This is the second in a series of reflections on Church structure, Church order,

particularly focusing on the ministry of the bishop, the place and ministry of the bishop,
and, with him, presbyters or priests and deacons and then the saints and the charismatic
people in the Church and the whole body of the faithful, the plroma of the faithful.
Thats what were reflecting on now.
Last time, in my first reflection on this subject, I tried to set the stage, as it were, by
saying that human beings, male and female, from the beginning were created to be
prophetic and priestly and pastoral and royal, that we blew it. Humanity blew it from the
beginning and denied their humanity, and denied their prophetic and priestly and pastoral
and royal calling by sinning, by rebelling against God, by refusing to keep his
commandments, by refusing to be prophetic and priestly and pastoral. So they made
themselves fools, and we made ourselves fools. We made ourselves desecraters instead of
consecraters. Instead of mediators, we became obstacles between creation and God and
other people and God. And instead of being kings and rulers we became slaves and
subjects to the very dust and earth and all the demonic powers that we were supposed to
rule over.
So thats the tragedy. Thats how it was in the beginning. And we said last timeif you
didnt listen to it, go back and listenthat the Lord God Almighty didnt give up on us.
He kept working with us, and he found righteous people to interact with. He found
Enoch; he found Noah. And then he finds Abraham, then he makes the promise to
Abraham. And you have Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, the tribes of Israel. You have
Moses, the passover exodus, the tabernacle, the temple, the time in the wilderness, the
crossing the Jordan, the entering the promised land, the building of Jerusalem Temple, the
institution of the priests and all of the sacrificial rites.
You have God doing all of that to reconstruct humanity, to make us again to be prophetic
and priestly and royal and pastoral, and to know the truth and to do the truth and to
glorify God. Thats what he wants from us. Thats what makes us human. Thats what
gives us joy and happiness, peace, shalom of Godthats how we get it.
So God acts through all that, and then, ultimately, all this is for Christ, to produce Christ,
who is the one teacher, the one prophet, the one great high priest, the one pastor, the one
good shepherd, the one king, the one governor, the one bishop, the one overseer, the one
apostle, the one everything. And as we ended our talk last time, we said Jesus is himself
everything. He is the Adam. He is the lone humanity. He is the lone Jew. There is only
one human being; theres only one Jewand thats Jesus. You might even say theres
only one Christian and thats Jesus.

But what we want to see is that it all is fulfilled in this one person, Jesus of Nazareth, the
Messianic prophet, the Messianic teacher, the Messianic priest, the Messianic king, who
is prophet, priest, and king by giving himself over to the cross and to death and to
suffering in order to destroy death and to raise the dead. So he fulfills all of his Messianic
ministry, all of his divine humanity, on the cross. And he takes upon himself the curse and
the sin of the world. He takes on himself the foolishness, the rebellion, the perversion of
humanity in order to straighten it all out, to heal it, to cure it, to sanctify it, to glorify it, to
make it be what God wants it to be from the beginning, and thats what our Lord Jesus
does.
So we said last time that there is one priest, one bishop, one teacher, one pastor. Theres
not many; theres only one. But then we said last time also that by faith and by grace, we
all participate in the one priesthood, the one prophetic ministry, the one teaching
capability, so to speak, the one being very words of God ourselves as Jesus is. By grace
and by faith we become everything that Jesus is by nature. Hes divine and human, and
we become human, really human, and therefore divine, by communion with him and
keeping his commandments through love and through his grace. We cant do it without
the grace; its all grace.
What we said last time is that all Christians participate in the one prophetic and priestly
and pastoral character of Jesus himself. But then we said last time that in the Church, in
the Church as the qahal Israel, as the assembly of Israel on earth until the Lord comes
again in glory, the Messianic community, the Church of Christ, there are some within the
community who are ordained, consecrated, receive the laying-on of hands called
cheirotonia in the Bible and in Greek, in order to be leaders of the Church, to be the ones
who very specifically guarantee the presence of the Lord Christ in the community and his
power in the community. Christs presence and Christs power in the community is
guaranteed in the structure of the Church through the bishops and the presbyters and the
deacons who are ordained for that particular purpose.
Here we would like to make a theological nuance, a kind of a fine point which I consider
to be extremely important. The bishops and the priests in the Church and, in their own
way, the deacons, do not represent Jesus as if he were absent. Its not a vicarious type of
ministry. In other words, the bishops and the priests and the deacons dont stand in the
place of an absent Christ. What they do it, by their ministries, through their sacramental
graces and powers and authorities, they reveal the very presence of Christnot his
absence, but his presence. They show that he is still there as teacher. Hes still there as
prophet. Hes still there as high priest. Hes still there as king. Hes still there as good
shepherd. Hes still there, doing all the things that the prophets and the priests and the
shepherds and the kings are supposed to do for the sake of the salvation of humanity and
the whole world.

