Genealogy of an institution
Why the Reformed churches of France and Scotland gave their assemblies a chairman instead of a ruler.
Every body of equals needs someone to run the meeting, and the risk is that the man who runs the meeting becomes the man who runs the church. The Reformed churches of France and Scotland had both broken with a church governed by bishops who held permanent authority over other ministers, and neither intended to rebuild it under a new name. Their answer was a presiding officer chosen by his peers, with a job defined by procedure rather than rank, whose term ended when the meeting did.
Paris, 1559
The first national synod of the French Reformed churches met in secret in Paris in May 1559 and adopted a confession and a discipline. The confession holds that all true pastors “have the same authority and equal power under one head,” Christ, so that no church “shall claim any authority or dominion over any other” (art. 30).1
The discipline opens with the same rule and builds the chair directly on it. Article 1 forbids any church to claim primacy or domination over another, and forbids the same among ministers, elders, and deacons. Article 2 has each synod elect a president by common accord to call the sessions, gather the votes, declare the majority, keep each man speaking in his turn, and silence the contentious, following the judgment of the assembly in everything, and he is himself subject to its censure. Article 3 ends the office with the meeting: la charge du Président expirera à la fin du Colloque, and the next council is free to elect him again or another man.2
The sequence is the argument. Parity comes first, the chair second, its expiration third.
Scotland, 1578
The Second Book of Discipline follows the same pattern nineteen years later. It rests church rule on “mutual consent of brethren, and equality of power,” adopted “to take away all occasion of tyranny” (2.4), and defines the moderator as one chosen “by the common consent of the whole brethren convened” to “propose matters, gather the votes, and cause good order to be kept” (7.4).3 In practice the chair belonged to the meeting. Andrew Melville was elected moderator at two separate assemblies in April and June 1582.4
When the chair stopped rotating
The clearest evidence of what the rotation guarded against comes from the moment it was abolished. In December 1606 James VI used an assembly at Linlithgow to impose constant moderators on the presbyteries, and by 1610 bishops had been declared moderators of the diocesan synods.5 The Scottish ministers’ grievances of 1633 record that presbyteries were forced under legal threat to accept constant moderators, men “stiled vulgarly Bishops.”6 A Scots writer of the 1640s put it plainly: constant moderators were “nothing els in effect but the bishops’ deputts.”7
Where the claim stops
Neither the French nor the Scottish discipline states the reason for the term limit in so many words. What both state is the premise, parity against domination and tyranny, and both build the expiring chair directly on it. When a king made the chair permanent, contemporaries named it for what it was, and full episcopal government followed within four years.
The chair rotates because no minister was meant to sit above his brethren.
Sources
1 Gallican Confession (1559), art. 30, trans. Philip Schaff, The Creeds of Christendom, vol. 3.
2 Discipline ecclésiastique, Synod of Paris (1559), arts. 1–3, in Jean Aymon, Tous les synodes nationaux des églises réformées de France (The Hague, 1710), vol. 1. Aymon prints a manuscript compilation revised in 1637. Translation ours.
3 The Second Book of Discipline (1578), 2.4, 7.4. Text: Free Presbyterian Church of Scotland.
4 “Melville, Andrew (1545–1622),” Dictionary of National Biography; University of Glasgow, University Story.
5 Memoir prefixed to The Works of George Gillespie, vol. 1 (1846).
6 “Grievances of the Scottish ministers, 1633,” in John Rushworth, Historical Collections, vol. 3. Text: British History Online.
7 Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue, s.v. “moderatour”, quoting Craufurd (c. 1646).