TOWARDS PRIESTLESS ECCLESIAL STRUCTURES
John N Collins PhD
1 Introduction
The church has a deep structural problem that is entirely bound to ancient metaphysical and philosophical principles, not to mention imperial politics, that at this point requires either a radical decision or the acceptance of the possibility of a major schism.
Ilia Delio, https://www.globalsistersreport.org, 5 September 2018
Ilia Delio bolsters her ultimatum with telling considerations of ancient Western philosophy. Her claims require no embellishment here. In referencing “imperial politics” as one other damaging factor, however, she prompts reflection on where else cultural factors have contributed to the “deep structural problem” within the twenty-first century church. Without hesitation I propose priesthood.
More than bishops, priests are the lead factor in the Catholic experience of church. As well, from the ordinary Catholic’s perspective, priesthood is the closest an individual comes to theological reflection. Sunday after Sunday, the priest embodies a particular theology. He – and there is no she – is “the other Christ”/ alter Christus making available the Body and Blood of Jesus in the Eucharist. Through sacramental ordination the priest receives power to perform liturgy in this way. In theological jargon, he has been “ontologically” changed. He also receives authority to forgive sins (“I absolve you…”). A fully fledged member of the hierarchy, a parish priest is beholden in his decisions only to his bishop. In addition, however, all such accoutrements make your priest an agent of the clericalism currently identified as providing safe haven for sexual predators.
Priests themselves are acutely aware of the social ostracism to which they have become exposed. Their lives are blighted. Their ministry, in the minds of increasingly huge numbers of lay church members, adds up to nothing. So tight and prescriptive is the theology that has shaped their lives and ministry over many centuries that priesthood has itself become “a deep structural problem” within the church. What “radical decision” needs to be made in its regard?
Return to the sources
In the 1950s the cry was out that “a return to the sources” would revitalize the church for its role within the new world emerging in the post World War II era. This was a cry to revisit what the Scriptures had to offer in the shaping of pastoral strategies, and to assess what initiatives informed members of the earlier centuries had taken to enrich life within the church as it was deepening its presence within the dominant ancient culture. In the 1960s, however, the “return to the sources” found itself diverted in the course of tensions between progressives and traditionalists at the Second Vatican Council. Nowhere was the conflict so evident as in the Council’s treatment of priesthood…
2: Personal Circumstances
In the 1950s the cry was out that “a return to the sources” would revitalize the church for its role within the new world emerging in the post World War II era. This was a cry to revisit what the Scriptures had to offer in the shaping of pastoral strategies, and to assess what initiatives informed members of the earlier centuries had taken to enrich life within the church as it was deepening its presence within the dominant ancient culture.
In the 1960s, however, the “return to the sources” found itself diverted in the course of tensions between progressives and traditionalists at the Second Vatican Council. Nowhere was the conflict so evident as in the Council’s treatment of priesthood. Here compromises allowed a characterization of priesthood that prioritised the Word of God but contrived to leave wriggle-room for unreformed Tridentine ritual to deprive God’s Word of airplay. Thus was priesthood condemned to continue as dehumanized and its priests despatched to become across the next centuries automatons of sacramental dispensation.
These tensions within theology of priesthood were not merely academic but had become very much part of my personal experience before the first decade of my priesthood closed. I recall the dashed hope when the Council’s Decree on The Ministry and Life of Priests finally reached me in Canberra early in 1966. A decade later I was a 5-year married man who had fortuitously completed a doctoral dissertation in King’s College London examining the early Christian notion of ministry. I say “fortuitously” because the proposition I had put to my professor concerned not ministry but the statement of the Son of Man in Mark’s gospel that he had come “not to be served but to serve and give his life as a ransom.” (Mk 10:45)
This verse from Mark’s gospel had long been widely examined and debated within biblical scholarship. There were very good reasons for this, including that the statement was explicitly theological and that it formed the high point in the main narrative of this gospel. But in the mid-20th century in particular people and churches had been turning to it for one other reason. They sensed there a message for their times. They found the message in the theme of service. Thus the introduction to the Council’s last document (December, 1965) The Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, concluded with the famous words, “The Church is not motivated by an earthly ambition but is interested in one thing only – to carry on the work of Christ … for he came into the world to bear witness to the truth, to save and not to judge, to serve and not to be served.”
