Theopedia

Bishop

“Pay careful attention to yourselves and to all the flock, in which the Holy Spirit has made you overseers, to care for the church of God, which he obtained with his own blood.”

— Acts 20:28

Definition

A bishop (from the Greek episkopos, “overseer”) is a leader given oversight of a local church, charged with teaching sound doctrine and governing its affairs. In the New Testament and in the 1689 London Baptist Confession, the term names the same office as elder (presbyteros), not a separate, higher rank, and stands alongside deacon as one of the two offices Christ has appointed for his church. Christ himself is called the Shepherd and Overseer of his people, the pattern every human overseer serves under (1 Pet. 2:25).

Confessional Definition

The 1689 London Baptist Confession treats bishop and elder as two names for one office, not two ranks. Its chapter “Of the Church” states that a particular church, “gathered and completely organized according to the mind of Christ, consists of officers and members,” and that the officers Christ has appointed for that church “are bishops or elders, and deacons.”1

The confession’s next paragraph describes how a man is called to that office: “the way appointed by Christ for the calling of any person, fitted and gifted by the Holy Spirit, unto the office of bishop or elder in a church, is, that he be chosen thereunto by the common suffrage of the church itself,” then set apart “by fasting and prayer, with imposition of hands of the eldership of the church, if there be any before constituted therein.”2 The office is filled by the vote of the local congregation and the laying on of hands by that church’s own existing elders, not by consecration from a bishop outside or above the local church. A later paragraph names preaching “by way of office” as a duty belonging to “the bishops or pastors of the churches,” alongside deacons as the church’s other, distinct office.3

Read together, these paragraphs rule out a bishop who holds authority over multiple congregations or over his fellow elders: every bishop is an elder, every elder a bishop, and the office is bounded by, and accountable to, the single local church that called him to it.

Biblical Basis

Scripture uses bishop (episkopos) and elder (presbyteros) of the same men and the same work. Addressing the same group he had just called “the elders of the church” at Ephesus (Acts 20:17), Paul tells them, “the Holy Spirit has made you overseers [episkopous], to care for the church of God” (Acts 20:28). Writing to Titus, Paul instructs him to “appoint elders in every town,” then, in the very next verse, gives the qualifications “for an overseer, as God’s steward, must be above reproach” (Titus 1:5-7). Paul’s greeting to the Philippian church names both offices side by side: “all the saints in Christ Jesus who are at Philippi, with the overseers and deacons” (Phil. 1:1). His fuller list of qualifications opens the same way: “the saying is trustworthy: If anyone aspires to the office of overseer, he desires a noble task” (1 Tim. 3:1-7).

Peter, who identifies himself as “a fellow elder” rather than a separate order above the elders he addresses, exhorts them to “shepherd the flock of God that is among you, exercising oversight [episkopountes], not under compulsion, but willingly” (1 Pet. 5:1-2). The same letter calls Christ “the Shepherd and Overseer of your souls” (1 Pet. 2:25), the office every human overseer holds under him.

Historical Development

The New Testament itself uses the two titles interchangeably. “The term ‘elder’ (presbyteros), used to describe the office of overseer, was later more precisely described and replaced by that of ‘overseer’ (episkopos).”4 Reading 1 Timothy 5:17’s distinction between elders and those “who rule well,” this treatment concludes that “elders and overseers may be the same persons and bearers of the same office,” with “overseer” naming the elder’s governing function specifically.5 In the earliest churches, oversight and government belonged to the whole body of elders as a group; a separate teaching office was not yet needed, since apostles, evangelists, and prophets carried that work.6

A single presiding elder emerged early, for the sake of order rather than by a new divine institution. In each city, the elders “selected one of their number to whom they gave the special title of bishop, lest, as usually happens, from equality dissension should arise”; that bishop directed the elders’ meetings and carried out their common decisions but did not hold “dominion over his colleagues.”7 Jerome, cited for the church’s own memory of this development, put it plainly: “A bishop is the same as a presbyter,” and before factions arose in the churches “at Corinth” (1 Cor. 1:12), “churches were governed by a common council of presbyters”; only afterward, “that the seeds of dissension might be plucked up,” did one presbyter take precedence, so that bishops came to outrank elders “more by custom than in consequence of our Lord’s appointment.”7

