There are some good comments below (making a better case than this one). Yet, as a former Evangelical—raised in Biblicist Baptist and Plymouth Brethren circles, but now Orthodox—I can sympathize with your approach. However, I still think your Sola Scriptura assumptions create a blind spot. Even acknowledging your point about the New Testament witness to a plurality of elders, you probably shouldn't gloss over the very early emergence of bishops, possibly during or shortly after the apostolic era. A more reasonable reading would be to see this development not as corruption, but as the Church maturing under the same Spirit who guided the apostles.
Your argument also assumes the Sola Scriptura premise that the apostolic Church was a fixed structure that could not develop without corruption. Yet St. Paul calls the Church itself “the pillar and foundation of the truth” (1 Tim. 3:15). If the Church is the pillar and foundation of truth, when exactly did it cease to be that? Since the Church was entrusted with recognizing and preserving the canon of Scripture, why conclude that it corrupted its own governance? It seems far more consistent to understand that truth has been preserved within a living, Spirit-guided community—not by the text of Scripture alone.
Are there any autonomous congregation overseen by a plurality of coequal elders (bishops/overseers) that have been extant since ancient times?
What I mean: there are dozens of ancient churches which are neither Catholic nor Eastern Orthodox. For example, the Assyrian Church of the East.
Are there any ancient churches that have this plurality of coequal elders like you speak of? If not, why did none survive to the present day, if that is the divinely instituted form of Governance?
You are historically correct: if we look for an unbroken, continuous 2,000-year institutional lineage of autonomous, elder-led congregations, we will not find one. Every major institutional church that traces its roots continuously to antiquity (Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, Oriental Orthodox, or the Assyrian Church of the East) eventually adopted the monarchical episcopate.
As noted by early church fathers like Jerome, the shift from a plurality of coequal elders to a singular ruling bishop was a gradual, human development born out of a desire to prevent "plants of dissension." In the 2nd and 3rd centuries, the church faced immense pressure from persecution and fracturing due to severe heresies. The pragmatic response they chose was to centralize power in the hands of a single strong leader to enforce unity.
Once this shift happened, it became the dominant survival mechanism. Decentralized, autonomous congregations were either absorbed into this growing episcopal network or fractured by the very heresies the bishops sought to centralize to fight. In an era before the printing press or a widely distributed New Testament canon, the centralized, hierarchical model was simply the fittest for institutional survival. But "institutional survival of the fittest" is a sociological reality, not a metric for divine truth.
The assumption is that if God institutes a structure, it will never be abandoned or lost by His people. But biblical history proves the exact opposite.
Consider ancient Israel. God explicitly instituted a decentralized, tribal confederacy guided by judges. That was the divine blueprint. Yet, in 1 Samuel 8, the people demanded a king so they could be "like all the nations" and have a centralized monarch to fight their battles. God told Samuel, "they have not rejected you, but they have rejected Me" (1 Samuel 8:7).
Israel abandoned the divinely instituted structure for a pragmatic, centralized, worldly structure. If we applied your metric to ancient Israel, we would have to conclude that because the decentralized judge model didn't survive, the monarchy must have been God’s original, perfect design. We know from Scripture that isn't true. Humans routinely abandon God's design for their own pragmatic alternatives.
The hierarchical paradigm views the church as an ancient oak tree; you must be biologically attached to the trunk (through an unbroken apostolic succession of bishops) to be part of it. If you trace the branches of the Assyrian Church of the East, the Oriental Orthodox, and the Eastern Orthodox back, they all connect to that 2nd/3rd-century trunk.
But the New Testament paradigm is not an unbroken tree; it is an agricultural seed. Jesus said, "The seed is the word of God" (Luke 8:11). The survival of Christ's church does not depend on an unbroken, institutional chain of human farmers passing down the exact same plot of land for two millennia. The church has always existed wherever the pure seed of the Word has been planted and obeyed, even if completely overshadowed by highly visible, centralized hierarchies.