For myself, in 1965 I was totally enveloped in work as de facto director of studies within a new secondary school and as a part-time priest and Sunday preacher. Thus I was only casually in touch with changing theological perspectives. Nonetheless, this leading sentiment of service to the world was making something of a scandal of the priorities being set by my religious order of “missionary” priests.
This was the period of social disruption in Africa in the course of decolonization. In places the disruption brought wars and was accompanied by famine (Biafra). From India we were receiving heroic images of Mother Teresa. In response to the gospel she had abandoned the relative comforts of her Loreto order to immerse herself among the destitute of Calcutta.
These scenarios appeared to be informing me that the church’s ministry as I was charged to live it was ill-equipped to respond to the gospel. And here was I, with no time to develop theological skills and interests that I had cultivated across five years in Rome and Jerusalem after my seminary, using post-school hours – when these were available! – to coach the sons of Canberra’s public servants to play rugby union when my father and two brothers had played a real game in AFL for the Melbourne Demons!
On leave of absence (a two year “exclaustration”) I got a first job teaching secondary students in Papua New Guinea – e.g. teaching Cicero’s Latin to Year 12 students of an average age of 25 and from the New Guinea highlands – and then a second job teaching catch-up English to first year students in the University of Papua New Guinea. Here I finally signed myself out of the clergy, posting the damning document under the door of the archbishop of Port Moresby. Here, halfway through my first year, I stepped into the dark by taking up the chance of a PhD in London.
It was in these circumstances, with Professor Christopher F. Evans pressing me for a research topic, that I woke one steamy morning in Bomana, the university enclave, wondering why the verb diakonein occurred in the Greek text of Mark 10:45. Accordingly I proposed to Professor Evans that I would like to identify the rhetorical and theological connections between the “service” of the Son of Man and his giving of his life for others. He thought the topic might do.
The Protestant best-friend of my wife-to-be financed the trip with a personal loan – my religious order did not want to throw “good money after bad” – and my wife (we married in Richmond, UK) financed our life in London with jobs not particularly to her liking after a superior position in Melbourne CBD. In 1990, on a return visit with our pre-teen daughter and son to our London home in Mecklenburg Square, we were able to visit Professor Evans in his retirement in Oxford where the dear man (he lived past 100) signed my copy of his 900 page commentary on Luke’s gospel – published just that year - with the warm words “with admiration and affection”. That copy now contains a photograph of the pair of us in his garden, me holding his book, and he mine, also just published by Oxford University Press, Diakonia: Re-interpreting the Ancient Sources.
3 Some terminology on priests, presbyters, sacerdotal...
Acknowledging the mystique of the priesthood long remained a trade mark of Catholics, and John Paul II tapped into this mystique in the homily he delivered at the Chrism Mass of Holy Thursday in 1999. At the centre is the thought that ‘Christ, through his blood, became the one and eternal priest,’ his thought connecting immediately with priests by way of the other idea that priests are ‘consecrated in the image of him’. At the Mass of the Lord’s Supper later that day he commented on priests having become part of ‘an uninterrupted series which begins in the Upper Room’ of Christ’s supper and which has its roots in the sacrificial rituals of the Temple of Jerusalem.
In presenting these ideas the pope was harking back to ideas in his major treatment of priesthood and ministry in the lengthy document called I will give you shepherds (1992). Here the pope moved quickly forward to show that Jesus ‘manifested in himself the definitive role of the priest’ by establishing ‘a ministerial priesthood’ in the apostles, from whom ‘in endless succession throughout history’ priesthood is destined to continue. Within this line of succession each priest is ‘a derivation, a specific participation in and continuation of Christ himself, the one high priest of the new and eternal covenant’ (paragraph 12).
Not surprisingly, John Paul’s emphases are reflected in the way priesthood is presented in the Catechism of the Catholic Church (1994). In the priest’s work ‘it is Christ himself who is present to his Church as … high priest of the redemptive sacrifice…’ (1548); from this sacrifice ‘their whole priestly ministry draws its strength’ (1566); priests receive ‘a sacred power for the service of the faithful’ (1592) and are united with bishops in ‘sacerdotal dignity’ (1585).
