1 The Sacramental Shape of the Church

The previous chapter intended to correct the conception of political authority in Vatican II by proposing a more robustly theological conception that drew together the insights of several Protestant exegetes. In this chapter I intend to correct the problematic ecclesiology that affected Vatican II’s teaching on church-state relations. In Chap. 5, I argued that there was a tension in the Council’s ecclesiology. When presenting a largely pre-conciliar conception of the lay apostolate’s role in mediating between church and state, it sometimes employed a scholastic theological idiom that relegated the church’s essence to an immaterial, supernatural plane separate from the world. However, by contrast, there were strides made in LG to move beyond a scholastic idiom by describing the church as an eschatological sacrament and mystery, embodying the already begun, yet still obscure and incomplete, salvation of the world. As mentioned earlier in Chap. 7, Part II is not meant to be a repudiation of Vatican II, but rather a constructive response, building on the Council’s efforts to improve the pastoral and missionary practices of the church. Hence the return to scripture in the previous chapter was following the Council’s method of ressourcement. Similarly the ecclesiology to be elucidated in the current chapter will develop seeds already present in the conciliar documents, particularly the teaching that ‘the principal manifestation of the Church consists in the full, active participation of all God’s people in the same liturgical celebrations, especially in the same Eucharist’ (SC 1975a, pp. 14–15, n. 41). My aim is to present an ecclesiology able to understand church-state relations without relying on the dichotomy between religion and politics, which undermines Christians’ ability to see the church as a unique kind of social and political community.

In Chap. 5, I used Cavanaugh’s political theology to argue that Vatican II’s distinction between natural and supernatural planes of activity obscures the church’s visibility as a social and political body. However, in Chap. 6 I also criticised Cavanaugh’s ecclesiology for making the mistake of attending almost exclusively to the Eucharist, while neglecting the importance of the other sacraments and the proclamation of the Word of God in forming the church. Can O’Donovan help us to construct a more balanced ecclesiology? According to Travis Kroeker, whereas Yoder (as well as Cavanaugh, I would argue) focuses too much ‘on the social embodiment of Christ’s rule … without paying attention to the inner formation of the wills and minds of Christian witnesses’ (Kroeker 2000, p. 58), O’Donovan has the opposite problem of thinking that ‘the church will have no visible political character’ (ibid.). ‘O’Donovan refuses to allow that the church constitutes a new political order or alternative society, since it serves a hidden Lord whose rule cannot yet be made visibly public’ (ibid.). To support his criticism, Kroeker cites O’Donovan’s claim that ‘the political character of the church, its essential nature as a governed society, is hidden, to be discerned by faith as the ascended Christ who governs it is to be discerned by faith’ (O’Donovan 1996, p. 166). Kroeker is not entirely fair to O’Donovan, who devotes considerable space to considering how the sacraments visibly give ‘institutional form and order’ (ibid., p. 172) to the church and enable us to ‘know where the church is’ (ibid.) by its performance of ‘a series of formed acts and observances [i.e. the sacraments], through which in acted speech … it recapitulates the saving acts of Christ’ (ibid., p. 173).

Following O’Donovan’s lead, my ecclesiology will also be constructed on the sacraments. However, as ecclesiology touches more closely on what the Catholic Church considers as authoritatively taught and settled areas of doctrine, the scope for receptive ecumenism will become narrower in this chapter in comparison with Chaps. 8 and 10 of Part II. My dialogue with O’Donovan will continue, although I will be making my argument at times against the grain of his own thinking. Not every issue or aspect of ecclesiology need be discussed but only what is necessary to bring into focus the shape and structure of the community created by the Spirit and encountered by political authorities in a way that avoids the problems I identified earlier in Vatican II’s ecclesiology. For that specific purpose, the current chapter will proceed to answer two questions: How do the sacraments give visible, social form to the church’s participation in Christ’s royal victory over the Powers? And what do the sacraments empower Christians to do in imitation of Christ’s messianic office as king, prophet, and priest?

2 Baptism

The exposition of O’Donovan’s political theology in chapter eight began to show how we can break down the conceptual partition between theology and politics when exploring the revelation of God’s kingdom in the scriptural narrative, and what that revelation reveals about our own political undertakings. While we learnt there of the kingship of Christ defeating the Powers, we turn now to consider the church created by his triumph. What makes a society ‘political’? According to Pierre Manent, we sometimes forget the command-obedience relationship at the ground of all political societies due to the influence of social contract theory since Hobbes, which imagines an autonomous self who exercises self-rule by consenting to the social contract and authorising the sovereign to rule over itself (Manent 2018, pp. 71–77). ‘Nothing in modern democracy has changed the fact that political existence depends upon structures of command and obedience’ (O’Donovan 1996, p. 18). Therefore we can say, without using metaphorical language, that the church is a political society because ‘it is brought into being and held in being, not by a special function it has to fulfil [such as healthcare or education], but by a government that it obeys in everything’ (ibid., p. 159). The church is a political society because it ‘is ruled and authorised by the ascended Christ alone and supremely … and it is not answerable to any other authority that may attempt to subsume it’ (ibid.).

Asserting the political nature of the church ensures that we do not centre politics around the state, as Vatican II did, and then repeat its mistake of understanding Christians to be engaging in politics only when they interact with the state. Whereas Vatican II works with a neo-Thomistic picture of Christians being ‘citizens of both cities’ (GS 1966b, p. 42, n. 43), ‘at one and the same time a believer and a citizen of the world’ (AA 1975b, p. 772, n. 5), a more helpful perspective is Augustine’s view that ‘there is no dual citizenship’ (Smith 2017, p. 45) because ‘members of the heavenly city are not members of the earthly city, too’ (O’Donovan 2004a, p. 58). For the Augustinian view, the question is not how Christians should distinguish between their political and religious identities and obligations. The pertinent question is rather how the sacramental practices of those whose ‘citizenship [politeuma] is in heaven’ (Phil 3:20; ESV) reveal the church to be a political society witnessing to ‘a divine authority and a more lasting social order’ (O’Donovan 1996, p. 7). By being orientated to this eschatological horizon, the church exposes the comparative fragility and imperfection of public order or earthly peace, as Augustine calls it, which is the duty of earthly political powers to uphold.

The first sacrament that reveals the church’s political identity, i.e. its obedience to Christ, is baptism. In ‘the patristic era baptism (that included confirmation) was deemed the primary sacrament’ (O’Collins and Jones 2010, p. 95), unsurprisingly given the explicit commandment to baptise in Matthew’s Great Commission and in the longer ending of Mark (Mt 28:19; Mk 16:16). The church is commanded to baptise because it signifies that entering the citizenry of the heavenly kingdom depends entirely on the unmerited gift of grace and is neither assisted, nor hindered, by the moral luck of one’s birth. Augustine criticised the belief, presumably because it was held by some, that Christian parents could transmit grace instead of original sin to their offspring, which ‘implied that humans could engineer their grace over time through the progressive breeding of the most spiritually fit’ (Waters 2007, p. 22). However, Augustine argued, ‘children can never be proper objects of hope because they merely magnify the futility of the passing age’ (ibid., pp. 22–23). No amount of biopower or biopolitical control over reproduction (to use the Foucauldian idiom) can alter the mortality, ‘the alienation and division effected in Adam’s posterity’ (Bouyer 1960, p. 69). Instead, ‘if God is the true object of hope, as Augustine contended, then grace is a divine gift given to every generation instead of a possession imparted from one to the next’ (Waters 2007, p. 23). Hence, by baptising all its new members, regardless of their parentage, the church reveals that it is a new sort of community being formed and sustained by divine grace.

The church’s novelty springs from the new era in salvation history begun by Christ. He was born of a virgin because his advent marked a new beginning unlike the kind of common novelty brought into the world by our natality, i.e. by every new-born’s ‘capacity of beginning something anew, that is, of acting’ (Arendt 1958, p. 9). Although God used the family of Abraham and his descendants to be the ‘carrier of the covenant’ (Atkinson 2014, p. 78) from Genesis 12 onwards, even Abraham’s progeny could not escape the effects of propagation, which led to further divisions between Jews and Gentiles and within the Jewish people itself. Christ’s advent, therefore, was to surmount such divisions by founding a new kind of political community, ‘a city measured more by endurance through time than by extension through space’ (Milbank 2006, p. 407). What matters for the church ‘is not the cultivation of excellence in the heroic present [to occupy and defend a certain territory] … but rather the ever-renewed transmission of the signs of love and the bringing to birth of new members from the womb of baptism’ (ibid.), regardless of the new members’ ethnicity or nationality, who are ‘all one in Christ Jesus’ (Gal 3:28; ESV). ‘All recipients of divine love and grace are, by this favour, and not by any heroic excellence, full members of the community’ (Milbank 2006, p. 407) because the baptised are all redeemed equally, including those who are otherwise marginalised in society (such as women, children, slaves, etc.). Baptism means to enter a polity in which all contingent differences are not abolished, but the enmity and partiality that come from the divisions persisting in the saeculum are meant to be superseded by mutual regard and love, as often indicated by Paul’s use of the reciprocal pronoun, allēlōn. For example:

so we, though many, are one body in Christ, and individually members one of another [allēlōn] (Rom 12:5; ESV)

that there may be no division in the body, but that the members may have the same care for one another [allēlōn] (1 Cor 12:25; ESV)

For you were called to freedom, brothers. Only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for the flesh, but through love serve one another [allēlois]. (Gal 5:13; ESV; cf. Lohfink 1985, pp. 99–106)

Furthermore, baptism is inseparable from responding by faith to Christ’s triumph over the Powers.Footnote 1 ‘Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved, you and your household’ (Acts 6:31; ESV), Paul and Silas tell their jailer at Philippi, and afterwards, ‘he was baptized at once, he and all his family’ (Acts 6:33; ESV). ‘Whoever believes and is baptized will be saved, but whoever does not believe will be condemned’ (Mk 16:16; ESV), as Christ declares in the longer ending of Mark, which indicates not only the need for baptism but also its connection with belief, as was also clear in Acts 6. However, the juxtaposition of baptism and belief with only unbelief in the second half of Mk 16:16 tells us that baptism is useless without faith. Since Christ’s triumph over the Powers is not yet openly revealed, the baptised know only by faith that, ‘even though there may be so-called gods in heaven or on earth—as in fact there are many gods and many lords [kyrioi]—yet for us there is one God, the Father … and one Lord [kyrios], Jesus Christ’ (1 Cor 8:5–6; NRSV). Faith should be ‘the decision which tore them from subjection to the principalities’ (Schlier 1961, p. 55) because the shield of faith and the whole armour of God, as Ephesians 6:10–17 describes, give to the baptised the ability to resist the lure of the Powers. It is no surprise that two longstanding parts of the baptismal rite, since at least the third century, before the profession of faith and the baptism itself, are the exorcisms of those about to be baptised (Wainwright 1969, pp. 20–21) and their renunciation of ‘the devil and his pomp and his angels’ (Tertullian, De Corona, 3, as cited in Bettenson 1969, p. 147).

