We have an invisible wall of distinction between ordained ministers and the other offices. The Anglicans shape their clerical office by separating the clerical and lay offices through the use of the terms “ordained” and “commissioned,” and we do not. We ordain every officer, lay or not, and this should not confuse us as to our intention. Our lay elders are not ministers; we do not allow them to do the things that Ministers do, even with wide and substantial overlap in service and cooperation. Our offices have an similarity of purpose but not identity of scope which is why the offices cannot integrated.

Dr. Ross is a personal hero of mine; to be corrected by him is a great honor. He rose to present a very common interpretation of the offices within the Anglican communion that makes the serious and necessary distinction between “ordained” and “non-ordained” positions within the government of the church — especially with regard to women in service. Dr. Ross helpfully highlights the distinction between ordained and non-ordained roles. I believe the analogy I am drawing still holds when we focus on the actual functions of governance and oversight rather than the terminology of ordination.

Here, we do need to keep in mind that the phrase to which he took offense was ‘She holds the office of Senior Warden, an office analogous to the office of Ruling Elder in the Associate Reformed Presbyterian Church.’ The concept of analogy is one well known in our Reformed theology. Analogies occur when some things are the same and some things are different. Obviously, there is not a one-to-one identity in the use of offices within Presbyterian and Anglican ecclesiology.

So the question is not to quibble about words but to see what they mean. Do the Anglicans intend that the Senior Warden of the church be analogous to what we would think of as a Deaconess within the church? Or what we would think of as an Elder?

This can be stated more clearly: Does the role have authority over the congregation’s governance even if not the the authority to preach and administrate the sacraments?

“Lay Ministry” and “Ministers”

Part of the confusion arises because many Presbyterians today are more familiar with 19th-century American Presbyterian polity than with the classical Presbyterian understanding of the offices.

This distinction matters when we compare our practice with that of competing traditions. We can see this in the fact that so many transferring in as Teaching Elders from other denominations go through a retraining and a substantial shift in perspective. They arrive as Teaching Elders to take a call – and are informed that according to our standards Teaching Elders do not exist.

We could say that our Ministers and their Teaching Elders are substantially overlapping but they are not identical. They are not identical in definition, authority, ordination or the scriptural evidences we use to define them. Such as Isaiah 66:21 “And I will also take of them for priests and for Levites, saith the Lord.”

Father and Brothers, I am acutely aware that our interpretation of the offices is in the deep minority and against the tide of contemporary theology. We are very nearly the only communion that holds our view, the old view of the Westminster Standards. That it is old and worn does not show it to be in error. Our view, the historic view of ancient Presbyterianism and the ARPC, holds up very well when weighed exegetically and historically.

Section 2.9 of the Form of Government States:

“God in His word has instituted three permanent offices for the government, discipline, and guidance of the Church. These offices are the minister, the elder, and the deacon.”

The Old Form of Presbyterian Church Government serves as the basis of our contemporary presentation of the same doctrine (rev. 2024).

“A presbytery consisteth of ministers of the word, and such other publick officers as are agreeable to and warranted by the word of God to be church-governors, to join with the ministers in the government of the church.”

“As there were in the Jewish church elders of the people joined with the priests and Levites in the government of the church; so Christ, who hath instituted government, and governors ecclesiastical in the church, hath furnished some in his church, beside the ministers of the word, with gifts for government, and with commission to execute the same when called thereunto, who are to join with the minister in the government of the church. Which officers reformed churches commonly call Elders.”

Wars were fought and thousands of our ecclesial ancestors died over the relatively simple matter of no Bishops. I think once a good presbyterian lady threw a chair at a Bishop and started a riot. But the issues involving the offices were very clear, if not always explained in the same way. Luther was a little mushy in defining the offices. Calvin was very clear with his affirmation of four. The OPC has four or five depending on how you divide them. The PCA has two if we take the office of Elder as one office that has two forms or emphases. The Historic Presbyterians always held three: Ministers, Elders and Deacons (Doctors, Evangelists or Missionaries always being Ministers set to a special purpose).

“Ordained” and “Commissioned”

Recently, a discussion with some experienced pastors and elders became embroiled in a controversy over “bishops” and pastors in their offices, some arguing the complete absence of such in the Bible. In a Baptist church or a theologically liberal church of the 1800s we might have expected to hear this but in conservative, confessional, Reformed and Presbyterian churches it is a little confusing.

The Apostle Paul said, “This is a true saying, If a man desire the office of a bishop, he desireth a good work. A bishop then must be blameless, the husband of one wife, vigilant, sober, of good behaviour, given to hospitality, apt to teach” (1 Timothy 3:1–2, KJV)

And the Geneva Bible, translated before it with the influence of Calvin and Knox:

1 This is a true saying, If any man desire the office of a Bishop, he desireth a worthy work. 2 A Bishop therefore must be unreproveable, the husband of one wife, watching, temperate, modest, harborous, apt to teach, 3 Not given to wine, no striker, not given to filthy lucre, but gentle, no fighter, not covetous. 4 One that can rule his own house honestly, having children under obedience with all honesty. 5 For if any cannot rule his own house, how shall he care for the Church of God?

