Church Government According to the Bible. Simon V. Goncharenko

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Church Government According to the Bible - Simon V. Goncharenko


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target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="#ulink_b1b130bb-0049-5895-81bd-57f2889d5ed9">4 With his stringent view of human depravity, Cartwright argued that episcopacy had no foundation in Scripture and that a system not commanded by God should not be tolerated.5 In response, Whitgift claimed that the Scriptures were authoritative for all things pertaining to redemption, but permissive in matters indifferent to it.6 Or, in the words of Stephen Brachlow, “Since he could find no evidence in the New Testament that Christ had delineated an organizational structure for the church with the precision and clarity Christ had employed in other doctrinal matters, Whitgift reasoned that ecclesiology must therefore be an adiaphora7 issue, an indifferent matter, secondary to the more substantive doctrinal teachings of the gospel.”8 Cartwright believed that the Scriptures revealed a model for church organization—a single pattern for the church that amounted to a perpetual and immutable law for all succeeding generations living under the gospel.9 Thus, people were to put into practice what was in the Bible and abstain from doing what was not in it.

      There seems to be a degree of arbitrariness about Cartwright’s approach. Having professed that the practice of biblical church discipline was a matter of salvation in his debate with Whitgift, Cartwright conveniently failed to mention the soteriological significance of ecclesiology in his correspondence with Harrison. This same type of inconsistency is apparent in most major Protestant denominations’ exposition of church polity today, for although they all look to the same source of support for some or all of their views, each seems to emerge with a different argument.

      The aim of this work is to provide assistance in eliminating the fog of random exegesis by fleshing out hermeneutical assumptions shared by the adherents of all polity models and grounding these in the word of God, and in so doing, present the most biblically defensible model of church government.

      Sufficiency of Scripture and Church Polity

      The importance of reevaluating biblical data in the area of church polity is clearly evidenced by the wide variety of different Protestant approaches to structuring church. As was the case some 450 years ago in Whitgift and Cartwright’s day, so it is today: Any given Sunday morning reveals a plethora of ways in which God’s people understand and practice church polity. They all look to the Bible to derive support for all or some of their beliefs and practice. But can the Bible truly support all of their different views?

      A close evaluation of the various models of church polity yields a number of hermeneutical issues that each model has to address, even if just on the level of assumption. The particular positions taken by the proponents of each specific government style with regard to these hermeneutical issues influences their exegesis and affects their conclusions.

      First, however, a quick definition of some frequently used terminology is in order.