WHAT IS A PRIEST? One Anglican View

by Robert E. Terwilliger

from To be a priest, pp. 3-10,
edited by Robert E. Terwilliger and Urban T. Holmes, Seabury Press, New York, 1975.
Republished on our website with the necessary permissions.

Robert E. Terwilliger is the Suffragan Bishop of Dallas. He was the founder and director of Trinity Institute, New York, a national theological center for Episcopal clergy.

God has given us a priest—this is the Gospel. There are other ways of stating the Gospel, but this is an essential way because it is an essential way of seeing Jesus Christ: “We have a great high priest.”

Jesus Christ is the one and only priest. This is the teaching of the New Testament. The most powerful expression of the unique priesthood of Christ is the Epistle to the Hebrews. He is the “high priest of our confession” (Hebrews 3:1). He is “not a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who in every respect was tempted as we are, yet without sinning” (Hebrews 4:15). He is made priest by God himself who declares both “Thou art my Son, today have I begotten thee” and, also, “Thou art a priest for ever after the order of Melchizedeck” (Hebrews 5:5-6).

The writer fastens on this mysterious figure of Melchizedeck from the Old Testament. He appears in Genesis as the priest-king of Salem, “king of righteousness,” “king of peace.” Melchizedeck is the vivid symbol of the strange uniqueness of the priesthood of Christ because he appears “without father or mother or genealogy, and has neither beginning of days nor end of life, but resembling the Son of God he continues a priest for ever” (Hebrews 7:3).

Jesus is the end of all other priesthoods. He is not just a priest among priests; he is not another one in the line of priests, or a member of a caste of priests. The priesthood of Christ is the termination, but also the fulfillment of the priesthood of the Old Covenant. That is the significance of all this strange business about Melchizedeck. His priesthood is absolutely new, and conies from God’s own act establishing the New Covenant through Christ’s self-sacrifice: “He has no need, like those high priests, to offer sacrifices daily, first for his own sins and then for those of the people; he did this once for all when he offered up himself" (Hebrews 7:27). This redeeming act uniting God and man forever gives Christians confidence to enter into the very presence of God now and in eternity.

The priesthood of Christ comes from the obedience of Christ. This talk about priesthood is not just cultic pious language, the stuff of mystic vision. It is grounded in the moral decisions of Christ which throughout his life led him to his death. It is grounded in his compelling awareness that he was called to be “the saving person,” the one who must become the destroyer of those powers which separate man from God—sin, pain, and death—and be the sacrifice for sin, pouring out his life even unto its end.

The priesthood of Christ is determined by the concrete choices of a particular man, Jesus, who was driven by love to undertake a specific, dangerous risk, a course that led him to his execution. There is nothing romantic about it; it is as earthy and real as his sweating in the Garden of Gethsemane and his crying out in desperation on the cross. But there is God in it too: God, acting in all this, participating in all this, in his own strange shocking way of liberating man from guilt and evil, bringing him back to himself. “God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself” (2 Corinthians 5:19).

The living, the dying, and the rising of Christ make him our priest; that is, they unite mankind to God in him. He is our mediator. This is the witness of the whole New Testament. It is left to the Epistle to the Hebrews to articulate this explicitly, but all four Gospels and every other book in the New Testament states the theme in different ways. Jesus is not just teacher, example, or “Christ figure.” He is the Redeemer, the deliverer who does something for humanity which humanity cannot do for itself.

Mankind needs a priest; our race is separated from God. The biblical idea of sin, which permeates our self-understanding when it is truly Christian, sees man as self-centered, self-serving, self-destructive, alienated from God, and contaminated in his presence. Many people are afraid of this radical realism in the Christian doctrine of man. They can only bear to speak about man as created in the image of God, and to think of our way to God as simply a matter of our own initiative and our innate good impulses. Classic Christian belief has always insisted that we have to have someone between, a mediator uniting God to man in himself because he did something powerful and sacrificial. That powerful and sacrificial thing, the cross and resurrection, both seen together as one act of God, reveal him to be the priest of the Cosmos, the Word, the Logos, the Conquering Light who lightens every man, so that “the new and living way” back to God through Jesus Christ our Lord is at the heart of the universe and pertains to all men who come into the world, whether they know his name or not.

