Get Rid of the Old Yeast: Responding to Clergy Sexual Misconduct
Part 3: A Bishop Must Be Blameless (1 Timothy 3:2)
Christ is Risen!
Forgive me for not posting in a while. Confessions, as well as the services and Holy Week and Pascha left me with little time (and less energy!) for writing.
In a passage we’ll come back to in a moment, St Paul concludes his instruction to St Timothy about the qualifications for ordination by telling the young bishop
These things I write to you, though I hope to come to you shortly; but if I am delayed, I write so that you may know how you ought to conduct yourself in the house of God, which is the church of the living God, the pillar and ground of the truth. And without controversy great is the mystery of godliness:
God was manifested in the flesh,
Justified in the Spirit,
Seen by angels,
Preached among the Gentiles,
Believed on in the world,
Received up in glory (vv. 14-16).
What’s immediately clear is that candidates for ordination must be good men. Not only that, they are to be married to an equally virtuous wife and have good children. The testimony of the church about character, however, isn’t enough. A prospective minister must also have a good reputation in the wider community; pagans and Jews must know him to be a good man.
All of this requires, St John Chrysostom (347-407) says, that the man who aspires to ordination “purify his soul entirely from ambition for the office.” Ideally, he goes on to say, he should think so highly of the ministry “as to avoid its responsibility from the start” before going on to say that
...if anyone should cling to a position for which he is not fit, he deprives himself of all pardon and provokes God’s anger the more by adding a second and more serious offense… [T]o desire the absolute authority and power of the bishop but not the work itself.
Meanwhile, St Augustine, never being one to not speak his mind, says that if the man lacks these qualities we don’t have a “bad bishop”—since a bad bishop is no bishop at all—but a “scarecrow ... guarding the vineyard.”
Using the analogy of a metalsmith, St Gregory of Nyssa explains the reason for this strictness is that “When making a vessel of iron” we don’t “entrust the task...to those who know nothing of the matter but to those acquainted with the art.”
And so,
Ought we not, therefore, to entrust souls to him who is well-skilled to soften them by the fervent heat of the Holy Spirit and who by the impress of rational implements may fashion each one of you to be a chosen and useful vessel?[As St Paul makes clear to St Timothy] the subject is molded by the character of his superior and that the upright walk of the guide becomes that of his followers too. For what the Master is, such does he make the disciple to be.
What then is the character of the man who we would see ordained? What, if you will, are the preconditions, for one taking on the cure of souls?
The candidate for holy orders must not be a drunkard but sober; not violent but gentle. Moreover, he must be a good husband and father who is married to a good and serious woman who is herself an admirable wife and mother.
And all of this is necessary because the clergyman is himself a living revelation of the Gospel. He must live in all areas of his life in such a manner so the faithful know how to live and that “the church of the living God, the pillar and foundation of the truth” might preach
...the mystery of godliness:
God was manifested in the flesh,
Justified in the Spirit,
Seen by angels,
Preached among the Gentiles,
Believed on in the world,
Received up in glory.
And this is why the clergyman who falls into sexual sin must be removed; he has failed to meet the minimum standard for ordination; he has failed to live up to what is required to enter the ministry. Behavior that would have precluded his ordination now requires his dismissal from the ministry.
One more thing.
While the reasons are likely somewhat different across Christian traditions, I think there are two reasons we are often paralyzed when confronted with clergy misconduct. We have
hold ordinated ministry too cheaply and
lost sight of the seriousness of sexual immorality within the life of the church.
We are, in other words, addicted to what Bonhoeffer calls "cheap grace" or
…the grace we bestow on ourselves. Cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline, Communion without confession…Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate.
Cheap grace, he goes on to say, is to hear the gospel preached as follows: "Of course, you have sinned, but now everything is forgiven, so you can stay as you are and enjoy the consolations of forgiveness." While maybe a comfort in the moment, in the long term, cheap grace fails because it contains no demand for discipleship.
Unlike cheap grace,
costly grace confronts us as a gracious call to follow Jesus, it comes as a word of forgiveness to the broken spirit and the contrite heart. It is costly because it compels a man to submit to the yoke of Christ and follow him; it is grace because Jesus says: "My yoke is easy and my burden is light.“
Let’s look at the harm “cheap grace” does in the life of the church and in our own lives as believers.