Humilitas

Alan Jacobs, who has written often for First Things , always with wit and wisdom , has written this for Christianity Today .

For those of us outside the Anglican Communion, it’s all too easy to wax snide about the, well, you know. Everyone knows. And that seems to be Jacobs’ point. What else needs to be said? What needs to be done, is the issue, and there are men (and women?) appointed to do it: namely, bishops. (I don’t know where Jacobs stands on women clergy; we do know where he stands on the bishop of New Hampshire business.)

Ah, bishops. As far as the history of my denomination goes: The Saxon Lutherans who left Germany in 1838 for the U.S. soon found themselves having to decide what the hierarchy in American was to look like. Bishop Martin Stephan made it easy for them—found guilty of sexual misconduct and financial corruption, he was deposed, and what became the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod remains, to this day, bishopless.

If Jacobs is correct about the biblical and ancient ecclesiology of bishop, priest, deacon, is the LCMS then something less than biblical and catholic? All depends on how you define “bishop,” I guess. (Just ask a presbyterian.)

And given the congregational polity of the LCMS, it would be foolish to import bishops now. It would only invite schism. And, let’s face it, we need not look to the Anglican Communion to question the value of a bishopric in maintaining doctrinal integrity within a denomination.

Yet many, certainly Catholics and Orthodox, would argue that denominationalism is the problem. Dopey or lazy bishops are no excuse for rejecting in toto what the majority witness of Christ’s church has maintained as the necessary bulwark against a rampant individualism and sectarianism.

Ain’t gonna be settled here . . . and back to the business of this post: If the day comes that the Anglican Communion finally collapses and fragments, it should be a day of mourning for all Christians. That Communion has produced great men and women of God who have been a blessing to the church for centuries: Consider Archbishop Cranmer and the beauty of his Prayerbook and the witness of his martyrdom; Lancelot Andrewes’ stewardship of the Authorized (King James) Bible translation; the social reformers, from John Wesley to William Wilberforce, who wedded a conservative loyalty to the Crown with a progressive social conscience, thereby staving off revolution along French lines; the tireless preaching of Bishop Ryle on the call to holiness; the apologists and scholars of the twentieth (and now twenty-first) centuries, from C.S. Lewis and Dorothy Sayers to John Stott, Alister McGrath, and N.T. Wright.

So we should probably can the Jefferts Schori jokes. (Although, she does make it so darn easy .) And pray that Alan Jacobs need not learn to be a Christian some other way.