So I like to say that the clergy present the Lord Jesus. They dont represent him, they
present him. They image him, to use a good Greek Byzantine term: they image Christ.
Theyre the sacramental images of Christ. Here you could say its kind of iconic, but
youve got to be careful, because it doesnt mean theyre like photographic
representatives or something like that, they have to look like Jesus with long hair and
beards or something. Thats ridiculous, but what it means is that they have a modality, a
form of sacramental reality that allows them to be the sacramental presences,
communicating the sacramental powers and authorities of Christ himself, who alone has
all power over it in heaven and on earth.
Its a presence of Christ that is being shown, not an absence. And its being shown in a
very particular way, through the bishops and the presbyters and the deacons. Its being
shown in other ways through other people. Its being shown in other ways through the
holy people, the saints, the prophets, the charismatic teachers, the healers, those whom
God raises up for particular purposes. Theres lists of these charismatic gifts in the
writings of St. Paul. You find them in Ephesians; you find it in Corinthians. You know:
The body has many gifts, yet the same Spirit.
But here we would say that to be bishop, priest, or deacon is not a charismatic gift. Its a
sacramental reality that belongs to the very being in order and structure of the community
of the Church itself, that you cannot have the Church without bishops, priests, and
deacons. You just cant. Well, deacons here, its a question But normally there would
be those who minister as the hands of the bishop and do certain things that they are
ordained to do. And in the earliest Church, some of the deacons were women. Theres no
doubt about it: men deacons and women deacons, but not presbyters and not bishops. The
presbyter-bishop was always a man, and a very particular type of man.
So what we want to see now is: how did all of this develop in the earliest Church? What
evidence do we have of this from the New Testament Scriptures, the 27 books of the New
Testament, and what evidence do we have [for] this in what is called the post-Apostolic
age? In other words, the end of the first century, the beginning of the second century, and
throughout the second century: that would be called the [post-]Apostolic age, or the subApostolic age, or however you want to call it, the postNew-Testament age.
And here, that would be the age that would pretty much coincide with the centuries until
Constantines conversion and the de-illegitimization of Christianity, and then ultimately
the making of Christianity as the established religion in the end of the fourth century. So
we could say the first and second and third centuries. Now, what do we see in those
centuries, the 100s and the 200s, before you get to the 300s? What do we see there about
bishops and presbyters and Church leadership and Church structure and Church order?

First of all, we have the testimony of the New Testament writings themselves, and we
have what are called the pastoral epistles, meaning the epistles that somehow show this
structure. And they are the two letters to Timothy and the letter to Titus. And then you
might add to that the letter to the Hebrews, where we see a very clear theological treatise
about the unique once-for-all priesthood of Jesus Christ as himself the only victim, and
then how that lives in the Church.
But the Timothy and Titus lettersand in Peter you find also, the letters attributed to
Peteryou find sentences that use these particular words, and you find them in the
writings of St. Paul as well. For example, in the writings of St. Pauland these are
considered to be really Pauline; certainly the Letter to the Philippians isthe Letter to the
Philippians actually begins with these words, that this letter is written to all the saints in
Christ Jesus who are in Philippi, with the bishops and the deacons (with the episkopoi and
the diakonoi). So you have that term bishop used, used in Philippians. You have it used
in Timothy: Those who desire the office of a bishop.
Its got to be admitted, because its simply the truth, that in the New Testament times and
in the Scriptures of the New Testament, these terms are not yet formulated in the
technical meaning in the meaning that they will have in another 50 years or so.
Presbyters and bishops are almost used interchangeably. The term deacon is used
as a minister in general and not as a church office. And then you have the problems of
translating them. How do you translate episkopos? Do you translate it superintendent;
do you translate it overseer? How do you translate presvyteros? Do you translate it
elder; do you translate it presbyter? Can you even translate it as priest, which is not
recommended, because theres another Greek word that means priest: ierevs, which is
not presvyteros. Presbyter means elder.
And in the Orthodox Church to this day, at least liturgically, those holding this office are
called presbyters. Its only popularly that theyre called priests. Theyre said to have
the gift of the hierosyn, the priesthood, but their title is presbyter. For example, in the
litany of the Divine Liturgy, you pray for the presbyterate and the diaconate and the
episcopate.
You have these three, though, already mentioned in the New Testament. Theyre already
there, and so for us Orthodox, thats extremely important, because they are already
testified to in the Apostolic writings that are canonized by the qahal Israel in Christ, by
the Church of Christ. You already have it there in the New Testament. So you have, for
example, in Timothy, I Timothy 3:
The saying is sure: if anyone aspires to the office of episkopos, bishop, he desires a
noble task. Now, a bishop must be above reproach, the husband of one wife, temperate,

