Hi, I'm David Bercot. Tonight, we're going to be looking at some questions that different readers have sent in. And I'll just get into the very first one. I'm not going to give the names of any of these people in case they would prefer to be anonymous. He said," I am a single man who will soon be ordained as an elder in a church." I recently discovered that some early Christians prohibited a bishop from marrying if he had entered the ministry while single.
I desire to marry in the future, and I don't see anything in the Bible that forbids it, but I feel uneasy wondering if I might be wrong. What do you think? Can I enter the office of Elder and then marry afterwards? Okay. So when I first got the question, I had to scratch my brain. It's like," Wow, where in the early Christian writings does it say you can't get married after you enter the ministry, or at least as an elder or a bishop?" And lo and behold, it's right there in the dictionary of early Christian beliefs.
But I'll share a little secret with you. I don't remember everything that's in that dictionary. I compiled it 25 years ago. No, more like 30 years ago. And it's got, I think, 7,000 quotations, something like that. I don't remember everything that is in there. If I haven't had to use it now, if I've used it, yeah, then I remember things. But if I haven't, I tend to totally forget that they're even in there.
So I actually reached out to the brother and said," You have a specific quote." And so he pointed me back to my dictionary. So there's two quotes in there. It's under church government, and the subheading is the beginnings of clerical celibacy. And there's a reason why I put that subheading. All right. So the first quote is from Hippolytus. It would date to about the year 225 AD. And he is criticizing Callistus, who was the bishop of Rome at that time. He had been an elder in the church.
I think when he's writing this, I don't think he's an elder any longer. There ended up being kind of a church split. He had been part of a schism for a while. Anyway, he says this," If also, however, anyone who is in holy orders should become married, he and he's talking about Callistus, permitted such a one to continue in holy orders as if he had not sinned." And he alleges that what has been spoken by the apostle refers to such a person. The quotation is," Who are you to judge another man's servant?" Okay.
So Hippolytus feels that it was wrong if you were ordained as an elder or bishop as a single man and then married afterwards. Okay. The other quotation, the only other one that I had found dealing with this from that time period is from the apostolic constitutions. Now, unfortunately, they're not pre-Nicene. They date to the year 390. Now, much of the material in the Apostolic Constitutions comes from the Didache, the Didascalia, and other things that are pre-Nicene. So the apostolic constitutions are a mixed bag.
You have to be careful when you're reading them. There are certain things in there that are clearly post-Nicene. And then there are things in there that we know from evidence are clearly pre-Nicene. And then some things you don't know.
And it says," Of those who come into the clergy unmarried, we permit only the readers and singers to marry afterwards if they so desire." So this is actually different probably from what Hippolytus is saying because here it's saying even if you came in as a deacon or by then they would have had subdeacons, that even if you had those even if you were only ordained to that, you could not get married if you didn't come in as a married person. Okay. So I'm going to give you a fairly brief answer on this.
The principle, the overriding principle that anyone reading the early Christian writings should never forget. And that is, the scriptures are our only inspired source of authority. Now, the early Christian writings are our best commentary on Scripture. And in my opinion, they're invaluable. When we are looking at the New Testament in particular, they shed a lot of light on the Old Testament.
But the New Testament in particular, where Christians have often disagreed on what this verse means or that verse, when we look at what they believed in the centuries before Constantine, particularly in the second century, when you're within a century of the apostles, then like I say, these writings are invaluable. But when you start using them as an independent source of authority, in other words, there's nothing in the Scriptures that deal with this, but you're using them as an independent source of authority.
Well, then you know frankly, they can be dangerous. Be very careful against doing that. So in your case, as you point out, there is nothing in Scripture that forbids that, that even gives a hint towards that. In fact, when we look at the qualifications of a bishop, 1 Timothy 3 verses 2 through 5, and I'm not going to read the entire one, but just the one that pertains the qualifications that pertain to your question.
Paul says," A bishop then must be blameless, the husband of one wife." So his assumption is that a bishop is going to be married, okay? That's the beginning assumption. And then he goes on after listing many other qualifications, he says," One who rules his own house well, having his children in submission with all reverence." So he not only is basing it on the assumption that this man is married, but that he has children. And so one of his qualifications is how does he manage his household?
And here in household, he's specifically talking about children, not servants. He says," For if a man does not know how to rule his own house, how will he take care of the church of God?" So when the underlying assumption is that this man who is a bishop or elder is a married man with children, then I would be very slow to adopt the view that this was an apostolic practice that if you were single, you couldn't get married later on. So again, we have no scripture against it.
So no, I would feel, in your case, in answer to your question, you are quite free to marry. The apostles say nothing against that, and they even assume that as an elder, that you are a married man. Now, we do know from the early Christians, I think they do shed some important light here. The question that often comes up is, is a man required to marry? Is he required to have children if he's going to be an elder? And no, the answer is no. The apostle Paul himself was not married.
And here he was acting in authority over the churches. And it would seem that Timothy was not a married man at the time that he was performing his ministry, and many of the others were no doubt single. And these were men who were in positions even higher up than a bishop or an elder. So the early Christians, no, they saw it as a good thing. And Jesus talks favorably about Christians who become eunuchs, figuratively speaking, for the kingdom.
That is, they forego marriage so that they can devote their life to the work of the kingdom without the burdens and responsibilities and distraction that marriage would bring. So it's an honorable thing. It's a good thing, but it's not a requirement. In fact, again, the requirement, the assumption is that this person is going to be married.
And another issue here and why I entitle this in the dictionary of early Christian beliefs, I entitle it the beginnings of clerical celibacy because I did not find anything earlier than the quote from Hippolytus.
When I wrote the book," Will the Real Heretics Please Stand Up?" One of the metrics I used in that, I said," I'm not going to present anything in this book as being a teaching of the early Christians unless at least five different writers express the same view and nobody expresses a contrary view." And I think I don't know if I stated this in the book, but one of my principles was also I had to have at least one and preferably several writers from the second century to make certain this was not something that came
in only in the third century.
Because I noticed when I first read the early Christian writings 40 years ago that there were changes that came in the third century. Most of them had to do with ecclesiastical matters, church matters. That's where you see the biggest changes. I'm not aware of any change in pertaining to how Christians should live. I'm not aware of any big or even small theological changes. There's more theological controversy. People got more picky.
I will say that on theology, but I'm not aware of any innovation that came in until you get past the year 300. But on church matters, yeah, there's a lot of things that you find in the third century that you do not see in the second century, and you certainly don't see in the New Testament. So here, you know we only have two sources, which is never very good. And the earliest one is in the third century when these changes were happening in church matters. And then we just have one single quote.
And like I say, the second quote here is from 390 when so many things had changed in the church. So we have little authority even from the early Christians. If you were making them your authority, which you should not do. But even if you were, there's very little authority here. From the pre-Nicene church, you just have a single quote, which would be very unwise to use that as a basis for making a decision. So I'm glad you reached out, and I think you can go and get married with knowing you have God's blessings.
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