Episcopacy and the Leaven of the Pharisees

Schaf also takes the Anglo-Catholic Oxford movement to task: He suggests that many who are in this school are attracted to it by a "feeling of poetical romance" and not a few of them have aspirations to the hierarchy inherent in an episcopal system. And for all their insistence on history, Schaf says that this is the glaring hole in their system. The "utter misapprehension of the divine significance of the Reformation, with its consequent development, that is of the entire Protestant period of the Church." They have no conception of historical development, much less the great blessing of the Reformation to the broader Church. He calls their "external, mechanical conception of the Church and episcopacy" nothing more than the "old leaven of the Pharisees." He bases his assertions on the fact that there is no scriptural authority for such a rigid apostolic succession as is commonly held in those communions that insist upon it. There is not high priestly caste in the Christian Church, clergy are servant-leaders of the flock, but are in an important sense still members of the priesthood of all believers. Their's is a specific calling in the body of Christ which includes real authority, but it is not a hierarchical system of automatic authority. Finally he scoffs at those who would think that merely returning to an episcopal polity would fix all the problems of Protestantism: "Preposterous imagination! Can the Church be renovated, by putting on a new coat?" (122-126)