sensible, dignified, hospitable, an apt teacher, no drunkard, not violent, but gentle, not
quarrelsome, and no lover of money. He must manage his own household well, keeping
his children submissive and respectful in every way, for if a man does not know how to
manage his own oikos, his own household, how can he care for Gods church, the oikos
tou Theo, the household of God? He must be not a recent convert (whatever that might
mean) or he may be puffed up with conceit and fall into the condemnation of the devil.
Moreover, he must be well thought of by outsiders or he may fall into reproach and the
snares of the devil.
Deacons, likewise, must be serious, not double-tongued, not addicted to much wine, not
greedy for gain. They must hold the mystery of the faith with a clear conscience. Let
them also be tested first, that if they prove themselves blameless, let them serve as
deacons.
The women, likewise (and the usual interpretation in our tradition is the women deacons
likewise, not women generally, but the women who are doing diakonia, who are doing
ministry and service), they also must be serious. No slanderers, temperate, faithful in all
things. Let deacons be the husband of one wife, and let them manage their children and
their households well, for those who serve well as deacons gain a good standing for
themselves and also great confidence in faith which is in Christ Jesus.
Now, you have similar words, almost identical words in the Letter to Titus. Heres what it
says in Titus:
This is why I left you in Crete, that you might amend what was defective and appoint
elders (here the word is presbyters) in every town as I directed you. If any man is
blameless, the husband of one wife, and his children are believers, and not open to the
charge of being profligate or subordinate. For a bishop (and then he uses episkopos), as
Gods steward (oikonomos) must be blameless, not arrogant or quick-tempered or a
drunkard or violent or greedy for gain, but hospitable, lover of goodness, master of
himself, upright, holy, and self-controlled. He must hold firm to the sure word as taught
so that he may be able to give instruction in sound doctrine, health doctrine, and also to
confuse those who contradict it.
Here you have qualifications for these positions. What we see is that hereand this is
certainly true in the New Testament, generallythe word presbyter and the word
bishop are almost used interchangeably. You could almost speak of presbyter-bishop
as one and the same office. It will become distinguished very quickly, certainly by the
beginning of the second century, but in the New Testament writings themselves, its
pretty much indicating the same thing. Its simply the one who heads the household, who
heads the community. Thats what it is.