The Famous Accompanying Notes Reference the Text Above (Possibly by Knox), Saying:

Having dispatched the treatise, as well of doctrine and of the manner of handling of it, as also of public prayer, he now in the third place cometh to the persons themselves, speaking first of Pastors and afterward of Deacons, and he useth a preface, that the Church may know that these be certain and sure rulers. A Bishopric or the ministry of the word is not an idle dignity, but a work and that an excellent work: and therefore a Bishop must be furnished with many virtues both at home and abroad. Wherefore it be requisite before he be chosen, to examine well his learning, his gifts, and ableness, and his life.

Here, this is to remind us that the most common interpretation of the “Elders” passage in Tim. 3 is that it refers directly to the ordained Ministers and not to Elders other than inferentially or by practical application. All Pastors are Elders but not all Elders are Pastors.

And of course these translations of the Bible (KJV and Geneva from Beza’s Greek) that were used in accord with the writing and approval of our beloved Westminster Standards. And the Standards themselves teach, “The Scripture doth hold out the name and title of Bishop, as well as Elder, to belong to those that have the oversight of the Church, as Acts 20.28. Phil. 1.1. 1 Tim. 3.1,2. Tit. 1.7” (Form of Presbyterial Church-Government, 1645).

This can be surprising to the contemporary Reformed and Presbyterians that love the Westminster theology. Interpretations that generalize the ministry or eliminate the historic titles for the three offices were popularized by the Restoration Movement, Plymouth Brethren or Baptist theologies. But Samuel Miller’s influential book “The Warrant, Nature, and Duties of the Office of the Ruling Elder in the Presbyterian Church” (first 1821/1831) created the modern version of Ruling and Teaching Elders that dominates contemporary Presbyterianism today. Before that presbyterians were well known for have one primary interpretation.

By the 1860s the arguments became prominent in American Presbyterianism with very little evidence for positions that implied that our historic Presbyterianism went wrong on this. The use of the term Bishop was criticized following this line of reasoning.

Here we need to pause to explain the term “bishop” and its derivation. There are different ways to translate a word, and different intentions in translation itself. In the American translation debates regarding the Bible, the NIV and then the ESV largely replaced the King James Version, which had itself eclipsed the Geneva Bible.

These early versions were very intentional about preserving the original language with the original term, presupposing that the reader would need to learn some important terms from the original languages in order to properly read the Bible. As such, they used the practice we call “transliteration.” Transliterations are generally a part of any good translation, but not every term translated contains or intends a transliteration.

The Word in the Original Greek Text of the Bible Is: Episkopos.

As usually happens with terms through time when used continually in another language, there is a certain amount of verbal drift. We could see this as most of the reason we do not use the KJV or the Geneva Bible today. Language has changed and continues to change, blend, and move in ways that are very hard to predict. We can only respond to them as they do.

So episkopos, a compound word from the Greek prepositional prefix epi, meaning “before” or “above,” with skopos, from which we receive the modern English word “scope,” meaning “to see clearly.” As episkopos was used through the generations in the English language it became “BisCoeps” in Old English, then “Biscop,” and by the 1400s “Bishop” had gained its place as the directly derived way English-speaking peoples said the word episkopos.

As such, Bishop is not a term foreign to Scripture or alien to the theology of the Bible, but simply the way English-speaking people say the Greek term episkopos. So the King James Version and the Geneva Bible were correct because they are transliterating the biblical term as it is used in Acts 20:28, Philippians 1:1, 1 Timothy 3:2, and Titus 1:7.

Writing about this can unleash a flurry of arguments about the way the church has used the term through history to justify every manner of abuse of the offices and the people — and yes, the Reformers were well informed as to the use and abuse of the term Bishop by the church. Instead of discarding the term in the Bible, however, they discarded the heretical misinterpretation of the term and its office. They used evidence and rational argumentation to correct the thinking of the people with regard to the three offices — bishop, presbyter, and diaconos — rather than discard the biblical terms.

The Anglican and Episcopal Churches Still Use the Word in the Way Alien to the Use in the Bible Which Is Describing What We Call Pastors or Ministers

Here is the difficulty with translations that abandon the biblical word in favor of what one might think is an idea-for-idea translation: you choose a word that will have continuity and discontinuity. But in the Bible, the writer already chose a term with continuity and discontinuity under the direction of the Holy Spirit. It is very hard to maintain that continuity in the face of ever-increasing discontinuity.

A great example is the term poimēn (ποιμήν), which we translate as or “shepherd.” Jesus uses it about himself and then it is used in the Bible with reference to those serving in the ministry. It is commonly translated “Pastor” once that word is borrowed from the Latin into English, having to do with the pastoral nature of being a shepherd. But in contemporary English “Pastor” is never used for shepherds.

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