Order and the Ministry

The central practical argument of 1 Clement is an argument about order. Against the Corinthian sedition the Roman church appeals to the divinely-appointed order that runs through creation, the Old Testament cult, and the Christian ministry alike: God has fixed the seasons and the bounds of the sea, commanded the offerings and services at appointed times, and arranged the ministry so that the apostles, sent from Christ as Christ was sent from God, appointed bishops and deacons and provided for their orderly succession. The deposing of lawfully appointed presbyters was therefore not a private quarrel but a tearing of an order received from God through the apostles — and chapters 40–44 have become the single most quoted patristic text in the discussion of apostolic succession and holy orders.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Apostolic Father)

The pastoral problem of 1 Clement is narrow and concrete: a faction at Corinth had thrown out its lawfully appointed presbyters (The Letter to the Corinthians). But the Roman church meets that narrow problem with a very large argument. It does not merely say that the deposed men were good men, or that the deposers were ambitious — though it says both. It says that the act of deposing them ran against the grain of an order woven into the whole structure of reality: the order of the cosmos, the order God prescribed for the worship of Israel, and the order by which the Christian ministry itself was established and is handed on. The plea against sedition is, at bottom, a plea for taxis — for rank, station, and appointed place — against the disorder (akatastasia) of men who will not keep their own. Chapters 40 through 44 carry the weight of that argument, and they have carried, ever since, a weight of doctrinal controversy out of all proportion to their length.

The Argument from Order: Cosmos and Cult

Before the letter ever reaches the ministry it lays a foundation in the order of creation. In a celebrated passage the Roman church surveys the universe as a single ordered whole obedient to its Maker: “The heavens, revolving under his government, are subject to him in peace. Day and night follow the course appointed by him, in no way hindering each other… The sun and the moon and the dancing stars according to his appointment circle in harmony within the bounds assigned to them, without any swerving aside. The earth, bearing fruit in fulfillment of his will at the proper seasons… The ocean, impassable to man, and the worlds beyond it, are governed by the same ordinances of the Master. The seasons, spring, summer, autumn, and winter, peacefully give place to one another” (1 Clement 20.1–9; trans. Holmes 2007). Even the sea, the ancient emblem of chaos, keeps the bounds set for it: God “enclosed” the deep and “set bounds about it” (cf. 1 Clement 20.6–7, echoing Job 38:11). The argument is a fortiori: if the inanimate and irrational creation keeps its appointed station “in peace and concord,” how much more ought rational men, called to be God’s people, to keep theirs.

From the order of the cosmos the letter moves to the order God prescribed for worship. This is the burden of chapter 40, which generalizes the principle into a rule for the offering of worship: “Since, then, these things are manifest to us, and we have looked into the depths of the divine knowledge, we ought to do in order all things which the Master commanded us to perform at the appointed seasons. Now the offerings and ministrations he commanded to be performed with care, and not to be done rashly or in disorder, but at fixed times and seasons. And where and by whom he wishes them to be performed, he himself has determined by his supreme will” (1 Clement 40.1–3; trans. Holmes 2007). Worship is not to be improvised; God himself has fixed the when, the where, and the by whom.

To make the point the letter turns to the most ordered worship it knows — the sacrificial system of the Old Testament, with its graded ministry: “For unto the high priest his proper services (leitourgiai) have been assigned, and to the priests their proper office is appointed, and upon the Levites their proper ministrations are laid. The layman is bound by the ordinances for the laity” (1 Clement 40.5; trans. Holmes 2007). Each order has its own place, and no order may usurp another’s: “Let each of you, brothers, in his own rank (en tō idiō tagmati) give thanks to God, maintaining a good conscience, not transgressing the appointed rule of his ministry (leitourgia), in reverence” (1 Clement 41.1; trans. Holmes 2007). The high priest, priests, Levites, and laity stand here not as an institution to be copied detail for detail, but as an analogy — a divinely instituted model of ordered ministry, each in his own rank, against which the Corinthian disorder is measured and found wanting.

