Bad bishops

 It's good to have a wise and godly bishop, but the other sort we can do without.

Notice the ingenious justice of independent bishoprics.  Once the believers scent a bad bishop, a nasty shepherd that sheep ought not follow if they know what is good for them, they shift one diocese over. Bad priest? Miraculously, the next parish grows. Sheep want shepherds who lead them to grass and water and stuff. That is why I like the idea of largely independent dioceses. It is a firewall of sorts to the spread of bad teaching and moral corruption.

A way to envision one church for the whole world is on this episcopal, diocesan model. It is agreeable to scripture and tradition and appears to work well.

I am impressed, in theory, with apostolic succession, but I am more impressed by apostolic success. Let me be indelicate. A bishop in gross impropriety* is no bishop to me, regardless of lineage, and a pope in error is simply a graven image who isn't a statue yet. It is rather like my thinking about baptism in error. If I baptize an unbeliever what I have is a wet unbeliever. He is truly a bishop who is one functionally; he does God's work by God's spirit. Ownership of a miter and crozier cannot make up the lack of that.

Some churches have bishops under another name, supervisors or overseers who facilitate the work of the churches in a region, which is certainly the functional description of what a bishop does. The churches concerned want the function of the biblical role without the baggage of the traditional name. The biblical episcopos works out in modern translation to mean one who oversees, watches over, supervises in the sense of super (over) vises (sees, allied to our word "vision.")

What is my connection here to my topic of Christian unity? I think the episcopal model of church government offers the best hope of cooperation and, eventually, unity. It is robust, scriptural and has stood the test of time. It furthermore allows for local differences of practice and of opinion on secondary issues. It is important that the bishoprics be independent of one another. That allows bad bishops to fall by the wayside, as described above, rather than contaminating other dioceses and the whole church.

With the idea that future unity will be organized on the idea of independent bishops, we can start working on that unity by fostering cooperation of bishops across denominational boundary lines. What I am thinking here is that we can make a start, at least, on unity of faith and practice if we say that bishops (under any name, but the real thing and not poseurs who are bishops only ex officio)  are in a very good position to start discussing among themselves what sorts of inter-church cooperation are practical. What I think that discussion will show is that the practical challenges of Christianity's day to day operation are pretty much the same whoever you are, and that a certain amount of help and mutual support is possible on that basis. Let us say there is a disaster somewhere, what the children need are Spagettios and nuns, and the idea is get the help to the kids as fast as our turboprops can turn--that sort of thing. Once that is working, in a way that includes all the bishops from all the churches, they can start talking about further kinds of togetherness. A certain amount of that cooperation exists already, but on an ad hoc basis. I am talking about making it an intentional action--indeed, a duty--of every bishop everywhere.


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*In my communion the standard for excommunication is open and notorious sin. That would be a reasonable standard if it were always consistently applied--to bishops.