By the early second century, this presiding-elder custom had hardened, especially in the East, into a fixed monarchical episcopate. Ignatius of Antioch, writing around AD 110, gives “incontrovertible evidence for this when he speaks repeatedly, as much as thirteen times, of overseers, presbyters, and deacons as three distinct” ranks rather than two names for one office.8 The West followed the same pattern more slowly. Over the following centuries this single-bishop arrangement developed further, in Rome above all, into a claim that a bishop’s authority rested on an unbroken chain of consecration reaching back to the apostles themselves, a claim the confession’s own framers, and the Reformers before them, did not accept.9

Opposing Views

Roman Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, and Anglicanism hold bishop to be a distinct, higher order of ministry than elder, not another name for the same office. On this view, bishops alone hold the authority to ordain other clergy and to govern a diocese of churches, an authority transmitted from the apostles through an unbroken succession of episcopal consecrations. Historic Roman Catholic theology counts “the government of the Church by bishops” and “the perpetuity of the apostleship” among the doctrines resting, at least in part, on unwritten apostolic tradition alongside Scripture.10

Reformed theology rejects apostolic succession as a continuing office, holding that the apostles’ unique, foundational authority passed only into their written word, not into a chain of consecrations. “Contrary to Rome, the apostolic foundation of the church and its government does not mean a continuing apostolate. For us it survives, not as an institution but only in the apostolic Word, which remains as the foundation of the church.”11 On this point the Reformers “categorically rejected the papal system, particularly the notion of apostolic succession,” separating not only from Rome but from the Greek Orthodox and Anglican churches as well.12 Calvin argued at length that the ancient, human arrangement of one presiding elder had been corrupted by Rome into a claim its own defenders could not make good: “we, in our turn, will ask, What have they in common with the apostles?”13

Objections and Responses

Objection: the church’s early and near-universal move to a monarchical bishop shows this development carries apostolic, not merely human, authority. Response: the ancient church’s own writers did not claim this for it. Jerome, one of the sources for how quickly the custom spread, still called a bishop “the same as a presbyter” and attributed a bishop’s precedence over other elders to church custom, not to Christ’s own institution.7 A widespread and early custom is not thereby a divinely instituted one; Scripture itself, the confession holds, already settles the matter by using “bishop” and “elder” of the same office (Acts 20:17, 28; Titus 1:5-7).

Objection: without a chain of episcopal consecration back to the apostles, a church cannot be sure its ministry and sacraments are valid. Response: the apostles’ own office was “extraordinary and temporary,” a founding office that does not continue; what does continue is their word.14 A church’s ministry is therefore secured not by an unbroken line of bishops but by fidelity to apostolic doctrine, and its officers, on the 1689 confession’s own terms, are called and set apart by the local congregation itself, not consecrated into office by a bishop standing outside or above it.2

Related Doctrines

References

  1. The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 26, “Of the Church,” para. 8. ↩

  2. The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 26, “Of the Church,” para. 9. ↩ ↩2

  3. The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 26, “Of the Church,” para. 11. ↩

  4. Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 21, “The Church as a Spiritual Reality.” ↩

  5. Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, chap. 21, “The Church as a Spiritual Reality.” ↩

  6. Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, chap. 21, “The Church as a Spiritual Reality.” ↩

  7. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. Henry Beveridge (Edinburgh: Calvin Translation Society, 1845-1846), book 4, chap. 4, sec. 2, 328-329. ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  8. Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, chap. 21, “The Church as a Spiritual Reality.” ↩

  9. Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, chap. 21, “The Church as a Spiritual Reality.” ↩

  10. Charles Hodge, “Chapter V. Roman Catholic Doctrine Concerning the Rule of Faith,” in Systematic Theology, Volume I (New York: Charles Scribner and Company, 1871), 105-106. ↩

  11. Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, chap. 21, “The Church as a Spiritual Reality.” ↩

  12. Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, chap. 21, “The Church as a Spiritual Reality.” ↩

  13. Calvin, Institutes, book 4, chap. 5, sec. 13, 348. ↩

  14. Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, chap. 21, “The Church as a Spiritual Reality.” ↩