In our little church in Langley, B.C.,
there is a chair on which no one sits, nor would anyone ever dare to. We have many chairs and places to sit—we have
benches along the sides of the nave (but no pews), chairs in the narthex for
overflow visitors, chairs in the church hall for our post-Liturgy lunch. We have chairs in the library. We have places to sit in the altar. But this chair remains empty, as if there
were an invisible RESERVED sign resting upon it. It is found in the back of the altar area, and
it is the episcopal throne, in its traditional place. (In churches using the Greek style of church
architecture, the bishop’s throne is located outside the altar, on the south
side of the nave.) It is clearly
episcopal, for it is a part of the synthronon
or bench for the clergy to sit on during the reading of the lessons at Liturgy,
and in our church it is the only part of the bench that comes with
arm-rests. Sometimes leaving the throne
vacant feels a little like reserving a chair for Elijah at a Jewish bris:
one always keeps the chair available, even if one never expects its
occupant to actually show up. If the
sacramental reality of Christ’s true Body and Blood in the Eucharist has been
called “the Real Presence”, there is a sense that the bishop’s reality in the
Eucharist might be called “the Real Absence”:
we have his picture in the narthex, we elevate and pronounce his name
repeatedly throughout all the services, we have his crucial signature on our antimension, we love him and have him
always in our prayers and in our hearts.
But despite all this, he is pretty much never actually here.
In this our bishop is like every other
bishop I have ever heard of. His own
cathedral city and home (the so-called “see”, from the Latin sedes, or seat) is many miles away, and
he is very busy taking care of his diocese and his many parishes. Not being able to bi-locate, of course he can
only be in one place at a time, and so most parishes have to do without the
bishop’s actual presence for most of the time. When he does come to visit, it is an occasion
of joy, and celebration, and high festivity.
We bake special bread which we offer him along with salt as the
traditional gifts of welcome when he first enters. Everyone wants to see him, and get his
blessing, to exchange a few words with him.
(I always make sure that our catechumens in particular get some time
with him.) At the service, we pull out
all the liturgical stops as we vest him and make things as fully glorious as we
can. The choir has been practicing the
special music well in advance of his arrival, as have the subdeacons. Lots of photographs are taken when he comes.
Everyone is happy when he visits.
Note the verb in the last sentence: we are happy when he visits. It is this verb and
this reality which most differentiates our situation from that of the early
church. In the days prior to Constantine
and even afterward in the days of St. John Chrystostom, the bishop never
visited a church any more than I can be said to visit my little parish in Langley. I don’t visit my church; I am there because I
am the pastor. So it was in the days of
Chrysostom: he didn’t visit the Church
of the Hagia Sophia; he was there all the time because he was its pastor—that
it, because he was its bishop.
And it was not just the church in the
Imperial capital that experienced its bishop as its normal Sunday morning
pastor and weekly preacher. Every church
was like that. The bishop was everywhere
the pastor of the local church. And in
that day, “the local church” was really local.
Every little village, hamlet, town, or city had its own bishop, so that
his “church” (what we now call his “diocese”) consisted of the village or city
where he lived and the surrounding countryside. (We even see this reflected in our Liturgy
today, when we pray for Christians in “every city and country”—for by “country”
is not meant “nation”, but “countryside”, the region surrounding the
city.) The bishop was the local pastor,
the one who blessed and presided at every baptism, who anointed all in his
church who were sick, who excommunicated the straying, and who reconciled the
excommunicated back into the communion of the church when they repented. He was assisted in his pastoral work and
deliberations by a committee of presbyters, and further helped by his
deacons. But he was the face of the
local church, the pastoral face upon which all the faithful looked every
Sunday. In the early days he was chosen
by them and was bound to them until he died.
He never “visited” his church, for he never went away.
