Sunday, May 14, 2023

Stephen De Young (EO) on Church Structure and Apostolic Authority in 1 Clement

  

Church Structure and Apostolic Authority

 

First Clement is one of the earliest extant Christian documents, outside of the New Testament texts themselves. It is a short letter that St. Clement wrote on behalf of the Christian community in Rome to the Christian community in Corinth. At this point in history, the Roman church did not have a strong, central bishop but rather a number of presbyters, some of them carrying a sort of senior status that allowed them to represent the entire community to others. From roughly AD 88 to 99, St. Clement was that leader. His title as “Bishop of Rome” is retroactive, based on the structures that solidified there in the mid-second century.

 

The fact that the magisterial episcopacy developed from the mid-second century, at different rates in different parts of the Church, is in no way a critique of its validity. A bishop was a successor to the apostles upon their departure from this life. We see, within the pages of the Scriptures, St. Paul making St. Timothy such a bishop from Crete by sending him there and enjoining him to ordain presbyters and deacons. At the same time, when Paul stops in Ephesus on his way to Jerusalem, a group of presbyters governs the church there. Ephesus still enjoyed the active ministry of an apostle: not only St. Paul but also St. John the Theologian, as well as the Theotokos and St. Mary Magdalene in the second half of the first century. Rome, as the capital of the empire, was in a similar situation. It is for this reason that St. Clement seems in his epistle to use the terms “bishop” and “presbyter” interchangeably; different Christian communities at this point had somewhat different structures.

 

Saint Clement writes to the church at Corinth not from the perspective of a leader in that far distant community, nor from the perspective of having a special office that entitles him to do so. He writes the letter from the Roman church to the Corinthian church as a brother. Clement appeals again and again not to his own authority, or even the authority of Rome, but rather to the authority of the apostles, in particular St. Paul. He reminds the members of the church at Corinth of the letters that St. Paul wrote to them (Clem. 47:1). He quotes again and again from the Epistles of St. Paul, including Hebrews. His approach is therefore as an associate of the apostles, to bring the authority of the apostles to bear. Saint Paul is the apostle of Corinth, who founded the community there and wrote at least four letters to the Corinthian church, and so it is to St. Paul that St. Clement repeatedly and directly appeals.

 

Saint Clement also represents an early testimony to several events in the latter part of the first century known from sources outside Scripture. First Clement refers directly to the martyrdoms of Ss. Peter and Paul without expressly naming their location as Rome, though he wrote the epistle from there (Clem. 5). Clement presents both martyrdoms as the result of jealousy and envy, and the epistle goes on to record the names of other martyrs in this early period at Rome. In describing the martyrdom of St. Paul in particular, St. Clement refers to Paul as having journeyed to the extreme points of the West—an apparent confirmation of the success of the apostle’s intention to voyage to Spain. (Stephen De Young, Apocrypha: An Introduction to Extra-Biblical Literature [Chesterton, Ind.: Ancient Faith Publishing, 2023], 287-89)