All this fuss about Nazir-Ali
You may have missed the news, but an Anglican Bishop, a former Bishop of Rochester, recently defected to the Roman Catholics. Once touted as a possible archbishop, the Pakistani-born bishop, a good man, explained why he has moved over to the Catholics:
"...I am deeply saddened that the Church of England is not the church I joined. There are many individual parishes, priests, and believers who remain committed to biblical faith and values. But as an institution it seems to be losing its way.."
So far so good: many other Bible-believing Christians are of the same opinion, that the CofE is drifting away from its Scriptural moorings - fast.
So why is this reputedly-evangelical bishop moving to the Catholics? Why doesn't he join his local evangelical church up t' road?
“...I am excited about the opportunities that joining the ordinariate will bring: to uphold human rights and help millions of suffering Christians and others round the world. The Catholic Church is a truly united global organization, which gives it strength.”
Being a low-church creature I have little idea what "joining the ordinariate" means. Except that the Catholics have created a special division to receive wayward ex-anglicans (back) into their fold.
What is a Bishop, Pray Tell?
What's lost in all the fuss is the basic question - what is a bishop? If a bishop is someone really important - like the Apostle Paul or Charles Spurgeon - then his defection may matter.
But Nazir-Ali is only a bishop, and bishops do not actually exist in heaven's view.
There is no office in the New Testament called 'bishop.' The three words used for church leaders are all interchangeable, presbuteros (elder), poimen (pastor) and episkopos. This latter one is sometimes translated bishop, but it refers to the one and same office as the other two.
These three words are interchangeably used by Holy Writ to express different aspects of the role of a church leader. Presbuteros emphasises the spiritual maturity of the man, poimen emphasises his caring pastoral side and episkopos his leading side.
In the New Testament we have elders (the spiritual leaders described by the three words above) and deacons (practical servants).
That's it. No bishops.
The man-made office of bishop arose by the year 100AD to fill an authority gap that was caused by the death of the apostles. In the twilight zone between the apostles' deaths and the completed canon of the New Testament where could you go to know what was the truth and what was not? The creeds were one important way of knowing what truths were most important, and the invention of a new office- the bishop - was another.
The man-made office of bishop filled an understandable authority gap for the church in this era. Bishops became leaders of groups of churches. So now you had ordinary pastors presided over by the big-shot pastors called bishops. Human ideas, human organisation, human hierarchy...
(And then, of course, once you have created one extra-biblical office, it's only a step away to create another - an overall bishop, a father bishop, a papa bishop, a pope. But that's a tale for another time.)
So Bishops don't exist
Seen through the eyes of Scripture, then, bishops just simply do not exist. They are an impostor office. The very most that can be said for a man who is called a bishop is that he is the pastor of his local church.
No-one should recognise a bishop as anything other than an ordinary pastor. No-one should bow and scrape at their feet. No-one should obey them (unless he is your local pastor).
Set in the light of Scripture, Nazir-Ali is just an ordinary Christian bloke. He's not even a church pastor - he's just an ordinary Christian bloke like you and me.
An ordinary bloke defects to the Catholics
No need to make a fuss, then about his defection. Sure, it's as odd as can be that someone who once called himself an evangelical has moved from a protestant denomination to pre-protestant Catholics.
But let's also remember that not only does heaven not recognise bishops, heaven does not recognise human organisations or denominations. All heaven recognises are local churches, one here, one there, spread out across the world, each acccountable to their invisble Head, the Lord Jesus Christ. Some of these churches are true faithful congregations of God's people and some of them are not.
From heaven's viewpoint, then, what has Nazir-Ali done?
I have no idea what local church he used to worship in and no idea what local church he is now attending. And I have no idea if the latter is more, or less faithful, than the previous.
All I do know is that when heaven looks down, it does not see a big-shot moving from one big spiritual grouping to another. All the angels see is one ordinary Christian who has moved from one local church (true or false) to another (true or false).
When we boil away the human traditions in this story that is all we have.
The church needs to stop paying any attention to foolish transient man-made titles, whether Dr, Sir or Bishop and start looking at the world the way God does.
Nazir-Ali's defection really is no big deal.
At all.
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