Orders of Ministry are Interchangeable in the NT – they describe the same office

By Chuck Collins

www.virtueonline.org

August 14, 2025

J. B. Lightfoot was a renown New Testament scholar at Cambridge when he was called in 1879 to be the Anglican Bishop of Durham. He spent the last decade of his life shepherding the people and congregations of his diocese.

His commentaries on many of St. Paul’s epistles and his work on the apostolic fathers are still widely read today. He is perhaps best remembered by a book he wrote that some Anglicans find troubling. In “The Christian Ministry,” Lightfoot shows the evolution of the office of bishop from the New Testament into the early church. He shows that the terms presbyter (presbuteros, elder or priest) and bishop (episcopos) are interchangeable in the New Testament; they describe the same office.

There is no clear distinction in the Bible between the two and there is not a clear three-fold distinction of orders of ministries (bishop, priest, and deacon) in Holy Scripture.

It didn’t take but several decades after the apostles for the church to find three orders very helpful, but to say that this is biblical is simply wrong. And in the wrong hands, this becomes a false grounding for sacerdotal views of ordained ministry that seeks to justify “special” classes of Christians and an ongoing office of apostles.

The English reformers saw the historic episcopate as of “bene esse” (for the well being) of the church. Since it is not clearly Scriptural, they couldn’t say, as the later Tractarians did, that the historic episcopate is of the “esse” of the church or that episcopacy is an indispensable requisite in a Christian church.

A case can be made that episcopacy went wild with the 1830s Tractarian revival (see Tract 10!) on into the first Lambeth Conference in 1867. This led to such ideas as: ordination automatically conveys special grace to make ordinary Christians into a special Christians.

This is the kind of nonsense that Paul rails against in 1 Corinthians 12! We in the Anglican Church in North America (ACNA) have unfortunately ceded authority to priests and bishops that, in someone who doesn’t see himself as a servant, can too easily lead to the abuse of power. Why, for example, do we now anoint hands with oil in ordination, “that whatsoever they bless may be blessed, and whatsoever they consecrate may be consecrated”?

There is nothing about making magic hands in our Anglican heritage until the 2019 Book of Common Prayer. We can say that a church order based on bishops, priests and deacons is good, and may even be the best system of church governance, without giving in to ugly and unbiblical clericalism.

The Rev. Canon Chuck Collins is a theologian and historian in the reform tradition.