Elders as honored household heads and not holders of "office" in earliest Christianity. - "The Elders: Seniority Within Earliest Christianity" - book review

R. Alastair Campbell, THE ELDERS: SENIORITY WITHIN EARLIEST CHRISTIANITY. STUDIES OF THE NEW TESTAMENT AND ITS WORLD. Edinburgh, UK: T & T Clark, 1994. Pp. xiv + 309. Cloth, $43.95.

Continued debate over the origin, shapes, and historical development of ministry and order in the early church appears to be as much an inevitability as death and taxes. Perhaps this is to be expected with an issue in which all ecclesial communions have such pronounced self-interests in justifying their own ecclesial orders. At the same time, the diverse and numerous exegetical, historical, social, and theological factors involved, combined with the less than fully clear nature of the literary sources, virtually guarantees a plethora of differing reconstructions, none of which has led yet to an overall consensus.

A recent contribution to this debate is the study of R. Alastair Campbell, THE ELDERS: SENIORITY WITHIN EARLIEST CHRISTIANITY, published by T&T Clark in 1994. This edited version of Campbell's London doctoral dissertation, written under the supervision of Graham Stanton, while focusing needed attention to the role of elders in the early church, is actually more comprehensive in scope and proposes a new reconstruction of the development of ministry in the early church down through the Apostolic Fathers. In emphasizing the household matrix of ministry, Campbell sketches a course of development that is aimed at displacing a previous consensus influenced initially by the work of the German jurist Rudolf Sohm (1841-1917, especially Sohm's KIRCHENRECHT [Leipzig: Duncker und Humbolt, 1892]), then elaborated by Hans von Campenhausen (ECCLESIASTICAL AUTHORITY AND SPIRITUAL POWER IN THE CHURCH OF THE FIRST THREE CENTURIES [London: Black, 1969]) and adopted by subsequent "neo-Sohmians" including Ernst Kasemann, Karl Kertelge, Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza, and James Dunn among others.

This consensus, as described by Campbell (pp. 1-19; 236-37), has held that the history of ministry and order in the early church was marked by polarities of leadership patterns, theological tensions, and an eventual decline into hierarchical institutionalism. Building on Sohm's Protestant-inspired contrast of spirit and law, charism and office, and a notion that an originally charismatic community eventually degenerated into a legalistic institution, von Campenhausen and other "neo-Sohmians" postulated a polarity between egalitarian Pauline churches led by charismatically endowed persons and Jewish-Christian communities led by elders allegedly following the "model" of the synagogue. These office-holding elders were guardians of tradition and harbingers of an "official" and "ecclesiastical" way of thinking. After Paul's death, charismatic leaders disappeared and Pauline overseers and deacons were merged with Jewish-Christian elders to produce a threefold pattern of ministry out of which institutional, degenerate, clerical Catholicism was born.

Campbell challenges this view and offers a counter theory based on the household matrix of the early churches and their leaders. He develops a neglected aspect of Sohm's theory, namely that the elders were never the holders of office in the church but, like elders everywhere, were always persons of leading households and clans who were honored in their communities as "senior members of proven Christian character" (p. 9).

Focusing first on these elders (chs. 2-3), he surveys the evidence on elders in Israel (pp. 20-66) and in Greco-Roman society (pp. 67-98). In Israel, it is noted, the consistent reference to elders in the plural indicates that" 'the elders' is a collective term for the leadership of the tribe or the ruling class, but never the title of an office to which an individual might be appointed" (p. 26). "The elders are the senior men of the community, heads of leading families within it, who as such exercise an authority that is informal, representative and collective" (p. 65). "Eldership connotes not only age but also wisdom and honor deriving from the prestige of the families whose heads they were (p. 66). In Greco-Roman society, the nature and status of elders was similar, though the preferred term for the ruling oligarchy was hoi gerontes rather than hoi presbyteroi (p. 95). The sole place where hoi presbyteroi appears as a title of office is in papyri from Egypt where the term refers to "local authorities and village officials" (p. 75). Along the way, Campbell offers a brief but trenchant critique of E. Schussler Fiorenza (IN MEMORY OF HER--1983) and her theory of Jesus' alleged egalitarianism and rejection of familial and patriarchal structures (pp. 16-17, 154-55).

In chapters four through seven Campbell turns to the New Testament and the Apostolic Fathers and extends the study to include other terms and forms of leadership as well. All forms of leadership, he stresses, were determined by the household structure of the earliest Christian groups and the house churches, including not only presbyteroi but also episkopoi (overseers).