Today is the feast of St. Stephen the Protomartyr in the eastern church. The western churches celebrated his feast day yesterday. His story is told in Acts 6-8:1. One element of this episode has always puzzled me. Verses 2-4 of Acts 7 tells us:
And the twelve summoned the full number of the disciples and said, “It is not right that we should give up preaching the word of God to serve tables. Therefore, brothers, pick out from among you seven men of good repute, full of the Spirit and of wisdom, whom we will appoint to this duty.”
However, there is no further mention of Stephen “serving tables.” In fact, “Stephen, full of grace and power, [performed] great wonders and signs among the people” and spoke to the people with wisdom through the Holy Spirit (7:8,10). It is highly unlikely that Stephen would have been stoned to death if he had stuck to his original job description. The Spirit seems to have had other plans for him.
December 27th, 2009 | 7:26 am | #1
Stephen wasn’t an elder; he wasn’t one of the original disciples. He was a deacon — he served tables and ministered to the widows. And yet he was the one chosen to speak the truth.
Thanks for this post.
December 27th, 2009 | 9:25 am | #2
Glynn, where do we read that Stephen was a deacon? Acts 6 never mentions deacons and the one Scripture that does describe deacons (1 Tim 3: 8-13) makes no mention of serving tables or any of the traditional roles of deacons.
December 27th, 2009 | 10:48 am | #3
My assumption, too, is that this episode records the commissioning of the first deacons.
December 27th, 2009 | 1:45 pm | #4
I believe Mr. Sido is representing a Calvinist view of an ordering of the church’s ministry that depends upon a literalistic use of the terms we find in Scripture used to describe what we Lutherans call “The Preaching Office” — strict Calvinists miss the fluid nature of the various terms, and, like the Roman Catholics and Orthodox, attempt to impose on the Scriptures a rigid ordering of various churchly offices, which simply did not exist in the time of the Apostolic age. Thus, we find: pastors, teachers, elders, deacons, bishops, etc. … all various terms describing the church’s ministry and various orderings of the same. This reminds me of Mr. Sido’s unfortunate remarks earlier on this blog site where he attempted to introduce the non-Biblical concept of “the regulative principle of worship” on the discussion, with the same mistaken Biblicism.
December 27th, 2009 | 2:08 pm | #5
By the way, since this is a blog site that is part of a larger family of blogs and a journal that are firmly planted in the Western Church tradition, I would prefer we observe the Feasts, Festivals, commemorations and other saints day and observances according to the Western Church Year calendar, held, generally speaking, in common by Roman, Lutheran Anglican and other liturgical communions. I am uncertain what Calvinist bodies do, or don’t do, with the Church Year observances.
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