We see this exact principle in the Old Testament with King Josiah. For generations, the Book of the Law had been lost, and the Israelites simply defaulted to the idolatrous traditions of whatever kings and priests were in power. Yet, when Josiah recovered the written text in the temple (2 Kings 22:8), he did not need an unbroken, multi-generational chain of faithful priests to authenticate his reforms. The recovered written word itself provided all the authority needed to reinstitute the divine pattern.
The Apostolic Deposit is the written Word of God. The fact that the dominant historical institutions abandoned the decentralized governance of local elders in favor of a centralized hierarchy does not change the seed. When believers in any era take the New Testament and implement its explicit commands (establishing autonomous congregations overseen by a plurality of coequal elders), they are not inventing a "new" church. They are simply replanting the original seed, which bypasses the need for a 2,000-year institutional pedigree.
Promises were made in scripture concerning the church that were never made about Israel. The church would be “led into all truth,” the church is “the pillar and ground of the truth,” and “the gates of hades shall not overcome” the church. None of these were said about ancient Israel. The issue I have with this whole line of argumentation is that you are not in any way able to say you are part of that body that existed in communion with each other for the first millennium, which continues to this day in holy Orthodoxy. St Basil nor St Ireneaus, nor St Athanasius would recognize your theology, practice, nor ecclesiology. Should you approach the chalice, they would ask who is your bishop, and then turn you away. The problem for you is that the church is a unified family, an organic body. And the body you are part of is not unified with the body that has existed from the beginning.
I appreciate the pushback, as it brings us to the question of how we interpret biblical promises and define the "church."
It seems your critique rests on three main pillars: (1) misapplying specific biblical promises to a macro-institution, (2) romanticizing the first millennium as a perfectly unified body, and (3) elevating the 3rd and 4th-century Fathers over the 1st-century Apostles as the ultimate litmus test for fellowship. Let’s look at each.
You rightly point out that Christ made profound promises to the church. But we must read those promises in context, not as a blank check for institutional infallibility.
John 16:13 - Jesus is not speaking to a future ecumenical council of bishops here; He is speaking specifically to the Apostles in the upper room. He promises them the Holy Spirit to guide them into all truth so they can authoritatively establish the New Testament deposit. Applying this text to post-apostolic church councils to justify later historical developments is a severe exegetical leap.
1 Tim 3:15 - Read the context. Paul is writing to Timothy to instruct him on how people ought to conduct themselves in the local congregation (discussing the qualifications for plural elders/bishops and deacons in the preceding verses). Paul is saying the local, functioning assembly that us upholding the Apostle's doctrine is the pillar of truth in its community, not a universal, macro-episcopal hierarchy.
Matt 16:18 - Hades is the realm of the dead. Christ's promise is that death will not conquer His church—starting with His own resurrection—and that His kingdom will endure. It is not a promise that the visible, institutional leadership will never deviate structurally. God always preserves His people, even when the highly visible institution goes astray. He preserved 7,000 who hadn't bowed to Baal when the visible leadership of Israel was entirely apostate. I'm not saying that the church was worshiping Baal or totally apostate for the last 2,000 years, just that it deviated in at least this one way. God can and has certainly still been able to work with that.
You stated that the church existed in a unified communion for the first millennium. Historically, this is simply untrue. The first millennium was incredibly fractured. The church was ripped apart by the Donatists, the Novatians, the massive Arian crisis (where the institutional majority actually became Arian for a time, exiling Athanasius himself!), the Nestorian schism, and the Non-Chalcedonian (Oriental Orthodox) split in 451 AD.
The idea of a neat, perfectly unified, organic visible institution for a thousand years is a historical revisionism used to validate the modern Orthodox claim of exclusivity.
You argue that 2nd-to-4th-century Fathers like Irenaeus, Athanasius, and Basil would turn me away from the chalice because I lack a monarchical bishop, proving I am not part of the "organic body... from the beginning."
