On The Role of Bishops
Photo by Dag Heinrichowski on Unsplash
Thomas Gumbleton, a long-running Roman Catholic Bishop in Detroit, died in April. He was 94 years old, having been a bishop since 1968. He was surely an outlier among Catholic bishops, as his compassion and his commitment to restorative justice led him to focus his energy and leadership on urgent social issues and social crises:
-he paid students’ tuition when they needed such assistance;
-he was a peace advocate and war protester, actively engaged at nuclear sites;
-he vigorously advocated for LGBTQ rights, a cause that evoked his removal from parish ministry;
-he gave support for victims of clergy sexual abuse.
He stood alongside Jesus’ name for those “who were hurting,” as James Martin shared in his summation of Gumbleton’s life in The Christian Century, June 2024.
Reflection on the bold, compassionate ministry of Gumbleton has led me to consider the role of bishops in the church and, more broadly, ordained leadership in the church. In the New Testament, the term “bishop” (episkopus) is used only sparingly, as the early church had not yet developed an organizational chart. The New Testament characteristically refers to the exercise of “oversight” of Christian congregations, an office that carried with it none of the “magisterial” claims that have later attached to the office. For the most part the accent in these several usages is on the moral qualities of leadership, without details about duties or responsibilities.
-In Acts 20:29 Paul admonishes church leaders in Ephesus to be “alert for “wolves” that seek to distort the truth. Paul offers himself as an example for such leaders; he did not covet silver, gold, or clothing. The bishops are to “support the weak” and he encourages generous giving.
-In the later Epistle of I Timothy, bishops have a noble task; they should be above reproach, temperate, sensible, respectable, hospitable, and gentle, not a drunkard, not quarrelsome, not violent, and not a lover of money. Bishops, moreover, must be well thought of by outsiders and skillfully manage the household of faith and their own household as well (3:1-7).
-In Titus 1:7-9, a bishop must be blameless, not arrogant, not quick-tempered, not violent, not addicted to wine, and not greedy for gain. Positively a bishop must be hospitable, a lover of goodness, prudent, upright, devout, and self-controlled. The only specific function mentioned here is to teach and preach “sound doctrine” with a capacity to refute those who contradict such sound teaching.
-In I Peter 5:1-11 the leaders are identified as “elders” who “exercise oversight.” Such leaders must not lord it over others, but be humble and disciplined.
The general image in these texts is that the bishop is to protect the faith community in a hostile environment, and also guard against internal distortion. The summation of moral qualities for such a leader reflects the general catalog of Paul in Galatians 5:22-23. The only substantive function is “sound teaching,” and that is left without content. The accent is on morality and an exemplary life, with multiple warnings against coveting, love of money, and greedy gain.
The most thorough and comprehensive review of bishops in the early centuries of the church known to me is the magisterial work of Peter Brown, Through the Eye of a Needle: Wealth, the Fall of Rome, and the Making of Christianity in the West, 350-550 A D (2012). Brown takes his title from the instruction Jesus offers to his disciples, after the encounter with the rich man who had “great possessions.” He specifies the alternative life to which he summons them:
It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God (Matthew 19: 24).
Brown’s careful, wise historical review focuses on the powerful seduction of money as a major temptation for church leaders, and the requirement that bishops must model a refusal of the temptation of money. Brown’s analysis pertains not only to the manifest greed of some church leaders but to the readiness of the church to accommodate itself to a world constructed by private wealth to the neglect of the common good. Clearly the warnings issued to bishops noted above, along with the parable of Jesus, constitute recognition that the church and its leaders must be very different from a world that is propelled by money.
Brown opens his review with a recognition that from Constantine forward, the Roman state was flooded with an economy of gold that produced men of enormous wealth. He marks “the entry of the rich” into the church after 370 A.D. as the beginning of triumphant Catholicism” (p. 32). The church lived in a society that practiced the “love of the city” with its showy extravagance over the “love of the poor.” He cites Ambrose, the great bishop in Milan, as representative of those who saw in the gospel a mandate to care for the poor, and consequently a vigorous warning against the accumulation of wealth. According to Augustine, moreover,
The abandonment of private wealth was a first step toward that future [of a Heavenly Jerusalem] (p. 180).
Brown shows that Jerome, third of this great triad of witnesses and teachers, likewise warned against excessive wealth, and advocated for the well-being of the poor. The witness of these three presents a solid front concerning a critique of excessive private wealth that brought with it excessive power.