The connection between baptism, faith, and union with Christ’s triumph is highlighted by Paul in Romans:

We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life. (Rom 6:4; ESV)

The author of Colossians uses the Pauline understanding of baptism when warning those who seemed to be returning to subjection to the Powers: ‘If with Christ you died to the elemental spirits of the world [tōn stoicheiōn tou kosmou], why, as if you were still alive in the world, do you submit to regulations?’ (Col 2:20; ESV). The Colossians are also explicitly warned: ‘Let no one disqualify you, insisting on asceticism and worship of angels’ (Col 2:18a; ESV). From this and many other parts of the NT, we see that the baptised are ‘still within the grasp of the principalities, exposed to their attacks’ (Schlier 1961, p. 54). They are still capable of sinning and returning to the bondage from which they had been freed. However, the confident proclamation that God has ‘delivered us from the domain of darkness [tēs exousias tou skotous] and transferred us to the kingdom of his beloved Son’ (Col 1:13; ESV), and that the Colossians had ‘come to fullness in him [i.e. Christ], who is the head of every ruler and authority [archēs kai exousias]’ (Col 2:10; NRSV), reveal the author’s conviction that the Colossians had received everything they needed to be capable of resisting the Powers of the World.

We see the same connection between baptism, faith, and overcoming the Powers in the Johannine literature: ‘For everyone who has been born of God overcomes the world. And this is the victory that has overcome the world—our faith’ (1 Jn 5:4; ESV). The word for ‘world’ (kosmos) in this verse carries the connotations in the Pauline and Johannine cosmology of those who are enslaved by sin (Jn 8:34) and under the power of ‘the ruler of this world’ (Jn 14:30; ESV), since ‘the whole world lies in the power of the evil one’ (1 Jn 5,19; ESV). The reference to being born of God in 1 John 5:4 may allude to John’s prologue:

But to all who did receive him, who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God, who were born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God. (John 1:12–13; ESV)

These verses see faith in Jesus as leading to a share in divine sonship, anticipating Jesus’ teaching to Nicodemus about being born of water and spirit in baptism (Jn 3:15). Moreover, the elaborate formula (‘not of blood nor …’) and the textual variants in quotations by Tertullian and Irenaeus that use the same verses to refer to Christ’s Virgin Birth, rather than to believers (Orchard et al. 1953, p. 981), suggest that John is at least alluding to a certain analogy between the Virgin Birth and baptism. ‘Christians are mystically, as Christ was literally, virgin-born’ (Knox 1952, p. 202). This supports the point made earlier that baptism represents sacramentally the advent of a new era in Christ and the entry of a new citizen into the community obedient to Christ and gathered by his Spirit.

Finally, baptism also reveals the political nature of the church by leading some of the Powers to rebel by proposing imitations of baptism. ‘Under the pressure of the Gospel and the Christian allegiance that it evokes, political authority comes to demand an opposed and ultimate allegiance’ (O’Donovan 2004b, pp. 37–38). In Revelation 13, after describing the demonic Power giving its power and authority to the First Beast, a political regime that persecutes the church (Rev 13:1–10), there follows a vision of the Second Beast:

It exercises all the authority of the first beast on its behalf, and it makes the earth and its inhabitants worship the first beast, whose mortal wound had been healed. … Also it causes all, both small and great, both rich and poor, both free and slave, to be marked on the right hand or the forehead, so that no one can buy or sell who does not have the mark, that is, the name of the beast or the number of its name. (Rev 13:12, 16–17; NRSV; emphasis added)

In other words, ‘a public profession is required of everyone … each man must show to whom he belongs, under whose protection and in whose service he is’ (Schlier 1961, p. 88). The mark is a ‘secularised seal of baptism which levels all differences between men and only distinguishes between friends and enemies of the ruling system’ (Schlier 1967, p. 236). The antitheses described of small and great, rich and poor, free and slave, emphasise that the Powers want to reclaim the loyalty of the totality of society for themselves. Although the Second Beast wields the threat of exclusion from society’s transactions, which would presumably result in starvation, it seems to demand more than a sign of political loyalty to the First Beast. O’Donovan argues that interpreting Revelation 13 to be only about a kind of political totalitarianism would be ‘not mistaken, but too limited’ (O’Donovan 2004b, p. 37) because it is about

the more fundamental evil of pseudo-messianic ideology, a claim to ultimate loyalty based on the occupation of a decisive role in history … [i.e.] posing as the emissary of divine redemption. (ibid.)

O’Donovan’s interpretation may well be supported by the blasphemous names on the heads of the First Beast (Rev 13:1) and by its mouth uttering ‘haughty and blasphemous words’ (Rev 13:5). Schlier sees these as references to the imperial Caesar cult and he lists various divine titles that the emperors gave themselves, including salus mundi, salvation of the world (Schlier 1967, p. 235; 1961, pp. 80–81). Moreover, it seems to be the function of the Second Beast, which is described later as ‘the false prophet’ (Rev 16:13; 19:20; 20:10), to provide a pseudo-messianic ideology justifying worship of the First Beast. Although the language is obscure, the Second Beast seems to use the visible mark of loyalty, as well as performing deceptive miracles and using an image of the First Beast (Rev 13:13–15), to make the First Beast appear worthy of worship: ‘the whole earth marvelled as they followed the beast … saying, “Who is like the beast, and who can fight against it?”’ (Rev 13:3–4; ESV). The mark is ‘the name of the [first] beast or the number of its name’ (Rev 13:17; NRSV) and Schlier and Cullman both argue that the number (616, not 666) is code for kaisar theos (Schlier 1961, p. 89; Cullmann 1949, p. 27). Regardless of what the number means, the reference to the Caesar cult in Asia Minor is unmistakable, reflecting a period in which ‘the blending of the ritual institution with the administrative became the leading idea of the provincial organisation of the imperial period’ (Mommsen 1886, p. 345). The Second Beast, therefore, ‘is the priestly propagandist who invests the bestial power with a ritual, and thereby furthers its effectiveness’ (Schlier 1961, p. 85).

Throughout its history, the practice of baptism has inspired, like the negative image of a photograph, numerous parodies of itself, which momentarily make more visible the eschatological division in loyalties created by Christ’s confrontation with the Powers, as it is prolonged by the church’s mission. Two examples will suffice. During most of the Edo period in Japan (1629–1856), the authorities forced suspected Christians to prove their repudiation of outlawed religions by trampling upon fumi-e, i.e. images of Jesus or Mary (Cavanaugh 1999, p. 98). Another example was the oath of unconditional obedience to the Führer on pain of death, required of all conscripted soldiers in the Wehrmacht from 1935 onwards, an oath which the Catholic Church at the time failed to recognise for what it was and hence did not officially oppose. One of the few who refused to take the oath, the Catholic peasant and martyr Franz Jägerstätter, saw that the oath to Hitler and confessing Christ’s Lordship were mutually exclusive:

Christ demands from us also a public acknowledgment of our faith, exactly as the Führer Adolf Hitler demands from his Volk. … We must still obey God more than we obey human beings. And who can serve two masters at once? (Jägerstätter 2009, p. 180)

His parish priest, Bishop Fliesser, and several others told him the oath did not make him responsible for the Nazi regime’s policies and ‘he had neither the competence, nor information, nor the right to challenge the secular ruler as to the justice or injustice of the war’ (Zahn 1964, p. 161). For Jägerstätter, however, ‘the question reduces itself to a choice between two “kingdoms”’ (ibid., p. 128). If many were willing to sacrifice their lives for National Socialism, he asked, then: ‘Why should it be so hard to give up our lives for a king [i.e. Christ] … whose ultimate victory is certain, and whose kingdom exists forever?’ (Jägerstätter 2009, pp. 179–180).

In summary, the church is a political community because it is obedient to Christ. Baptism reveals that the church is a unique kind of political community because one’s entry into it is wholly dependent on grace, not on the facts of one’s birth; it is a community defined by endurance over time, not occupation of any space; and it is meant to surmount the enmity and partiality that can affect relations between the other communities into which we are born. Baptism also reveals the political nature of the church by causing the Powers to sometimes react to the church’s mission with parodies of baptism that aim to prevent their subjects transferring their obedience and loyalty to Christ.

3 Eucharist

The previous section’s discussion of baptism began to outline the sacramental shape of the church as a political community and to correct Cavanaugh’s exclusive focus on the Eucharist. We move on now to the Eucharist with the same aim as before of providing the essential features of an ecclesiology that will help to rectify Vatican II’s teaching on church-state relations.

Paul’s remarks about the Israelites’ baptism in the cloud and sea and their consumption of spiritual food and drink (1 Cor 10:1–4), and the blood and water flowing from Christ’s side after his death (Jn 19:34), have both been understood by several Fathers, such as Chrysostom and Augustine, and modern interpreters, such as Cullmann, to be references to baptism and the Eucharist (Cullmann 1953, pp. 31–32, 114–115). However, there is a crucial difference between the two sacraments. Baptism ‘cannot be repeated, just as the death of Christ cannot be repeated’ (ibid., p. 109), but there is a sacrament ‘which is meant to be repeated, the Sacrament of the fellowship of love, the Lord’s Supper’ (ibid.). This reflects the purpose of each sacrament in shaping the church’s identity.

According to Cullmann, the theme of baptism is the thread uniting Jesus’ discourse with Nicodemus about rebirth by water and Spirit, John the Baptist’s last witness to Christ, and Jesus’ conversation with the Samaritan woman (Jn 3:1–4:30). The association made in the discourse with Nicodemus between water and the Spirit reappears when Jesus offers to give living water, which whoever drinks ‘will never be thirsty again’ (Jn 4:14; ESV), and promises the hour has come for true worship to the Father in the Spirit. According to Cullmann, that baptism is performed only once seems to be at least implied in the water that slakes thirst forever (literally: ou mē dipsēsei eis ton aiōna) and becomes thereafter the wellspring of eternal life (Cullmann 1953, p. 83). Later, at the washing of the disciples’ feet, Jesus says to Peter: ‘The one who has bathed does not need to wash, except for his feet, but is completely clean’ (Jn 13:10; ESV). Cognates for the word meaning ‘bathed’ (leloumenos) seem to refer in other passages directly or indirectly to baptism, e.g. ‘he saved us … according to his own mercy, by the washing [loutrou] of regeneration and renewal of the Holy Spirit’ (Titus 3:5b; ESV; cf. Eph 5:26, Heb 10:22). The word ‘bathed’ probably reflects the early church’s practice of baptising by immersing the whole body in water. Hence, not needing to bathe again, Cullmann argues, can be interpreted as meaning that ‘he who received Baptism, even when he sins afresh, needs no second Baptism, for one cannot be twice baptized’ (Cullmann 1953, p. 108; original emphasis). Similarly, in Hebrews 6:4–6 the repetition of baptism is rejected because if baptism means ‘participation in the Cross of Christ’ (Cullmann 1950, p. 15), then re-baptism would require Christ to be crucified again.