The phrase ‘sacerdotal dignity’ reminds us the central emphasis on priesthood because the term ‘sacerdotal’ has been the key word in the whole body of theology as well as in the popular understanding and estimation of priesthood. It comes from the Latin word for priest, sacerdos. In the religious culture of the ancient world this word identified the kind of priest who sacrificed animals in the rituals of Rome. The sacerdos was, literally, the giver (-dos) or deliverer to the gods of sacred (sacer-) gifts designated ‘sacrifices’. In the Latin bible the same word designated the priests of the Jewish Temple, who performed the same type of sacrificial ritual. The Greek word for this kind of priest is hiereus and, interestingly, does not occur at all in the New Testament in reference to any member of a Christian community. It was not until the 3rd century that Christian writers slowly began to use priestly terms of their ministers. But of course in Catholic seminaries of recent centuries the word ‘priest’ was dear to every student waiting for the day of his priestly ordination. On that occasion he would hear polyphonic choirs sing in his honour, ‘Tu es sacerdos in aeternum: Thou art a priest forever…’
Of course the word ‘priest’ kept company with a set of other priestly words once part of the every day language of a Catholic. Thus the parish church was structured in part like a priestly temple of old with its altar, sanctuary, tabernacle, and with ancient priestly rituals involving water, incense, sacred language (Latin) and sacred garments or vestments handed down as symbolic of ancient priestly garb. The whole conceptualisation and practice was an embodiment in Christian terms of the definition of priest which Plato provided in Athens of the 5th century BCE: priests are those ‘who know how to give to the gods in a manner pleasing to them gifts from us by means of sacrifices, and to win for us from them by means of petition the bestowal of good things’ (Politicus 290).
Despite this long history of the priest/sacerdos, the language of the Second Vatican Council revealed a shift in terminology. The council freely adopted the Latin word presbyter in place of the traditional term sacerdos. This term has no specifically cultic or sacrificial connotation, was derived directly from sources in the Greek and Latin New Testament (e. g., 1 Timothy 5:17), where it usually designated one of the ‘elders’ or senior members of a community. Thus it was not at first a title of an official with a specific role within the church community, but was the standard designation of the older experienced members, a usage common in depicting the role of ‘elders’ in society at large (compare ‘alderman’). and within Judaism.
In the western Latin church, with the eventual consolidation of the hierarchic order of ‘bishops, priests, and deacons’, presbyter did come to designate a member of an advisory group answering to a leader designated episkopos, who would emerge as the historical ‘bishop’. However, with the increasing geographic spread and demographic mix of the bishop’s pastoral, especially liturgical, responsibilities, his presbyters were allocated to providing leadership and liturgies in outlying zones. Consequently, by the time the bishop had attracted the Greek title for the priest offering sacrifice, namely hiereus, the connotation of that term spilled over to the term presbyter as well. In Latin-speaking churches, this led to the introduction of their equivalent term sacerdos. While presbyter remained in the terminology, it now took on from sacerdos an additional sacerdotal connotation.
What emerges from this interplay of titles is its impact upon later theology. As the Latin Christian culture expanded with the Empire, some vernacular cultures maintained both terms, sacerdos and presbyter, and they became synonymous. In Italy today the sacerdote of the liturgy is the prete (a word deriving from presbyter) walking down the street. Within Germanic cultures in the fourth and fifth centuries, the Latin term presbyter became the Priester, prêtre, priest of northern Europe, and, of course, these northern priest terms were already endowed with the sacerdotal connotation that had earlier accrued around the presbyter of the Mediterranean. Thus, the third century sacerdotal character of presbyter came to determine how theology of the presbyterate developed up to the middle of the twentieth century.
4: Mentions of Christian “priests” in early records
New Testament, Greek, c. 50-110 CE: the standard term for priest is hiereus/ιερεύ [today, hiereas], but the term is never applied to an individual Christian. at 1 Peter 2:9 the whole body of Christians is named «a royal priesthood» (hierateuma), but this is a citation from OT (Exodus 19:6) concerning Israel and applied metaphorically to the whole Christian body without any liturgical or pastoral reference.
