File Name: Lindsay, Thomas Martin - The Church and the Ministry in the Early Centuries
File Submitter: david psalms
File Submitted: 25 Nov 2012
File Category: Reference Books (topx)
Author: Thomas Martin Lindsaye-Sword Version: 9.x - 10.x
The aim of these Lectures is to pourtray the organized life of the Christian Society as that was lived in the thousands of little communities formed by the proclamation of the Gospel of our Lord during the first three centuries.
The method of description has been to select writings which seemed to reveal that life most clearly, and to group round the central sources of information illustrative evidence, contemporary or other. The principle of selection has been to take, as the central authorities, those writings which, when carefully examined, reveal the greatest number of details.
Thus, the Epistles of St. Paul, especially the First Epistle to the Corinthians, have been chosen as furnishing the greatest number of facts going to form a picture of the life of the Christian Society during the first century, and the material derived from the other canonical writings such as the Acts of the Apostles, the Apocalypse and the Pastoral Epistles, have been arranged around them. Similarly the Didache, the Sources of the Apostolic Canons and the Epistles of Ignatius have been selected for the light they throw on the life and work of the Church during the second century. The Canons of Hippolytus, supplemented by the writings of Irenaeus and of Tertullian, have furnished the basis for the description of the organization during the first, and the Epistles of Cyprian of Carthage for that of the second half of the third century.
The method used has the disadvantage of making necessary some repetitions, which the form of Lectures rendered the more inevitable; but it puts the reader in possession of the contemporary evidence in the simplest way.
Quotations from the original authorities have been given in English for the most part, and, as a rule, the translations have been taken from well known versions--from the Ante-Nicene Library, from the late Bishop Lightfoot's translations of Clement of Rome and of Ignatius, and from Messrs. Hitchcock and Brown's version of the Didache. This has been done after consultation with friends whose advice seemed to be too valuable to be neglected.
Table of Contents
Chapter I. The New Testament Conception of the Church.
Chapter II. A Christian Church in Apostolic Times.
Chapter III. The Prophetic Ministry.
Chapter IV. The Churches Creating Their Ministry.
Chapter V. The Ministry in the Second Century.
Chapter VI. The Fall of the Prophetic Ministry and the Conservative Revolt.
Chapter VII. Ministry Changing to Priesthood.
Chapter VIII. The Roman State Religion and Its Effects on the Organization of the Church.
Appendix. Sketch of the History of Modern Controversy About the Office-bearers in the Primitive Christian Churches.
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