How securely rooted is the Catholic
understanding of the
ministerial priesthood in the Scriptures?

The priest in history
and in mystery
Part I

By Aidan Nichols

n Since my topic is an historical overview of the priesthood in theological perspective from the New Testament origins to today, I certainly have a wide canvas on which to paint. This is how I propose to go about my task. First, and in connection with the origins-an absolutely crucial area-I offer a preamble to explain what, unfortunately, has gone wrong with a certain quantity of recent scholarly investigation of our topic, and outline an alternative view. Secondly, I shall highlight some key areas of the subsequent tradition largely by depicting four notable figures-but with a view to suggesting what the entire canvas should look like in the end. Finally, I add a coda drawing one important conclusion and making what may prove an unpopular appeal.

First, then, the origins. How did we get from the New Testament to here? How securely rooted is the Catholic understanding of the ministerial priesthood (or, if we are to include the diaconate, the Sacrament of Order) in the Scriptures, the canonical witness as these are to the divine foundation of the Church?

Ever since the sixteenth century Reformation, and indeed before that, anti-sacerdotal movements in the Western Church have called into question the well-foundedness of the Catholic ministerial pattern by reference to the New Testament texts. Where these movements were laicist in character they gave priority to those texts which spoke of the fundamental equality of all the baptized; where they retained some form of the distinction between the ordained and the non-ordained baptized they generally interpreted the New Testament evidence in terms of a distinction between the Church flock on the one hand and, on the other, an otherwise undifferentiated "pastorate," under which term they lumped together a variety of New Testament ministerial titles-including episkopos (bishop) and presbyter, from now on to be treated as synonymous, and to which pastorate they denied any strictly priestly-that is, cultically mediatorial-character. If, then, we have been living for half a millennium with these challenges to our title-deeds-I mean by that the scriptural foundation of our claim to be the recipients of a unique sacrament giving us a special mediatorial rôle vis-à-vis the Christ who is the Head of the entire ecclesial body-what is new today?

Three things are new today: first, the wealth of historical scholarship which can now be brought to bear on this issue; secondly, the thesis that, among the churches of the New Testament there existed a variety of ministerial forms which cannot be reduced to any one emergent pattern, be that Catholic, Presbyterian, or some other; and thirdly, the tendency of a number of Catholic students to embrace this hypothesis of the irreducible pluralism of ministerial "types" and to draw, whether tacitly or explicitly, two interrelated conclusions.

The first of these conclusions maintains that the three-fold Sacrament of Order as we know it is largely the result of a Diktat by Church authority which-doubtless influenced by hierarchical (and patriarchal) patterns of thinking and behavior in late antiquity-imposed a monolithic straitjacket on the previously existing variety, ranging as this had from congregationalism to rule by a theologian in an apostle's name. One form was imposed at the behest, presumably, of a Zeitgeist-and so-equally presumably-that imposition can be undone or at least the singular form radically modified by another Zeitgeist, namely our own.

The second conclusion, linked to this, is that the claim of episcopate and presbyterate to represent a special ministerial priesthood of the New Covenant, qualitatively distinct from though in the service of the universal priesthood of the faithful, and communicated, in contrast to other charisms, not by the preaching of the Word and baptismal initiation but by a laying on of hands in lineal succession to the apostles, becomes too difficult to maintain and falls, in practice, to the ground.

If we wish to think with the mind of the Church in all recorded periods since she emerged from the so-called "sub-apostolic tunnel," we will naturally treat this entire picture with the utmost caution.1 Especially will we do so if we wish to maintain as a living force in our lives the promises made at our Ordination-for certainly this view of things is not compatible with the understanding of this sacrament found in the Ordination liturgies of East and West, and not least clearly so when we consider the addresses to those about to be ordained as given in the Roman Pontifical.

So allow me to present another view-suggesting, first of all, why much recent scholarship in the Church has gone up this manifestly blind alley.

The desire to see and celebrate difference wherever possible, including in the New Testament Canon, is not something self-evidently right and proper, either in itself or as a way of tuning in to the Scriptures. It is not so much a gift of the New Testament churches to the contemporary Church as a gift-or perhaps we should say a poisoned chalice!-handed to the Church from contemporary culture. The privileging of difference over identity as a philosophical theme is peculiarly modern and indeed "post-modern." It is a favored motif of the philosophy and literary theory which followed the collapse of cultural Modernism, the last great movement of secular humanism in the West, as cultural Modernism went down before the combined non-humanist forces of Freudianism, Marxism and Structuralism in the later 1960s. No doubt difference often is as important as identity. E. M. Forster remarked that a novelist's "business lies with individuals, not with classifications,"2 and we are all novelists when our interest in our fellow men and women is engaged. But identity also has its rights. What reader of Where Angels Fear to Tread would think it irrelevant to understanding Gino Castella and Mrs. Herriton that both exemplify in different ways the same human nature?

