From Apostles to Bishops: The Development of the Episcopacy in the Early Church (review)

Father Sullivan's confessional allegiances are not unimportant in this book and neither, therefore, should mine be. I am an ordained minister of the Uniting Church in Australia (a union church of Congregational, Methodist, and Presbyterian churches formed in 1977); half my teachers during my foundational theological training in Melbourne in the late 1970's were Jesuits; I am Principal of the Uniting Church theological college in Brisbane, which is itself part of a highly integrated ecumenical consortium (the Brisbane College of Theology: Anglican, Roman Catholic, and Uniting), and with the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Brisbane (John Bathersby) I am Co-Chair of a National Dialogue between the Roman Catholic and Uniting Churches.

The basic question which Father Sullivan explores in this very well written book is whether the historic episcopate, particularly as understood by the Anglican, Orthodox, and Roman Catholic traditions, is of divine institution, an issue he properly describes as "truly church splitting." In his own words, "[t]he question that divides Catholics and Protestants is not whether, or how rapidly, the development from the local leadership of a college of presbyters to that of a single bishop took place, but whether the result of that development is rightly judged an element of the divinely willed structure of the church" (p. viii). He acknowledges that none of the Apostles could be described as "bishops" in the historic sense, that until the early part of the second century no single bishop presided over any Christian community, and that even then, apart from in Antioch and the Roman province of Asia, probably nowhere did they do so until the middle of that century. By the end of the century, however, and this would be agreed across confessional divides, in a development which can only be described as rapid, the structure of single bishop-presbyters-deacons had become the norm everywhere. This fact leads to a number of observations: first, that the traditional Roman Catholic claim that there is, as an integral part of the structure of the Church, an apostolic succession represented by an "unbroken line of episcopal ordination from Christ through the apostles down through the centuries to the bishops of today"¹ is unsustainable as our author himself acknowledges; and second, that while the historical record alone will not support such a claim, the rapid emergence of the threefold ordering of the Church as normative does require, at the very least, the exploration of potential theological arguments arising out of that record. It is this which Father Sullivan skillfully and thoughtfully explores. That I do not believe that he has made his case does not diminish his fine scholarship.

Father Sullivan's opening chapter ("Apostolic Succession in the Episcopate: a Church-Dividing Issue") is a very fair and balanced account of the issues at stake here both between and for Catholics and Protestants. His short "Afterword," again very balanced, offers useful and positive reflections on possible ways forward in this ecumenical divide. In between he offers some observations, mainly by way of textual commentary, on the writings of the New Testament and those of both Church Fathers and other early Christian writers from Clement of Rome to Cyprian of Carthage as they either address or inform the presenting issue. In these brief commentaries there is, however, just the slightest touch of coloring by what he is trying to demonstrate, that is, evidence for a theological argument for the divine will in the early ordering of the Church and the emergence of a separate and singular episcopate.

In his final chapter ("Successors by Divine Institution?"), Father Sullivan argues that the post-New Testament development of church order into a single episcopate supported by a normative threefold structure is not only consistent with what he presumes to be the divine will for the defense and maintenance of both unity and orthodoxy in the...