Our understanding, Orthodox understanding would be: this would be the one who is not
an apostle. And here, for our Church, its pretty much agreed upon that apostles, although
having episcopal and presbyteral and diaconal functionsin other words, they were
overseers and they were elders and they were ministers and they were servantswere not
technically what we would call today bishops or priests. They were not. I think we
have to really insist that, already by the beginning of the second century, the end of the
first, the beginning of the second, that the bishop or elder, the presbyter or episkopos,
presvyteros or episkopos, was the one that the apostle established to be the head of the
Christian community.
In other words, the first bishop of the community was not the apostle who founded the
church. It was the man who was put over the church when the apostle departed. Here we
have a good witness to this in the writing of St. Irenaeus in the third century, the 200s,
where he says about the church of Rome, that it was the blessed church founded by the
Apostles Peter and Paul, whose first bishop was Linus, whose second bishop was
Clement, whose third bishop was Eleftherios, and he goes through the names of eleven
bishops. But the first one is not Peter.
And here, we have to say very clearly: for the Orthodox, Peter was not the first bishop of
Rome. He was not the first bishop of Antioch, either. He was not the first bishop of
anywhere, because the apostles were very particular, once-for-all ministry of announcing
as eyewitnesses of the death and resurrection of Christ who had a very unique place in
Christianity and that place was over when the last of them died.
There were apostles who had to be eyewitnesses and servants of the word. There were the
Twelve, headed by Peter. There had to be twelve because of the twelve tribes of Israel,
but there were other 70 apostles. Some women were apostolic. Mary Magdalene is called
in our Church an apostle: an apostle to the apostles. Namely, those who were sent to be
witness to the risen Christ, the crucified and glorified Christ.
Presvyteros and episkopos were not apostolos as such. You may have had
apostolically minded bishops and priestsI surely hope we dobut theyre not apostles
technically. For example, in I Peter, you have again the term presvyteros used:
I exhort the elders (presvyteroi) among you as a fellow elder (synpresvyteros) and a
martys (a witness) of the sufferings of Christ as well as a partaker of the glory that is to
be revealed. Tend the flock of God that is in your charge, not by constraint, but willingly;
not for shameful gain, but eagerly; not as domineering over those in your charge, but
being examples to the flock. And when the chief shepherd (and there youve got it: the
poimen, the good shepherd; thats the pastor), when the chief pastor is manifested, you
will obtain the unfading crown of glory.

Likewise, you who are younger, be subject to the presvyteroi, to the elders. Clothe
yourself, all of you, with humility toward one another, for God opposes the proud, but
gives grace to the humble. Humble yourselves, therefore, under the mighty hand of God.
And he continues. So you have this presbyter-bishop person in the Christian community
from the beginning as a successor to the apostolic founders of the communities who head
the local community. They function as the fathers, and even, in some sense, the husbands,
of those communities. They present Christ there. They guarantee the presence of Christ.
They exercise the authority and the power of Christ. And thats why theyre even called
episkopoi or oikonomoi, an oikonomos or an episkopos, because episkopos and
oikonomos were names of household slaves. They were the names of servants.
Its really interesting that the heads of Christian communities were given the title that
belonged to a servant at that time. And what did it mean? The episkopos was the chief
servant in a household. An oikonomos was the servant who took care of all the masters
properties, monies, goods, and powers. Now, the men who held those positions were not
the lord; they were not the master. The lord and master was Christ, but they did
everything in the masters name. They shone forth the master. They imaged the master.
They presented the master. They were there, holding the masters place, so to speak,
showing that he was there, but not absent. In some sense absent, of course, but spiritually
present: I am with you always, even to the end of the world, the Lord Jesus told his
disciples and apostles.
So the episkopos and the oikonomos, the bishop, the presvyteros, the elder of the
community, was an overseer, a manager, a superintendent, a father. St. Paul says, You
have many teachers but not many fathers. I have become your father. And these guys are
fathers because they beget people to God through baptism and through their preaching
and proclamation of the Gospel.
These are very particular men. Im stressing men because no women were included in this
at all. Whatever some modern scholars try to prove and stand on their head to prove, you
cant prove it. There were no women at all, and as well see through Church history,
when there were sectarian Christian groups that had women bishops and presbyters,
when they entered into the one [Church] that we believe was the true orthodox, catholic
one, those particular women had to stand among the widows and the virgins. They
couldnt stand among the presbyters. They were not presbyters, and they certainly were
not bishops.
In Timothy and Titus and in Peter, its very clear that theyre talking about a man. A man,
the husband of one wife. He could be a married man, he could have children, but he had
to manage his household well. Without going through this in great detail, and I advise