In times of relative prosperity and peace, Christians become self-satisfied about human nature and dangerously optimistic about man. There are signs that this naive unrealism is now going away in the presence of an uncertain future. It is easy to lose the sense of our need for deliverance, and even to come to think of salvation as nothing more than therapy. One consequence of this is to regard priesthood in purely human and functional terms. The priest is understood to be just a person who is chosen by a religious community to represent the community to God and God to the community. He is recognized, perhaps because of his gifts and competence, and set apart by some official act to do this professionally. In his person he gathers the community symbolically to himself as the offerer of prayer and sacrifice to God, and he speaks and acts on behalf of God toward them all. There is no such concept in the New Testament. To put it bluntly: this concept belongs to a different religion.

There is only one priest, Jesus Christ. He and he alone can bond God and man because of what he did for us, and because of what he is as the incarnate unity of God and man. This essential Christian perception is movingly expressed in the eucharistic hymn of William Bright:

Look, Father, look, on his anointed face,
And only look on us as found in him.

The priesthood of Christ is sent forth into the world. The commission of the apostles is part of the Gospel. Jesus projects what he is and what he does for man into history in the persons of other men. He chooses, definitely chooses and designates, the Twelve to go forth in his name. They are to be not merely teachers and examples but extensions of himself and his divine mission. “He who receives you receives me, and he who receives me receives him who sent me” (Matthew 10:40). The full power of this sending was manifest after the Resurrection, when the apostles acted so explicitly in the name of Christ.

Perhaps this can be best seen in Paul, particularly in the authority of Paul made clear in his letters to the churches. He acts not as a vicar of Christ, one who is there in the absence of Christ, but as one through whom Christ himself is acting.

It is through the ministry of apostles that the Church is brought into being and built up. They do act as ministers of the Church and in the Church, but they are, above all, apostles to the Church. They represent the continual coming of Christ to the Church and the world.

In the New Testament the Church is spoken of as a priestly community. The language of priesthood is actually used of Christ and of the Church, but not of the ministry. “The priesthood of all believers” is a phrase popularized during the Reformation, based on this New Testament precedent; however, it cannot mean the priesthood of each and every believer separately, but the priesthood of the whole body which is the body of Christ the priest, in whom all Christians are members together. The togetherness of the priestly body is the priesthood of Christ present in this world. The apostolate is the organ through which the priesthood of the Church together is created, focused, and actualized.

The commission given to the apostles was too much for them. They were sent to evangelize the world. Before long it became obvious that they had to fulfill their commission through others—apostolic men. The exact configuration of the ministry in the New Testament period, and the subapostolic period (the period after the apostles), is not possible to determine with the certainty we would like. It appears that the forms of ministry which developed were various but not chaotic. Out of the experience of the Church, and under the authority of the apostles and the apostolic teaching, there emerged a canon of ministry, just as there emerged a canon of Holy Scripture. This shortly took the final form of the Christian episcopate with assisting ministries of presbyters and deacons. In the second century both this shape of the ministry, and its significance as a continuation of the apostolic ministry, was accepted.

It is essential for the theology of the ministry to understand the inner meaning of this process. Just as the creation of the canon of the New Testament, by the choice of some among many primitive writings, as Holy Scripture was the work of the Holy Spirit, so we may also see the emergence of the episcopal form of apostolic ministry as the work of the Holy Spirit. Contemporaneous with this development came the formulation of the creeds of the Church. Scriptures, creeds, and ministry became the protection of the Church and the definition of its identity during the tumultuous days of early heresy and schism. They are, all three, best understood as works of the Spirit which came through the works of men.

The Christian bishop came to be recognized as the essential high priestly presence, through whom the high priesthood of Christ functioned in the Church. He was the presiding figure at the Eucharist, not standing at the table to represent the local Christian community but uniting their Eucharist to all other Eucharists, because he is bishop in the whole Church and a form of Christ’s participation in the Church.

