Diakonia: the fallibility of two popes and the World Council of Churches
Re-thinking one of the dogmas of New Testament scholarship
La Croix International May 12th, 2022 https://international.la-croix.com/news/religion/diakonia-the-fallibility-of-two-popes-and-the-world-council-of-churches/16070
Diakonia (often written diaconia) originates as part of the ancient Greek word group διακον- (diakon-) that has been in the literary records for 2500 years. Increasingly over the last 80 years the term has been occurring as a loanword in European languages in discussions about ministry and ministers in the Church.
Prior to such discussion, the word was easily recognizable in theological circles as part of terminology relating in particular to the diaconate and the Church order of deacons. In fact, from the 1830s, with the gradual development of diaconate within the Inner Mission of the German Evangelical Churches, their leaders and theological collaborators emphasized the idea of the deacon as a loving servant attending to the needs and physical well-being of members of the Christian community.
Under the impulse of these strong pastoral values deriving from diakonia, 20th century theologians proposed a rethink of the term ministry itself.
Why should not all three orders of the Church’s ministry – that is deacon, presbyter, and bishop – be expressions in the Church of Christian service?
After all, the ministerial terminology had come into English and most European languages from the Latin translation (the Vulgate) of the original Greek biblical text. For the Greek verb, the Vulgate provided ministrare, and for the noun it provided minister (except where the Greek meant “diaconus” for the deacon). On this basis, people would speak of young men “entering the ministry”, meaning they would become “priests” (Catholic) or “ministers” (Protestant). In the Church – Catholic or Protestant – the ministers performed what only ministers could.
From lowly service to "loving service"
Since the 1950s, however, translators have considered that the English biblical text should project the updated understanding of diakon - words as service terms. Inevitably this had dramatic effects upon the theology of ministry itself, that is, upon the understanding of who does what in the Church and why.
The newer scholarship began to draw attention to what it had come to see as the basic meaning of the ancient Greek diakonia, namely, a lowly service. But because Jesus himself is reported as having come “to serve” (Mk 10:45), among Christians diakonia came to be understood as a lowly service that was also loving or benevolent like his.
This new and specifically Christian embellishment of ministry as diakonia soon enough earned the scholarly endorsement of Kittel’s Theological Dictionary of the New Testament (vol. 2, 1964, German original 1935).
TDNT, as it is known, owed much in this matter to the 1931 study by Wilhelm Brandt, Dienst [service] und Dienen [to serve] im Neuen Testament. Brandt engaged this linguistic analysis under the inspiration of the “loving service” extended by the deaconesses of Bethel (North Rhine-Westphalia) to the disadvantaged. Brandt was their chaplain.
The exemplary instance of such loving service within Churches today came to be understood as the embodiment of services due to needy Greek widows in the Acts of the Apostles (6:1-6). Seven men were understood as being commissioned by the Apostles to attend to this “daily diakonia”.
The shift from "ministry" to "service"
Understood as loving service to the needy, however, “diakonia” falls within the competence of and, indeed, as a responsibility of every Christian with or without a commissioning. Confusion has thus arisen and remains unresolved in ecclesiological circles as to how the ministry/diakonia of the ordained is to be distinguished from a ministry/diakonia to which everyone in the Church is called.
This problem confronted me in the 1970s when I undertook a dissertation on the interplay of service words in the statement by Jesus that he came “not to be served but to serve” (1946, RSV). The issue was not to be solved by going back to the AV of 1611: “not to be ministered unto, but to minister.” That was hardly a clarification.
But within the more recent shift, what kind of “ministry” would the term “service” make? No doubt the answer intended by the shift from “ministry” to “service” becomes clear in many appeals to Mark 10:45 by Church authorities, pastors, and theologians. Ministry as diakonia becomes a benevolent service.
Thus the influential lexicographers, J. P. Louw and E. A. Nida, recommended in their Greek-English Lexicon (1999) that we understand: “The Son of Man did not come in order for people to serve him but in order to serve people.”
Like the English verb “to serve”, for which the Shorter Oxford Dictionary provides 39 meanings that are to be discerned according to the context in which that verb occurs, the Greek diakon- words are dependent upon their literary context for their own meaning to be discerned.
The reinterpretation of diakonia
My examination of the diakon- words used by some 90 authors across the 400 years spanning BCE and CE enabled me to determine that the Son of Man “did not come to have people serving himself but came to carry out a set task, namely, to give his life as a ransom for many.” His service, in other words, was an activity to which he knew he had been commissioned.
This understanding is exhibited in the Geneva Bible produced by émigré English Puritans in 1602. While we read that “the Sonne of man came not to be served but to serve”, we are also presented with an explanatory note in the margin:
the Pastors are not called to rule, but to serve according to the example of the Sonne of God himselfe, who went before them forsomuch as he also was a Minister of his Father's will.
