In "A Bishop Among Presbyters" (Post Nuance, October 23), Jonathan Tomes argues that James Ussher's Reduction of Episcopacy restores to pastors the government their ordination gives them, while keeping a continuing bishop to preside over them. The Congregational divines of New England read the same Scripture and reached the opposite verdict. Ussher's scheme does not give government back to the pastor. It moves the keys from the congregation to a ladder of clerical synods, and it gives the bishop an office the New Testament never gave to anyone: oversight of many churches.
Start with the angel of Ephesus, since Ussher's whole case for a continuing president rests on it. Tomes concedes that reading the angel as a standing officer "involves a further interpretive step." James Durham declined to take it. In Acts 20 Paul "calleth not One, but the Elders of the Church of Ephesus: and giveth not to One, the charge or name of Bishop; but to All of them He committeth it." So "take we the stile Angel, to be collective."1 The Presbyterian London ministers who wrote Jus Divinum Ministerii went further than Ussher's critics usually remember. Baxter quotes their concession: "These Angels were Congregational, not Diocesan."2 Once the angel is the pastor of one assembly, Ussher's suffragans, diocesans and archbishops have no text left.
John Davenport drew the conclusion the Congregational Way built on. "We read of Bishops in the New-Testament, but what? Not one Bishop over many Churches, but many Bishops over one Church; not Diocesan, but Congregational Bishops." Even after the apostles, when one pastor was called bishop "for orders sake," for many years "he did no act of power" without the presbytery's consent and the people's, "in the presence, of the People."3 Tomes quotes Ussher's formula that bishops and presbyters differ gradu, non ordine, in degree rather than order. Davenport accepts the identity of order and draws the conclusion Ussher would not. If the bishop of Scripture is the elder of a congregation, then a bishop over a deanery is not a higher degree of that office but a different office, and nobody can show who instituted it.
That brings us to the claim Tomes cares about most: the presbyter's "right to govern," grounded in ordination and restored by Ussher's assemblies. Look at what the assemblies actually do. The parish pastor may admonish and bar from the Table. Excommunication itself goes up to the monthly synod of the rural deanery, where the suffragan concludes all matters "according to the Major part of their voices," excommunication included.4 Thomas Shepard answered this arrangement in its Presbyterian form, and the answer applies doubly to Ussher's: "though the Pastor of a congregation may oft consent, yet the major part of the Presbytery must carry it, whether he consent or no, and therefore his power is swallowed up." Shepard thought it "a mystery" that a pastor "should not have power to rule in his own flock over which Christ hath made him a Bishop."5 Ussher does not restore that power. He hands it to a majority of neighbouring clergy, with a bishop in the chair.
John Cotton's Keyes of the Kingdom of Heaven (1644), which Rutherford said he would meet halfway, shows that the Congregational answer was not hostility to synods. Cotton called synods "an Ordinance of Christ," with real authority to "determine, declare and injoyn." They are, however, "not armed with authority and power of Excommunicating or delivering unto Satan." Having judged the case, they must "leave the formall act of this censure to that authority which can only execute it, placed by Christ in those Churches themselves."6 Increase Mather put the New England Platform in one line: "it belongs not to Synods, or Councils to Exercise Church Censures, nor any act of Church Authority, or Jurisdiction," and Christ instituted no "Synods appointed... in a way of Subordination to one another."7 Ussher's four tiers of appeal are exactly that subordination. The striking thing is that Ussher privately agreed. He told Baxter, unprompted, "that certainly Councils or Synods are not for Government but for Vnity."8 His Reduction builds a government on synods all the same.
Then there are the people. Tomes notes that Cyprian's appeal to "the people's consent" reaches beyond Ussher's clerical assemblies, and leaves it there. For the Congregational Way that is not a footnote. Shepard cited "the Testimony of Cyprian oft alledged, that it is in the power of the people to choose worthy Ministers, and reject the unworthy."9 Ussher's scheme gives the brethren no part in calling a pastor or in casting out an offender; churchwardens and sidesmen report scandals, and ministers do the rest. Cotton named the effect: discipline exercised only by synods of presbyters "still keepeth the Church as under nonage," like a mother who will not let a grown daughter "go on its own feet."10 Tomes's subtitle promises the government of a Reformed church. What Ussher offers is a church that is governed, but never governs.
Last, credibility. Tomes says Ussher's name "came to lend legitimacy" to limited episcopacy. He leaves out who refused it. Ussher told Baxter that when he offered his terms to the King, "intemperate Men were displeased with him, and they were then rejected."11 In 1660 the nonconformists offered nothing but "the Paper called A. Bishop Usher's Reduction,"12 and the bishops refused it again. On Bartholomew's Day 1662 "about One thousand eight hundred, or Two thousand Ministers were Silenced and Cast out,"13 Congregationalists among them. By then the New England churches had been governing themselves for thirty years, many of them under ministers whom Laud's courts had driven out of England.
The Congregational Way grants Tomes a good deal, and it should. Ussher's first proposition, weekly parish discipline with power to bar the scandalous from the Lord's Table, is the closest the English establishment ever came to an eldership in the congregation. His recognition of churches without bishops was right. So was his refusal to excuse every separation, which New England shared. Mather insisted that Congregationalists "differ essentially" from the Brownists, who "disown all Churches besides their own," and called them "the genuine Posterity of the good Old Puritan Nonconformists."14 Validity does not prove a separation lawful. But the standard cuts both ways. A congregation that withdraws from a bishop to exercise keys Christ gave it has not broken an order Christ instituted. It has stopped submitting to one he did not.
Tomes closes by saying the bishop belongs among ministers who share responsibility for the church. In Scripture the bishop belongs among the brethren of one church, who choose him and before whom he judges. Ussher brought the bishop down from his throne into a synod of presbyters. He never let him into the congregation, and that is where the keys are kept.
Notes
- James Durham, A Commentarie upon the Book of the Revelation (1658), Lecture IX, p. 50. Read ↩
- Richard Baxter, Five Disputations of Church-Government and Worship (1659), ch. 7, §18, p. 348, quoting the London ministers, Jus Divinum Ministerii, pt. 2, p. 82. Read ↩
- John Davenport, The Power of Congregational Churches Asserted and Vindicated (1672), pt. 2, ch. 6, pp. 78–81. Read ↩
- Richard Baxter, Five Disputations (1659), ch. 7, §7, p. 344, summarizing Ussher's second proposition. Read ↩
- Thomas Shepard, A Treatise of Liturgies, Power of the Keys, and of Matter of the Visible Church (1653), ch. 5, p. 109. Read ↩
- John Cotton, The Keyes of the Kingdom of Heaven (1644), "To the Reader." Read On Rutherford meeting Cotton "half way," Increase Mather, Disquisition (1716), Preface. Read ↩
- Increase Mather, Two Discourses (1716), Preface, pp. iv–vi. Read ↩
- Richard Baxter, Five Disputations (1659), ch. 7, §16, p. 348. Read ↩
- Thomas Shepard, Treatise of Liturgies, Power of the Keys (1653), ch. 16, pp. 203–204. Read ↩
- John Cotton, Keyes of the Kingdom of Heaven (1644), pp. 57–58. Read ↩
- Richard Baxter, Reliquiae Baxterianae (1696), I, §62, p. 206. Read ↩
- Richard Baxter, The True History of Councils Enlarged and Defended (1682), ch. 14, p. 86. Read ↩
- Richard Baxter, Reliquiae Baxterianae (1696), I, §279, p. 384. Read ↩
- Increase Mather, A Disquisition Concerning Ecclesiastical Councils (1716), Preface, pp. iv–v. Read ↩