There is a fatal historical flaw in this argument: the 3rd and 4th centuries are not "the beginning." If a 4th-century Father would turn me away from communion for being submitted to a plurality of coequal elders rather than a singular diocesan bishop, then to be consistent, he would also have to turn away the Apostle Paul. He would have to excommunicate the Apostle Peter, who called himself a "fellow elder" (1 Peter 5:1). He would have to turn away the entire 1st-century church of Ephesus, which was overseen by a council of presbyters (Acts 20:17, 28). He would have to excommunicate the early church in Carthage, which operated without a singular ruling bishop well into the 2nd century. As Jerome himself explicitly admitted, in the beginning, bishops and elders were the exact same office, and churches were governed by a "common council of presbyters."
All of those ancient, pre-monarchical Christians would be turned away from the chalice too! If your standard for sacramental communion excludes the 1st-century apostolic church, it is your standard that has deviated, not ours.
You claim the church is a "unified family, an organic body," and you are absolutely right. But we must define what actually unites that body across time. Hierarchical traditions argue that the connective tissue of the church is a tactile, unbroken institutional chain of bishops. But Scripture defines the connective tissue entirely differently. The Apostle John wrote, "that which we have seen and heard we declare to you, that you also may have fellowship with us" (1 John 1:3).
True apostolic succession (and therefore true, organic communion with the ancient church) is achieved through fidelity to Apostolic teaching, not an institutional pedigree. The true church is "built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Jesus Christ Himself being the chief cornerstone" (Eph 2:20). It is not built on the evolving, pragmatic administrative hierarchies of the post-apostolic era. I am not striving to be in communion with the 4th-century developments. My loyalty is to the foundational, 1st-century teachings of Peter, Paul, and Christ.
When a local church submits to the New Testament pattern (governed by a plurality of coequal elders and holding fast to the faith once delivered), it possesses the exact same spiritual DNA as the 1st-century church and is therefore in unbroken, organic unity with the true body that has existed from the very beginning.
Thank you for your reply. I’m not a scholar, but three responses to your three objections.
1) the way you understand the church is different than the way 1700 years of Christians understood it, at least. When the church met in council, they understood they were embodying Christ on earth, speaking the truth. They use the same construction as he council of Acts 15 to render their report: “it seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us.” Christians have always understood that truth is to be found in infallibly the church’s received and accepted doctrines and practices, and the witness of the saints and holy fathers. Find me a Christian between 325 and 1500 who says otherwise…and smarter men than will make the case for the first 300 years too. You position is modern, an innovative approach toward the church.
2) The church was indeed united through the early centuries. From the outside if you don’t assume a singular church, it appears messy and impossible to parse. But in reality, heresies arose, and these false members were expelled. They were identified for what they were, anti-Christ, and communion was not extended to them. And it was the unified body that did this, not individual parishes.
3) The unified, organic body of Christ is visible, like his body…because it is his body. The unity we enjoy is not simply the unbroken institutional passing of the charism of leadership from bishop to bishop, though that is an important part. It is also the teaching. This, Roman Catholics are not part of the body as they departed from the faith and have continued a path of aggressive innovation ever since. Again—you would be alone in your perspective on the faith—through archeology and study you think you’ve discovered how the church “really was” in the earliest days, and how that supports your modern ecclesiology. But the fact is you would find zero, none, nobody from at least the early 4th to the 16th who wouldn’t call you a heretic for your position. And I’m
Going to wager before that also. Sts Ireneaus and Ignatius crush your case, frankly. Ireneaus traces episcopal lineages, and Ignatius, (taught by the apostle John himself!) says that if you are not with the bishop, you are not in the church.
I don’t doubt that there was some degree of evolution and change from the earliest days of the church to the 4th century—every orthodox Christian knows this. But the point is, that same body to which the apostles and early saints belonged, they continued and became what we see in the 4th century. Your modern analysis calling their practices “unbiblical” is just silly. They are the ones who help us interpret the Bible, not the inverse.
You would be turned away from the chalice because the church, the visible church never failed, and you would not be connected to her in baptism, in faith, in practice, holding your own tradition above that of the saints.
Blessings to you, I pray your path draws you ever closer to Christ.
You made a crucial admission in your post: "I don't doubt that there was some degree of evolution and change from the earliest days of the church to the 4th century..."