More widely, this attempt to see difference everywhere and accord it sole value follows-since groups and communities are the issue-from the Romanticism of the early nineteenth century. In its opposition to the French Revolution of 1789 with its claim to the allegiance of peoples everywhere since it alone proclaimed the universal human rights to be enjoyed by all, that Romanticism stressed the incomparability of local cultures, insisting that people have the right to be in all senses different.3

And just as the post-modern celebration of ontological difference, when unqualified by the complementary truth of identity, leads us into philosophical incoherence,4 so the Romantic celebration of communal difference, when uncomplemented by emphasis on our solidarity in the same human nature, renders us unable not only to criticize some other group but even to enrich it.

To sum up: the view that it is impossible to see the Catholic ministerial pattern emerging from the pages of the New Testament is popular today because it chimes with a peculiarly modern intellectual prejudice in favor of seeing and having pluralism everywhere-an attitude which may even end up in the parish Liturgy as with the Requiem Mass whose recessional hymn, reportedly, was "I Did It My Way"!

But then secondly, the whole idea that the proper way to read the New Testament is by laying aside the witness of the Church to the Scriptures she in one sense originated, ignoring the subsequent tradition which is their unfolding, and substituting for the rôle of these a changing toolbox of methods, whose contents depends on the intellectual fashion of each age-this implies a profoundly unCatholic attitude to the Bible. To make a discerning subordinate use of those tools is fine-for the Logos is active in all sound natural reason. But the Church cannot make these tools her principal instrument in the appropriation of her own Scriptures. To use the contemporary jargon, the kind of "hermeneutic" or interpretative standpoint we need is not a "hermeneutic of suspicion" where the base line is that whatever Church orthodoxy has found in these texts is the one interpretation we will a priori suspect as false, but what I like to call a "hermeneutic of recognition," where our basic stance is precisely the expectation that we will find in the texts signs and pointers to the developed Catholic Christian theory and practice. Only within such a hermeneutic can the specifically modern tools find their due place in ecclesial exegesis.

Now even if in your charity, dear reader, you grant that what I have so far asserted is pertinent to the problem of "The Priest in History"-or at least to the question with which I began, "How did we get from the New Testament to here?" you might still regard it as something which only concerns pure scholarship or at most the kind of slightly more popular theologian, usually from the Teutonic countries or Latin Amercia, who suddenly finds his sales increasing owing to the attentions of the former Holy Office! But I think you will find that quite a few thoroughly popular modern books on the priesthood confine themselves to a mixture of spirituality, psychology and anecdote, avoiding all account of the New Testament foundations which they leave rather to studies of "Ministry"-a term conveniently large enough to include both the apostolic ministry (that of bishops, presbyters and deacons) and various forms of lay ministry, studies which not infrequently tend to elide the difference of kind between these two under the impact (or within the general atmosphere) created by the sort of scholarship whose presuppositions I have been describing.

At this point, when I have come to the end of my more negative remarks on our subject and can enter upon a more positive exposition, let me say that the aim of my approach is not to depreciate the status of the lay faithful vis-à-vis the ordained, but to establish that if we are to have a high doctrine of the royal and universal priesthood of the baptized then we must have a correspondingly high doctrine of the ministerial priesthood which represents that people in the High Priest Jesus Christ before the Father and represents to them the Father's Mediator, Jesus Christ. The higher our doctrine of the laity the higher still must be our doctrine of the priesthood-not in order to preserve relative status, as cynics might say, but rather, as evangelical thinking demands, because a high concept of the laity itself requires an exalted status for the priesthood in which the laity comes publicly before God. The chief reason why the Church cannot be a democracy is that in Scripture her faithful are not a dêmos, an ordinary populace to whom in "democracy" is given the krateia, or leading power. Rather are they an extra-ordinary populace, ho laos tou Theou, the sacred people of God with a different logic governing their corporate life. The ordained man, in being commissioned for a lifetime as servant of this people, is to become an icon of Christ the Servant and thus to be exalted-not to become a mere moderator of the charisms of other people.

