Reconsidering Ecclesiology

In my Reformation Day post I said that one of my disagreements with Roman Catholicism was a preference for a decentralized ecclesiology (doctrine of the church) as opposed to a centralized, hierarchical one. Specifically I wrote:

For most Protestants, the local congregation is sufficient in itself for the Church to be present. The universal church is the invisible collection of all believers, past and present, living and dead. It doesn’t have an institutional expression per se. As Timothy George puts it “the invisible church emerges into visibility in the local congregation” when the Word is rightly preached and the Sacraments and rightly administered.

Thinking about this some more, this seems not quite right. To be more specific, there are many forms of church polity that steer between pure congregationalism (which is what my earlier post looks like it’s endorsing) and an episcopal form like that of the RCC. Indeed, my own ELCA tries to steer just such a middle course.

This was brought home by a post at Noli Irritare Leones comparing Quaker and Anglican ecclesiologies:

…I hold no fixed theological position about how local churches ought to relate to any larger organization. But I do know that the Trinity International University faith statement version of justifying local control makes no sense to me; there has never been a time when you had only local churches and some sort of invisible church; local churches have always, rather, been part of some larger organization. It’s so now; it was so in the time of the early post-Biblical church, and it was so in Biblical times as well. Paul certainly doesn’t speak, in his epistles, as if local congregations were all there were.

I think this is right. There has to be some way that local congregations relate to one another and are accountable to the larger Christian community. Whether this means something like an episcopal structure may be a matter of prudence rather than biblical mandate, but it seems like something like episcopal oversight was prevalent very early on in the church’s history, not something to be disregarded lightly.