Summary by Jean M. Tillard, What Priesthood has the Ministry? (Grove Pamphlet, 1973) 16-17: «In fact, nowhere does Scripture tell us in a precise way who presides at the eucharist: nowhere does it show one of the Twelve or one of the ministers of which it speaks carrying out this task. There is no evidence to justify our affirming that presiding at the Holy Banquet was necessarily closely connected with one or other of the ministerial functions attested in the apostolic writings.»
Apostolic Fathers, c. 90-150 CE, including Clement, Ignatius, Polycarp, Didache, Barnabas, Hermas, Papias, Letter to Diognetus: no instance.
Clement of Rome, c. 95 CE: no instance. Tillard (22) comments on parallels Clement draws between Christian liturgy and Jewish Temple worship: “the parallelism is so close that one expects to see Clement use some term from the sacerdotal vocabulary to characterize these ecclesiastical functions. He does not do so.”
Ignatius of Antioch, c. 100 CE: no instance. Tillard (22): “If for him Jesus is the High Priest surpassing the priests of Israel, if he sets in high relief the role of the bishop surrounded by his presbytery and his deacons during the eucharist … yet never does he explicitly call the bishop hiereus.”
Justin, Martyr, c. 160 CE: no instance. Tillard (23): «Justin, in describing the eucharist with the people assembled around the president [proestōs/presider (Apology 1.65-67)], ... does not apply to the ministers of the eucharistic synaxis the title «priest». He reserves it for Jesus (Dial.116.1-3).»
Summary: Tillard 24: «we have met only with authors who are Latin [c. 200+ CE] or from the Roman milieu as evidence of the clear-cut transition to a priestly view of ministries: Tertullian, Cyprian, the Apostolic Tradition...
(28) The sacertotalisation of the ministries appears to be a typical instance of the creativity of the community going beyond the letter of the Scripture...»
5: «If not by priesthood, what did get early Christians going?»
Our fixations about priesthood begin at the beginning of the story of the eucharistic meal. In his Apostolic Exhortation of 1992 following on from the Bishops' Synod on the Formation of Priests in 1990, «I Will Give You Shepherds», John Paul II duly invoked one traditional Catholic proposition (5):
When Jesus lived on this earth, he manifested in himself the definitive role of the priest by establishing a ministerial priesthood with which the apostles were the first to be invested. This priesthood is destined to last in endless succession throughout history.
Many priests, it is true, look on the liturgy for Holy Thursday as an occasion when they commemorate their own status as ordained priests. But scholars are few and far between who would endorse the view that the gospel narrative reveals a priestly character devolving upon the apostles, let alone any expectation that this character would forever traverse millennia in an unbroken line. This pipeline theory, as dismissively referenced by others, has seen better days. The New Testament provides no evidence at all of a priestly caste among Christians supported by such a succession. How, even given the enhanced methods of historical research now at the disposal of scholars, could we ever reassure priests or their congregations that the line of succession had never been broken? Is there a guarantee this or that line has not lost its integrity and authenticity across the centuries?
Outside of the narratives of the Last Supper we have considerable evidence in the New Testament about ministry but very little information about who did the ministry or what the ministry involved or whether the ministry was authenticated. One document informs us that ‘elders of the community’ are to be called to the sickbed to pray over and anoint the sick (James 5:14). The Latin Vulgate bible of the middle ages called these officials presbyteros, and the Catholic Douay New Testament of 1582 presents them as ‘priests of the church’. This is just totally anachronistic.
Among the late documents (c. 100 CE?) known as the Pastoral Letters (and wrongly attributed to the authorship of Paul) we read of ‘bishops’ (1 Timothy 3:1-7) and ‘deacons’ (8-13), but we would be very mistaken to think of these officials in modern terms. These related ministries, whatever they were precisely, are also mentioned in the address opening the Letter to the Philippians (1:1). The Greek term episkopos is indeed the origin of the English word ‘bishop’, but in this text simply cannot be designating a figure like the historical bishop. The letter is to the small community of believers in the northern Greek city of Philippi, but the address is in the plural. Such a small group of believers would not have more than one episkopos, whatever his function.