you to do it yourself: get Timothy, get Titus, read what it says about the bishop, and you
will see that there are very, very specific qualifications: not any man could hold this
position. As John Chrysostom would say, that position excludes most of the men in the
Church, because they dont have those qualifications, and all of the women, because they
dont have those qualifications. That would be the Orthodox Christian teaching, and that
would be the ancient Christian teaching.
It would certainly be the ancient Christian teaching in the orthodox catholic churches that
we affirm and understand as succeeding. They may not have been, in some sectarian
Christian groups like Marcionites or Montanists or Gnostics of various sorts, but in the
orthodox catholic Church, that was definitely the case. And thats why some modern
feminist scholars say the orthodox catholic Church, the ancient Christian Church that we
identify with, was male-chauvanist, and it wanted to be dominated by men, and it killed
the real spiritual, mystical Christianity that you found in Montanism and Gnosticism.
Well, we dont believe in that. We think that thats just simply totally wrong.
And by the way, those same authors not only had women bishops and mystical leaders
who were women, but they also basically rejected the Old Testament and they also
basically rejected the Cross of Christ. One thing that really distinguishes Gnostic and
heretical early Christian spiritualizing groups from the Church, the Church that we
identify with and we are right now in the 21st century, is that their God was not the God
of the Old Testament; they did not honor the Old Testament Scriptures; they did not
believe in the real Incarnation of Jesus; they did not believe in his real Resurrection; they
did not believe in the real crucifixion; they did not, because they said all this had to do
with the male body, they spiritualized the whole thing.
They did not believe in the real Presence in the holy Eucharist of the Body and Blood of
Christ, and they certainly did not believe in the episcopate, the male episcopate and the
apostolic succession. They did not even believe in the authority of the Apostles, because
they were all men. If you want to read about this, read Elaine Pagels book, The Gnostic
Gospels. She lays it all out there in four-part harmony. Orthodox catholic Christianity is a
male chauvanist plot, according to her. The real Christianity were the Gnostics and the
spiritualists. Well, people have to decide what is right and what is wrong, what is true and
what is false.
Our Church simply says Gnosticism and Montanism was wrong, and the churches of the
Apostles and then such men as Ignatius of Antioch and Polycarp of Smyrna and Irenaeus
of Lyons and Cyprian of Carthage and then, later on, John Chrysostom and Basil the
Great and Gregory the Theologian and Gregory of Nyssa and all the holy Fathers,
Ambrose, Augustinethis is the true Church; this is the real Church. The other ones are
heretical and simply contrary to Gods Gospel in Jesus.

What we want to say right now is that in the New Testament, you already have emerging
what we call the three-fold ministry that belongs to the very structure of the Church. You
have bishops, you have presbyters, and you have deacons. You may even have had a kind
of a two-fold in the beginning: the presbyter-bishop and then the deacons. And the
deacons were both men and women, most likely, because the Church had women deacons
all through history. John Chrysostom in the fourth century he had, like, hundreds of them
in Constantinople. They were the women who assisted the bishops with the baptisms with
the women and put the chrism on the body and dunked the women in the water and so on.
There were women deacons, and we know: Phoebe, Tatiana, Nonna, those were all
deacons. Theyre called deacons.
And by the way, theyre called deacons in Greek; theyre not called deaconesses.
Theyre called deacon, but with a feminine article: ho diakonos is a man, and h
diakonos (the same masculine word) is for the woman. Thats how its in the New
Testament, and thats why in Timothy when it says, And the women also, John
Chrysostom interprets that as the women deacons, not women generally, but the women
who were technically in the diakonia ministry, who were ordained for that purpose.
And we know that by the third century, we have the service for the ordination of the
women deacon, which was absolutely identical for the service for the ordination of the
man deacon, except that the prayer for women mentioned Phoebe as the prototypical
deacon (woman deacon), whereas the prayer for the man mentioned Stephen as the
prototypical deacon for men.
But staying in the New Testament now, we have bishops and presbyters and deacons. And
they are not considered in the New Testament to be charismatic ministries. Theyre not
like charismatic prophets or speakers-in-tongues or healers or administrators or the
people that you find listed in some of the epistles of St. Paul as the holders of the
charismatic gifts. I can quickly find some of these lists of the charismatic members of the
Church, and these charisms, they come and they go, and theyre given by God, and they
disappear, whereas the episcopate, the presbyterate, and the diaconate become structures
of the very Church itself. They belong to the Churchs very being.
For example, in the Corinthian letter, the charisms would be: apostles, prophets, teachers,
workers of miracles, healers, helpers, administrators, speakers in various kinds of
tongues. Are all apostles, are all prophets, are all teachers, do all work miracles, do all
possess the gift of healing, do all speak in tongues, do all interpret? Well, the answer,
obviously, is no. And then the Apostle Paul says, but the gift that unites them all is love.
And then you have I Corinthians 14.

