MetaCatholic

Josh McManaway has been thinking about the church, having become convinced of the importance of reading the New Testament in the light of the Fathers. I think he overstates his case, but one very important point he makes is this:

I think what happens when we exclude Patristics from our study of the Church is we isolate the NT in an unnatural way from the earliest Christian communities that used the text.

This is, I think, partly a reflection on his former position, but is also a weakness in some (many?) contemporary forms of Protestantism. The church that recognised the books that became the New Testament, did so in significant part because the church recognised in them the apostolic faith that she had received, was contending for, and was preaching. Driving a wedge between the early fathers and the New Testament is bad history and bad hermeneutics. McManaway’s rhetoric, however, carries him away, when he says:

… the Apostles would’ve had to have said, “Okay guys, no priests, no sacraments, Peter’s not the Pope, and Christ isn’t literally present in the Eucharist” and then their students would’ve said, “Okay, so you’re telling us to have priests, sacraments, Peter is Pope, and Christ is literally present?” It just doesn’t make any sense that the Apostles’ instruction would’ve produced something that different from what was intended.

I comment here only on one of these, the issue of priests, because I think it illustrates some of the hermeneutical issues well. A common Protestant claim is that all Christians are priests, but that there is no specific ordained priesthood, and that this is the clear position of the New Testament. This view has often been articulated , in more or less subtle ways since the Reformation. I offer a quick survey of some early non biblical texts, before coming back to the NT evidence.

• The Didache may well be the earliest such text. It seems to reflect a situation in which the community appoints leaders as bishops and deacons (15:1), but that there are also itinerant ministries of apostle (not the twelve) and prophet, which need to be tested, but may be in some sense higher offices than the resident ones. Their ministry, like that of the implied author, is more widespread than a local community, and is part of what holds the church together. It may well be the case that the visiting prophet was, when present, the president at the Eucharist (10:7). The prophets are called (probably more as analogy than title) the community’s high priests (13:3).
• Both the sense of attention to order, and the analogy of old and new covenant are expressed more strongly at the end of the first century in Clement’s letter. Writing as some sort of minister responsible for relations with other churches, Clement clearly feels able to speak with some sense of authority to the Corinthians. Clement is happy to use minister (leitourgos) indiscriminately of the ministers of both covenants, and he follows a summary of the orders of OT priesthood and people with urging the Corinthians to be humbly content with their own order. (40:5-41:1). he follows this with a sense of the apostles receiving their orders and in turn appointing bishops and deacons (42:3-4). A pattern of universal order is envisaged, and Clement comfortably moves from OT priesthood to NT ministry with no sense of dislocation.
• The next decade or so sees Ignatius putting great (and possibly polemical) stress on the office of bishop, even more comfortably appropriating the language of the OT. There are clearly a number of churches in Asia Minor which by this time have apparently single bishops as a focus of their churches ministry. The unity of the ministry is tied to the unity of the Eucharist (Philadelphians 4) and its validity (Smyrneans 8), and although the bishop is clearly senior, Ignatius also uses the language of a threefold ministry.

I deliberately stop here for four reasons, rather than proceeding down the line. These books may overlap with, but certainly follow close on the heels of, the last books of the New Testament to be written.  They establish the ease with which the Church relates the language of  OT priesthood to NT forms of ministry. They show how very early the link between ordained minister and Eucharist is established. They still show evidence of some diversity in ministry. The first three of these form part of the bedrock of later development, and show an early version of the lenses through which the NT would be read, recognised and canonised. The last of them, however, prevents us drawing a clear and simple line of ordination and priesthood directly back to the apostles. All, however, evince a concern with an ordering of ministry which is more than simply the business of a local congregation. This goes back into the Pastorals, at least, and I have argued, into the undisputed and early writings of Paul.

Turning, then, to priesthood in the NT documents, we must note that no early writer, and, let us not forget, native speaker of the same language, read the text as excluding language of priesthood for Christian ministry. The common evangelical argument rests on two main planks.

1. The NT nowhere uses language of priesthood for Christian ministers, but stresses Christ as a unique priest.
2. The NT speaks instead of a priesthood of all believers.

I would like to make a brief comment on each of those in turn. The whole argument of Hebrews, the only NT witness to argue for Jesus’ priesthood (actually high priesthood – something often subtly overlooked in debate), shows exactly how hard it was legitimately to use the language of priesthood of anyone not born into the appropriate Jewish family. There are in fact very few specified Christian ministers in the NT (and probably none from priestly families), and while the church was still intimately connected with Judaism, it is difficult to see any way in which the language of priesthood could be divorced from its Jewish connotations, and used for someone who lacked the proper hereditary pedigree. Paul stretches slightly in the direction of appropriating the language when he describes his evangelization as a “priestly service” (ἱερουργοῦντα - Rom 15:16) but that is as far as he goes, and probably, linguistically, can go. It is hard to see any theological argument being securely based in what is probably simply an historical necessity of the language.

The “priesthood of all believers” (so called) is based primarily on 1 Peter, with support from the Apocalypse. The references in Revelation (1:6, 5:10, and 20:6) are, like much else in the book, not entirely clear. Presumably related to the worship of heaven, and acting as a contrast to those who worship the beasts, the latter two references also seem to be related to the period of the millennium. I, rather like Dionysius of Alexandria, “hold that its interpretation is a wondrous mystery” and hesitate to draw any clear doctrinal arguments from it. The reference from Peter is much clearer:

But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people, in order that you may proclaim the mighty acts of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light. Once you were not a people, but now you are God’s people; once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy. (1 Pet 2:9-10 NRSV)

This clearly takes statements about Israel’s priestly nature (Ex 19:5 and the LXX of Ex 23:22), combines them with a number of other biblical allusions from Isaiah, Micah and Hosea, and then applies the language about Israel’s calling to the dispersed Church. The intent of the argument is not to say anything per se about priesthood, but to set out and appropriate Israel’s vocation as the Church’s vocation. Therefore, since the common priesthood of Israel is in no way a barrier to or a polemic against the provision of a specific ministerial priesthood, it is hard to be persuaded by any argument that says Peter intended such a polemic, or was making any comment at all on ministerial order rather than ecclesial vocation.

What this suggests is that there is nothing clear in the text of the NT that either prevents or criticises the linguistic and theological moves attested in the very earliest of patristic writings, and subsequently developed over the next two centuries. Those who read these texts written in their own language, recognised them as scripture partly through their consonance in the same faith, and collected them and canonised them as part of that same inheritance, are the same people whose reflections on ministry in the light of that slowly forming canon led them to a theology of priesthood dependent on and reflective of the true high priesthood of Christ. They almost certainly offer a surer guide than those who, fourteen centuries later, mined the same scriptures for their own polemic against mediaeval developments.