That admission is the entire crux of the debate. Orthodoxy would condemn Roman Catholicism for "aggressive innovation" that departed from the faith, yet you give the post-apostolic church a free pass for "evolution and change" regarding the very foundational structure of church governance. You cannot have it both ways. If Rome's innovations are invalid, 4th-century structural innovations are equally invalid.
You challenged me to "find a Christian between 325 and 1500" who agrees with my ecclesiology. Notice the dates you chose! You are asking me to find agreement within a timeline after the monarchical bishop had already been established as the norm, contrary to the apostolic deposit. I don't need a Christian from 325 AD to validate my position; I have the Apostle Paul in 60 AD.
The undeniable historical and biblical fact is that Paul did not go around setting up diocesan, monarchical bishops as Orthodoxy and Catholicism conceive of them today. He established autonomous congregations governed by a plurality of coequal elders.
If the 4th-century church structurally looks fundamentally different from the 1st-century church that Paul established, it is the 4th-century church that has deviated. I am not striving to align with the 4th century; I am striving to align with the 1st.
You bring up Sts. Ignatius and Irenaeus as proof, but again, they are later than Paul. Anyway, let's look closely at them.
Ignatius (early 2nd century) writes frantically about obeying the singular bishop. Modern scholarship recognizes that Ignatius’s bishop was a local pastor of a single congregation, not a diocesan monarch over multiple parishes, as the Orthodox bishops of today are. Ignatius's frantic pleading for submission also proves it was a new, contested paradigm to fight off early Gnosticism, not a universally settled apostolic tradition. It wasn't the universal standard even during his time.
Irenaeus does trace episcopal lineages, but as I demonstrated, early churches like Rome were governed by fractionated presbyteries (councils of elders) well into the late 2nd century. Later historians took prominent men from those early plural presbyteries and projected them backward into neat, singular "episcopal lineages." It is exactly the kind of "evolution" you admitted took place.
Your final epistemological claim is the most telling: "Your modern analysis calling their practices 'unbiblical' is just silly. They are the ones who help us interpret the Bible, not the inverse."
This completely inverts the biblical order of authority. The church is built upon the foundation of the Apostles and Prophets (Ephesians 2:20), not the other way around. The text of the New Testament, being the written and uncontested contents of the apostolic faith, sits in judgment over the traditions of the church; the church does not sit in judgment over the Apostles. If the Apostle Paul explicitly writes that a local church should be overseen by a plurality of coequal elders, a later post-apostolic council cannot "interpret" that to mean "submit to one monarchical bishop ruling over a diocese." That is not an interpretation, it's a contradiction.
To say that the 4th-century church "became what we see" simply because they were the successors is to argue that institutional momentum equals divine truth. Ancient Israel "became" a centralized monarchy demanding an earthly king, but God explicitly said, "they have rejected Me" (1 Samuel 8:7). Institutional continuity does not guarantee structural fidelity. It's important to note that Israel didn't stop being Israel during the monarchy or after the monarchy failed. Likewise, the church didn't stop being the church just because it deviated. I never said the church failed. The point I'm making is simply that, over time, it erred in its structure, and that the original design instituted by the Apostles is superior to later traditions.
I do not elevate my own tradition above the saints. I simply elevate the explicitly written tradition of the Apostles above the later, evolved traditions of 4th-century men.
Blessings to you as well. I truly respect your zeal for the historic faith, even if we fundamentally disagree on where that history begins!
The problem is that zero Christians for more than 1200 years held your theology or ecclesiology. This makes no sense. The Spirit led none of these saints to know the truth in your telling of things. Glad someone finally figured it out in the 1500s. There is one body. It has existed since the beginning.
I would point out that the Acts 15 council seems to indicate that the elders of various congregations should meet periodically to develop a consensus rather than being independent, i.e. "that all of you agree with one another in what you say and that there be no divisions among you, but that you be perfectly united in mind and thought" (1 Cor. 1:10).
Similarly, the Acts 15 council seemed to reach a common view rather than a pluralistic majority. Notably, Judas Iscariot's replacement was appointed by lot rather than a vote.
Also notably, contemporary congregational formats (in the West) have a tendency to popularly opt for heterodox positions on sexuality and egalitarianism.
