Theology of Church

A Tale of Three Priesthoods

They walked with some strange sense of fear and joy as they entered the temple. As they entered with sacrifices in hand, they would bring peace and reconnection between the people and God. These ancient Hebrew priests were healers, reconcilers, bringers of hope.

He struggled up the hill, falling, bleeding, crying, and yet harboring a greater joy and hope than any had ever known. As he was brutally murdered, he would forever bring peace between people and God. This God-man and eternal high priest was the healer, the reconciler, the true hope.

They ignorantly left home with video cameras and little knowledge of what they were getting themselves into. They ended up in the path of danger, in houses of desperation, in the hearts of the abused, unseen, and desperate children of Northern Uganda. As they video taped a young boy named Jacob bitterly weeping, they were annointed with his tears and became the bearers of peace. These modern priests fathered a movement, Invisible Children, of healing, reconciling, and sparce but undeniable hope.

In a world of genocide, isolation, famine, war, child soldiers, and a seemingly-insurmountable AIDS pandemic, we are in desperate need of priests. To the world's great fortune, God seeded a nation of priests when God chose Israel to be God's people. God again blessed the world beyond what we dare hope for in the person of Jesus Christ, the eternal High Priest. Today this blessing continues in the church, a nation of priests, a peculiar treasure, upon a hungry dehumanized world longing for the relational connection it was created for. For this reason, it is timely to re-examine an ecclesiology of priesthood.

XME Formula

Ecclesiology cannot stand alone. It is born out of a Christology that births a missiology. The church does not have a mission but is by nature mission.¹ Edmund P. Clowney states, “The church does not have a mission, but is mission….the church exists only in mission.”² Therefore, in discussing the priesthood of the church, we begin with the priesthood of Christ and the on-going mission of Christ's priesthood.

The foundational question for an Eccliology based on this Christological missiology, or the XME formula, is "Who is Christ and what did Christ accomplish?" Torrents of ink have been placed on paper in answer of those two questions. Suffice for founding a priestly ecclisology that Christ was and is the eternal High Priest and that Christ's death and resurrection can be viewed as X suggests, as victory over sin and death. Donald Miller speaks of salvation as historically completed: "Objectively, the correct answer to the question: 'When were you saved?' would be: 'Around the year 30 AD.'It was when 'the place of the skull was transformed by an open tomb that our salvation was effected."³ Clowney depicts the church as “Those who know that the whole world is saved and can declare its salvation.”⁴ Christ’s death is entirely efficatious for reconciliation and Christ is fully potent as the eternal High Priest. The church's ministry, then is founded only on Christ, who is the source of our very existence⁵ and the one from whom Christian priesthood flows. Further, the purpose of the church can be defined simply as the continued work of what was completed on the cross. Manson writes, "The work, decisively done on the Cross, is continued in the church."⁶

As our priesthood flows from Christ’s, our mission is born of God's mission in the world.⁷ Hall consistently refers to God as "the one whose mission precedes ours."⁸ There are many facets to this mission, but the common thread is reconciliation. Yoder writes, "The priestly character of the community of faith arises out of its very mission: the role of the church is not to serve itselfbut to be the bearer of reconciliation. The royal character of this community can be specified in terms of its participation in God's intentions for the direction of the world."⁹ Again, this mission is clearly to join in God's reconciliatory presence¹⁰ and mission. "The eternal purpose of God for [humanity]," states Miller, "[is] rooted in the divine determination to bring [humanity] into perfect fellowship with [God's self]."¹¹

From this Christological mission, we can begin to form an ecclesiology. The obvious conclusion is that the church is a reconciliatory entity. The missional church is clearly an "intstrument of redemption."¹² Hall explicitly states the mission of the church as "A meeting in which the One whose mission predeeds ours brings together for reconcilliatoin and communion those who are alienated from one another."¹³ Hall further explores this humanizing role of the church as cultivating connection in a world of isolation and violencce: "Christian mission orientated toward the 'mending' of this world and its creatures would first hope, not that persons would be prepared for heaven, but that they would be enabled more fully to enter into the life of earth: to be more human; to be neighbors; to be with rather than against or alone."¹⁴

Having arrived at this foundational understanding of the church as, in its very essence, a Christological mission, we begin to see the importance of the biblical metaphor of a royal priesthood. In the next several pages, we will explore the meaning of this metaphor and its implication for the world. In this exploration, we will begin by exploring the role of priesthood. Then we will enter into the crucial question: to whom are we priests? In the end, we will find the rhythm of our three priesthoods living and calling forth new life and hope in the world.