And this provides a suitable lead-in to my alternative account of the New Testament origins. In my own brief reconstruction in Holy Order I made use of the work of doctrinally responsible Anglican scholars in the Catholic tradition-like Austin Farrer and Gregory Dix-who grappled with these issues in the less radical form in which they then existed a generation before they hit the Catholic world.5 Their essays were especially concerned to show the New Testament origins of the episcopate but in so doing they also illuminated the way the entire Catholic pattern of the three-fold ministry makes best sense both of the New Testament and of the sub-apostolic or early patristic materials. They offer two things of the greatest value to us.

First, they show what subsequent research in primitive Christology has confirmed: the vital rôle in Jesus' thinking of the contemporary Jewish notion called by modern scholars "judicial mysticism" whereby a man's representative agent (in Hebrew, his shaliach) could be deemed to be the person himself. Simply appealing to the thought-world of the time and so without the need to posit a concept specifically originated by the divine understanding of the Word Incarnate, it becomes at a stroke credible that Jesus could have bestowed on the Twelve plenipotentiary powers as stewards of the Kingdom, commissioning those original bearers of the apostolic ministry in the very way the Synoptic Gospels suggest-namely, for carrying out the triple office of proclamation of the Word of God, cultic celebration, and government of the community of Jesus' followers. This is the munus triplex which Catholic tradition has always recognized, though not necessarily under that name. Mentioning these three tasks in the sequence pastoring, sanctifying, teaching, the fifteenth century Nicholas of Cusa, for example, will define the sacrament of the apostolic ministry as consisting in ordo, praesidentia, cathedra, and in the De concordantia catholica, explains accordingly that to the priesthood belongs "ruling virtue, lifegiving virtue, illuminating virtue"-using "virtue" there in its older English sense of active capacity.

To this we can add that in the Johannine school was preserved, in chapter 17 of St. John's Gospel, the important tradition that on the eve of his death the Lord Jesus singled out in crucial fashion the central cultic aspect of apostleship, what Cusanus would call a "life-giving presidency," for in his High Priestly Prayer he not only defined his own death in liturgical terms as a sacrifice through which he would intercede efficaciously for others but also consecrated the Twelve for the new worship "in spirit and in truth" he had promised in speaking earlier in the Gospel to the woman of Samaria. The Twelve are to become, as the later Catholic interpretation of the Synoptic Last Supper command has maintained, the ministerial priesthood of the New Covenant established in his sacrificial dying. "For their sake I consecrate myself, so that they too may be consecrated in the truth" (John 17:19). The priestly office of the Twelve is thus a fruit of Christ's sacrifice on the Cross-a consideration which points to the Cross's special relationship with the Eucharist, as understood by the later Church.6

Not that this in any way excludes the teaching and pastoral office of the Twelve for they are, in St. John's account, to transmit the knowledge of the Father and the Son (the teaching office) and also (the pastoral office) to render the disciples a unity on the model of that which holds good for those divine Persons. But which panel of the "triptych" of the triple office will be made central? That is a quite crucial question for how all three offices are to be conceived. As René Laurentin has pointed out, the liturgical dimension of the priesthood is its most properly and specifically priestly dimension.7 The post-Vatican II Catechism of the Catholic Church in its own treatment of the triple office takes just the same view (1539-1545).

So much, and to begin with, for the ministry of the apostles themselves. But more than this, the Anglo-Catholic scholarship of that earlier generation (largely ignored by their Roman Catholic contemporaries whose biblical scholarship was at the time confined in the main to its own confessional milieu) offers us a plausible reconstruction of how the unique ministry given to the apostles was transmitted to, in and with the ordained ministry of the Catholic Church.

In the first place, that means: how the apostolic ministry was speedily applied to and supplemented by local auxiliaries in the form of presbyters, those ministers whom First Thessalonians calls hoi proistamenoi en tô Kuriô, the ones who "preside in the Lord" (5:12). Such leaders are not to be thought of as purely community-generated, thrown up by a charismatic process from the grassroots. Given that the doctrine of the Church forms an intrinsic part of the truth of revelation in all the major theologies of the New Testament Canon, it is unthinkable that Paul or any other apostle would have communicated the Gospel message in authoritative fashion while washing his hands of the issue of the form of the Church. And the derivation of the ecclesial priesthood from the apostolic priesthood is absolutely crucial for ourselves, since the ordained ministry would not be a sacramental reality in its own right unless it took its rise from the same action in which Jesus Christ himself instituted the apostolate as an effective sign of his continuing authority in the Church.

So far I have only mentioned presbyters, alias presidents in the Lord. But, as we see from the terms of Paul's address to the Church at Philippi, some of these presbyters may well have had special powers of episkopê or governance (for, as we know, a camel is a horse designed by a committee!), and these will have needed further assistance, diakonia, from those called accordingly, "deacons." The emergence of embryo bishops within a wider council of presbyters is most clearly attested in the Pastoral Epistles which thus appear as the key to the future, hence their stigmatisation by a certain sort of Protestant radical as Frühkatholizismus, "early Catholicism."