You have a very similar list in the Letter to the Ephesians, which is considered to be a
kind of deutero-canonical book, in other words, a Pauline book, but perhaps not written
by the hand of Paul himself, but when he speaks about supplying the edification of the
Church and supplying what is needed, he also, in the Ephesian letter, gives a list of what
these kind of gifts can be. Im here trying to find it as I speak with you, and I will find it
just in a minute. He gave gifts to menhere it is
and his gifts (charisma) were that some should be apostles, some prophets, some
evangelists, some pastors and teachers. For the equipment of the saints, for the work of
the ministry, for building up the Body of Christ, until we all attain to the unity of the faith
and the knowledge of the Son of God, to mature manhood
And he continues on.
Some scholars would say, Well, you see, there were different kinds of structures in the
early Church. There was a looser structure like you find in Corinthians, and then there
was a tighter structure like you find in Timothy. Sometimes they even like to show that
these were contentious parties in the Church, and they were fighting for their own way
and all that kind of stuff, because almost all modern scholarship in the New Testament,
they see everything in terms of controversy and quarrel and fight and fight-for-power. I
think thats sick, frankly; I think thats just plain sick.
I think our interpretation would be that, yeah, you had loose things in the beginning. You
had Gentile communities like the Corinthians. But then when it became clear that the
Lord was not coming back chronologically very soon and the Church was going to have
settle down for a long, or at least a longer history in time and space and had been
separated from Judaism by being expelled from the synagogues and becoming Christians
as a separate Jewish sect, then they had to develop their own structure, their own order,
their own way of existing, and thats when you get the bishops and the presbyters and the
deacons, and then they become universally part of all the churches by the end of the first
century or the beginning of the second.
Its not for nothing that one of the first post-Apostolic writings that exist is a letter of the
bishop of Rome to the Corinthian community, telling the presbyters they are to straighten
themselves up and to get in order. In fact, someone once said that the Corinthian
community was so wild that it made it into the New Testament the same way that Pontius
Pilate made it into the Nicene Creed: for all the troubles they had. They had to be put in
order. The Apostle Paul himself had to write to them and say, I want everything to be
done decently and in order. I want the women charismatics to be quiet in church. I dont
want many prophesying. I dont want this tongue-speaking all over the place. He already
had to tell them that, already in the first century, already in the middle of the first century.

So there had to be some kind of order brought to the Church, and one of the most
amazing things, in my mind, is that by the time you get to the end of the first century and
the beginning of the second, you have basically the same order in virtually all of the
churches throughout the entire Roman Empire. From Rome to Corinth to Jerusalem to
wherever, you basically have a church which is headed by a bishop. And in Jerusalem, by
the way, it was James, the brother of the Lord, according to Tradition, even according to
the Book of Acts. Hes the one who presided at the council in Jerusalem, because he was
the bishop. And hes always called the first bishop of Jerusalem.
So you had bishops from the beginning. You had deacons and presbyters and deacons and
ministers from the beginning, belonging to [the] very structure of the Church. And here I
would insist on this: different from charismatic people. The Church always has
charismatic people. The modern starchestvo, the eldership in Russia, was a charismatic
institution, and they did lots of thingsthey preached, they [taught], they healed, they
heard confessions, they gave advicebut they were not ordained clergy in the same
sense as a bishop, a priest, and a deacon.
Very often, they were in a little bit of contention with each other sometimes, because the
bishops could get overly domineering, and the charismatics could get overly charismatic.
But you have that already in the Old Testament: the prophets versus the kings, and all that
kind of stuff, the priests But it never was big animosity that meant that there were just
different parties with different understandings of the faith itself. That is simply not true.
And, just like in the Old Testament Ezekiel is a priest and a prophet, so in the New
Testament, bishops like Cyprian or John Chrysostom are also prophets while at the same
time being bishops.
You had it there from the beginning. Its in the New Testament. By the time you get to the
end of the first century, as I just said, you find pretty much the same structure in all the
churches. You have one of the presbyters becoming the leader of the community, and
thats the one who will ultimately be called the bishop. Then you have council of elders,
older men, who exist as a council around the bishop. And then you have the deacons, and
then you have other orders: you have the widows, you have the virgins, you have the
women deacons.
And you can see this in the letters of St. Ignatius of Antioch, written before 112. You see
this in the apostolic constitutions. You see this in the Didach. You see this in the writings
of Hippolytus. You see this in the writings of Justin the Philosopher and Martyr. You find
this witnessed to already in the 200s. You find it already in the 100s. You find it already
in the second century. So if youre interested in this, I would recommend that you read
the seven letters of St. Ignatius of Antioch. He was the bishop of Antioch who died as a
martyr in Rome. He wrote seven very, very important letters about the earliest Church,