A celebration of the Eucharist was
unthinkable without the presidency of the bishop. We see this in a rule in an Egyptian Church
Order that declares that a community of Christians cannot have their own bishop
if they only number twelve persons. This
of course tells us that there were some little enclaves of Christians numbering
less than twelve that still wanted their own bishop, otherwise the canon would
have been unnecessary. This reveals as
nothing else could the importance of the bishop to the local church in those
early days. If the number of Christians
grew in a village or city so that all could not meet in the same place, then
the bishop would deputize one of the presbyters to serve that group. But the bishop was still the main pastor of
the village or city, the hub around which Christian life in that area revolved.
This means that things have changed
dramatically in the life of the local church.
Now a presbyter, not the bishop, is the local pastor, for bishop’s
church or diocese is now no longer a single community and its outlaying
countryside, but a sizable area consisting often of many cities and villages
and vast distances. (Our own bishop has
all of Canada for his diocese.) He can
only visit each of his parishes once in a while, and thus can only maintain a
slight familiarity with the parishioners there.
For day to day pastoral care, the parishioners rely not on the bishop
who often lives at a great distance away and who is busy with many other
parishes, but on the local presbyter. He
is their priest (a title which once normally described not the presbyter but
the bishop). He is the one who gets the
late night emergency call to the hospital.
He is the one who presides at the normal Sunday Eucharist, who baptizes
the babies and catechumens, who anoints the sick, hears the confessions, and
buries the dead. The bishop is loved and
respected, but he functions as a beloved but distant uncle more than as a
father. Things have changed.
Canonically and constitutionally, of course,
things remain what they have always been.
Gregory Dix, writing some time ago in his chapter “Ministry in the Early
Church” in Kirk’s large volume The Apostolic Ministry, distinguishes
between what he calls the “constitutional” history of the episcopal office and
the “administrative” one.
Constitutionally, the office remains what it was from apostolic
days: a ministry of shepherding,
consecrating, ordaining, and (for the Anglican Dix in Britain),
confirming. But administratively the
office underwent many changes. Dix
recounts:
“There is the first stage [in Britain] when the bishop
is above all an evangelist, a missionary monk.
Under the Heptarchy he becomes something not very readily
distinguishable from a tribal wizard.
Under the Anglo-Saxon monarchy he becomes a royal counselor…passing by
slow degrees into a great feudal landlord and than a national noble. After this, both before and after the
Reformation, he is primarily the great civil servant. Later still he becomes the somewhat torpid
grandee of the eighteenth century.
Finally he is translated into the Victorian philanthropist and the
modern spiritual bureaucrat.”[1]
Obviously Dix writes here only of bishops
in his native Britain, but his point holds for bishops in all places, in that
while the bishop’s constitutional role remains constant, his administrative
role is in flux. “Continuity of name
does not necessarily imply continuity of function.”[2] So it is that although the name of bishop has
remained constant through Christian history and his constitutional role has
remained unchanged, his administrative role has changed almost out of all
recognition.
To truly help our bishops in their ongoing
tasks, it is necessary to understand the history of the office, and to see how
it has changed administratively since the pre-Nicene days. That is not because the pre-Nicene period
constituted a “golden age” of church history, but because it was only then that
we first get to examine in some detail how the church was structured in the
apostolic days and how it was meant to function. As we will see, though there is little in the
New Testament which would help us learn how the church leadership actually
interacted with the rest of the church, many of these details can be found in
the literature of the second and third centuries—details of an office first
established by the apostles as part of the deposit of the Faith.
The present relationship of bishop to
presbyter and parish in Orthodoxy is the fruit of a long and convoluted
development, paralleling that the development of the bishop’s office in Britain
that Dix recounted. Therefore we will attempt
to summarize some of those changes in the chapters to come, to show how we
arrived at our present situation. After
a quick survey of the long evolution of the bishop’s office in the eastern part
of the church, we will offer some concluding reflections.
We begin
at the beginning, in the apostolic first century.
The book
from which this Introduction was taken has been published by Ancient Faith Publications and is also available from Amazon.com
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