In baptism, therefore, ‘the individual is, for the first time and once for all, set at the point in history where salvation operates’ (ibid., p. 30; emphasis added). As for the Eucharist, by contrast, the ‘meaning of this repeated appropriation of the death and resurrection of Christ … is that here there gather … those who already believe and who again and again assure themselves of their salvation as a community in the act of the Eucharist’ (ibid., pp. 29–30; original emphasis). Cullmann compares baptism to receiving citizenship at a particular point in time and the Eucharist to receiving the daily rations given to every citizen (ibid., p. 39). Those who accepted Peter’s words at Pentecost ‘were baptized, and there were added that day about three thousand souls’ (Acts 2:41; ESV) because ‘with every Baptism a new victory is won over the hostile powers, as a new member is set at the place where he can be delivered from these powers’ (Cullmann 1950, p. 32). The Eucharist is, by contrast, never described in the NT as leading to the addition of new members to the community, which reflects later evidence (e.g. in the Didache) that the Eucharist was received only by those already baptised (Louth 1987, p. 195). Instead, receiving the Eucharist turns individual members into one Body of Christ (1 Cor 10:17).

In 1 Corinthians we see that the visible, social body created by the Eucharist demands discipline to exclude forms of behaviour that threaten to damage the communion of the members with each other and with Christ. Paul accused some in the Corinthian church of ruining the Eucharist by their uncharitable conduct. The rich, who humiliate the poor and hungry and show contempt for the church (1 Cor 11:22), ‘bring divisions to the church, and thus threaten the visibility of the body of Christ’ (Cavanaugh 1998, p. 246). Earlier in the letter Paul writes that since all who eat from the same altar are ‘partners in the altar’ (1 Cor 10:18; NRSV), those who eat meat sacrificed on the altars of pagan deities are ‘partners with demons’ (1 Cor 10:20; NRSV). Receiving from Christ’s altar, however, is not compatible with worshipping at any other altar (1 Cor 10:21; cf. Cavanaugh 1998, p. 246), nor it is compatible with committing the various forms of immortality he lists (1 Cor 5:9–11), because such behaviour would be to deny that each believer’s body has now become a member of Christ’s Body (1 Cor 6:13–20). The Eucharist, in other words, requires the baptised to reject conduct that would remove them from allegiance to Christ and lead them back to being subject to the Powers. The contrast between being liberated from the Powers by baptism, and the ongoing process of striving to be freed from the Powers, can be discerned in the different tenses employed in Colossians:

Do not lie to one another, seeing that you have put off [aorist participle] the old self with its practices and have put on the new self [aorist participle], which is being renewed [present participle] in knowledge after the image of its creator. (Col 3:9–10; ESV)

The Body of Christ created by the Eucharist visibly manifests the communion of its members with Christ by its moral discipline, but also by the way that the community uses time and space. If the church were an essentially spiritual, immaterial, and atemporal community, then fixing certain times and places for worship would be insignificant or merely a way to condescend to our need for external ritual and symbolism. In fact, the church’s use of time and space to gather for the sacraments reveals that this is the political community of those obedient to Christ, existing alongside the communities of those still subject to the Powers.

‘Special importance was attached in early Christianity to the fact that the whole community should gather in one place’ (Cullmann 1953, p. 10; original emphasis), which is why Ignatius of Antioch repeatedly rebuked those holding separate meetings (Louth 1987, pp. 62, 72, 80; cf. Cullmann 1953, p. 10).Footnote 2 That one place, however, no longer needed to be in the Temple because the Spirit’s descent at Pentecost meant that the place of worship has become wherever Christians gather (Mt 18:20; Eph 2:21–22; Heb 10:25).Footnote 3 Hence, the church’s catholicity, its mission to draw all people into Christ’s Body, rather than to occupy any particular territory, was shown by branching out from Jerusalem to other places and centres around which new local churches could gather.

The church gathered daily (Acts 2:46, 5:42) but the rhythm of its meetings was especially determined by commemorating the Lord’s Day, i.e. the day of the resurrection (Acts 20:7; 1 Cor 16:2; Rev. 1:10, Didache, 14:1 Epistle to Barnabas, 15:9, cf. Louth 1987, pp. 178, 197). The Sunday Eucharist was not merely to recall past events, but to commemorate the Paschal Mystery in a way that proclaims Christ’s Lordship and accomplishes his saving work in the present (Schmemann 1973, pp. 56–57; Wainwright 1981, pp. 66–67). Its weekly repetition, however, within the larger cycle of an annual commemoration of the Paschal Mystery on Easter and Pentecost expressed the church’s need to wait during the saeculum for the full revelation of his Kingdom and to use the time given to ‘come to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to maturity, to the measure of the full stature of Christ’ (Eph 4:13; NRSV).

In summary, whereas baptism was an individual’s unrepeatable entry into the citizenry of the church, the Eucharist is the sacrament that repeatedly creates one Body from the individual members. The unity of Christ’s Body is not merely spiritual but is made socially visible by the gathering of the local church together in the same place and time for the Eucharist, and by the moral discipline demanded of all communicants to wage an ongoing struggle against the Powers and reject conduct that would lead them back to subjection under them.

4 Participating in the Threefold Office: Prophet, Priest, King

Vatican II recognised that ‘the principal manifestation of the Church consists in … liturgical celebrations, especially in the same Eucharist’ (SC 1975a, pp. 14–15, n. 41). However, adopting the conceptual dichotomy between religion and politics (GS 1966b, p. 41, n. 42) meant that Vatican II divided the lay apostolate’s activities into spiritual and temporal orders (AA 1975b, p. 772, n. 5), and reduced the sacraments and liturgy to cultic acts of worship, belonging to a spiritual order separate from politics and everything else that makes up the temporal order. Eschewing the problematic dichotomy between religion and politics, I have instead argued that baptism and the Eucharist create the church as a social and political community, by leading individuals from subjection to the Powers to citizenship in the church and by enabling the church to receive again and again its political identity as the Body of Christ, united in faith and obedience to its risen King. Instead of treating the sacraments as only cultic practices, I have sought to understand them according to the two original meanings of leitourgia, which could mean ‘a function or “ministry” of a man or of a group on behalf of and in the interest of the whole community’ (Schmemann 1973, p. 25). Thus, baptism is a leitourgia because (according to this definition) it serves to unite us, one by one, to Christ’s victory over the Powers. Leitourgia could also mean ‘an action by which a group of people become something corporately which they had not been as a mere collection of individuals’ (ibid.). The Eucharist is a leitourgia according to this second definition, because it makes the baptised into the Body of Christ in the world.

What follows from the church taking shape by baptism and the Eucharist? What are the newly regenerated and incorporated members of the church empowered and commanded to do? They are required and enabled by the Spirit to participate in Christ’s threefold office, i.e. to share in Christ’s royal conquest of the Powers by bearing prophetic witness, as he did, to his Kingdom, and by sacrificially offering themselves to others, through and in participation with Christ’s priesthood.

The significance of Christ being ‘King of kings’ (Rev 19:16) has been sufficiently established in my exposition of O’Donovan’s thought. However, I have not discussed Christ’s fulfilment of the offices of priest and prophet, partly because O’Donovan’s focus on Jesus’ kingship led him to devote much less attention to Christ’s priesthood (Long 2018, p. 47). Yet Hebrews calls Christ a priest (hiereus), a high priest (archiereus), and claims Christ ‘holds his priesthood [hierōsynēn] permanently’ (Heb 7:24; ESV; cf. 3:1, 10:21). Meanwhile, Christ’s prophetic office is clearly implied by his own words (Mt 12:41; Mk 6:4; Lk 13:33–34) and Luke portrays Jesus as a rejected prophet from the beginning of his ministry (Lk 4:16–30).

Moreover, the NT describes Christians as sharing in his threefold office. ‘The one who conquers, I will grant him to sit with me on my throne, as I also conquered and sat down with my Father on his throne’ (Rev 3:21; ESV), as Christ declares to the Laodiceans. The earliest confessions in the NT ‘are not content to say that Christ sits at the right hand of God; they emphasize with characteristic regularity the subjection of the invisible powers under Him’ (Cullmann 1949, p. 59; cf. Phil 2:6–11; 1 Pet 3:22). Therefore, we can understand Revelation 3:21 to mean that Christ enables Christians to share in his royal conquest of the Powers. Jesus has ‘made them a kingdom and priests to our God, and they shall reign on the earth’ (Rev 5:10; ESV; cf. 20:6). They are ‘a royal priesthood’ (1 Pet 2:9; ESV) and ‘like living stones are being built up as a spiritual house, to be a holy priesthood, to offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ’ (1 Pet 2:5; ESV). In Paul’s letters the charisma of prophecy seems to be granted only to some Christians (1 Cor 14:1–33). ‘Luke, however, took a broader view of prophetic utterances’ (O’Collins and Jones 2010, p. 274). ‘Like Paul (1 Cor. 12:13), Luke assumed that all Christians received the Holy Spirit (Acts 10:44–48), and he closely linked prophecy with the reception of the Spirit’ (O’Collins and Jones 2010, p. 275). We see this in the way Luke uses the prophet Joel to explain ‘the Spirit being poured out on all human beings’ (ibid., p. 274) as the means to enable them all to prophesy in the last days (Acts 2:14–21; cf. Num 11:29), perhaps intending to present Pentecost as fulfilling the wish of Moses: ‘Would that all the LORD’s people were prophets, that the LORD would put his Spirit on them!’ (Num 11:29; ESV).

In summary, the NT seems to describe the whole church participating in Christ’s threefold office. Once united to Christ’s Body by baptism and the Eucharist, how specifically do Christians participate in Christ’s triumph as prophet, priest, and king over the Powers?

