Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 Establishing Order via National, Provincial, and Local Church Orders: “Let All Things Be Done with Decency and Order”
- 2 Establishing Authority: Electing Elders and Deacons
- 3 Establishing Confessional Identity : An “Honest Citizen, Even Though a Catholic”
- 4 Navigating Intra-Confessional Conflict: “Live at Peace with Everyone”?
- 5 Establishing Belief and Practice: Rural Approaches to Sabbath Observance
- Conclusion : Establishing and Navigating Reformed Identity in the Rural Low Countries
- Bibliography
- Index
2 - Establishing Authority: Electing Elders and Deacons
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 February 2024
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 Establishing Order via National, Provincial, and Local Church Orders: “Let All Things Be Done with Decency and Order”
- 2 Establishing Authority: Electing Elders and Deacons
- 3 Establishing Confessional Identity : An “Honest Citizen, Even Though a Catholic”
- 4 Navigating Intra-Confessional Conflict: “Live at Peace with Everyone”?
- 5 Establishing Belief and Practice: Rural Approaches to Sabbath Observance
- Conclusion : Establishing and Navigating Reformed Identity in the Rural Low Countries
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Abstract
Chapter 2 begins with establishing the importance of elders and deacons in Dutch Reformed congregations. The importance of their offices was practical but, the chapter demonstrates, was also a deeply held theological position. While theological tenets and Dutch Reformed church orders were meant to regulate the elections of elders and deacons, small, rural churches altered the processes and policies governing the nomination and election of elders and deacons, the men who were nominated and elected, and the expectations around each office. In particular, the chapter elucidates the challenges that rural churches faced regarding elders and deacons and the means by which they addressed those challenges.
Keywords: Elders; Deacons; Elections; Church Orders; Ecclesiastical Offices
Introduction
If anyone says that bishops are not superior to priests, or that they have not the power to confirm and ordain, or that the power which they have is common to them and to priests, or that orders conferred by them without the consent or call of the people or of the secular power are invalid, or that those who have been neither rightly ordained nor sent by ecclesiastical and canonical authority, but come from elsewhere, are lawful ministers of the word and of the sacraments, let him be anathema.
So reads Canon 7 of the Twenty-Third Session of the Council of Trent. The canon unambiguously condemns those who might object to the legitimacy of the Catholic ecclesiastical order. In diametrical opposition to the Council of Trent's declaration, Menno Simons declared to his readers in his explanation of the “true” Christian faith that, “Again, you are also priests anointed of God.” However, Simons goes on to contrast the priesthood of these true believers with Catholic conceptions of the priesthood: “Besides, you are not such priests, who of their own righteousness offer bread and wine for the sins and transgressions of the common people, and for the souls of the deceased, neither are you to sing nor read mass, nor worship the golden, silver, wooden and stone images, nor serve nor burn incense to them as the poor, ignorant priests of the world do.”
Obviously, the Protestant Reformations as a whole conceived of ecclesiology quite differently from their Catholic counterparts. Philip Benedict, for example, observes that, “The Protestant Reformation wrought few transformations more thorough than that which restructured what had previously been called the first estate.”
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Navigating Reformed Identity in the Rural Dutch RepublicCommunities, Belief, and Piety, pp. 91 - 124Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2023