There are some good comments below (making a better case than this one). Yet, as a former Evangelical—raised in Biblicist Baptist and Plymouth Brethren circles, but now Orthodox—I can sympathize with your approach. However, I still think your Sola Scriptura assumptions create a blind spot. Even acknowledging your point about the New Testament witness to a plurality of elders, you probably shouldn't gloss over the very early emergence of bishops, possibly during or shortly after the apostolic era. A more reasonable reading would be to see this development not as corruption, but as the Church maturing under the same Spirit who guided the apostles.
Your argument also assumes the Sola Scriptura premise that the apostolic Church was a fixed structure that could not develop without corruption. Yet St. Paul calls the Church itself “the pillar and foundation of the truth” (1 Tim. 3:15). If the Church is the pillar and foundation of truth, when exactly did it cease to be that? Since the Church was entrusted with recognizing and preserving the canon of Scripture, why conclude that it corrupted its own governance? It seems far more consistent to understand that truth has been preserved within a living, Spirit-guided community—not by the text of Scripture alone.
Are there any autonomous congregation overseen by a plurality of coequal elders (bishops/overseers) that have been extant since ancient times?
What I mean: there are dozens of ancient churches which are neither Catholic nor Eastern Orthodox. For example, the Assyrian Church of the East.
Are there any ancient churches that have this plurality of coequal elders like you speak of? If not, why did none survive to the present day, if that is the divinely instituted form of Governance?
You are historically correct: if we look for an unbroken, continuous 2,000-year institutional lineage of autonomous, elder-led congregations, we will not find one. Every major institutional church that traces its roots continuously to antiquity (Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, Oriental Orthodox, or the Assyrian Church of the East) eventually adopted the monarchical episcopate.
As noted by early church fathers like Jerome, the shift from a plurality of coequal elders to a singular ruling bishop was a gradual, human development born out of a desire to prevent "plants of dissension." In the 2nd and 3rd centuries, the church faced immense pressure from persecution and fracturing due to severe heresies. The pragmatic response they chose was to centralize power in the hands of a single strong leader to enforce unity.
Once this shift happened, it became the dominant survival mechanism. Decentralized, autonomous congregations were either absorbed into this growing episcopal network or fractured by the very heresies the bishops sought to centralize to fight. In an era before the printing press or a widely distributed New Testament canon, the centralized, hierarchical model was simply the fittest for institutional survival. But "institutional survival of the fittest" is a sociological reality, not a metric for divine truth.
The assumption is that if God institutes a structure, it will never be abandoned or lost by His people. But biblical history proves the exact opposite.
Consider ancient Israel. God explicitly instituted a decentralized, tribal confederacy guided by judges. That was the divine blueprint. Yet, in 1 Samuel 8, the people demanded a king so they could be "like all the nations" and have a centralized monarch to fight their battles. God told Samuel, "they have not rejected you, but they have rejected Me" (1 Samuel 8:7).
Israel abandoned the divinely instituted structure for a pragmatic, centralized, worldly structure. If we applied your metric to ancient Israel, we would have to conclude that because the decentralized judge model didn't survive, the monarchy must have been God’s original, perfect design. We know from Scripture that isn't true. Humans routinely abandon God's design for their own pragmatic alternatives.
The hierarchical paradigm views the church as an ancient oak tree; you must be biologically attached to the trunk (through an unbroken apostolic succession of bishops) to be part of it. If you trace the branches of the Assyrian Church of the East, the Oriental Orthodox, and the Eastern Orthodox back, they all connect to that 2nd/3rd-century trunk.
But the New Testament paradigm is not an unbroken tree; it is an agricultural seed. Jesus said, "The seed is the word of God" (Luke 8:11). The survival of Christ's church does not depend on an unbroken, institutional chain of human farmers passing down the exact same plot of land for two millennia. The church has always existed wherever the pure seed of the Word has been planted and obeyed, even if completely overshadowed by highly visible, centralized hierarchies.