They do so firstly by publicly confessing belief in Jesus’ kingship before the Powers and by accepting the suffering that results, even to the point of martyrdom if summoned to it. When Jesus is asked if he is a king by Pilate, Jesus does not deny it but replies that his kingdom (NRSV & ESV) or kingship (RSV) is not of this world (ek tou kosmou) and yet he has come into this world (eis ton kosmon) so that he may bear witness (martyrēsō) to the truth (Jn 18:33–38). The political-eschatological nature of Christ’s words can be understood by seeing their echo in Revelation, which describes Jesus in heaven as ‘the faithful witness [martys], the firstborn of the dead, and the ruler of kings on earth’ (Rev 1:5; ESV). Christ came to bear witness to (or be a martyr for) not an otherworldly and apolitical kingdom, or to a reign still to be achieved in the future, but to a kingdom that takes its origin from God, rather than from any human authority in the present saeculum. Hence it does not need ‘to be asserted against other such authorities by force of arms’ (O’Donovan 1996, p. 176). Having been the faithful witness, according to Revelation 1:5, Christ now reigns in heaven over the kings on earth. After Pentecost, Christ’s apostles and disciples were commanded and empowered by the Holy Spirit to be his witness (martyres) ‘in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth’ (Acts 1:8; ESV; cf. Jn 15:27).

The necessity of bearing witness is underlined by Jesus’ promise that for someone to acknowledge or deny Jesus publicly will determine whether Jesus in heaven grants or denies his recognition to that same person (Mt 10:32–33; Lk 12:89). In imitation of Jesus, who ‘in his testimony [martyrēsantos] before Pontius Pilate made the good confession’ (1 Tim 6:13; ESV) ‘in the open political setting of a public trial’ (Peterson 2011, p. 162), so also his followers ‘will be brought before kings and governors for my name’s sake. This will be your opportunity to bear witness [martyrion]’ (Lk 21:12–13; ESV). When brought before the public organs of the state, ‘before the synagogues and the rulers and the authorities’ (Lk 12:11; ESV), the martyr’s confession ‘leaps beyond this world’s concept of “public” and demonstrates in his words the public claim of another, a coming new world’ (Peterson 2011, p. 157). The Scillitan Martyrs, whom I mentioned in the first chapter, are a good example of this; their refusal to follow the proconsul by referring to Caesar as ‘Lord’ points to the claim of another, higher public authority. Vatican II distinguishes between two kinds of lay apostolate: the apostolate in politics and other temporal affairs, and the separate apostolate of evangelisation, to which it assigns the layman’s task of witnessing to the Gospel by word or by deed (AA 1975b, p. 773, n. 6). By contrast, the exegesis of scripture presented so far has brought into relief the impossibility of such a separation. For Christians to bear witness to the authority of Christ’s kingship before the Powers is an essential aspect of their engagement in temporal affairs.Footnote 4

Bearing witness is closely linked to baptism and to Christ’s office as prophet. After ‘God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Spirit and with power’ (Acts 10:38; ESV) at his baptism (Lk 3:21–22), in the desert, ‘full of the Spirit’ (Lk 4:1; ESV), Jesus defeated the devil’s temptations, and then ‘filled with the power of the Spirit, returned to Galilee’ (Lk 4:14; NRSV) where, as the long-awaited prophet, he ‘began to teach in their synagogues and was praised by everyone’ (Lk 4:15; NRSV). The rejection he immediately faced in his hometown, Nazareth, was taken by him to be proof that he was truly a prophet like Elijah or Elisha (Lk 4:24–30). In a parallel way, after his apostles received the Spirit of prophecy at Pentecost, they began to teach and bear witness to Christ before the authorities, even in the face of rejection and persecution (Acts 2:1–4:31). Baptism and its fulfilment in the anointing rite of the sacrament of confirmation or chrismation are the ‘personal Pentecost of man, his entrance into the new life of the Holy Spirit’ (Schmemann 1973, p. 75; cf. 1 Jn 2:20, 27). Baptised and confirmed Christians are thus strengthened by the Spirit to become prophetic witnesses to Christ’s kingship before the Powers, just like his first followers, even unto death.

Having argued that bearing witness to Christ is one way that Christians are empowered to share in his reign over the Powers, I now move on to argue that they are also empowered to offer themselves sacrificially to others, through and in participation with Christ’s priesthood. What kind of priesthood is Christ’s? Like the Levitical-Aaronic priesthood, Christ also offered a sacrifice and forged a covenant. However, the unique character of Christ’s priesthood can be gleaned from the Letter to the Hebrews. It uniquely describes Christ as offering himself in a way that

combines two elements of the catechesis of the New Testament: on the one hand, the presentation of Christ as a sacrificial victim and, on the other, the aspect of voluntary commitment which characterizes the Passion of Jesus. (Vanhoye 2009, p. 197)

Unlike the Gospels or Pauline epistles, Hebrews uses verbs of ritual oblations, anapherein (Heb 7:27) and prospherein (9:14, 25), to describe Christ offering himself. Whereas those verbs referred in the Old Testament to the offering of animal sacrifices, Hebrews uses them to describe Christ offering himself as the victim ‘by the way in which he bore suffering and death’ (Vanhoye 2009, p. 197) when condemned and executed. Thus, unlike the animal sacrifices of the High Priests, Christ offered ‘a personal, existential sacrifice’ (ibid.; emphasis added) of himself, on the one hand, and as a priestly mediator, on the other, he ‘brought about in his own person the perfect covenant between mankind and God’ (ibid., p. 315; cf. Heb 8:6, 9:15). These two aspects of his priesthood need to be distinguished. All Christians are consecrated to offer themselves sacrificially in service to God and to their neighbour, through and in imitation of Christ’s offering of himself. However, Christians can only make their existential offerings in complete dependence on Christ’s unique priestly mediation between God and man (1 Tim 2:5). ‘No one can bypass Christ and arrive at God; a fortiori, nobody can claim to act as a substitute for Christ to lead other men to God’ (Vanhoye 2009, p. 222). Christ is the only priest in the fullest sense of the word; hence Hebrews never gives Christians the title of ‘priest’ which could have led to confusion with the Levitical priesthood (ibid.).

Leaving aside the unique aspect of Christ’s priesthood as the one mediator, how do Christians participate in the other aspect of his priesthood? We read in Hebrews that Christians are ‘given confidence to enter the sanctuary by the blood of Jesus’ (Heb 10:19; NRSV). Obviously, this cannot mean entering the sanctuary of the Second Temple to perform ritual sacrifices. The offerings that Christians make must be modelled on Christ’s existential sacrifice. Thus, we read later:

Through him [i.e. Christ], then, let us continually offer a sacrifice [thysian] of praise to God, that is, the fruit of lips that confess his name. Do not neglect to do good and to share what you have, for such sacrifices [thysiais] are pleasing to God. (Heb 13:15–16; NRSV)

Although done through Christ, and hence dependent on his unique mediation, the author of Hebrews ‘employs the technical term for “sacrifice” (thysia)’ (Vanhoye 2009, p. 224) for prayer in verse fifteen and for alms and sharing goods in the community in the next verse. Similarly to Hebrews 13:16, Paul uses cultic language to refer to the alms sent by the Philippians as ‘a fragrant offering, a sacrifice [thysian] acceptable and pleasing to God’ (Phil 4:18; ESV). Probably with an eye to his expected martyrdom, Paul also describes himself as ‘being poured out as a libation over the sacrifice [thysia] and the offering [leitourgia] of your faith’ (Phil 2:17; NRSV). Finally, he appeals to the Romans ‘to present your bodies as a living sacrifice [thysian], holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship’ (Rom 12:1; ESV), meaning ‘the sacrifice that must be offered to God is one of a holy life, completely conformed to his will and acceptable to him’ (Torrell 2013, p. 40). These different ways of describing actions in cultic, sacrificial language may help us to understand what 1 Peter means in addressing his recipients as ‘a royal priesthood’ (1 Pet 2:9; ESV) and ‘a holy priesthood, to offer spiritual sacrifices [pneumatikas thysias] acceptable to God through Jesus Christ’ (1 Pet 2:5; ESV).

To summarise, the offerings or spiritual sacrifices Christians are called to perform, as participants in Christ’s priesthood, are:

  • firstly, prayer and worship, i.e. the sacrifice of praise;

  • secondly, almsgiving and the sharing of goods with the needy;

  • thirdly, the offering of faith;

  • and fourthly, the offering of one’s entire life to God, which can include offering one’s life to the point of martyrdom, as indicated by Paul’s use of the cultic term for drink offering (spendomai, cf. Num 15:1–10) to describe his approaching martyrdom. (Phil 2:17; 2 Tim 4:6)

Since the three offices of Christ are ‘distinguishable but inseparable’ (O’Collins and Jones 2010, p. 245), it should not be surprising that sharing in his royal conquest over the Powers by bearing witness and by sacrificial offerings should eventually converge on the same form of ultimate conformity to Christ: martyrdom.

Vatican II also recognised that all ‘the faithful who by Baptism are incorporated into Christ … in their own way share the priestly, prophetic and kingly office of Christ’ (LG 1975c, p. 388, n. 31; cf. AA 1975b, p. 777, n. 10). The argument of this section and indeed of this chapter has not sought to repudiate entirely the Council’s ecclesiology. I have intended to show rather that the Council missed the opportunity to use the innovative elements of its ecclesiology, such as the threefold office of Christ, to enrich its teaching on church-state relations. The conceptual dichotomy between religion and politics meant that Vatican II was vague about how sharing in the threefold office would affect the laity’s apostolate in the world, and the threefold office remained a concept whose potential was not sufficiently explored. The scriptural exegesis I have given in this section was meant to show how baptism and the Eucharist empower the church to participate in Christ’s threefold office and thus share his victory over the Powers. The obedience of the church to Christ, which is the core of the church’s identity as a political community, is meant to lead its members to share in Christ’s royal, prophetic, and priestly ministries, and thereby become conformed to his example.

5 Ordained Ministry

This section is a coda to chapter nine and it can be skipped without missing a crucial part of the overall argument. I will, however, endeavour to defend my decision to include a discussion of the ordained ministry. It may seem that a section on it treads needlessly on contentious territory dividing Catholics from my Protestant interlocutors, and limits the appeal of the argument for those who do not share the same doctrine about the role and sacramental nature of Holy Orders, or what is more commonly called the priesthood. Since church-state relations seem so often to turn into the vexed question of the relationship between those belonging to the sacerdotium and regnum, one could be forgiven for thinking that the problem lies in the entire priestly edifice, in the excessive claims made for its authority and importance in relation to the laity. To continue the dialogue with O’Donovan from a Catholic perspective, I must face not only this objection, but a particular challenge that O’Donovan makes. He claims the ‘identity of the church is given wholly and completely in the relation of its members to the ascended Christ independently of church ministry and organisation’ (O’Donovan 1996, p. 169). O’Donovan is wary (rightly) of the clergy’s role becoming too prominent, such that the church is in danger of attempting to make ‘its hidden government visible by a representative icon of the ruling Christ’ (ibid., p. 166). If I follow his example of arguing for the political nature of the church, could it not be argued that I ought to follow him also in being wary of the clergy usurping the place that should by occupied by Christ alone as the church’s one head and governor? If the headship of the church by Christ the King be marginalised, would that not reduce the church to just one more ‘religious’ body with a specialised caste dedicated to its cultic practices, which leaves undisturbed the right of rulers to govern without recognising any higher authority?

