Aging & Wisdom Quote by Charles Hodge

Hodge is doing something more pointed than a history lesson: he is drafting the apostolic era as a constitutional blueprint, then using it to police the present. By insisting the early Church was "one body" rather than "isolated, independent congregations", he turns unity into a fact of origin, not a negotiable ideal. The phrasing is deliberately anti-voluntarist. "Isolated" and "independent" sound like modern vices, the ecclesial equivalents of frontier individualism, and Hodge writes in an America where that individualism was becoming a default social theology.

The key move is the double option at the end: each church is "subject to all the rest, or to an authority which extended over all". That "or" is strategic ambiguity. It lets him argue for real oversight without naming a single institutional winner. He can validate a shared, connectional discipline (comforting to Presbyterians), while also acknowledging a centralized authority in principle (a nod toward catholicity) without conceding Rome. The subtext: autonomy is not simply imprudent; it is un-apostolic.

Context matters. Mid-19th-century Protestantism was splintering under revivalism, democratized religion, and denominational competition; even "Bible-only" impulses could yield endless microchurches with no external accountability. Hodge, a Princeton theologian invested in order, doctrine, and confessional stability, reaches back to apostolic "one body" language as a rebuttal to the marketplace model of church. The quote works rhetorically because it frames governance as fidelity: structure is not bureaucracy layered onto the gospel, but an inheritance embedded in the Church's earliest self-understanding.