I thought I'd share some highly-interesting quotations I came across in recent studies of mine regarding Ignatius of Antioch and his view of church government. As I've argued in previous videos, Ignatius's distinction between bishops and presbyters is not the same distinction of the offices that we see in the modern church today. As a result of this distinction, Ignatius's view is easily harmonized with the Presbyterian model that is found throughout the New Testament and the rest of the apostolic fathers.
Despite what popular-level apologetics on YouTube may otherwise like us to think (especially coming from the Roman Catholic perspective), the scholarship on issues such as this is highly complex and multi-layered (and far from unanimously supporting the modern Roman Catholic view). As Dr. Stewart demonstrates in this particular example, it is faulty to assume that Ignatius advocated for a monoepiscopal church government simply because he uses the word "bishop" without considering the grander context of his writings explaining why he uses this term in the first place (a classic example of the word-concept fallacy). Ignatius is much more of a Presbyterian than you might like to believe!
"On balance, I have preferred to see Ignatius as simply the episkopos of a single Christian community, simply because the descriptions that Ignatius gives of worship within the Asian congregations seem to reflect the worship of a single Christian household, and because his insistence on a single meeting would seem to reflect a mindset formed in a single congregation rather than a group of congregations meeting separately by necessity...a frank confession of uncertainty surely is preferable to the past confident assertions of Igantius's monepiscopate based solely on mistaken assumptions regarding the nature of aboriginal systems of Christian leadership. Ignatius provides no evidence for the formation of monepiscopacy in Antioch..."
Source: "The Original Bishops: Office and Order in the First Christian Communities" by Alistair C. Stewart (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2014)
Biblical Understanding
I thought I'd share some highly-interesting quotations I came across in recent studies of mine regarding Ignatius of Antioch and his view of church government. As I've argued in previous videos, Ignatius's distinction between bishops and presbyters is not the same distinction of the offices that we see in the modern church today. As a result of this distinction, Ignatius's view is easily harmonized with the Presbyterian model that is found throughout the New Testament and the rest of the apostolic fathers.
Despite what popular-level apologetics on YouTube may otherwise like us to think (especially coming from the Roman Catholic perspective), the scholarship on issues such as this is highly complex and multi-layered (and far from unanimously supporting the modern Roman Catholic view). As Dr. Stewart demonstrates in this particular example, it is faulty to assume that Ignatius advocated for a monoepiscopal church government simply because he uses the word "bishop" without considering the grander context of his writings explaining why he uses this term in the first place (a classic example of the word-concept fallacy). Ignatius is much more of a Presbyterian than you might like to believe!
"On balance, I have preferred to see Ignatius as simply the episkopos of a single Christian community, simply because the descriptions that Ignatius gives of worship within the Asian congregations seem to reflect the worship of a single Christian household, and because his insistence on a single meeting would seem to reflect a mindset formed in a single congregation rather than a group of congregations meeting separately by necessity...a frank confession of uncertainty surely is preferable to the past confident assertions of Igantius's monepiscopate based solely on mistaken assumptions regarding the nature of aboriginal systems of Christian leadership. Ignatius provides no evidence for the formation of monepiscopacy in Antioch..."
Source: "The Original Bishops: Office and Order in the First Christian Communities" by Alistair C. Stewart (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2014)
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