These concerns, which one can detect in how O’Donovan discusses and downplays the role of the ordained in his own typically low-church ecclesiology, should be taken seriously. They are real dangers that threaten to overwhelm the recognition of Christ’s kingship over the church and society. One could even go so far as to argue that the overreach of the papacy’s claims to power in the late mediaeval period meant the Reformers in England and elsewhere were justified in criticising the power of the clergy for obscuring the crown rights of Jesus (Lockwood O’Donovan 2023, p. 232; McKay 2005). However, I wish to answer O’Donovan’s fears with an exegesis of scripture that will show, at least in the roughest of outlines, firstly, that faithfulness to scripture requires us to recognise the place and necessity of an ordained ministry within the church and, secondly, that the particular responsibilities of the ordained, rightly understood, safeguard the autonomy of the church and serve the entire church’s mission of participating in Christ’s threefold office.

We can begin by pointing to the problems that arise when the ordained ministry’s importance is rejected. Consider, e.g., the problem faced by the Confessing Church in the Kirchenkampf against the Nazis: on what grounds could the Confessing Church claim authority for the Barmen Declaration over its rival, the pro-Nazi German Christian movement? In 1940 Bonhoeffer wrote that if the church’s authority to teach cannot be ‘grounded solely in Scripture and confession … then there is only return to Rome or under the state church, or the path of individualization’ (Hollerich 1993, p. 305). The Confessing Church’s failure, in the end, to agree on ‘a common acknowledgement of concrete and binding dogmatic teachings’ (Hütter 1994, p. 346) was an instructive failure. It would indicate, one might argue, that the church cannot do without a ministry, inherited from the Apostles and preserved from error by the Spirit, to teach authoritatively what is and is not part of the apostolic faith, and to judge what would and would not be in obedience to the ascended Christ (Dulles 2007; Peterson 2011, pp. 17–29, 37–39). If the scriptures really were perspicuous or clear enough for any believer to understand the ‘things that are necessary to be known, believed, and observed for salvation’ (Westminster Confession of Faith, 1.7, as cited in Parsons 2015), then one must ask how the Confessing Church and German Christian movement could claim scriptural warrant for diametrically opposed views about the church’s relation to the state and to Nazi ideology. Nor is there any obvious way to break the exegetical deadlock without appealing to another authority outside the scriptural text. In the words of another Anglican theologian, ‘Scripture is just words on a page, reason but a name for an activity, and tradition just a ghost of an idea, until we have a person or persons … doing what authorities do … real authority is never present to us except as it is exercised by a person’ (Austin 2010, p. 37). The impasse that the Confessing Church reached, the difficulty of explaining the authority of its declarations of faith, as described by Bonhoeffer, caused one of its members, Heinrich Schlier, to convert from the Lutheran faith to Catholicism in the 1950s. Consider also the cautionary tale of Emperor Constantius II who rejected the Nicene Creed in favour of another creed that affirmed Christ was ‘like the Father in accordance with the Scripture’ (Ratzinger 1987, p. 115). For ‘this escape into biblicism was far from establishing the dominance of the word of Scripture’ (ibid., pp. 115–116) but instead ‘deprived the Church of the right to make her own decisions and placed the concrete ordering of ecclesial matters in the hands of the state’ (ibid., p. 115). The Powers will soon occupy the vacuum created by suppressing the teaching authority of prelates.

These disquieting examples do not, however, settle matters. It remains the case that ‘the word hiereus, “priest,” is not used in describing Christian ministers in the New Testament’ (2022, p. 203), as is openly admitted by Anthony Giambrone in The Bible and the Priesthood, an excellent study of the biblical theology of the sacrament of ordained ministry. Moreover, the only two occurrences of the word for priesthood, hierateuma, in the NT apply the term to the entire ecclesial community: ‘you yourselves like living stones are being built up as a spiritual house, to be a holy priesthood. … But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation’ (1 Pet 2:5a, 9a; ESV). Finally, one could argue, the Levitical priesthood and the sacrificial system of the temple failed to secure the people of Israel’s faithfulness to the Mosaic covenant, as can be seen in the many criticisms made of the priests by the Old Testament prophets (e.g. Hosea 4:6; Mic 3:11; Neh 5; Amos 2:8; Mal 1:6–14). Therefore, one might think, Christ brought both the temple and Levitical priesthood to an end at his advent and ascent to the Davidic throne, and inaugurated an egalitarian community that would no longer have need for priests to offer sacrifices, because he is both the true High Priest (Heb 4:14) and the all-sufficient sacrificial victim (Eph 5:2).

However, the priestly character of the entire church does not rule out the necessity of a particular group within the community to play a critical role of mediation, and whose ministry is crucial for those gathered by the Lord to become a priestly people. 1 Peter’s declaration that the believers are being made into a royal priesthood and holy nation (1 Pet 2:9) uses the exact same Greek words as the Septuagint translation of Exodus 19:6, when the Lord tells Moses that he will make Israel into a royal priesthood and a holy nation (basileion hierateuma, ethnos hagion). That 1 Peter’s author would use such language could well have been to evoke the covenant that was foretold by the Lord to Moses in Exodus 19 and sealed in Exodus 24, as a means to explain to his addressees how they have undergone a ‘new covenant-making ceremony, modelled on Moses’ mediation at Sinai but now bound to Christ’s final sacrifice’ (Giambrone 2022, p. 231; original emphasis). The author addresses the recipients of the letter at the beginning as those ‘who have been chosen and destined by God the Father and sanctified by the Spirit to be obedient to Jesus Christ and to be sprinkled with his blood’ (1 Pet 1:2; NRSV). Giambrone comments:

In the Old Covenant, the sprinkling of blood directly recalls three things: the ordination of the priests in Leviticus 8:30, the Day of Atonement in Leviticus 16:14, and the covenant ceremony in Exodus 24:3–8. (Giambrone 2022, p. 231)

The description of ‘the precious blood of Christ, like that of a lamb without defect or blemish’ (1 Pet 1:19; NRSV), by which we have been ransomed, recalls the blood of the unblemished lamb in Exodus 11’s description of the Passover ceremony and the sprinkling with blood at the sealing of the covenant in Exodus 24 (Giambrone 2022, p. 231).

According to the widespread early tradition of the Church, Jesus at his last Passover meal interpreted his own death through the covenant-making ceremony in Exodus 24. … The entire preoccupation of the passage in 1 Peter 2 is the new covenantal creation of a holy people as the Lord’s divine possession out of what was a rejected, unholy nonpeople—namely, the Gentiles. … If the sprinkling with Christ’s high priestly blood, which is a sign of participation in the New Covenant sacrifice, confers on all the faithful the dignity of priestly election, this is manifestly no longer an ethnic and biological destiny, as it was for the Jewish hiereis [priests]. (ibid., pp. 231–232; emphasis added)

What we can learn from the citation of Exodus 19:6, in other words, is that the author uses analogies with the Old Testament to explain the novelty of the New Covenant’s ‘trans-ethnic and extraterritorial election of the Gentiles’ (ibid., p. 232). No longer reliant on a caste of priests descended from the line of Aaron and Levi, nor on the farms and plantations of a chosen land to produce the first fruits and animals, victims to be offered in the Jerusalem temple, the New Covenant was instituted to create one, royal-priestly, and holy nation able to incorporate the Gentiles. As it says elsewhere in the NT, the Lamb ‘ransomed for God saints from every tribe and language and people and nation … [and] made them to be a kingdom and priests serving our God’ (Rev 5:9–10; NRSV). It may be significant that 1 Peter addresses itself to ‘those who are elect exiles of the Dispersion’ (1 Pet 1:1; ESV). This may refer to the Jews living not in Palestine but among the Greeks (cf. Jn 7:35), or to Jewish Christians who escaped Judea to flee persecution (Acts 8:1). However, the theme of the Gentiles’ inclusion into the elect people in 1 Peter could mean that the author regards all members of the church throughout the world ‘as sojourners and exiles’ (1 Pet 2:11a; cf. 1:17), living ‘in a state of worldly exile and “dispersion”’ (Giambrone 2022, p. 232), since the New Covenant is no longer tied to a chosen land and particular locale for worship and sacrifice.

We can therefore conclude:

In securing the broad typological framework, the critical theological point becomes clear. The status of Israel’s ministerial priesthood is not being transferred in 1 Peter 1-2 and transposed in a blanket way onto all the individual Christian faithful. Peter is not saying that the unique election and sprinkling that once consecrated Aaron as high priest is now a description of the election of every believer. The message is rather about a corporate and covenantal status, as the Greek word hierateuma implies. The letter speaks of a national identity that coexisted in Israel alongside and not in competition with the Aaronic priesthood. (ibid.)

The Old and New Covenants have rites to mark the moment of belonging to the citizens of God’s kingdom and swearing fidelity to the covenant, i.e. circumcision and baptism (Gen 17:9–14, Ex 4:24–26, Lev 12:2–3). In both Covenants, the first rite must be performed before being permitted to participate in another rite that unites the people in communion with God and with each other by remembering and making present again the power of God’s salvation, i.e. Passover and the Eucharist (Ex 12:48, Jos 5:2–9). But the Old Covenant also includes detailed instructions for the first priestly ordination and for how the priests are to begin and to continue offering sacrifices in Leviticus 8–9, which could be considered ‘the great, cumulative telos, the end goal of the entire Sinai revelation … positioned precisely here in the heart of the middle book of the Torah’ (Giambrone 2022, p. 41). When the Lord’s glory is revealed and Aaron’s inaugural offerings are consumed by fire in Leviticus 9, it ‘is nothing other than a second and greater Sinai’ (ibid.), a theophany that ‘renders the Tabernacle the equivalent of Mount Sinai’ (Milgrom 1991, p. 574, as cited in ibid.), but also looks forward to a similar theophany and consumption by fire ‘at the consecration of the Jerusalem temple (1 Kings 8:10–13; 2 Chron. 7:1–3)’ (Giambrone 2022, p. 42). What, then, is the equivalent to the ordination of Aaron and his sons to the priesthood, or to the duties of the Levites, in the New Covenant? If we accept that Exodus 19 and 24 function in 1 Peter’s typology to explain the royal-priestly character of the entire church, following the analogy of Israel’s covenantal sprinkling as a whole nation to be a royal priesthood, then the commandment later in the Old Covenant for the ordination of priests evidently suggests to us the following questions: ‘Without the Aaronic priesthood of the altar, would or could Israel have been a priestly and holy people? … Without priests, how exactly was Israel—or are the Christian people—priestly?’ (ibid., p. 233). To interpret 1 Peter to mean that there is only the common or baptismal priesthood, to the exclusion of an ordained or ministerial priesthood, in fact seems to be a repetition of the mistake of Korah and his fellow insurrectionists who rebelled against the priestly hierarchy.