The letter then makes the analogy concrete with reference to the Jerusalem cult: sacrifices are not offered “in every place… but in Jerusalem alone; and even there the offering is not made in every place, but before the sanctuary at the altar, the offering being first inspected for blemishes by the high priest and the ministers already mentioned” (1 Clement 41.2; trans. Holmes 2007). The same passage speaks of these offerings in the present tense, a detail sometimes pressed in the debate over the letter’s date; that question is treated separately and set aside here (The Letter to the Corinthians). For the argument of chapters 40–41, what matters is the principle: God appoints place, time, and minister, and to break that appointment is to sin against the giver of the order.

The Apostolic Succession of the Ministry

Having established the principle of ordered ministry, the letter applies it directly to the Christian ministry in chapter 42 — the passage that has become the single most quoted text in the patristic discussion of apostolic succession. The argument is a chain of “sending” (apostellein) that runs from God to the present ministers: “The apostles received the gospel for us from the Lord Jesus Christ; Jesus the Christ was sent forth from God. So then Christ is from God, and the apostles are from Christ. Both, therefore, came of the will of God in good order (taxis). Having therefore received their orders and being fully assured by the resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ, and confirmed in the word of God with full assurance of the Holy Spirit, they went forth with the glad tidings that the kingdom of God should come” (1 Clement 42.1–3; trans. Holmes 2007). The ministry is thus traced back, link by link, to its origin in the will of God: God → Christ → the apostles → the ministers they appoint.

That appointment is described next: “Preaching therefore through countries and cities, they appointed their first-fruits, when they had proved them by the Spirit, to be bishops and deacons (episkopous kai diakonous) of those who should believe” (1 Clement 42.4; trans. Holmes 2007). The apostles tested their earliest converts and set the proven ones over the future believers. To this the letter appends a scriptural warrant — a loose adaptation of Isaiah 60:17: “And this they did in no new way, for indeed it had been written concerning bishops and deacons from very ancient times; for thus says the Scripture in a certain place: ‘I will appoint their bishops (episkopoi) in righteousness and their deacons (diakonoi) in faith’” (1 Clement 42.5; trans. Holmes 2007, citing Isaiah 60:17 LXX). The Hebrew and the standard LXX of Isaiah 60:17 read “I will make your overseers peace and your taskmasters righteousness”; 1 Clement has reshaped the verse so that it speaks of “bishops” and “deacons,” reading the apostolic ministry back into prophecy.

Chapter 44 completes the argument by extending the appointment beyond the first generation. The apostles, the letter says, foresaw that the very office of oversight would become an object of strife: “Our apostles also knew, through our Lord Jesus Christ, that there would be strife over the bishop’s office (episkopē). For this cause therefore, having received complete foreknowledge, they appointed the aforesaid persons, and afterwards gave the further injunction that, if these should fall asleep, other approved men should succeed to their ministry (leitourgia)” (1 Clement 44.1–2; trans. Holmes 2007). The apostles thus built succession into the ministry itself: the death of one minister was provided for in advance by the appointment of another. This is the textual heart of what the later tradition would call apostolic succession.

From this the letter draws the conclusion that condemns the Corinthians: “Those, therefore, who were appointed by them or, later on, by other reputable men with the consent of the whole church, and who have ministered to the flock of Christ blamelessly, humbly, peaceably, and unselfishly, and for a long time have been well spoken of by all — these men we consider to be unjustly removed from their ministry” (1 Clement 44.3; trans. Holmes 2007). Two modes of lawful appointment are recognized: directly by the apostles, or by later “men of repute” acting “with the consent of the whole church.” Either way, ministers so appointed who have served blamelessly cannot justly be deposed. The Corinthian sin lay precisely in deposing such men: “For it will be no small sin for us, if we depose from the bishop’s office (episkopē) those who have offered the gifts blamelessly and in holiness” (1 Clement 44.4; trans. Holmes 2007), and the letter laments that “we see that you have removed certain persons, though they were living honorably, from the ministry which they had honored by their blameless conduct” (1 Clement 44.6; trans. Holmes 2007; cf. 47.6, where the deposers are “one or two persons” rebelling “against the presbyters”). The deposing of lawful ministers is set against the whole edifice of order erected in chapters 20–44.