We see this exact principle in the Old Testament with King Josiah. For generations, the Book of the Law had been lost, and the Israelites simply defaulted to the idolatrous traditions of whatever kings and priests were in power. Yet, when Josiah recovered the written text in the temple (2 Kings 22:8), he did not need an unbroken, multi-generational chain of faithful priests to authenticate his reforms. The recovered written word itself provided all the authority needed to reinstitute the divine pattern.
The Apostolic Deposit is the written Word of God. The fact that the dominant historical institutions abandoned the decentralized governance of local elders in favor of a centralized hierarchy does not change the seed. When believers in any era take the New Testament and implement its explicit commands (establishing autonomous congregations overseen by a plurality of coequal elders), they are not inventing a "new" church. They are simply replanting the original seed, which bypasses the need for a 2,000-year institutional pedigree.
Promises were made in scripture concerning the church that were never made about Israel. The church would be “led into all truth,” the church is “the pillar and ground of the truth,” and “the gates of hades shall not overcome” the church. None of these were said about ancient Israel. The issue I have with this whole line of argumentation is that you are not in any way able to say you are part of that body that existed in communion with each other for the first millennium, which continues to this day in holy Orthodoxy. St Basil nor St Ireneaus, nor St Athanasius would recognize your theology, practice, nor ecclesiology. Should you approach the chalice, they would ask who is your bishop, and then turn you away. The problem for you is that the church is a unified family, an organic body. And the body you are part of is not unified with the body that has existed from the beginning.
I appreciate the pushback, as it brings us to the question of how we interpret biblical promises and define the "church."
It seems your critique rests on three main pillars: (1) misapplying specific biblical promises to a macro-institution, (2) romanticizing the first millennium as a perfectly unified body, and (3) elevating the 3rd and 4th-century Fathers over the 1st-century Apostles as the ultimate litmus test for fellowship. Let’s look at each.
You rightly point out that Christ made profound promises to the church. But we must read those promises in context, not as a blank check for institutional infallibility.
John 16:13 - Jesus is not speaking to a future ecumenical council of bishops here; He is speaking specifically to the Apostles in the upper room. He promises them the Holy Spirit to guide them into all truth so they can authoritatively establish the New Testament deposit. Applying this text to post-apostolic church councils to justify later historical developments is a severe exegetical leap.
1 Tim 3:15 - Read the context. Paul is writing to Timothy to instruct him on how people ought to conduct themselves in the local congregation (discussing the qualifications for plural elders/bishops and deacons in the preceding verses). Paul is saying the local, functioning assembly that us upholding the Apostle's doctrine is the pillar of truth in its community, not a universal, macro-episcopal hierarchy.
Matt 16:18 - Hades is the realm of the dead. Christ's promise is that death will not conquer His church—starting with His own resurrection—and that His kingdom will endure. It is not a promise that the visible, institutional leadership will never deviate structurally. God always preserves His people, even when the highly visible institution goes astray. He preserved 7,000 who hadn't bowed to Baal when the visible leadership of Israel was entirely apostate. I'm not saying that the church was worshiping Baal or totally apostate for the last 2,000 years, just that it deviated in at least this one way. God can and has certainly still been able to work with that.
You stated that the church existed in a unified communion for the first millennium. Historically, this is simply untrue. The first millennium was incredibly fractured. The church was ripped apart by the Donatists, the Novatians, the massive Arian crisis (where the institutional majority actually became Arian for a time, exiling Athanasius himself!), the Nestorian schism, and the Non-Chalcedonian (Oriental Orthodox) split in 451 AD.
The idea of a neat, perfectly unified, organic visible institution for a thousand years is a historical revisionism used to validate the modern Orthodox claim of exclusivity.
You argue that 2nd-to-4th-century Fathers like Irenaeus, Athanasius, and Basil would turn me away from the chalice because I lack a monarchical bishop, proving I am not part of the "organic body... from the beginning."