Reconciliatory Role of Priests

The primary role of a priest is as a reconciliatory and relational entity. Christ, the perfect high priest is eternally and unbreakeably connected to God and to humanity,¹⁵ so too must be priests. First, priest are connected God. Gnuse writes, "Throughout the biblical text preists are defined not according to what they do but by what they are - people who live in the divine presence."¹⁶ Second, the priests are connected as a community. Craddock writes that this priesthood is "clearly community and not individual [designation]."¹⁷ Priests, then, live reflexively between God and humanity, bringing the two together. Herschel Hobbs depicts this as the primary definition of the priesthood: "A priest was one who stood between God and humans in order to bring them together."¹⁸

This historical reconciliatory role of priests is, through Christ, passed on to the church. As the new royal priesthood, church holds the hope of connection in a world marked by disconnection and isolation.¹⁹ So key is this connection that it is the very foundation of this new priesthood of all. Hillyer reveals that the priesthood of the Old Testament was a priesthood that was limmited to a caste in response to the moral failure in the story of the Golden Calf. This new priesthood is based on a new connection between God and humanity that allows all believers, once again, to be priests.²⁰ Karkkainen sees this connection as the ultimate purpose of the church: "The final goal of the church [is] the unity of all people of God under one God."²¹

Peter depicts this royal priesthood as offering sacrifices. This offering marks priesthood.²² It was through this sacrifice that humanity was able to draw near to God. Dozeman writes, "The mediation of sacrifices purged humans, drawing them closer to the realm of God, now centerd in the sanctuary...The well-being offering even allowed Israelites to feast in t he presence of God before the sanctuary."²³ As he depicts the priestly officiation of sacrifices, Dozeman notes a three-stop movement toward reconciliation: sin to forgiveness to celebration.²⁴ Manson concurs with this celebratory end: "The sacrifice may be thought of as a sacred meal which the worshippers share with their God."²⁵

Christ, as the High Priest, offered a final sacrifice, uniting humanity to God and ensuring the eschatoligical feast of reconcilliation. What, then, is the priestly role of the church in Christ's wake? The clear answer is the Eucharist. As Manson writes, "Those who celebrate and lead in the celebration of Eucharist become the priests."²⁶ As a sacrifice, the Eucharist can be seen as a) a shared meal, b) gifts offered to God, and c) means to repair relations between God and God's people. The Eucharist moves us from sin to forgiveness to celebration and is, at its very heart a celebratory feast. But is the priesthood of the church about ritual? Surely not. However, Craddock sees the church's priestly role, as depicted in 1 Peter, as highly ritualistic - to the point that Eucharist is not only an enacted church service, but a live way of being: "Rather than being anti-ritual as some have claimed, [Peter] presses ritual to include relationships and benevolent behavior."²⁷

Seven Other Roles of Priests

The primary mission of the priestly church, then is to live a priestly life of Eucharistic being, bringing forgiveness to sin and celebration to forgiveness and uniting all people to God. There are, however, many other facets to the priestly role. Craddock offers a list of priestly actions: "Acts of praise, deeds of kindness, sharing of goods, acceptable conduct, and proclamation of the Gospel."²⁸ Craddock's list is a fine addition to the recolciliatory role of the priesthood. However, Dozeman offers a more complete list that we will not consider: 1) Preists administer temple worship. The church, as a royal priesthood, is then a community dedicated to the curation of worship and to the praises of God. 2) The priests are charged with the maintenence of the temple: there are two applications for this role to the life of the church. a) The whole world is the Lord’s. Therefore, maintenance of the temple means care of the world. And b) the church, as Peter suggests is the temple.²⁹ Our priesthood then binds us to each other’s well being and to the well being of the church as a whole. 3) The work of the priest is to discern God's vision for the world. Dozeman is careful to separate this vocation from that of the prophet’s visionary insight. Instead, the priesthood discerns an institutional vision for the people of God. 4) Priests are teachers. In his treatment of the priesthood of all believers, Luther saw priests as participating in a double role of intercessor and instructor.³⁰ Reidar Byornard states of Hebrew priests that “They were teachers and guides.”³¹ Clearly the teaching role of priests, and by extension of Christ’s church is of great import. 5) Priests are judges. In Numbers 5-6, priests discern guilt and innocence within the people of God. 6) Finally, priests are healers.³² Dozeman compares the priestly function of ancient Israel to the medical vocation of today: "The ordained preisthood in anceint Israel is not unlike health care professionals in contemporary society, only the priesthood is a form of religious health care, since it allows for the divine medicine of holiness to be distributed to humans on earth."³³ He further applies this role to the work of medical ethics today, asserting that the priesthood of the church calls for a voice in rapidly changing currents of medical law and ethics: "It is also a priestly responsibility to evaluate the ethical frontier of health care, where the church must clarify the meaning of life and death as medical preactices continue to change."³⁴