When in the third century presbyters were commissioned to celebrate, this concept of priesthood persisted in their ministry. They represented not just the local congregation but the apostolic universality of the high priesthood of Christ creating the Church eucharistic. This they possessed by virtue of the laying on of hands by the bishop. The priest was seen as the minister of Christ to his Church to be the agency and the guarantor of the Eucharist to assure the sacramental presence of the body and blood of the risen Christ.

No man takes the apostolic ministry upon himself. This absolutely essential principle was realized by the Church in its early Spirit-formed years. This is the principle of ordination. The laying on of hands by the bishop represents the commission of Christ in his Church; and furthermore, it is the means whereby the man ordained is united with the priesthood of Christ. No man has any priesthood of his own; it is only by the power of the Holy Spirit that the one priesthood of Christ can be shared out among his shepherds. This has nothing to do with man’s goodness, his grace, his gifts. It has also nothing to do with his insufficiency or sin. A man is made a priest, be he bishop or presbyter, only by the bestowal of the Spirit. Thus the Church continued and continues to actualize the commission of the risen Christ to his apostles:

Receive the Holy Spirit.
If you forgive the sins of
any, they are forgiven; if
you retain the sins of any,
they are retained (John 20:22).

Ordination is a gift of the Holy Spirit. In these days of new awareness of the Spirit it is urgent for Christians to repossess their sense of the work of the Spirit in the whole life of the body of Christ. The Church is that community which exists by the continual invocation of the Holy Spirit. Its life is not its own. It has its existence and its identity only because of the perpetual coming of the Spirit.

The charismatic movement has made us freshly cognizant of the charisms, the gifts of the Holy Spirit, which are bestowed on the members of the Church in variety and power. We have learned again that there are many ministries, many services, within the Church which the Spirit gives: tongues, teaching, prophecy, administration, and a myriad of others. And we have come to sense that the ministries, the services, are not rights, certainly not professional achievements, but gifts, precisely gifts, given by the Spirit.

Ordination is also a charism, a sacramental charism. It is given as the Church invokes the Holy Spirit—Come Holy Ghost—and the bishop, laying on his hands, says in one form of words or another: “Receive the Holy Spirit.”

Ordination to the sacramental priesthood is a giving of the Spirit to make a man a bishop or a presbyter; it is not a mere act of recognition of the gifts a man already possesses. It does not signify that this man is acknowledged by the community—certified, as it were—to be the sort of man who should be its spiritual leader, its minister of worship. The priest must do something no individual can do in his own strength: he must be the one through whom the living priesthood of Christ becomes active toward and within the Church. This can happen only by an act of God, the Holy Spirit of God.

Let no one say: Magic! If it be magic, it is the magic of the resurrected Lord and the day of Pentecost, of the Acts of the Apostles and the faith of the Church for centuries. It is rather an incarnational action in which, by the power of the Holy Spirit, Christ is born to us again in ministry. Yes, through an external as well as an internal movement in the world, in body as well as in spirit—but that is the way of the Spirit, for the Holy Spirit is not very spiritual.

Furthermore, this gift of the Spirit creates a new ontological reality, a new form of being for a man—he is a bishop; he is a priest. There is an “is-ness” about it. Western Catholic theology has had a way of speaking of ordination as a bestowal of “grace.” This term is not untrue but it is insufficient. It is rather the gift of the life, power, and presence of God, of God the Holy Spirit. This does not mean that the ordained are saints. It means that God’s power has been delivered into their hands and for their use of it they shall be held accountable. It is like all of God’s gifts: there is a reckoning. As in the parable of the talents, there is an eschatological moment of truth.

Richard Church, Dean of St. Paul’s in London, preached an ordination sermon about a century ago entitled “The Gift of the Spirit.” I have been moved to paraphrase his words in my own charges at the ordination of bishops and priests. He speaks of ordination in this tremendous way:

The awful gift of his consecrating presence, to be prized and cherished and faithfully served, or to be despised and rejected—but never to be recalled. On whom the Holy Ghost has set his seal, the seal must remain either for blessing or for judgment Pascal and Other Sermons, p. 119

Christian priesthood is apostolic priesthood. Its projection into history comes from the act of Christ choosing the Twelve, and goes on in the ways which the Church, obeying his example, continues the commission. It is a “ministry of presence,” but it is far more than that. It is not just a ministry of being there, of being here and being there silent and inarticulate; it is a ministry of the Word, for he who is the great high priest is also the word made flesh.