They [Korah and the others] assembled themselves together against Moses and against Aaron and said to them, “You have gone too far! For all in the congregation are holy, every one of them, and the LORD is among them. Why then do you exalt yourselves above the assembly of the LORD?” (Num 16:3; ESV)

When the rebels are consumed by fire (Num 16:35), ‘Korah and his fellow agitators are thereby revealed as helpless protectors of the people against God’s dangerous glory, while Moses and Aaron are confirmed in their divine election’ (Giambrone 2022, p. 56). There must be some kind of ministry in the New Covenant that performs the same duty as the Aaronic priesthood because the Letter of Jude in the NT claims the heretics and false teachers ‘reject authority’ and ‘perished in Korah’s rebellion’ (Jude 8, 11; ESV). The teachers of a false gospel can hardly be accused of rejecting the civil authority; there must be an authority within the church that is being intended, which the false teachers are accused of rejecting.

1 Peter 5, moreover, tells us even more clearly ‘that organized structures of consecrated community leadership have not been levelled or abrogated in some sort of radical egalitarian vision’ (Giambrone 2022, p. 234). The author exhorts the presbyters, speaking as a fellow presbyter (sympresbyteros), to be willing shepherds of their flock (poimanate to en hymin poimnion tou theou) and to exercise overnight (episkopountes) without being domineering (katakyrieuontes, cf. Mt 20:25; Mk 10:42), promising them an unfading crown of glory from the chief-shepherd (archipoimenos) for their labours (1 Pet 5:1–4). The young are also exhorted to be subject to the presbyters (1 Pet 5:6). These verses present one very important aspect of the ordained ministry, which is its role of providing order and pastoral oversight, according to the model set by the Good Shepherd (Jn 10: 1–21). Jesus called himself the one, supreme shepherd, under whom there would be one flock (Jn 10:16; cf. 1 Pet 2:25), but he also commands Peter: ‘shepherd my sheep’ (Jn 21:16), to give a literal translation of the imperative phrase ‘poimaine ta probate mou.’ In Acts 20:17–28, Paul tells the presbyters of the Ephesus church (presbyterous tēs ekklēsias) that they have been set by the Holy Spirit to be overseers of their flock (episkopous) and to shepherd (poimainein) the church of God. ‘A sharing in Jesus’ exclusive role of ecclesial headship is evidently possible for those to whom it is somehow given’ (Giambrone 2022, p. 203; cf. Rev 21:14; Eph 2:20).Footnote 5

Jesus’ investiture of Peter with the authority of shepherd evokes his earlier discourse contrasting the Good Shepherd who lays down his life for his sheep with the hired hands who betray the flock (Jn 10:1–18; cf. Ezek 34). It also conveys a similar message as the Synoptic tradition of Jesus teaching the Twelve about how their service and humility in leadership must contrast with how those who rule the Gentiles lord it over them (Mk 10:35–44), which the author of 1 Peter may well have been referring to in his exhortation to the presbyters (katakyrieuontes is used in 1 Pet 5:3, Mt 20:25, and Mk 10:42). We can interpret the shepherd motif, therefore, as applied to Christ and derivatively to those exercising a particular ministry of leadership within the church, as recalling the motif in the ancient world of the shepherd-king, an ideology found widely in how reliefs and seals depict Sumerian, Egyptian, and Assyrian kings (Giambrone 2022, pp. 181–182). The shepherd-king motif was also adopted by the OT’s descriptions of the kingship of God and of the Davidic king (Ps 2:9; 23; 70:70–72). But Christ subverts the royal-shepherd motif in the discourse about the Good Shepherd. No ordinary shepherd would literally die for his sheep! Yet the image conveys a transformation of the motif from one of an ideology of domination into one of humble service. The conformity of the presbyter-shepherds to Christ’s self-sacrificial example, as we see in Acts 20 and 1 Peter 5, sets the paradigm for how they are to govern the flock. In performing their duty of oversight in this way, the ordained ministry participates in Christ’s office of king in a particular way, distinct from how the whole church participates in his kingship in the way I discussed in the previous section.

How do ordained ministers participate in Christ’s office of prophet? We mentioned in an earlier section that all baptised and confirmed Christians are strengthened by the Spirit to become prophetic witnesses to Christ’s kingship before the Powers. The witness of all Christians before the Powers is how they participate in Christ’s office as prophet. The ordained ministers support that by participating in Christ’s prophetic office in an additional way: by their ministry of preaching the Gospel and teaching authoritatively what is and is not in conformity with the faith and doctrine entrusted to the apostles and their successors (1 Tim 6:20, 2 Tim 1:14).

Aaron and his sons were meant ‘to distinguish between the holy and the common, and between the unclean and the clean and … to teach the people of Israel all the statutes that the Lord has spoken to them through Moses’ (Lev 10:10–11; NRSV). The Levites in general, as Moses says in his final prayer over Israel, ‘teach Jacob your ordinances, and Israel your law’ (Deut 33:10). Their judgements in legal disputes must be obeyed (Deut 17:12). Yet the prophets criticise the Jerusalem priesthood for lacking knowledge of the law and for failing to teach it properly:

Its priests have done violence to my teaching and have profaned my holy things; they have made no distinction between the holy and the common, neither have they taught the difference between the unclean and the clean, and they have disregarded my sabbaths, so that I am profaned among them. (Ezek 22:26; cf. Isa 56:9–12; Hos 4:6)

Ezekiel, therefore, prophesies a restoration of the priesthood, who will faithfully perform their duties at last (Ezek 44:15–31). Similarly, Malachi criticises the corruption of the priesthood (Mal 1:6–2:3) and promises that the Lord will renew them in fulfilment of the Lord’s covenant with Levi (Mal 2:4, possibly referring to Num 8:5–26).

My covenant with him [i.e. Levi] was a covenant of life and well-being, which I gave him; this called for reverence, and he revered me and stood in awe of my name. True instruction was in his mouth, and no wrong was found on his lips. He walked with me in integrity and uprightness, and he turned many from iniquity. For the lips of a priest should guard knowledge, and people should seek instruction from his mouth, for he is the messenger of the Lord of hosts. (Mal 2:5–7; NRSV; emphasis added)

The following chapter’s famous prophecy of the coming messenger of the covenant, who will purify the Levitical priesthood, so that they can once again ‘bring offerings in righteousness to the LORD’ (Mal 3:3; ESV), is an important correction to the mistaken view that pits the prophets’ focus on righteousness and social justice against sacrificial worship. This view (which is an offspring of Reformation criticisms of superstitious priestcraft) relies on passages such as Hosea 6:6, ‘I desire steadfast love and not sacrifice, the knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings’ (ESV). Yet Hosea is not arguing for ethical values, instead of ritual or sacrificial worship. His criticisms are rather with the northern monarchy’s promotion of ‘the calf cult set up by Jeroboam in the hill country of Ephraim with the calculated intent to oppose the House of David’ (Giambrone 2022, p. 88; cf. Hos 8:4–6; 13:2–3). The issue is not with sacrificial worship as such, but with idolatrous worship that breaches the covenant with the Lord by committing cultic infidelity (Giambrone 2022, pp. 87–88; Hos 2:19–20). The passage in Malachi about the Levites, furthermore, points to the prophetic hope not for a cessation of sacrifices, nor the abrogation of the priesthood, but for their renewal and restoration, so that ‘the offerings of Judah and Jerusalem will be acceptable to the Lord, as in days gone by, as in former years’ (Mal 3:4; ESV).Footnote 6

Failure to foster the cult-based knowledge that alone will make Israel fruitful is a failure specifically in divine-human mediation, which will only be overcome when a superior knowledge descends unsullied from on high. (Giambrone 2022, pp. 101–102; cf. Hab 2:14)

Therefore, it is only fitting that as Christ fulfilled the office of messianic prophet by proclaiming ‘the coming judgment of Israel’ (O’Donovan 1996, p. 96; original emphasis), and gave a definitive ‘interpretation of the law’ (O’Donovan 2005, p. 142) by ‘his righteous Torah instruction (e.g., Matt. 5)’ (Giambrone 2022, p. 187), so he commissions his apostles to be preachers of the Gospel to all nations, ‘teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you’ (Mt 28:20; ESV). Their commission to teach from the one to whom all authority in heaven and on earth is given (Mt 28:18) is given most clear description in the pericope about the keys in Matthew 16 and 18.

After Peter proclaims that Jesus is ‘the Christ, the Son of the living God’ (Mt 16:16; ESV), Jesus responds that Peter will be the rock (petra) or foundation of the church. I will put aside the problem of what this implies about the role of Peter and his successors in relation to the other apostles, i.e. the authority of the papacy, because it is not germane to my argument (Giambrone 2022, pp. 188–190, 268–273; Leeman 2016, pp. 335–336). Once Peter’s task of being the foundation of the church is announced, ‘Jesus sets about giving him the tools for it’ (Leeman 2016, p. 336). ‘I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven’ (Mt 16:19; ESV). ‘In some fashion, the church, remarkably, will exercise the authority of Christ and his kingdom. A key is often a symbol of authority in the Scriptures’ (Leeman 2016, p. 336; cf. Isa 22:22; Lk 11:52; Rev. 3:7). It is common to see the language of binding and loosing to be taken from the

protorabbinic activity of interpreting Jewish law (halakha). That could involve interpreting the law in abstraction (e.g., “Moses’ words on divorce must have meant this, not that.”). Or it could involve judging the law’s relevance to a particular situation (e.g., “Do Moses’ words on divorce apply to them?”). [sic] (Leeman 2016, p. 339; original emphasis)

Jesus’ use of the neuter ‘whatever,’ rather than the masculine ‘whomever,’ suggests an authority to judge not only persons but also things (ibid., p. 340). In Matthew 18:18, the phrase about binding and loosing is used again in the context of Jesus’ discourse about discipline and excommunication, about the church gathered in Jesus’ name and authority having the authority to remove those who live unrepentantly in a way that transgresses the church’s faith (Mt 18:15–20).