The word itself is parallel in construction and meaning to the English overseer but without connotations of the sheer bossiness carried at times by that word in English. In Ph 1:1 the term would apply most readily to a person who is presiding at a banquet and with some of the responsibilities of a maitre d’. Any such person in the Greek cultural scene would be assisted by persons appropriately designated as ‘attendants’ as here by diakonoi. This term also has generated an equivalent term in many languages, in English this being deacons. But, while it would be a mistake to read the historical clerical and liturgical sense of ‘deacon’ into this first century passage, we can still acknowledge the inbuilt reference here and in 1 Tim 3 to a connection with a personage named episkopos. The more or less contemporary Jewish writer Philo provides charming evidence of diakonoi at work during a banquet.
Searches through Christian documents for description of roles of such officials are disappointing if we are seeking to validate ecclesiastical practice since, say, the medieval era. Many attempts of this kind were pursued in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. They remain largely an embarrassment. Meanwhile a genuinely rich source of insights has always been available into how first century Greek-speaking women and men were induced to become Christians and into how they were enabled to maintain a Christian attitude and lifestyle. These insights arise in the most obvious of places when we take the trouble to look.
Among our sacred keepsakes are several authentic pieces of writing by a person passionately engaged in supporting new Christians in their religious stances. And this writer falls back on a technique of sending a letter to challenge his former pastoral clientele to think back on how it was that they came to adopt the new religious system he had brought to them. If they could enter into this exercise they would come to the realisation that their decision remained the right one to hold.
The letter writer was, of course, Paul. And this phase of his relationship with the Corinthians carries a curious lesson for those looking for authenticity of Christian community today. Paul had remained among them until they showed signs of being a stable community. Then he left them to themselves. He had other missions to engage. We hear that in his absence other teachers did arrive but, from Paul’s point of view, by the time he departed the Corinthians had all they needed. He made no appointments. In writing back to them, having heard of some disputes between groups favouring one or other view from the other visiting teachers, he had no trouble addressing them as ‘the church of God in Corinth’ (1 Cor 1:2).
Paul’s letters – and there were more than the two we use – were sent in the 50s of the first century and had to cope with a disturbed scenario. His tactic was to ask the people to recall and rehearse the process by which they had been first drawn to become part of the group. In what develops I recycle a passage that was part of a lecture at Yarra Theological Union, University of Divinity, marking the 50th anniversary of the opening of the Second Vatican Council. The lecture was published in Worship 88.3 (2012) and again as chapter 8 in my Gateway to Renewal (2016).
There are still those who see in Paul’s adoption of the terms diakonia and diakonos indicators of a sense of lowly submission to his calling, in fact little different from doulos/slave. (I instanced A. D. Clarke, Pauline Theology of Church Leadership, 2008, although Clarke has since strongly modified his assessment.) And indeed evaluations of Paul’s language on this level, originating only in the 1930s, occasioned serious distortions in the theology of ministry across the last half of the 20th century.
My own involvement in trying to realign theology of ministry with Paul’s convictions and thus expose the high status of his conception of ministry has preoccupied me since my linguistic research into the Greek διακον- terms in the 1970s. My engagement intensified after the publication of my semantic study of διακονία in 1990. An article published in the journal Ecclesiology, January 2012 (available in ch. 8 of Gateway to Renewal, this also citing a lecture of 1990 at the International Meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature in Vienna accessible as ch. 6 in Diakonia Studies), probably provides as full an account of ministry as diakonia that an enquirer at this level is likely to need.
Leading aspects of the semantic profile of the diakon- terms in first century discourse about communication include the following:
- a speaker so designated is under a mandate to deliver a message;
- the mandate is commonly of a divine origin;
- the designation implies absolute commitment to and fidelity in the delivery;
- the audience recognises these implications and values;
- the process of delivery can include the notion of mediation.
Such characteristics of first century usage of diakon- terms – indeed also of earlier classical and later patristic usage – are recognisable in Paul’s correspondence with the Corinthians, and this recognition leads to conclusions regarding Paul’s ministry as follows.
In bringing our familiarity with ancient Greek usage to the writings of the Christian Paul, we can immediately recognize that in using diakon- words he was not taking up language off the streets or indulging in neologisms or drawing on some in-house jargon or borrowing the sectarian argot of rival propagandists; rather, he was dipping into a rich tradition of language and selecting terms appropriate for what he had to say. These words were indeed from the store of the literate, the learned, the rhetoricians, the poets. They were words of acknowledged quality and character, capable of expressing subtleties of the kind his mysterious encounter with revelation evoked, at the same time as they breathed a nobility engendered from a long association with language about gods and their messengers to earth. We can be sure that Paul has chosen his words well.
