I would love to experience the Church coming back together — in orthodox ways, of course. I think part of the way lies with agreeing on essentials and non-essentials, and treating the two areas accordingly. How do we figure out what those essentials and non-essentials are?

If you read Acts without preconceptions, you might get the idea that the Jewish church that was based in Jerusalem, the capital of the Jewish world, transformed into a Gentile church that is based in Rome, the capital of the Gentile world. That is the grand arc of the story in my opinion.

Rome, according to this way of thinking, is sort of a geographic and symbolic capital of Christendom/Christianity. (It’s like the White Tower of Gondor in Lord of the Rings.)

Basically, three major ideas underlay the greater “Catholic” way of thinking (held by Roman Catholics, also Orthodox and many Anglicans): God routinely works through people, the Church is supernatural, the Church is visible. These ideas set “Catholic” thought apart from a certain type of “Protestant” thought.

The visible church is a key doctrine for Catholic thought. The idea here is simply that the Church is an institution. Egalitarian postmodernist individualists (e.g. many Americans today) really don’t like this idea, hence the popularity of such books as The Shack. But it simply makes good sense to realize that any group of people can be called an institution when it is designed to endure. That does not mean that an institution has to be “institutionalist” in the sense that creativity and freedom are stifled, but it can’t help from being institutional because that’s part of its nature as a human organization. So, the Church of the Apostolic era had a visible, unifying element in it that functioned to provide cohesion and leadership to the Body of Christ. We call these men the Apostles and Prophets. There is a really good reason we don’t see the development of monarchical bishops and a clear historical account of apostolic succession from apostles to bishops–the apostles were always there to fill this function. After they died, the ability to authoritatively write Scripture died with them. (I also think that God has used plenty of Christian churches who don’t have bishops to do His will and reserved the right to operate in this way by not writing episcopal authority into Scripture.)

Christ is with His Church in the Presence of the Holy Spirit. It was the Spirit, so we believe, that guided the changes in the Church in the early years. The Church effectively evangelized the known world and successfully defended itself from challenges both from within and from outside. It did this first with apostles then, once they died, with bishops.

It is the Bishops who hold together the global/catholic/universal Church. They hold it together across space and time. They are the cohesive element in the visible Church. To get rid of Bishops, one must get rid of the idea of a visible Church. But why do that? It seems to me the burden of proof is on those who would deny the existence of the Church as a visible body of believers in the world rather than those who would affirm it. These people would claim that Scripture holds together denominations or local churches, but that is not very logical at all really, nor does Scripture claim this for itself. You have to make derivative conclusions from Scripture in order to believe this, and these conclusions are not necessary. The written word of God does have authority and does hold us together in terms of Orthodox Christian beliefs. But people hold people together in any organization. And God holds His people together using His people. (We see the idea that God works through people here.)

God also works through His people to feed His people and does this in the same way He does all His acts of grace and service…through spiritual gifts given to His people. The spiritually-gifted people who supernaturally feed His supernatural people are called priests (we see the third idea, that of the supernatural Church). We see the feeding going on in Scripture, but we don’t get a treatise on how it works. But neither do we get a treatise on church government, church worship, or even the Holy Trinity in Scripture. These things are worked out over time as the Church finds the opportunity and need to work them out, and OF COURSE we use Scripture as the foundation of our thoughts and doctrines.

That’s Catholicism in a nutshell as far as I can tell at this point in my own journey of figuring out how to reconcile the unity and diversity of God’s people.

The problem today is that even if the Roman Bishop is the “princeps inter pares” in the college of bishops like Peter was in the college of apostles, there are divisions among orthodox (i.e. non-heretical) bishops. The East (Eastern Orthodox Churches) and the West (Roman Catholic Church) are not unified, but both obviously contain true bishops. The Church of England (and some northern European, Lutheran states) retained episcopal-apostolic succession, so the orthodox bishops within the Anglican Communion must also be counted among the faithful. Rome historically defined both the East and the English as schismatics and therefore lumped them in with heretics, which logically justified every decision made by the Council of Bishops still in communion with the Roman Bishop as THE correct decision. But that doesn’t seem to follow in my opinion. If a bishop has become a heretic by denying the gospel or the Scriptures or the Trinity or something along these lines, then I can see why it would be both just and prudent (and commanded by Scripture) to deny them fellowship and reject their opinions, thus making orthodox decisions without them. But I don’t think either the Eastern bishops or the Protestant Anglican bishops have fallen away from the faith. (Admittedly, these days, there are Anglican bishops that have fallen away, and probably some Catholic and Orthodox as well.) It is vastly different to be arguing with someone who is a true believer who might have some errors in their logic, their interpretation, or their doctrine than to be arguing with someone who is a false believer, a heretic, and one who has fallen away from truth.

So hopefully, as the enemy continues pounding away at Truth, just like He did in the early centuries of the Church, the visible Church will come back together under its visible leadership, the bishops, just like it did in the early centuries. If this happens, it will happen in Rome, with the Bishop of Rome as the President and Chairman, but also with the acknowledgment that all true bishops are equal in the same sense that the apostles were equal. And hopefully there will be a place for organized groups of spiritually gifted Christians to exercise their gifts in freedom, though also under the benevolent oversight of the traditional overseers of the flock of God, for the sake of unity. I’m talking here about the denominations, the local churches, the seminaries, the para-church organizations, the networks, the associations, the mission agencies. One major change would of necessity have to be that those who would wish to supernaturally feed God’s supernatural people with supernatural food (i.e. the Eucharist), would have to do so under the explicit authority and commissioning of the bishops, just like the NT elders appointed by the apostles and their “fellow-workers” like Timothy also spiritually fed God’s people. Like in the NT, though, I don’t see why priestly elders would have to be celibate. Although along with Paul, I wish many more people would devote themselves to this high calling of personal and lifetime sacrifice for the sake of God’s kingdom–celibacy and consecrated virginity. The world then needed more of them, which is why Paul said what he did (1 Cor. 7:25-35). We are in just as dire straits today and my prayer is that God raises up more celibates like Paul to fill the deep and vast spiritual needs of a hungry world and Church.