The Diaconate

John L. Girardeau, a pastor in Charleston and later a professor at Columbia Theological Seminary, published this treatise in three parts in the Southern Presbyterian Review as the Southern church took up what he called the Deacon Question.

His central target is the theory that the higher office of presbyter contains the lower, so that elders may discharge diaconal functions at will. If that were so, Girardeau argues, the deacon as a distinct officer becomes superfluous, and the office decays into the merely nominal existence he saw around him.

Against it he sets a positive doctrine: the deacon holds a distinct, divinely warranted office whose sphere is both the care of the poor and the whole temporal business of the church, so that ministers and elders stay free for the ministry of word, prayer, and government. He presses that full responsibility must rest on the deacons themselves, since dividing their work with others dwarfs them, and that the office is not confined within the bounds of a single congregation. It is among the fullest nineteenth-century American Presbyterian treatments of the office, and it stands behind much of the later Southern Presbyterian argument for a robust diaconate.

The three parts appeared across the 1879, 1880, and 1881 volumes of the review; Parts 1 and 2 are linked from the PCA Historical Center, and Part 3 from the Log College Press scan of volume 32.