There is a fatal historical flaw in this argument: the 3rd and 4th centuries are not "the beginning." If a 4th-century Father would turn me away from communion for being submitted to a plurality of coequal elders rather than a singular diocesan bishop, then to be consistent, he would also have to turn away the Apostle Paul. He would have to excommunicate the Apostle Peter, who called himself a "fellow elder" (1 Peter 5:1). He would have to turn away the entire 1st-century church of Ephesus, which was overseen by a council of presbyters (Acts 20:17, 28). He would have to excommunicate the early church in Carthage, which operated without a singular ruling bishop well into the 2nd century. As Jerome himself explicitly admitted, in the beginning, bishops and elders were the exact same office, and churches were governed by a "common council of presbyters."
All of those ancient, pre-monarchical Christians would be turned away from the chalice too! If your standard for sacramental communion excludes the 1st-century apostolic church, it is your standard that has deviated, not ours.
You claim the church is a "unified family, an organic body," and you are absolutely right. But we must define what actually unites that body across time. Hierarchical traditions argue that the connective tissue of the church is a tactile, unbroken institutional chain of bishops. But Scripture defines the connective tissue entirely differently. The Apostle John wrote, "that which we have seen and heard we declare to you, that you also may have fellowship with us" (1 John 1:3).
True apostolic succession (and therefore true, organic communion with the ancient church) is achieved through fidelity to Apostolic teaching, not an institutional pedigree. The true church is "built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Jesus Christ Himself being the chief cornerstone" (Eph 2:20). It is not built on the evolving, pragmatic administrative hierarchies of the post-apostolic era. I am not striving to be in communion with the 4th-century developments. My loyalty is to the foundational, 1st-century teachings of Peter, Paul, and Christ.
When a local church submits to the New Testament pattern (governed by a plurality of coequal elders and holding fast to the faith once delivered), it possesses the exact same spiritual DNA as the 1st-century church and is therefore in unbroken, organic unity with the true body that has existed from the very beginning.
Thank you for your reply. I’m not a scholar, but three responses to your three objections.
1) the way you understand the church is different than the way 1700 years of Christians understood it, at least. When the church met in council, they understood they were embodying Christ on earth, speaking the truth. They use the same construction as he council of Acts 15 to render their report: “it seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us.” Christians have always understood that truth is to be found in infallibly the church’s received and accepted doctrines and practices, and the witness of the saints and holy fathers. Find me a Christian between 325 and 1500 who says otherwise…and smarter men than will make the case for the first 300 years too. You position is modern, an innovative approach toward the church.
2) The church was indeed united through the early centuries. From the outside if you don’t assume a singular church, it appears messy and impossible to parse. But in reality, heresies arose, and these false members were expelled. They were identified for what they were, anti-Christ, and communion was not extended to them. And it was the unified body that did this, not individual parishes.
3) The unified, organic body of Christ is visible, like his body…because it is his body. The unity we enjoy is not simply the unbroken institutional passing of the charism of leadership from bishop to bishop, though that is an important part. It is also the teaching. This, Roman Catholics are not part of the body as they departed from the faith and have continued a path of aggressive innovation ever since. Again—you would be alone in your perspective on the faith—through archeology and study you think you’ve discovered how the church “really was” in the earliest days, and how that supports your modern ecclesiology. But the fact is you would find zero, none, nobody from at least the early 4th to the 16th who wouldn’t call you a heretic for your position. And I’m
Going to wager before that also. Sts Ireneaus and Ignatius crush your case, frankly. Ireneaus traces episcopal lineages, and Ignatius, (taught by the apostle John himself!) says that if you are not with the bishop, you are not in the church.
I don’t doubt that there was some degree of evolution and change from the earliest days of the church to the 4th century—every orthodox Christian knows this. But the point is, that same body to which the apostles and early saints belonged, they continued and became what we see in the 4th century. Your modern analysis calling their practices “unbiblical” is just silly. They are the ones who help us interpret the Bible, not the inverse.
You would be turned away from the chalice because the church, the visible church never failed, and you would not be connected to her in baptism, in faith, in practice, holding your own tradition above that of the saints.
Blessings to you, I pray your path draws you ever closer to Christ.
You made a crucial admission in your post: "I don't doubt that there was some degree of evolution and change from the earliest days of the church to the 4th century..."