...in 2 Corinthians, 2:14-6:13 ... Paul’s use of these words is more nuanced under the demands of his talk of revelation. That Paul here speaks with great sensitivity of the process whereby he and believers are caught up into revelation has often been expounded. Throughout, Paul’s appeal is to the experience of revelation that the Corinthians have enjoyed: if they will look into their own hearts they will know that God is revealed there and that the only way this revelation came was through his diakonia. The writing here is full of sensual imagery: aroma and brightness. While the brightness is the end result of revelation possessed by the believer, the aroma says something of the process: God’s word, held and proclaimed by the diakonos, is pervasive. It is not the word of argument, but convinces by the presence of the Spirit as the word carries into the heart. The role of the diakonos in this is to be the word’s purveyor, its passage or medium. Thus, Christ’s letter at 2 Cor 3:3 is not a message Paul had brought from a community of believers in Jerusalem or Antioch and delivered to Corinth: this would be peddling the word. Rather, Paul is trying to make the Corinthians aware that the letter is from on high to the heart. Because he is speaking ek theou/from God, he is only God’s diakonos – not a master of his own word – and the word he has spoken becomes a word of revelation between the believer and God. [...]
The diakonia of the Spirit, the diakonia of righteousness, the diakonia of reconciliation (2 Cor 3:8, 9; 5:18) has not operated unless the people have the Spirit, become God’s righteousness (5:21), and rejoice in their reconciliation. Making revelation real in this way is the role of the diakonos, God making the appeal through the diakonos (5:20), and the diakonos putting no obstacle in the way (6:3). Then is his an unimpeded ministry, a pure diakonia, a mediation without fault (6:3), and he commends himself in the way that diakonoi of God should, for these are known by their fidelity to their task, by their labours, kindness, truth, and in the power of God revealed (6:4-10).
It was much more important for Paul to be known as a diakonos of God than as an apostle. As an apostle, one needs credentials, and credentials can be challenged. The authenticity of God’s diakonos, on the other hand, speaks for itself: it is the Lord who speaks.
Conclusion
If such is the nature of the ministry engaged by Paul in his mission to the Corinthians, I would suggest we have much to learn in regard to the instruction within the Decree Presbyterorum ordinis concerning ‘the first task of presbyters’ being ‘to preach the Gospel’ (PO 4). That instruction was issued in the light of expectations about how the teaching should be received by the faithful: this was in a process described as a ‘conscious, free, and grateful acceptance of God’s plan as completed in Christ and their manifestation of it in their whole life.’ (PO 2)
Today’s pastors could well envisage themselves hesitating before taking up such a mandate. Alternatively, they might see in just such a mandate – and in the permanent record they hold of Paul’s own total commitment to it – an invitation to bypass problems pervading contemporary literature about the crisis of identity in the priesthood.
For ministry of this quality and outcome one does not need a 7-year tour of ancient and medieval philosophies, the cramming of puzzling medieval fabrications in the search of a theology that works for generation X, Y or Z, the scanning of innumerable laws applicable only within a clerical enclave. Nor does the candidate require the confined life within a single sex seminary ... What a candidate does need is a curiosity about appeals within that arise from exposure to the gospel, a sensitivity to the nature of faith, and recognition by people of faith. Amid the gender tensions, a man and a woman are equally susceptible to being struck by the breath of the Spirit, and either one or both – in tandem may even be better! – are there to be called by their community to engage them all with what that Spirit is offering (1 Cor 12:4).
Finally, I recommend a thoughtful reading on how to run a church service along Paul’s lines in 1 Corinthians 14: here ‘tongues’ means what the text suggests (spiritual babble) while ‘prophesy’ means to teach, explain, commentate... All of course in a style compatible with Year of the Lord 2018. Importantly, your text should show brackets around verses 33b (second half of that verse) to 36: this is because most scholars are convinced that these verses directed against women are an interpolation from a post-Paul period (as in 1 Timothy 2:11-15).