and in these letters, he uses bishop, presbyter, and deacon. He shows their
interrelationship. He says that each community only has one bishop, or, as we might say
nowadays, one protopresbyter, one leading presbyter who then comes to be called
bishop.
And then the term episkopos is only applied to that one, and then the other ones around
him, who co-serve with him, and even celebrate Eucharists with his blessing, are called
presbyters. In modern times, wed call them priests. Then you had the deacons who
helped, who were his hands, who carried the Holy Eucharist, who read the Gospel, and so
on. But the bishop did the preaching, and then he would delegate to presbyters to do
preaching. Then the presbyters would even perhaps preside at celebrations of Eucharist of
the Lords Supper in the physical absence of the bishop.
And thats how the whole thing seems to have developed, according to Orthodoxy. This is
what you seem to have, very clearly shown, in the New Testament. One things for sure:
it is what the Orthodox Church sees. Not what they seem to see, but what they actually do
see. Our Church Tradition, this is the way we understand it.
So you have the witness of Ignatius, and then you have the witnesses of others. I
mentioned Hippolytus; I mentioned Justin the Martyr, but two others that really need to
be mentioned are Cyprian of Carthage and Irenaeus of Lyons, both of whom lived in the
200s, in the third century, and even overlapped the centuries, because they give us very,
very interesting data and understanding about these bishops and about what they were
doing and about how the Church life was organized and how it was interrelated in space
and how it was kept intact in time, because human beings live in space and time.
The Christian Church is priest over all the world, so you have churches in different
places. How did the churches in the different places relate to each other? Then, of course,
from the earliest time, you had problems about that. From the earliest time, for example,
the Church of Rome, because of Peter and Paul and because it was the imperial see, tried
to have certain prerogatives over other churches, like over the church of North Africa and
Carthage. Ill mention that in a future reflection. You have the seeds of what you can call
the modern papacy already in the third century. This didnt come from nowhere.
But then you also had contestations between bishops: whose territories is whose? So you
had this whole problem of when the Church gets spread out through space, and different
towns and different cities have Christian communities, how were they structured
interiorly, and then how do they relate to each other? How do churches in particular
regions relate to each other?

Then you have the other problem: how do they relate when the bishop dies and they have
to keep on going? Not only how do they relate in space, but how do they relate in time?
How is the integrity, the identity, the unity, the solidarity, the sameness of the Church
with the same Gospel, the same faith, the same worship, the same sacraments, how does
that persist in time? What happens as generations die and new generations come up? How
does that all work itself out? So we have to reflect on that, and we will do that in our next
reflection.
But what we want to see for today, from the beginning, is, to use Bishop Kallistos
formula that we mentioned last time: You have one, you have all, and you have some.
One only is the Lord Jesus Christ. He is the teacher, the prophet, the priest, the pastor, the
king, the governor, the master, the overlordits all his.
Then you have everyone whos baptized into Christ and sealed with the Spirit,
participating in Christ. They are in Christ. They have the gifts of Christ. They become by
Gods grace what Christ himself is by nature. Thats not magical; its not mechanical, but
by grace and by faith, by prayer, by fasting, by worship, human beings can become
Christians, in other words. We can become, as St. Gregory the Theologian will say in the
300s, little christs, or christs, we would say in modern English, with little-c. Theres
the Christ with the capital C, who was Christ by nature, and then there are christs with a
little /c/ who are the Church. And this is all the men and all the women, even all the
children, all the retarded people, all the sick peopleeverybody. Its just everybody in
the Church participates in that and actualizes it in his or her own way.
And then, within that community, you have some who have particular gifts and charisms:
healers, administrators, speakers-in-tongues, evangelists, and so on. But then you also
have some who are bishops, presbyters, and deacons. The bishops and the presbyters are
only men with the qualifications that you find in Timothy and Titus and the letter of Peter.
The deacons are both men and women, and they also have the qualifications that you
have in the letter of Timothy. Thats how we would understand it.
Then these churches live in harmony. Ignatius would say theyre like a harp with many
strings that play the one song, the new song, together. Thats how it is. Well talk about
Ignatius a little more later.
So then you have the some: some are bishops, some are presbyters, some are deacons,
both men deacon and women deacon, deacons and deaconesses, wed say in English. You
have that reality and that belongs to the very structure of the Church. That belongs to the
very structure of the Church. And we Orthodox see it as being there from the very
beginning. It had to work itself out in the first century, but we believe it got worked out
by the end of the first century, just like the New Testament canon got worked out by the

