Politics & Power Quote by Charles Hodge

Hodge is doing something sly here: he frames popular participation in church governance not as a modern concession, but as apostolic precedent so pervasive it becomes almost untouchable. “Recognized and sanctioned” is courtroom language draped over theology, a deliberate bid to convert a contested polity question into settled case law. Then he overplays his hand with “almost every conceivable way” - a sweeping phrase that signals the real battlefield. If the apostles endorsed lay involvement in countless forms, the burden of proof shifts to anyone defending tight clerical control.

The intent is polemical in the quiet, 19th-century Presbyterian mode. Hodge, writing in an American Protestant landscape jittery with democratizing energy, wants the church to be both ordered and representative: authority, yes, but not aristocracy. His Reformed instincts favor elders, councils, and discipline; his American context makes “the people” an unavoidable moral constituency. He’s not baptizing pure majoritarianism. “Substantive part” matters: participation must be real, not symbolic, but also bounded - a share in governance, not a takeover.

Subtext: legitimacy. By tying popular rights to the apostles, Hodge turns ecclesiology into continuity politics. The church that sidelines its members isn’t merely impractical; it risks looking unbiblical, even illegitimate. It’s an argument designed to outflank both high-church hierarchy and chaotic voluntarism: a democratic impulse anchored to an ancient warrant, making the present feel like fidelity rather than innovation.