority and Spiritual Power in the Church of the First Three Centuries (1969). Though von Campenhausen denies any intended complete presentation of church structure within the New Testament and would not seem to adhere to a Protestant understanding of the sufficiency of Scripture, the historical aspects of his work are careful and well repay time spent in the reading.

[16] Calvin, Institutes IV.iv.2 (McNeill, p. 1069). Cf. Elsie Anne McKee, “Calvin’s Teaching on the Elder Illuminated by Exegetical History,” in Timothy George, ed., John Calvin & the Church: A Prism of Reform (Westminster/John Knox Press, 1990), 147-155. John Owen, an early champion of congregationalism, defended the separate office of ruling elder (see Owen, Works, vol. 16, p. 42).

[17] James Stayer, “Anabaptists”, Oxford Encyclopedia of the Reformation, ed. Hans Hillerbrand, (Oxford, 1996) I.32.

[18] Werner O. Packull, Hutterite Beginnings (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995) p. 312. Cf. Emir Caner’s summary in Gerald Cowen, Who Rules the Church (Broadman & Holman, 2003).

[19] See Greg Will’s succinct summary of this in his article “The Church: Baptists and Their Churches in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries,” in Polity, ed., Mark Dever (Washington, DC; 2001), 33-34.

[20]Benjamin Keach, The Glory of a True Church, in Polity, ed. Mark Dever (Washington, DC; 2001), 65.

[21]Keach, in Polity, pp. 68-69. Cf. James Renihan, “The Practical Ecclesiology of the English Particular Baptists, 1675-1705: The Doctrine of the Church in the Second London Baptist Confession as Implemented in the Subscribing Churches,” (Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation: Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, 1997).

[22] Benjamin Griffith, A Short Treatise, in Dever, ed., Polity, p. 98.

[23]“The majority of the writers and churches did not recognize a distinct office of ruling elder,” (200). “The majority of particular Baptists were committed to a plurality and a parity of elders in their churches,” (205). James Renihan, “The Practical Ecclesiology of the English Particular Baptists, 1675-1705: The Doctrine of the Church in the Second London Baptist Confession as Implemented in the Subscribing Churches,” (Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation: Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, 1997).

[24] Summary of Church Discipline, in Dever, Polity, p. 120.

[25] Samuel Jones, Treatise of Church Discipline, in Dever, Polity, pp. 145-146.

[26]W. B. Johnson, The Gospel Developed, in Dever, Polity, p. 192.

[27]Johnson, in Polity, p. 193.

[28]See Johnson, in Polity, pp. 189-195.

[29]J. L. Reynolds, Church Polity or the Kingdom of Christ, in Dever, ed., Polity, p. 349.

[30] Reynolds, in Polity, p. 350.

[31] Reynolds, in Polity, p. 350.

[32] William Williams, Apostolical Church Polity, in Dever, ed., Polity, 531.

[33] Williams, p. 537. Though without citing Williams, Gerald Cowen has recently rehearsed this same argument in his book Who Rules the Church?

[34] “To our minds, the Scripture seems very explicit as to how this Church should be ordered. We believe that every Church member should have equal rights and privileges; that there is no power in Church officers to execute anything unless they have the full authorization of the members of the Church. We believe, however, that the Church should choose its pastor, and having chosen him, that they should love him and respect him for his work’s sake; that with him should be associated the deacons of the Church to take the oversight of pecuniary matters; and the elders of the Church to assist in all the works of the pastorate in the fear of God, being overseers of the flock. Such a Church we believe to be scripturally ordered; and if it abide in the faith, rooted, and grounded, and settled, such a Church may expect the benediction of heaven, and so it shall become the pillar and ground of the truth.” Spurgeon, “The Church Conservative and Aggressive” in The Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit, volume 7, pp. 658-659.

[35] A. H. Strong, Systematic Theology, pp. 915-916.

[36] Grudem, Systematic Theology, (1994) p. 912.

[37] Grudem, p. 913.

[38] John Hammett, “Elder Rule in Baptist Church” (unpublished paper, written in Summer, 2003), p. 11.

printed with permission of 9marks.com