end of the first century, just like the question about what to do about the Gentiles got
worked out by the end of the first century, just like the relationship of the keeping of the
works of the Law and circumcision got worked out by the end of the first century.
It took time for this to work itself out; there was controversy. I always point out that Peter
fought with Paul and Paul fought with Peter and Paul fought with James, and they had to
have the council in Jerusalem and so on. It took time to work all this out, and it took time
for the local Christian communities, once they were separated from the synagogue, to get
their interior order, to get the order by which they would live in history, how they would
be organized, how they would be governed, how they would worship. All this had to be
developed,even baptism.
By the end of the first century, you have all of the orthodox catholic churches of the
baptisms being done in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit following
Matthew. It was not done in the name of Jesus like some early Christians were doing.
That became not the accepted method, although nowadays there are churches that baptize
just in the name of Jesus and not in the name of the Trinity. But the churches that we
identified with, the ones with the bishops and the priests and the deacons, also baptized in
the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and you had to be a baptized person and
sealed with the Spirit to participate in the Holy Eucharist, in the Lords Supper, in the
Paschal Meal, to eat and drink in the kingdom of God.
The order of the Eucharist was developed at this time, too. So by the time you get to the
end of the first century and the beginning of the second, you also have a pretty much
universal order of the Eucharist in all the churches that we have records for. It begins
with the psalmody and the proclamation of the word of God. Some local particular
Christian hymns like the doxology and the trisagion, and then you have the offering of
the Bread and Wine, and then the bishop pronounces the prayers of consecration.
And these cannot be done by prophets. It cannot be done by wandering people. Its got to
be done by men in apostolic succession. Thats what we find in all the churches by the
beginning of the second century and to the third century. Thats how it worked itself out
as far as we can tell, and we can tell not only by the data that we have, by the records that
we have, but because our churches organically move through that particular process
themselves and it became part of the interior life of the Church.
We read those documents of the second century, and we say, Yeah! Thats just how it
is! Thats just how it is, still to this day. By the time you get to the 300s, you have
descriptions of baptisms and Eucharists in various places like Jerusalem and Antioch and
northern Africa and in Rome and in Milan, by St. Ambrose, that are virtually identical.
Cyrils and John Chrysostoms and Cyril of Jerusalems and Cyprians descriptions of

whats going on, and Hippolytus, theyre almost identical. And this is very, very early in
Christian history. This is there from the beginning. Its not something developed in the
middle ages or something. Its there from the beginning, but it had a long, long history
through 2,000 years of Christianity down to the present time.
Thats what were going to try to reflect on more as we move through this. So next time,
we will move into the post-New Testamental period, and well talk specifically about
Ignatius and Irenaeus and Cyprian, or Ignatius, Cyprian, and Irenaeus, in that order, and
then well get into the fourth century, which then basically gives us the structure that we
pretty much have within Orthodoxy in one way or another, with great conflict and
controversy about how its to be interpreted, but basically you have that, and in the
canons of the ecumenical councils just down to the present day. But thats for the next
time.
But what we want to see today is that the bishop, the presbyter, the deacon, the structure
of the Christian Church that was very fluid in the first half-century or so after Christ was
worked out to the point where, by the end of the first century, beginning of the second
century, virtually that structure became universal in all of the churches of Christ, in all of
the communities that wereeach one itself, fullythe catholic orthodox Church of Jesus
Christ. Certainly the Church that we believe in, and that we believe that, even to this day,
we are.