Apostolic priesthood is a proclaiming priesthood. In the Anglican tradition when it is true to itself, the ministry of the sacraments is never separated from the ministry of the word. In the Fourth Gospel the passages about the bread of life, about breaking the bread which is Christ, can be understood equally as referring to the Eucharist or the word. This perception is also realized in the renewal of the liturgy when the celebration of the word of God is given equal place with the celebration of the sacrament. This balance must be present in the ministry. There should never be a bishop or a priest who cannot tell what he is or what he is doing. The “mass priest,” or the purely “sacramental priest,” is not a Christian concept of priesthood. But more positively, there must be a revitalization of the awareness that the priest is by ordination a man sent to be an evangelist, even in his sacramental acts. It is as unnatural as it is unrubrical not to have a sermon at a Eucharist —even if it is only one sentence long. Our Catholicism must be an evangelical Catholicism, and our priesthood an apostolic priesthood. For this to happen, the perception of the transcendent dimension of the ministry of the word will have to come again. There is more to the ministry of the word than preaching, but preaching is its central form. To renew preaching, it is as necessary to know what it is as to know how to do it.

Preaching is not just ministerial talking in a church, in a certain place at a certain time. A sermon is not an essay read from a pulpit. Preaching is the proclamation of the word of God by a servant of God. It is a meeting between God and his people with the preacher in between. To be a preacher is an awesome thing, just as to be a consecrator of bread and wine is an awesome thing. The preacher is the mediator of the word, he is a man engaged in an act of God, and responsible before both God and the people for what he says. The Church must recover the sense of the presence in preaching, and when this comes—and come it will—it will be seen again as a most natural priestly act.

It is particularly tragic that the vision of the bishop, the high priest, as preacher has almost left the Church. In ancient times his episcopal seat was thought of as a teacher’s seat—a professorial chair, if you will—not a princely throne. Everything a bishop says is still listened to, even newsworthy, but the bishop’s ministry of the word has been downgraded in the presence of the exaltation of the lesser ministry of administration. The power, the priestly power, of the bishop in the Church and in society can be exercised by his ministry of the word; above all, his must be an apostolic priesthood.

Beyond the actual service of preaching, the priest is in other ways the servant of the word. In the celebration of the sacraments he must Proclaim their meaning by his acts and attitude—and in his face—far more than before. He is a man whose faith is exposed by his person. Not only must he face the congregation, but he must often lead reluctant and resisting people into new ways and deeper appreciation of the sacraments as much by his manner as by his teaching. If he acts as though he does not know what he is doing, does not like what he is doing, or does not believe in what he is doing, that word is plain and powerful. If, however, he is absorbed and awed by being an agent of God and the Church in the celebration of divine mysteries, it will not be lost. This is a way in which the word is expressed in holy deed with convincing power.

The priest is the presence of the word in the world. He is to be a man available at all times and in all places, not only to help but also to bring the Gospel. To be recognizable as a priest is not an act of pride, but of availability. How often I have wished (wickedly) that I had not been available on airplanes or on the street, particularly in the streets of a great city, by those who know they have a right to me! How many times also I have found that the urgent question about life or death, sin or God, has come to me from someone who knew me for a priest, but did not know me! Because I was a priest, unknown, uninvolved in the past or future of such a person, I was called upon to speak some word. We do not know the times or the reasons why Christ comes in such a need. But if we cannot be found when we are needed . . . ?

A priest is a voice. His words are to be a sacramental vehicle of the Word of God in season and out of season. A Christian priest is a man to whom the Holy Spirit is given by ordination so that the priesthood of Christ can be actively present in him and through him, that by his ministry men may be reconciled to God. He is the living presence of the word that “God has given us a priest.”

Copyright (c) 2007: All of the texts and techniques (pedagogical and relational)
displayed in this site are copyrighted materials.