The seventh function is drawn from the work of first name Hayward: story keeping.³⁵

Hayward proposes that the priestly function of story keeping involves telling stories doxologically. This doxological story telling has eight key aspects: 1) Mold stories in ways that enable rather than hinder illumination and leading of the people. 2) Discern historical events that are signs of the "Rule of the Lamb" and those that are "setbacks."³⁶ 3) Appropriate the ambivilance of the Jewish experience and the usability of other nations or majesties. 4) Claim movements of democracy and humanization for the Gospel. Though, the current author suggests extreme caution in tying the Gospel too tightly to democracy, which is like any government, a failing human system. 5) Describe behavior as resulting from Good News and not out of a concern for justification. 6) Present history in its liturgical setting. This aspect of story keeping challenges priests to live their present lives in the rhythms and with the past stories of the historic people and story of God. 7) See Christ's victory in our current time. This role is of specific importance today. As television reports a failing, cynical world and film more and more tells stories of death and loss, priests must proclaim the stories of victory. The third priesthood in our opening discussion was that of Invisible Children, an organization that is raising funds and awareness for the children whose lives are being decimated by a twenty-year-old war. Within the last year, great progress has been made and Invisible Children road crews are storming the country with the stories of victory in our time. This way of story telling must be key facet of the church’s priesthood. 8) Finally, it is the priestly role to see history with the resurrection as a guiding backdrop. Hayward states, "Hope is not a reflex rebounding from defeat but a reflection of theophany."³⁷ This also connects with what Miroslav Volf terms remembering rightly.³⁸ We remember the desolations of this life in light of the resurrection and therefore, for the expectantly sure hope of redemption

Priests to Whom

The next question is, to whom does the church live as a royal priesthood? The first answer is God. We are primarily God’s. Herschel Hobbs unpacks the use if the term peculiar treasure in Exodus 19:5. A peculiar treasure was a treasure that the king kept for himself. Thus, by parallel, the kingdom of priests is primarily a kingdom for God's enjoyment.³⁹ Peter H. Hobbie agrees that this priesthood is specially dedicated God: "Christians form a priesthood, dedicated to God's service."⁴⁰ Edge also echoes this primary purpose of our priesthood: "The totality of one's life is to be lived under God and for God."⁴¹

But, does our primary status as God’s leave us there? Some, such as Hobbie, suggest a retreat from the world, that the priest maintain the priestly body, stating that "community...is an end in itself."⁴² Hobbie further states, "God has chosen the Christian community to be God's own nation and race, separated from secular society and culture."⁴³ However, according to Trevor Hart, this is a scandalous thought that would require re-thinking the very concept of "Good News." He states that such exclusionary belief, "militates against the traditional perception of Christianity as truly offering good news to all human persons, and makes such claims to salvific universality or absolutes essentially scandalous."⁴⁴ Hall also counters the separatistic stance, stating, "The object of the divine Spirit, biblically understood, is not to get us out of the world but to get us into it."⁴⁵

The royal priesthood of the church, then is for the world. Dozeman reflects on ancient Hebrew priesthood as a basis for this stance: "All biblical writers agree that the goal of the priestly vocation is for the entire people of God to become a priestly nation in service to the world."⁴⁶ He further and firmly states: “The people of God must take on the role of priests to the entire world."⁴⁷ By far the most ecumenical of the popes, John Paul II demanded that the Christians be agents of reconciliation throughout the world: "[Pope John Paul II] calls all Christians to do their utmost, not just for the unity of the church but also for the unity of all divided humanity."⁴⁸
III. Conclusion
* "They were perfectly willing to be [God's] 'peculiar treasure' and even to be a 'kingdom of priests,' but they were not willing to assume the accompanying responsbilities." - Hobbs 17

* Put this someplace else As Peter mentions the church as a priesthood, he also calls it a "spiritual house." Miller sees this house as an eschatologically theraputic home: "[Humanity] is delivered from sin in order to achieve the meaning of [their] existence apart from sin. The purpose of the building of a house is to establish a home wherein all the complex aspects of family relatioships may be progressively worked out." – 413

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