The Terminology: Bishops and Presbyters

A feature of these chapters that is crucial for any reading of them is the letter’s vocabulary for the ministry. 1 Clement knows two terms for the higher ministers and uses them, in the same context and for the same persons, interchangeably. The office instituted in chapters 42 and 44 is the episkopē, the “bishop’s office,” and the men appointed to it are called “bishops” (episkopoi) in 42.4–5. Yet the very men whose deposition the letter is protesting — the same men holding the same episkopē — are called “presbyters” (presbyteroi): “Blessed are those presbyters who have gone on ahead, who took their departure at a mature and fruitful age, for they need no longer fear that someone might remove them from their established place. For we see that you have removed certain persons… from the ministry” (1 Clement 44.5–6; trans. Holmes 2007). The deposed are “presbyters”; their office is the episkopē; and the appointed ministers of 42 are “bishops.” The terms episkopos and presbyteros denote, in this letter, the same persons.

Two further observations follow from the vocabulary. First, the ministry the letter describes is twofold in its grades of higher and lower service: “bishops and deacons” (episkopous kai diakonous, 42.4), with the bishops also called presbyters. Second — and this is data of the first importance — the letter nowhere names a single monarchical bishop, neither at Corinth, the church being addressed, nor at Rome, the church writing. The plural “presbyters” and “bishops” stand throughout; no individual is named as the bishop of either city, and the letter itself speaks in the corporate voice of the Roman church rather than that of a single ruling prelate. This silence is a fixed point that every interpretation of 1 Clement must accommodate, and it bears directly on the wider question of the early Roman episcopate (The Third Bishop of Rome).

What Does 1 Clement 42–44 Establish?

Because these chapters stand so near the head of the patristic record, what they are taken to prove has been contested for centuries, and the contest tracks larger confessional and historical disagreements about the origin of the ministry. The question is not whether 1 Clement teaches that the ministry is apostolic in origin and ordered — it plainly does — but whether it already contains the developed doctrine of apostolic succession and the threefold hierarchy that later centuries would read out of it.

[Disputed: What 1 Clement 42–44 establishes about apostolic succession and the ministry. The “high” reading (much Roman Catholic and some Orthodox interpretation) takes the passage as an early and essentially clear witness to apostolic succession as a settled doctrine: the ministers stand in an unbroken line of appointment from the apostles, who were themselves sent from Christ as Christ from God, and whose office is divinely transmitted and may not be set aside; the chapters function as a charter of the ordered, transmitted ministry that the later threefold hierarchy makes explicit. J. B. Lightfoot’s classic essay “The Christian Ministry” reads chapters 42 and 44 as evidence that the apostolic ministry was deliberately provided with a succession from the first, even while Lightfoot himself stressed that 1 Clement still knows only the twofold presbyter-bishop and deacon (Lightfoot, “The Christian Ministry,” 1868; S. Clement of Rome, 1890). In Roman Catholic theology the passage holds a settled place in the dossier on holy orders and apostolic succession, and it is read in continuity with the conciliar teaching on the episcopate as the successors of the apostles. The “developmental” reading (much critical scholarship) holds that 1 Clement still reflects a twofold order of presbyter-bishops and deacons, not yet the threefold monepiscopate of Ignatius; that its “succession” is a succession of properly and lawfully appointed ministers — a guarantee of orderly appointment and irremovability — rather than the later technical doctrine of an episcopal pipeline of sacramental grace transmitted by consecration; and that the letter represents one stage in a development not yet complete. Hans von Campenhausen reads 1 Clement as marking the transition from a charismatic to an “official” conception of ministry, in which succession secures legitimate order but is not yet the developed sacramental theory (von Campenhausen, Ecclesiastical Authority and Spiritual Power, 1969). Peter Lampe sets the letter against a Roman church still organized in fractionated house communities under a college of presbyters, with no monarchical bishop yet in view (Lampe, From Paul to Valentinus, 2003). Horacio Lona’s commentary likewise reads the succession of chapter 44 as the orderly replacement of ministers rather than a fully formed doctrine of episcopal succession (Lona, Der erste Clemensbrief, 1998). The two readings are not always cleanly opposed — Lightfoot belongs partly to both — and the disagreement is as much about what counts as “the doctrine” of apostolic succession as about the text itself.]