Matthew 18 envisions people being bound and loosed. At the same time, this kind of work of interpreting doctrine (a “what”) must surely precede the work of personal application (a “who”). That is, there must be a standard (a “what”) by which to measure people (a “who”). … Jesus gave Peter and the apostles both the authority to interpret the law, in a teacher-like fashion, and the authority to interpret its claim upon actual people, in a judge-like fashion. … The keys are the authority to judge a “what” (doctrine, confessions, practices) as well as a “who” (the people who speak those confessions). Jesus’ “whatever” includes both people and doctrine, or at least any doctrine or statement that is adopted as a requirement for people to enter the fellowship of a church. (Leeman 2016, pp. 339–340)Footnote 7

We might consider Paul’s exercise of excommunication against the stubborn member in an incestuous relationship in 1 Corinthians 5:3–5 to be a clear example from the NT of this authority being exercising to remove from communion one whose behaviour contradicts the church’s doctrines. I have already mentioned earlier his criticisms of their Eucharistic gatherings for creating division and failing to show solidarity with the poor (1 Cor 11:17–34). An example of the church wielding its authority to define doctrine can be found in Acts 15, when the apostles met in Jerusalem to decide whether Gentile members needed to keep the entire Mosaic law. The language of the letter they entrust to be sent to Antioch reveals the authority possessed by the church to judge on matters of doctrine: ‘For it has seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us to lay on you no greater burden than these requirements’ (Acts 15:28; ESV). Erik Peterson argued that the phrase recalls the decrees made by city councils at the time, which declared what seemed good to the council and to the people. In either case, the language indicates a claim to declare something with sovereign authority (Peterson 2009, p. 38). It was this sovereign authority to define its own doctrines that was under threat when Emperor Constantius II attempted to force his own substitute for the Nicene creed upon the church, as mentioned earlier.

So far, I have argued that ordained ministers participate in Christ’s kingship by governing the church as shepherds under Christ, the chief-shepherd, providing the church with leadership and order. They participate in his prophetic office by defining what must be accepted as the church’s doctrine and disciplining those whose lives contradict that doctrine (Herbert 1957, p. 518). Their ministry supports the whole church’s participation in Christ’s threefold office by ensuring that the witness of the baptised before the Powers is not corrupted by heretical ideas or false teachers, a problem that was already besetting the apostolic church (Acts 15:1–2; Gal 2:4; 1 Jn 4:1–6; 2 Tim 3:6; Titus 1:16). Moreover, they ensure that the church’s Eucharistic gatherings are orderly and not marred by divisions or unruly members. Finally, we may ask, in what way do ordained ministers share in Christ’s priestly office? This may appear to be a harder case to make, apparently refuted by the NT failing to name anyone as a priest except Jesus. However, it is important to remember that for both the Greco-Roman world and the Jewish tradition, it was assumed ‘that animals were to be ritually slaughtered and offered to the gods’ (Giambrone 2022, p. 211). As the Jewish historian Josephus wrote: ‘Our slaughter of tame animals for sacrifices … is common to us, and to all other men’ (Against Apion, 2.14, as cited in ibid.). Furthermore, as mentioned above, the trajectory of the OT prophets and intertestamental literature was to look ahead not to the cessation of priestly offerings of sacrifices, but to the coming of a renewed, eschatological priesthood and to a purified cult (Nichols 2010, p. 92). What is especially remarkable about Isaiah’s prophecy is the place of the Gentiles in his vision of the renewed priesthood and cult (Giambrone 2022, p. 234–235). In Chapter 61, Gentiles are involved in the cult only by performing manual labour to produce the sacrificial offerings, possibly as slaves.Verse

Verse Strangers shall stand and tend your flocks; foreigners shall be your plowmen and vinedressers; but you shall be called the priests of the LORD; they shall speak of you as the ministers of our God. (Isaiah 61:5–6; ESV)

But the final chapter goes further:

I am coming to gather all nations and tongues; and they shall come and shall see my glory, and I will set a sign among them. From them I will send survivors to the nations, … to the coastlands far away that have not heard of my fame or seen my glory; and they shall declare my glory among the nations. They shall bring all your kindred from all the nations as an offering to the Lord, on horses, and in chariots, and in litters, and on mules, and on dromedaries, to my holy mountain Jerusalem, says the Lord, just as the Israelites bring a grain offering in a clean vessel to the house of the Lord. And I will also take some of them as priests and as Levites, says the Lord. (Isaiah 66:18–21; NRSV; emphasis added)

The book ends with the Lord’s promise that ‘those called and honored with the name of “priests,” who offer a bloodless and clean grain offering, will include non-Jewish, non-Levite, non-Aaronite Gentiles’ (Giambrone 2022, p. 235). This is the closest that the OT comes to anticipating the novelty of the New Covenant priesthood. What is never anticipated, however, is the radical break that the early church makes with ancient (pagan and Jewish) assumptions about priestly offerings. The terms used in the NT reveal the redefinition of sacrifice ‘within the new context of Christ’s mystical body’ (ibid., p. 211).

It is undoubtedly this circumstance and the special sacrificial theology that arose to describe both Jesus’ unique self-offering on the cross and its new form of cultic memorialization in the Eucharist that must contextualize the widely advertised, and almost widely misinterpreted, failure of the New Testament sources to use the Greek work hiereus as a technical term for the Christian community’s leaders. (ibid.)

As I mentioned in the previous section, Christ is described as the high priest of the New Covenant in the Letter to the Hebrews because his existential offering of himself, of his body and blood on the Cross, unlike the animal sacrifices of the Temple, performs the all-sufficient atonement for sins. His own body becomes the temple in which the supreme sacrifice was made, a point underscored by John and Hebrews (Jn 2:21; Heb 10:20). Christ ascends into heaven to present his sacrifice to God, just as the High Priest would do by entering the innermost sanctuary of the tabernacle or temple on the Day of Atonement. Yet the church continues to participate in the existential sacrifice of its High Priest, i.e. in the priestly aspect of his threefold messianic office. Baptism is one way in which all members of the church are mystically united to Christ in his triumphal victory over death and the Powers: ‘let us approach with a true heart in full assurance of faith, with our hearts sprinkled clean from an evil conscience and our bodies washed with pure water’ (Heb 10:22; NRSV). The reference to being sprinkled recalls, as mentioned earlier, the sprinkling on ‘the Day of Atonement in Leviticus 16:14, and the covenant ceremony in Exodus 24:3–8’ (Giambrone 2022, p. 231). The conjunction of being sprinkled clean alongside the washing (lelousmenos) with water evokes the cleansing from sin by baptism (Acts 2:38, 22:16), as argued earlier in the section on baptism. That Paul and the other apostles baptised new members of the church, in obedience to Christ’s Great Commission to the eleven apostles to baptise all the nations (Mt 28:19), is too well-attested to need proof (e.g. 1 Cor 1:14–16; Acts 8:37–38, 10:47).

However, the church is also united to Christ’s sacrifice by the Eucharist, and the cultic role of the ordained ministers in the Eucharist is the means by which they participate in Christ’s priestly office in a unique way, which is meant to serve the whole church’s participation in Christ’s existential sacrifice. Although priestly vocabulary (such as hiereis) is not used to describe their ministry, Paul does include hieratic, sacrificial language to capture how he performs a ministry akin to that of the Levitical priests in the Jerusalem temple, except that the temple has been replaced with the church itself, each member a living stone forming one edifice (1 Pet 2:5). For example, Paul likens himself to the temple priests, who were to be sustained by consuming a portion of the sacrifices and by receiving tithes, when he explains that he and others preaching the Gospel have the right to be sustained by their congregations, although he does not avail himself of the right:

Nevertheless, we have not made use of this right, but we endure anything rather than put an obstacle in the way of the gospel of Christ. Do you not know that those who are employed in the temple service get their food from the temple, and those who serve at the altar share in the sacrificial offerings? In the same way, the Lord commanded that those who proclaim the gospel should get their living by the gospel. (1 Cor 9:12b–14; ESV; emphasis added)

Joseph Fitzmyer comments: ‘One is reminded … of the OT regulations about portions of sacrifices reserved for priests in the tent of meeting and later in the Jerusalem Temple (Num. 18:8–20) and also of tithes for the Levites (Num. 18:21–24)’ (Fitzmyer 2008, p. 365, as cited in Giambrone 2022, p. 215).

Paul’s identification of the congregation as the temple and himself as its priestly agent is quite revealing. … He sees himself as a sort of hiereus, “employed in the service of ta hiera,” notably at the altar from which he deserves his portion. (Giambrone 2022, p. 215)

We see support for this in Paul’s references to the Corinthian church being a vineyard he planted and a flock he shepherded (poimainei) from which he has the right to take some of its fruit and milk. These are not randomly chosen agricultural metaphors, according to Giambrone. To call the Corinthian community a vineyard and a flock identifies them with the plantations and flocks of the promised land of Israel that were ‘meant to sustain the temple and its cultic staff’ (ibid., p. 213), and puts himself in the position of the Levitical priests sustained by the fruit of the land.

In the previous section, I mentioned four ways in which the NT describes the whole church’s participation in Christ’s priestly office: the sacrifice of praise, i.e., prayer and worship; almsgiving and the sharing of goods with the needy; the offering of faith; and the offering of one’s entire life to God. Paul presents himself as performing a role of priestly mediation to enable his flock to carry out these actions. In several letters, when discussing the collection that needs to be made for the poor, he uses cultic-sacrificial language to describe himself as the priest and the alms as an oblation to God. Giambrone’s insightful commentary justifies a longer quotation:

When in a text such as Philippians 4:18 Paul speaks about the gifts sent to him from the Philippian community, describing them cultically as “fragrant offering, a sacrifice [thysian] acceptable and pleasing … to God,” he is not merely being poetic. The Apostle sees the economic support that believers put into hands as somehow passing directly to God. … he is … a living conduit through whom the Philippians interact directly with God. There are really only two possible reasons why Paul should speak and think in this manner. Either he sees himself as belonging to the poor or else he sees himself as a ministering priest. These were the two manners in which Second Temple Jews might imagine the economic support of mere mortals as taking on a sacrificial character pleasing to God. (ibid., p. 216)

Even if we were to think the former is the case in the letter to the Philippians, the latter seems more likely when Paul writes to the Romans about the collection ‘for the poor among the saints at Jerusalem’ (Rom 15:26; ESV).