Not till the local ministerial leadership had become more personal and more unified in the single head of a presiding presbyter or monarchical episkopos was it suited to become a vehicle for the full takeover of the apostles' own commission as they departed this world. The emergence of single episcopal leaders of the presbyteral colleges of local churches, episcopal leaders assisted by their deacons, created a vehicle capable of carrying apostolicity-such full apostolic authority as is needful for fulfilling the intentions of the Lord Jesus in teaching, worship and governance throughout the universal as well as in the local church when the apostles themselves had gone. Thus, while the presbyterate is the original local form of the apostolic ministry (and this is the element of truth in Richerisme, that interesting Catholic theory of the seventeenth century which maintained that true Church order is presbyterial-but with bishops), nonetheless the episcopate is the apostolic ministry's most crucial form, for into it was eventually poured the complete ministry of the apostles themselves.8

At the other end of the sub-apostolic tunnel this is exactly what we find. Gradually the pre-Nicene episcopate wakes up to the consciousness that it has inherited the apostolic ministry-prophetic, priestly, pastoral-in its fulness, such that the bishops can together, when circumstances permit, determine the conditions of the transmission of the Gospel in the Church, and of the Gospel community in the world. Though this process leaves the diaconate largely as it was, except perhaps for bonding deacons even more closely to bishops than before, a dramatic change overcomes the presbyterate. From now on the presbyters will belong to the apostolic succession only through their ordination by the bishops who embody that succession. However, and this is the quid pro quo, by thus sharing in the apostolic succession, albeit via the bishops, the presbyters necessarily now also share in its triplex munus not just locally as hitherto but, in principle at any rate, on the scale of the universal Church. Every presbyter is ordained into the single presbyterium of the worldwide Church though for the service of a particular church within it. And of course the celebration of the Eucharist, remaining as it does the prerogative not only of bishop but also of presbyter, makes it possible not just to call the bishop a "priest"-sacerdos in Cyprian, archihiereus in Hippolytus, writers of the pre-Nicene age, but to extend the same vocabulary of priesthood-sacerdotium, hierosunê-to presbyters as well, something for which the earliest evidence we have comes in memorial inscriptions of the 360s in Asia Minor. The linguistic habit spread widely and incurred no objection in East and West, testifying to the sense that the priestly office-that is, cultic, above all, Eucharistic celebration-constitutes the central panel of the triptych of the ministry.

This, then is the kind of account we should be giving of the origins of the Catholic priesthood in the historical will of the Lord Jesus Christ through his founding of the apostolate. Though various nuances need adding-and I add them in my study Holy Order-this account is, I feel sure, on the right lines. In a second and concluding article I shall look at the subsequent history of priesthood, and that history's chief spiritual lesson for us today. n

To be concluded next month.

1 See for instance P. Grelot, Eglise et ministères. Pour un dialogue critique avec Edward Schillebeeckx (Paris 1983).

2 E. M. Forster, "Three Countries" (TS at King's College, Cambridge), cited in O. Stallybrass (ed.), E. M. Forster, Where Angels Fear to Tread (London 1975), p. 8

3A. Finkelkraut, The Undoing of Thought (Et London 1989), describes this process and its malign result.

4 Fergus Kerr, O.P., in reviewing D. Cupitt's The Last Philosophy asks, "Is it not possible to highlight once-neglected ideas of process, event, difference, subjectivity, and so forth, without throwing out correlative ideas of substantial identity, continuity and time-transcending truth?" Tablet, 10. 6. 1995, p. 746. [Italics are added.]

5 A. Nichols, O.P., Holy Order. The Apostolic Ministry from the New Testament to the Second Vatican Council (Dublin 1990); essays by Farrer and Dix in K. E. Kirk (ed.), The Apostolic Ministry Essays on the History and the Doctrine of Episcopacy (London 1946).

6 A. Feuillet, The Priesthood of Christ and his Ministers (Et New York 1975).

7 R. Laurentin, Marie, l'Eglise et le sacerdoce (Paris 1953), I. pp. 11-12. Unless viewed from the angle of the priestly office, the prophetic office can become mere punditry or academicism, the pastoral office simply a matter of social welfare.

8 For Richer, Christ gave jurisdiction to "the whole priestly order"-apostles (bishops) and the seventy-two disciples (presbyters) en bloc.