Brown illustrates the radical transition in the church in the fifth century A.D. when the wealthy joined and became dominant in church. This led to the rise of “magisterial bishops” because there was now much accumulated wealth and property to be managed in and for the church. A result of this adaptation to the wealth of the world was the “othering” of the clergy, now set apart to preside over a spiritual domain. In one of Brown’s most telling paragraphs is this:
Hence we witness a progressive “othering” of the clergy. They became a sacral class. Their dress, hairstyle, and sexual behavior were increasingly expected to be sharply different from that of the laity… The tonsure was taken on as a sine qua non of both the clerical and monastic state… The tonsure emerged as a response to lay demand for such a sign [of difference]. Those who interceded for the laity, as a sacral class, were to be clearly designated by means of a ritual shaving of the crown of the head that had deep roots in the ancient folklore of hair (517).
The emergence of a “sacral class” permitted people with worldly wealth to be accepted in the church as normal and without need for critique. Brown judges that the provision for celibacy for clergy was what one would call “economically driven.” The wealthy in the church wanted the clergy to occupy a position in the “spiritual” domain that did not mix with the affairs of the world. Thus the maintenance of “another world” became the responsibility of the clergy. In a telling figure, Brown notices that money that had previously gone to the poor was now designated for the construction of imposing tombs and mausoleums for the wealthy, thus an assurance of good prospects for the afterlife. Attention was drawn away from this life to that other life.
In passing, it is worth notice that African American enslaved in our own society also sang songs of hope concerning the next world in very different cadences; except for them such singing was coded language for hope of escape to the promised land of freedom beyond the reach of the enslaving economy. Excessive attention to the afterlife had a powerful capacity to leave the present economic world in its excesses unnoticed and therefore beyond criticism. The wealthy wanted a decisive distinction between the world of money and power and the other world of spiritual acceptance and wellbeing. Thus the church became an endorser and beneficiary of an economy that was unrestrained, as rich people willingly invested in the “sacral functions” of the church. The long-term result of this development in the church is an insistence that the clergy should “stick to spiritual matters and not engage in economic or political matters about which they know nothing.”
This transition in the fifth century set the Western church on its way to easy accommodation to wealth. And of course, in my own tradition of Calvinism, the great Reformer found ways to accommodate the rising mercantile class, not least by an acceptance of usury that led to acceptance of the legitimacy of rent capitalism. Brown’s study requires us to recognize that we in the Western church continue to collude in the affirmation of great private wealth. It turns out that radical Christian teaching on the economy for that reason becomes an immense challenge to the clergy.
I write these words on the Sunday when our local preacher exposited, for our “Mission Sunday,” the text of Deuteronomy 15:1-18 with its bold mandate of relief and restoration of the poor. She linked the text with the episode wherein Jesus defended the woman for her extravagance in anointing him with precious oil with the assertion, “You will always have the poor with you” (Matthew 26:11). Our preacher recognized that Jesus’ statement concerning the poor is a quote from Deuteronomy 15. In that text, however, the point that Jesus surely knew but did not quote is that generosity for the poor will assure that there will be no poor among you (Deuteronomy 15:4). The urgency of relief and restoration for the poor is indeed urgent; it is also possible! This teaching of Moses, moreover, is marked by five “absolute infinitives,” a device in Hebrew grammar in which the accent of a verb is expressed by a repetition of the verb. Thus “give generously” is “give give.” The usage of five absolute infinitives in this text assures that this teaching of Moses is his most important teaching. The early church, as Brown shows, fully understood the urgency of generosity to the poor. But as Brown also shows, the church long ago lost its way in this matter. It remains for us now to do the hard homework of recovering this most elemental mandate of the gospel.
We may indeed be grateful for the life and ministry of Bishop Gumbleton. His bold tilt of ministry toward the needy is a compelling witness to the deep insistence of the gospel. The clergy (and then the whole church) has always before it the either/or of clergy with concern for the poor in generative and transformative ways, or clergy that serve primarily to promote and protect the resources of the church for the sake of the church. This deep either/or is urgent for the contemporary church. The church requires clergy and bishops who step away from magisterial posturing by the church in order to embrace the “poor peoples’ church” that follows the lead of the poor man from Nazareth.
