Editor's Note: This article is part six of a series adapted from talks given to Faith Presbyterian Church in Tacoma, a congregation of our denomination (PCA) and presbytery (Pacific Northwest Presbytery). We have retained specific references to that congregation to keep intact the flow of thought. 

In previous installments of this study of Presbyterian church government, we have had occasion to notice that Presbyterianism has developed differently in various places. For all the similarities, there are some notable differences, for example, between the church government of the Church of Scotland and the Presbyterian churches in the United States, and still more differences between those churches and the Reformed (i.e., Presbyterian) churches of Holland, France, and Germany. For that matter, there are differences between the church governments of various American Presbyterian bodies. I want to devote several installments of this series to some ways the church government of our own denomination, The Presbyterian Church in America, has been shaped by its American context.

One of the most interesting and consequential of these distinctively American features of our Presbyterianism is the popularity of the so-called two-office view of Presbyterian church government. Historically, Presbyterianism since the Reformation has been a three-office church government (ministers, ruling elders, and deacons). But in the United States, two-office Presbyterian church government—that is, elders and deacons only, with the minister and ruling elder holding the same office—became more popular than it had ever been in Great Britain or Europe. Americans, with their strongly democratic and egalitarian instincts, are more inclined to be anti-clerical, to resist the clergy-laity distinction, and to resent an office in which a great deal of spiritual authority is vested in a single individual. It is no surprise, therefore, that the seed of two-office thinking that fell on the path in Europe found fertile soil in North America. I appreciate, of course, that the advocates of the two-office theory will not agree that their preference for it is due to their being Americans; they will be sure that they are only being faithful to the teaching of the Bible. I’ll leave it to you to judge who has the better biblical argument!

The argument for two-office Presbyterianism and for the view that ministers and elders have the same office and are distinguished only functionally consists simply in the observation that the term “elder” is used in the New Testament of both those we call ministers and those we call ruling elders (1 Tim. 5:17). Advocates may advance other considerations, but the biblical argument reduces to this. One significant problem with this argument is that there are other reasonable interpretations of Paul’s statement in that text than that it refers to both ruling elders and teaching elders. The Reformed tradition, generally, did not appeal to 1 Tim. 5:17 as containing a reference to the office of ruling elder. It is asking a great deal to establish a doctrine on the foundation of a text of uncertain relevance to the issue!

The serious consequence of the two-office theory, in my view, is that, by merging the ministry and the eldership into a single office, it unwittingly diminishes and weakens both.

Defenders of three-office Presbyterianism—which, in this respect, is the church government of historic Christendom, not just Presbyterianism—draw attention to the following facts. First, “elder” is the Bible’s embracive term for all church leaders, and therefore its use does not identify ministers and ruling elders as holding the same office. So it was in Judaism at the time of the New Testament, the background of the use of the term in the New Testament. For example, the phrase “the elders of Israel” in the Gospels refers to the membership of the Sanhedrin, the ruling council of the Jews. That council had among its members both priests and lay elders. The fact that both together could be called “elders” did not mean that priests and elders held the same office or that priests were only elders with special duties. A Jewish priest might be called an elder in some respects, but an elder was not and could not be called a priest. They held different offices. And the use of the term in the New Testament illustrates the same double use of the term “elder.” For example, Peter and John both refer to themselves as “elders” (1 Pet. 5:1; 2 John 1) because as apostles they were certainly leaders of the church. Being an apostle certainly made one an elder. Being an elder, however, didn’t make a man an apostle. But this simple observation undermines the main argument for two-office Presbyterianism!

Second, the term “elder” is drawn from Old Testament usage, and in that usage, an elder was specifically a lay ruler. The priesthood was a separate office from that of the elder. Given that the term elder is carried over into the New Testament without comment, there is a strong presumption that the term, when used of a specific office, refers to the same office of lay ruler it always had before. Interestingly, in the Law of Moses, a priest might assist with the government of the church (Deut. 17:8-9), but ruling was not his proper office or responsibility. Ruling was adjunct to his primary calling. But an elder was a ruler only. In the ancient epoch, he was never said to have been a teacher of the church or to have had a role in the worship of the church. 

Third, in both Romans 12:8 (leadership/government) and 1 Corinthians 12:28 (the NIV’s “administration”; the KJV had “government”), Paul connects a man’s gift with his function in the church. There are men with the gift of government, and if they have that gift, they are to govern. It stands Paul’s argument on its head to maintain, as the two-office view must, that in order for a man to govern the church, he must have some capacity to teach it as well. One’s position in the church, the apostle insists, is determined by the gift one has been given, and to some is given the gift of rule. Paul’s forceful argument in those two passages has led Presbyterian authorities in general, therefore, to argue that when one of the qualifications of an “elder” is said to be his ability to teach (1 Tim. 3:2)—which is why the two-office generally requires an elder to be some sort of a teacher—Paul is there either talking only about men we today would call ministers or preachers—as aptness to teach he has taught elsewhere is not a prerequisite for the status and function of a church ruler—or he is enumerating the entirety of qualifications that may pertain to the office of elder in the embracive sense of the term, aptness to teach being required if one is a minister, just as monogamy is required if one is a married man (v. 2). Remember, it was a commonplace of both Jewish and early Christian usage to employ the term “elder” either for church leaders irrespective of their office or for lay rulers only. 

Fourth, in the New Testament, the apostles saw themselves as taking up the historic functions of the Old Testament priesthood, namely the ministry of preaching and the superintendence of public worship (Acts 6:4; 15:2, 4 [“apostles and elders” is a close approximation to “priests and elders” so familiar in the Gospels and Acts as designating the composition of the Sanhedrin]; Rom. 15:26). So in the first century, there were, again, priests and lay elders serving the new church. 

Fifth and finally, already by the late first century and early second century, the beginnings of an Episcopal polity may be discerned in the writings of the so-called Apostolic Fathers. This is certainly easier to explain if the church were already accustomed to a distinction between ministers and elders and to individual ministers pastoring congregations also ruled by a body of elders, than if the apostolic church broke new ground and established the more radical collegiality assumed in the two-office theory.

I don’t think two-office Presbyterianism is either taught or illustrated in the Bible. Nor do I think that the issue is of little consequence. The serious consequence of the two-office theory, in my view, is that, by merging the ministry and the eldership into a single office, it unwittingly diminishes and weakens both. On the one hand, the elder, who should be the principal ruler of the church, becomes merely another ruler with the pastor. The inevitable position of the minister as primus inter pares among the rest of the elders renders his “eldership” more important than theirs and creates in the congregation the expectation that he is not only the minister but the chief ruler. This has happened times without number in Presbyterian churches, and theories that encourage it are no help. On the other hand, the two-office view diminishes the special calling of the minister, viewing him as it does first and fundamentally as an elder, albeit one who has been given the additional responsibility of preaching, rather than as a minister of the Word who additionally, but incidentally, shares the rule of the church with the elders. This lower view of the ministry, as an order of the eldership, has produced a concept of the ministry in the minds of many pastors and other people today that is something much less than an exclusive devotion to the Word of God and its public and private proclamation. Only the man who loves to preach and lives to preach will be adequate to such a work, demanding as it does the continual cultivation and full exercise of all his powers. And that holy consecration, I have come firmly to believe, depends upon a man seeing himself to be not an elder, but always and only a minister of the Word of God.