That admission is the entire crux of the debate. Orthodoxy would condemn Roman Catholicism for "aggressive innovation" that departed from the faith, yet you give the post-apostolic church a free pass for "evolution and change" regarding the very foundational structure of church governance. You cannot have it both ways. If Rome's innovations are invalid, 4th-century structural innovations are equally invalid.
You challenged me to "find a Christian between 325 and 1500" who agrees with my ecclesiology. Notice the dates you chose! You are asking me to find agreement within a timeline after the monarchical bishop had already been established as the norm, contrary to the apostolic deposit. I don't need a Christian from 325 AD to validate my position; I have the Apostle Paul in 60 AD.
The undeniable historical and biblical fact is that Paul did not go around setting up diocesan, monarchical bishops as Orthodoxy and Catholicism conceive of them today. He established autonomous congregations governed by a plurality of coequal elders.
If the 4th-century church structurally looks fundamentally different from the 1st-century church that Paul established, it is the 4th-century church that has deviated. I am not striving to align with the 4th century; I am striving to align with the 1st.
You bring up Sts. Ignatius and Irenaeus as proof, but again, they are later than Paul. Anyway, let's look closely at them.
Ignatius (early 2nd century) writes frantically about obeying the singular bishop. Modern scholarship recognizes that Ignatius’s bishop was a local pastor of a single congregation, not a diocesan monarch over multiple parishes, as the Orthodox bishops of today are. Ignatius's frantic pleading for submission also proves it was a new, contested paradigm to fight off early Gnosticism, not a universally settled apostolic tradition. It wasn't the universal standard even during his time.
Irenaeus does trace episcopal lineages, but as I demonstrated, early churches like Rome were governed by fractionated presbyteries (councils of elders) well into the late 2nd century. Later historians took prominent men from those early plural presbyteries and projected them backward into neat, singular "episcopal lineages." It is exactly the kind of "evolution" you admitted took place.
Your final epistemological claim is the most telling: "Your modern analysis calling their practices 'unbiblical' is just silly. They are the ones who help us interpret the Bible, not the inverse."
This completely inverts the biblical order of authority. The church is built upon the foundation of the Apostles and Prophets (Ephesians 2:20), not the other way around. The text of the New Testament, being the written and uncontested contents of the apostolic faith, sits in judgment over the traditions of the church; the church does not sit in judgment over the Apostles. If the Apostle Paul explicitly writes that a local church should be overseen by a plurality of coequal elders, a later post-apostolic council cannot "interpret" that to mean "submit to one monarchical bishop ruling over a diocese." That is not an interpretation, it's a contradiction.
To say that the 4th-century church "became what we see" simply because they were the successors is to argue that institutional momentum equals divine truth. Ancient Israel "became" a centralized monarchy demanding an earthly king, but God explicitly said, "they have rejected Me" (1 Samuel 8:7). Institutional continuity does not guarantee structural fidelity. It's important to note that Israel didn't stop being Israel during the monarchy or after the monarchy failed. Likewise, the church didn't stop being the church just because it deviated. I never said the church failed. The point I'm making is simply that, over time, it erred in its structure, and that the original design instituted by the Apostles is superior to later traditions.
I do not elevate my own tradition above the saints. I simply elevate the explicitly written tradition of the Apostles above the later, evolved traditions of 4th-century men.
Blessings to you as well. I truly respect your zeal for the historic faith, even if we fundamentally disagree on where that history begins!
The problem is that zero Christians for more than 1200 years held your theology or ecclesiology. This makes no sense. The Spirit led none of these saints to know the truth in your telling of things. Glad someone finally figured it out in the 1500s. There is one body. It has existed since the beginning.
I would point out that the Acts 15 council seems to indicate that the elders of various congregations should meet periodically to develop a consensus rather than being independent, i.e. "that all of you agree with one another in what you say and that there be no divisions among you, but that you be perfectly united in mind and thought" (1 Cor. 1:10).
Similarly, the Acts 15 council seemed to reach a common view rather than a pluralistic majority. Notably, Judas Iscariot's replacement was appointed by lot rather than a vote.
Also notably, contemporary congregational formats (in the West) have a tendency to popularly opt for heterodox positions on sexuality and egalitarianism.