In 1976 my doctoral dissertation to this same effect was approved by the University of London. Thirty years later Anni Hentchel of Wurzburg University came to the same conclusion in her own doctoral dissertation (Dienst und Dienen im Neuen Testament, 2007, these two German words meaning “service” and “to serve”).
Even more significantly, in 2000 Frederick Danker, editor of the 3rd edition of the classic Bauer, Arndt, Gingrich Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament, replaced the one-page article on the diakonia words with new lexical descriptions that were twice the length of those in the earlier edition. They were also mostly informed by the new semantic profile presented in my book of 1990, Diakonia: Re-interpreting the Ancient Sources (OUP, reprinted 2009, and included, with its successor Diakonia Studies, 2014, in the list of Oxford Scholarship publications).
Reviewers have long since expressed appreciation of the 1990 volume, including no little surprise at both the novelty and the significance of its scholarly import.
To cite Jerome Murphy-O’Connor of the École biblique, Jerusalem, in Revue biblique (1995): “He has forced us to re-think one of the dogmas of New Testament scholarship.”
The Oxford University Press Scholarship Online (26/04/22) itself notes that the re-interpretation of diakonia “undermines much of the theological discussion of ministry that has taken place over the past fifty years.”
Pope Benedict XVI and Pope Francis
Accordingly, thirty years after publication of the research, I am distressed to record that, in his first encyclical as pope in 2005, Benedict XVI, the scholarly Joseph Ratzinger, should have pronounced that the account about the institution of the Seven in Acts 6:1-6 marks the moment when “diakonia – the ministry of charity exercised in a communitarian orderly way – became part of the fundamental structure of the Church” (God is love, 2005, no. 21).
Taking this unique initiative even further, on the occasion of a Christmas address to the Roman Curia in 2017, Benedict’s successor, Pope Francis, expanded on the notion of “the God who came not to be served but to serve” by claiming ultimately for the Church a “diaconal primacy” of service.
As he instructed the Swiss Guards (Sept. 26, 2020), “To serve is love, it is love of the neighbor, it is being close to people. To serve is the Way.”
Accordingly, it is perhaps not surprising that within the broader Christian theological culture recent years have seen astonishing publicity attending such views about diakonia within the Churches.
The eloquent French theologian, Étienne Grieu, subtitled his book of 2009 Un lien si fort with the signal phrase (translated): “When the love of God becomes diakonia”. Years later, in a lecture on the diaconate in Lourdes (09.09.2017), he observed the novelty that was earlier attached to any talk of diakonia in France, attributing its sudden emergence to the influence of Pope Benedict’s encyclical of 2005
Elsewhere, in 2005 David Clark of the Methodist tradition invoked the notion of the “Diaconal Church” in his reformist study Breaking the Mould of Christendom. Following this in 2008 he edited 13 studies by other authors under the title The Diaconal Church.
The World Council of Churches and the Protestant Church in Germany
On a broader scale, in 2017 the World Council of Churches, long an advocate of diakonia, hosted an Ecumenical Strategic Forum on Diakonia and Sustainable Development for the purpose of articulating “a common vision for the Churches’ engagement for sustainable development.” The WCC news service of 5 May 2022 anticipated the June 5th publication of the policy document.
Paralleling developments of this kind, in 2019 Regnum Books of Oxford published 20 studies also under the title, The Diaconal Church, following this in 2021 with a major collection of studies under the title International Handbook of Ecumenical Diakonia (715 pp, with xlviii pages of prelims).
This quarto volume contains 104 studies on “Theologies of Diaconia…”, “Diaconical Ministries…”, “Trends…”, and “Models…” All of this aiming to uphold the conviction – as the editors express it – “that it is essential … to keep rooted in the distinct and ancient language of ‘diakonia’….” (p. xxii)
This vast publishing undertaking has occurred within what is now a worldwide consensus of which the core stands virtually unassailable in the remarkable German institution Diakonie (see diakonie.de, English page): this “charitable organization of the Protestant Church in Germany” employs almost 600,000 professionals supported by 700,000 volunteers and grew from the origins of the deaconess movement of the mid-19th century.
How the institution named Diakonie might respond to the re-interpretation of “the distinct and ancient language” of diakonia, which is the term that constitutes its own title and underpins its charitable undertakings, is too complex for an outsider to envisage.
What is an unavoidable call upon Christian scholarship, however, is to protect the Christian understanding of its scriptures from the mistranslation of Greek terms chosen by our foundational teachers in their inspired efforts in the first century to inform us of the nature of the mission of Jesus and of the processes of ministry in his name.
Of the 36 instances of diakon - words in the writings of Paul, 24 are expressing his profound understanding of “the ministry of the word” and to what ends it works.
It is not a work of loving service. Paul uses other words for that (1 Corinthians 13), and we call it love.
John N. Collins is a world expert on the history and meaning of diakonia/ministry. A former Sacred Heart Missionary, he studied at the Pontifical Biblical Institute (Rome) and the Ecole Biblique (Jerusalem) and has taught in universities in Australia. He is the author of several books.