The Orthodox synthesis, soberly stated, neither demands the maximal “high” reading nor rests content with a purely developmental one. Orthodoxy receives 1 Clement as a genuine and early witness that the Christian ministry is apostolic in origin — derived from the apostles, who were sent from Christ — and ordered, so that lawful ministers, appointed in due form and serving blamelessly, may not be arbitrarily deposed. That much the letter says without strain. What Orthodoxy does not require 1 Clement to contain is the fully developed threefold monepiscopate of the later second century, still less the technical doctrine of Roman primacy that a much later age would attach to this letter. Apostolic succession, in the Orthodox understanding, is carried by the episcopal order received within and by the whole Church, and is given in the laying-on of hands within the conciliar life of the Church; the letter’s recognition that ministers may be appointed “by other reputable men with the consent of the whole church” (44.3) coheres with that ecclesial, conciliar account of orders rather than with any later individualized theory (Holy Orders; Church Governance). The further question of what, if anything, the Roman church’s act of writing this letter establishes about Roman primacy is a distinct one, treated on its own ground and not to be smuggled into the exegesis of chapters 42–44 (The Primacy Debate; Orthodox vs Catholic).

The Theological Center: Order as Concord

It would distort 1 Clement to read chapters 40–44 as a treatise on church polity detached from the letter’s pastoral aim. The argument from order serves the letter’s governing theme, which is concord (homonoia) restored through humility (tapeinophrosynē). Order is not valued for its own sake but because it is the form that love and peace take in a community: each member keeping his appointed place is the social shape of the humility the letter everywhere commends (Concord and Humility). The deposing of the presbyters is condemned not as the breach of an abstract rule but as the work of jealousy (zēlos) and self-will tearing the body — the same vices the letter traces from Cain through the recent martyrs. The ministry, ordered and apostolic, exists to serve the peace of the church; and it is in defense of that peace, against the sedition that had shattered it, that the Roman church set down the most consequential pages the sub-apostolic age would leave on the subject of holy orders. The reception of 1 Clement within the patristic witness to the ministry belongs to the broader Orthodox reading of the Fathers as a single, cumulative testimony (Church Fathers).

References

Holmes, Michael W., ed. and trans. The Apostolic Fathers: Greek Texts and English Translations. 3rd ed. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2007.
Ehrman, Bart D., ed. and trans. The Apostolic Fathers, Volume I. Loeb Classical Library 24. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003.
Lightfoot, J. B. “The Christian Ministry.” In Saint Paul’s Epistle to the Philippians. London: Macmillan, 1868 (and later editions).
Lightfoot, J. B. The Apostolic Fathers, Part I: S. Clement of Rome. 2 vols. London: Macmillan, 1890.
von Campenhausen, Hans. Ecclesiastical Authority and Spiritual Power in the Church of the First Three Centuries. Translated by J. A. Baker. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1969.
Lona, Horacio E. Der erste Clemensbrief. Kommentar zu den Apostolischen Vätern 2. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1998.
Lampe, Peter. From Paul to Valentinus: Christians at Rome in the First Two Centuries. Translated by Michael Steinhauser. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2003.