In Romans 15:15–16, in discussing the collection, he speaks of “the grace given me by God to be a minister [leitourgon] of Christ Jesus to the Gentiles in the priestly service [hierougounta] of the gospel of God, so that the offering [prosphora] of the Gentiles may be acceptable [euprosdektos], sanctified by the Holy Spirit.” (ibid.)

What is important about the collection is that it is

an eschatological transformation of the old temple tax. Paul’s collection remodels the conventional offering of those in the Diaspora for the support of Jerusalem’s hieratic complex: the harvest by which the Levitical hiereis live and work. The “saints” themselves have now, in the Christian reformulation, taken the temple’s place as the object of this offering, a new and living hieron, while Paul’s ministry to the saints accomplishes his own priestly work of mediation on their behalf. (ibid., pp. 216–217)

Paul repeatedly reminds the recipients of his letters that they are God’s temple, in whom the Spirit dwells (1 Cor 3:16–17, 6:19). Thus, it is perhaps not surprising that the relief of the saints is described using terms that recall the tax collected by the Levites for the upkeep of the temple, revealing how the NT’s notion of sacrifice has become transformed by being focussed on the body of Christ, made up of his members in the church, served by an order of ministers like Paul. Moreover, the genitive phrase ‘offering of the Gentiles’ in Rom 15:16 has a key double meaning: ‘the gifts offered by the Gentiles, and the Gentiles themselves as a gift being offered by Paul’ (ibid., p. 217). Paul’s ministry aims to lead his ecclesial communities to offer themselves, their entire lives, to God, in imitation of his own Christ-conformed example (Phil 3:17) of ‘being poured out as a libation over the sacrifice [thysia] and the offering [leitourgia] of your faith’ (Phil 2:17; NRSV). Titus, too, is urged by Paul to set an example of good works for the church that he is appointed to oversee in Crete (Titus 2:7; cf. Heb 13:7). So, in imitation of their ministers’ Christ-conformed example, all the faithful are urged ‘to present your bodies as a living sacrifice [thysian], holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship’ (Rom 12:1; ESV; cf. 1 Cor 6:20).

I have mentioned so far how Paul sees his own ministry as having a priestly role when he mediates and facilitates almsgiving, the offering of faith, and the dedication and oblation of the entire life of the faithful to God. There remains to mention how his ministry leads to praise and thanksgiving. In 2 Corinthians, Paul describes himself as ‘having this ministry [diakonian] by the mercy of God’Footnote 8 and carrying it out for their benefit for the glory and praise of God: ‘For it is all for your sake, so that as grace extends to more and more people it may increase thanksgiving, to the glory of God’ (2 Cor 4:15; ESV). In the same letter, the collection he wants the Corinthians to arrange for the poor in Jerusalem is meant not only to help the needy; his role in mediating their alms is also meant to lead to praise and thanksgiving to God:

You will be enriched in every way to be generous in every way, which through us will produce thanksgiving to God. For the ministry of this service is not only supplying the needs of the saints but is also overflowing in many thanksgivings to God. By their approval of this service, they will glorify God because of your submission that comes from your confession of the gospel of Christ, and the generosity of your contribution for them and for all others. (2 Cor 9:11–13; ESV; emphasis added)

In several other places, Paul urges his communities to pray and give thanks to God (Rom 12:12; Phil 4:6; 2 Cor 1:11). There is an echo of this in Hebrews’ exhortation: ‘Though him then [i.e. Jesus] let us continually offer up a sacrifice of praise to God, that is, the fruit of lips that acknowledge his name’ (Heb 13:15; ESV). The notion of a sacrifice of praise is a particularly fitting way to describe how the bloodless worship of the church, relying on OT precedents of likening vocal praise to the voluntary peace offerings of bread and slaughtered animals, known as free-will offerings (Lev 7:11–18). ‘Accept my freewill offerings of praise [literally, of my mouth], O Lord’ (Ps 119:108; ESV). ‘I will praise the name of God with a song; I will magnify him with thanksgiving. This will please the LORD more than an ox or a bull with horns and hoofs’ (Ps 69:30–31; ESV). ‘Take away all guilt; accept that which is good, and we will offer the fruit of our lips [literally, the calves of our lips, referring to the animals offered in sacrifice]’ (Hos 14:2b; NRSV).

We have seen how the NT seems to present Paul and other ministers as having a crucial role of mediation, and hence of priestly service, to enable their congregations to share in Christ’s priestly office by offering praise, alms, faith, and their entire lives to God. It is significant that Paul expects (but does not find) the Eucharist of the Corinthian church to be a place of charity and solidarity with the poor and urges them to make the collection for the poor at their Eucharistic assemblies on the first day of the week (1 Cor 16:1), because ‘[t]his binds their work of charity directly to their celebration of the Lord’s passion’ (Giambrone 2022, p. 217). Justin Martyr’s description of the early Christian Eucharist in his First Apology (from the middle of the first century) similarly describes a collection for the poor being given to the presider of the Eucharist when the church meets on the first day of the week (ibid.). Therefore, the final point I shall make in this section is that offering the cultic memorialisation of the Lord’s passion with bread and wine is the most important way in which the ordained ministers of the New Covenant participate in Christ’s priesthood, because the Eucharist provides the locus and wellspring for the whole church’s participation in his priesthood by the four acts I have previously discussed. Holy Communion calls for holy living.

‘The cup of blessing that we bless, is it not a participation in the blood of Christ? The bread that we break, is it not a participation in the body of Christ?’ (1 Cor 10:16; ESV). ‘Ritual communion in the death of the Lord, in baptism and eucharistic participation, leads to a moral communion of life in the Spirit in Paul’s perception’ (Giambrone 2022, p. 224). ‘You are not your own, for you were bought with a price. So glorify God in your body’ (1 Cor 6:19b–20; ESV) or as he writes to the Romans: ‘present yourselves to God as those who have been brought from death to life, and your members [i.e. bodily limbs or parts] to God as instruments for righteousness’ (Rom 6:13; ESV). Receiving Christ’s blood, the price of our ransom, demands a new life. For all to participate in the priesthood of the Christ by a sacrificial life requires being sacramentally united to Christ by the Eucharist, which is only possible the bread and wine are identified with Christ’s body and blood: ‘this is my body … this is my blood’ (Mt 26:28; ESV).Footnote 9

The Last Supper should be seen as an important moment in the institution of the New Covenant’s ordained ministry, because Christ is acting there not only as High Priest, about perform the definitive Day of Atonement ritual by offering ‘blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins’ (Mt 26:28’ ESV). He is also acting according to the type of a royal figure executing a divine decree to found a new priesthood. Moses, although a Levite, was not ordained a priest in Leviticus 8–9 but he acts as the ‘high priest-maker. … Moses conducts the priestly ceremonies by which his brother is elevated in status’ (Giambrone 2022, p. 51). In doing so, Moses is not alone. As Moses did when founding the tabernacle cult in the desert, so King Solomon also performs a similar royal role when he inaugurates the cult in the Jerusalem temple and instituted Zadok to the office of High Priest instead of Abiathar (ibid., p. 52; cf. 1 Kings 2:26–27, 35; 8:1–66). Neither Moses nor Solomon acted on their own personal authority, but to execute a divine plan. The Lord declares that he will build a house for his name by means of David’s offspring (2 Samuel 7:4–17). ‘Unless the Lord builds the house, those who build it labour in vain’ (Ps 127:1; NRSV). The sevenfold repetition of ‘as the Lord commanded’ in Leviticus 8 (Giambrone 2022, p. 52) emphasises that ‘it is likewise the Lord himself who, through Moses’ agency, divinely established the tabernacle priesthood’ (ibid.).

It is to be expected that when a new priesthood was founded to accompany the New Covenant and supersede the temple priesthood, as the temple superseded the tabernacle, it would require a royal figure who, in a certain sense, must stand above or outside that priesthood (ibid., p. 53). Hence, Jesus is not a Levite, but of the royal tribe of Judah (ibid.; cf. Heb 7:14). In that royal capacity, he commands his apostles: ‘Do this in remembrance of me’ (Lk 22:19; ESV), literally as a memorial, an anamnēsin of Jesus, a word used in the Septuagint for the show bread to be placed on a golden table every Sabbath by Aaron as a memorial of the covenant (Lev 24:7). Paul uses the same word in his own account of the Last Supper (1 Cor 11:24–25). In the very next verse, he writes: ‘For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes’ (1 Cor 11:26; ESV). Christ’s self-sacrifice on the Cross is not repeated but made present again so that the Corinthians can be united to his sacrifice by the hands of the one performing the memorial ritual with the bread and wine. When Paul identifies the bread and wine with the death and offering of Christ as a sacrificial victim, the notion is already implied that ‘the man who broke the bread and said the “thanksgiving” over the “cup of blessing” had in him all the possibilities of a “priest”’ (Dix 1957, p. 249). The earliest Christians did not hesitate to refer to the ones presiding over the Eucharist in sacerdotal terms, often using terms taken from the OT but clearly used typologically to refer to a new priesthood (ibid.). 1 Clement, a text written before the end of the first century, employs the threefold ranking of High Priest, priests, and Levites to refer to the hierarchy of ministries within the church:

For to the high priest the proper services [leitourgiai] have been given, and to the priests the proper office has been assigned, and upon the Levites the proper ministries [diakoniai] have been imposed. The layman is bound by the layman’s rules. Let each of you, brothers, give thanks to God [eucharisteito] with your own group, maintain a good conscience, not overstepping the designated rule of his ministry, but acting with reverence. (1 Clement, 40.5–41.1, translation in Holmes 2007, p. 99, as cited in Giambrone 2022, p. 80)

A document on church order from the fourth century also uses similarly sacerdotal terminology:

You, therefore, O bishops [episkopoi], are to your people priests [hiereis] and Levites, ministering to the holy tabernacle, the holy Catholic Church; who stand at the altar [thysiasterio] of the Lord your God, and offer to Him reasonable and unbloody sacrifices … through Jesus the great High Priest [megalou archiereos]. You are to the laity prophets, rulers, governors, and kings; the mediators between God and His faithful people. (Apostolic Constitutions, 2.25, translation in Holmes 2007, p. 239, as cited in Giambrone 2022, p. 229)

This quotation, drawing together the particular prophetic, kingly, and priestly roles of the ordained ministers, can fittingly bring this section to a close. Their ministry is not meant to obscure or obstruct Christ’s position as the church’s prophet, priest, and king. Instead, by their teaching and preaching, governance and discipline, and by offering the Eucharist, their ministry is the vital means by which the whole church comes to share in Christ’s threefold office.