Rise of the Fuhrer Friars and Spiritual Stazi
Telling wives to snitch on their husbands. Cryptic warnings about illegal words. Opinion-based anathemas. Forbidden ideas. Thought Crimes. When did clergy in Reformed evangelicalism start acting like the Secret Police?
It might be true that some have warned for years that a certain segment of Reformed evangelicalism has harbored politically incorrect ideas. But it’s also true that people have warned for years that Elder Rule has led some to heavy-handed power trips. Perhaps they’re both right.
You can’t believe that certain ethnic or religious groups have historically had besetting sins, and you certainly can’t say it out loud.
If your husband has crazy or conspiratorial ideas, you should tell on him to your pastor.
If your congregant has shared an inappropriate meme, track him down across the ocean and tell his pastor – heck, tell a bunch of pastors – about it. Because it’s an international incident, for crying out loud.
If someone believes something you don’t, or if they frame an argument in a way you don’t like, don’t debate them. No, no. The fuhrer does not debate. Charge them with thought crimes and call an ecclesiastical Nuremberg.
Young men hold beliefs you don’t like? Launch up your podcast and scream at them, and demand that they submit to your authority.
If a popular preacher stumbles into adultery, demand that everyone keep their mouths shut unless they are Ze Elderz, who are handling it.
Find yourself challenged in the Marketplace of Ideas by a layman? Tell them they’re sinning against Ze Elderz’ authority.
These are all caricatures painted of Elder Rule, which we at Protestia have largely poo-pooed for years. After all, we’re all aware that deacons can be just as tyrannical as elders, especially if they are elders under a different title. Besides, it’s not like the tyranny of majority rule is any better in a church than it is in a country. Even a majority vote of the entire congregation can be, to some extent, tyrannical.
But I’ve got to tell you, what we’ve seen come out of Phoenix, Moscow, and Dallas in recent weeks has made that caricature come to life for all of us. At a certain point, we’ve gone far beyond Biblical ecclesiology, which accepts the plurality of elders as a Biblical given, and has replaced Monarchial ecclesiology with Oligarchial. This isn’t much better, although it does seem fairly new.
Of course, church government has always been a bit of a controversial bailiwick for Christians. Even the church fathers disagreed about whether or not the church should be led by a monarchial episcopacy or mono-episcopate for short. Most agreed with the plurality of elders, with Ignatius being the exception. But a little later in church history, Ignatius seems to have won out.
For my part, as a Reformed Baptist by conviction, I’ve always believed in elder-led governance, although in reality, it almost always becomes mono-episcopate. What I mean by this, is that the church will inevitably view one man in particular as being of higher authority, no matter what the church or even that pastor teaches about ecclesiology. I was once in a church I knew had no “senior pastor” by conviction – and who insisted dogmatically that such a term was devilish – but when I coyly asked who the senior pastor was, every eye in the room turned to the man they considered to be in charge.
My point is that there is a bit of a spectrum on this issue, at least so far as practice goes. But in my surmising, some have let eldership go to their head. Douglas Wilson and James White seem to have clearly made that error. Or, at least, it appears that way to me.
You can tell, in White’s literal screaming into the podcast camera at young men who have rejected his status of Bishop over the Internet, that he feels a degree of authority over young men he’s never met. They should submit, he thinks, to his vast superiority of intellect and experience.
Or perhaps, Douglas Wilson exhibits this trait, accusing young men of “fatherlessness” on the grounds that they listen to someone besides him. He is willing to be their daddy if they’d only submit to him.
And when you look online to social media, you’ll find, as a constant refrain, men telling other men that they’re not qualified to an opinion because they aren’t an ordained elder. One man told me that I wasn’t qualified to offer an opinion on JD Greear buying sermon material from Docent Group because – unlike him – I wasn’t a pastor. And he wasn’t even referring to my de-gracing but had just noticed that ‘pastor’ was not in my X bio. I’m pretty sure that’s not how the right to an opinion works.
Of all the hurtful things that I heard about myself, amidst the controversy in my own previous church, is when the new authorities told congregants that their opinion over handling my discipline didn’t matter “because they weren’t in leadership.” Never in 15 years had such an idea ever left my mouth, and I was ashamed that in my absence, such a thing would ever be uttered.
For those of us who are Baptists, there is only a thin veil between clergy and laity, to the extent that any divide exists at all. My first act as pastor of a new church, many years ago, was to scrape ‘Reverend’ from my name on the church door with my pocket knife and paint over the word ‘pastor’ on the front row parking space. We’re not comfortable with such divides in general.
No, as Baptists, we believe in the Priesthood of the Believer while holding true to the concepts of the pastoral office. The role of pastor is indeed an office, just as the role of apostle was an office (the disciples viewed Judas’ office as a vacancy that needed to be filled). While I’m firmly against laymen administering baptism or the Lord’s Supper without explicit permission granted by the church on a case-by-case basis, for example, I’m not willing to strike from the record the opinions of anyone within the body.
And I mean anyone. At least, not those with standing as baptized believers in the Lord Jesus.
This does not seem to be the impression left, as of late, by the aforementioned men. In fact, Wilson’s recent advice to wives to narc on their husbands for holding unpopular views seems to mirror the “If you see something, say something” propaganda posters in the Third Reich. It’s like the Secret Police rewarding children for tattling on their parents with brownies and a new set of parents. It’s unsettling.
Or, as another example, it sure seems like Tobias Reimschlonger – the pastor in Germany who tracked his former parishioner across the ocean to tell on him to his pastor (and when his pastor didn’t listen, tracked down prominent pastors and then told on that pastor) – appears comfortable with certain ideas being illegal. In fact, he said that directly on Iron Sharpens Iron, lamenting that the United States doesn’t have the same speech crime categories as Germany.
One would be hard-pressed to believe that the climate that promotes Friar Fuhrers online doesn’t restrict opinions in their own congregation. If the power exists, for example, to forbid political opinions, it also would probably forbid an opinion of the church’s worship music. And that, frankly, shouldn’t happen in a church that believes in the Priesthood of the Believer.
We are very much going to have to struggle with the idea of proper ecclesiastical authority and its role in both the church and outside the church. We’ll be discussing this topic during Thursday’s Polemics Round Table, and I hope you will join us in taking part.
That is, if your pastor gives you permission.