Church and State as Seen in the Formation of Christendom

by T. W. Allies

The vivid love and sense of the Church, as the great instrument of unity wrought by the Passion of Christ in the world, and compacted by the ministry which He has set up, distinguishes the letter of St. Ignatius as it does that of St. Paul to the same Ephesian Church, so specially beloved by the Apostle, and the scene of so many of his labours. But St. Irenæus[53] tells us that it was also from the bosom of this Church of Ephesus that the Apostle of love issued the Gospel in which he recorded for the world the great commission to feed the whole flock of Christ given to St. Peter on the shore of the lake of Galilee.

Let us add one more passage from the letter to the Trallians. “For when you are subject to your bishop as to Jesus Christ you seem to me to live not after the manner of men, but according to Jesus Christ, who died for us, in order that, believing in His death, you may escape death. It is therefore necessary that you do nothing without your bishop, but that you be subject to the presbytery also, as to the Apostles of Jesus Christ, our hope, in whom if we walk we shall be found. The deacons also, as being the ministers of the mysteries of Jesus Christ, must be acceptable to all. For they are not the ministers of meat and drink, but servants of the Church of God. Wherefore they must avoid all offences as they would fire. Let all in like manner reverence the deacons as Jesus Christ, and the bishop as the type of the Father, and the presbyters as God’s senate and the College of Apostles. Without these there is no Church.”

These words expressly state the organic unity of a local Church to be the bishop with his priests and deacons; but he had likewise noted that the bishops established throughout the earth were together “in the mind of Christ.”

The words of St. Clement the Pope, and St. Ignatius, the bishop of one of the three original patriarchal Sees, thus complete and corroborate each other. If we put the passages just cited from the latter with the statement of the former, that “the Apostles, preaching from country to country and from city to city, established their first-fruits, after proving them by the Spirit, to be bishops and deacons of a people that were to believe,” we have a perfect chain let down from above, and binding the earth in its embrace: God, who sends forth Christ; Christ, who sends forth the Apostles; the Apostles, who appoint local bishops, who are the bond to their clergy and people. In the whole of this the expression of St. Ignatius is verified: “hence in your concord and harmonious love Jesus Christ is sung.” If the bishops throughout the world were not united with each other in as complete a harmony as the presbytery with the bishop in a particular diocese, these words would not be true. But, on the contrary, they are together “in the mind of Christ,” as He is “the mind of the Father,” and they feed not each a separate flock, but together “the flock of Christ.”

But who is the bond of their union? It pleased the Divine Providence that, even before St. Ignatius wrote, and even in the lifetime of the Apostle who recorded the commission to feed the whole flock of Christ, the harmony and obedience of which St. Ignatius spoke should be broken in a particular diocese, and that St. Peter’s third successor should execute his office and assert the Divine commission by fulfilling it. His conduct in this marks, by a solemn act, the line between the Apostolate and the Primacy. That he speaks in the name of the whole Roman Church, as the voice of a Body, illustrates further the words of St. Ignatius, “Your presbytery is fitted as exactly to the bishop as the strings are to a harp.”[54]

In the testimony of these Apostolic Fathers, each completing the other, we have not only the local bishop planted as the unit of the Church’s organism in any particular city, but the bishop who sits in the See of Peter, the tie and bond of his brethren. The harp sounds its notes to Christ throughout the world.

Another point in which their testimony exactly agrees is, that while St. Clement speaks of the government of the Church as enacted with even greater accuracy and enforced with even stronger penalties than the law of Moses, St. Ignatius takes the strict observance of unity and obedience to external authority as a perfect test of the inward disposition, a perfect assurance that those who exercised these virtues were members of Christ. The temper in which these Fathers write is as far as possible removed from the notion that Church government was either lax or uncertain. To them it comes from above, and requires inward obedience, as the appointment of Christ.

Eusebius, the first historian of the Church, compiling about the year 324 notices of the times before him, with, records at his command which are no longer extant, describes in the following terms the first period, that in which the Apostles themselves preached, which we may speak of as running from the Day of Pentecost to the destruction of Jerusalem:—

“Thus, under a celestial influence and co-operation, the doctrine of the Saviour, like the rays of the sun, quickly irradiated the whole world. Presently, in accordance with divine prophecy, the sound of his inspired Evangelists and Apostles had gone throughout all the earth, and their words to the end of the world. Throughout every city and village, like a replenished barn-floor, numerous and populous churches were firmly established. Those who, in consequence of the delusions that had descended to them from their ancestors, had been fettered by the ancient disease of idolatrous superstition, were now liberated by the power of Christ, through the united force of the teaching and miracles of His messengers; and, as if delivered from dreadful masters, and emancipated from the most cruel bondage, they renounced the crowd of deities introduced by demons, while they confessed the one God, the Creator of all things. This same God they now also honoured with the rites of a true piety, under the influence of that inspired and reasonable worship which had been planted among men by our Saviour.”[55]

The next period is distinctly marked by Eusebius as the first succession from the Apostles. St. Paul,[56] he says, preaching to the Gentiles, laid the foundations of Churches from Jerusalem in a circle round to Illyricum; and St. Peter preached to the circumcision in the five provinces recorded by him in his letter. He continues, “It is not easy to say how many imitators of these were by them judged worthy to exercise the pastoral office in the Churches founded by them, except so far as St. Paul’s own words record them. For he had numberless fellow-workers, fellow-soldiers, as he himself called them, most of whom he has delivered to immortal memory by mention of them in his letters.” Thus Timotheus was first Bishop of Ephesus; Titus was set over Crete, and expressly enjoined to appoint bishops in its several cities, for St. Paul draws out what sort of a character the bishop so appointed should be.[57] “Linus, whom he mentions being with him at Rome, has already,” says Eusebius, “been named by us as having been first Bishop of the Roman Church after Peter. But likewise Clement, who was the third appointed Bishop of the Romans, is recorded by St. Paul as his colleague and fellow-labourer.”