Priesthood and the Church as Community

by Arthur A. Vogel

from To be a priest, pp. 141-146,
edited by Robert E. Terwilliger and Urban T. Holmes, Seabury Press, New York, 1975.
Republished on our website with the necessary permissions.

Arthur A. Vogel is Bishop of the Diocese of West Missouri, and prior to that was professor of systematic theology at Nashotah House. He is the author of a number of works in theology, and is a representative of the Anglican Communion to the International Anglican-Roman Catholic Consultation.

As the twentieth century reached its midpoint, prominent theologians were prophesying that future ages would look back on our epoch as the “Century of the Church.”

As this century progresses, there are increasing indications that the prophecy may prove to be true. Aided by the insights of Vatican II, a new appreciation of the life of early Christians, and the admission that the fragmentation of the Church dishonors the oneness of Christ, we are growing in our understanding of the nature and vocation of the Church. Above all, the Church is increasingly recognized to be much more than a formal institution; it is a people called by God, a community of witness.

The Spirit seems again to be mysteriously moving in the Church, and the renewal resulting from that movement is also playing an important role in the rediscovery of the Church’s nature. One of the acknowledged promptings of the Spirit is to replace thoughts of “I” by thoughts of “we.” The Spirit of Christ is the Spirit of humility and reconciliation. It is the Spirit who guides us to understand the Christian life in terms of fellowship, celebration, interdependence, and mutuality.

Growth in understanding the Church as a eucharistic fellowship, that is, as a community constituted and structured by the Eucharist—not just as a group of people who occasionally do the Eucharist among other things—is also leading to a reappraisal of the Church. The Eucharist epitomizes Christian community, for the Eucharist is an action involving community in its totality. In the divine liturgy, a person appointed by ordination presides at an assembly of people, but the recalling ordered by Christ for his people is made by the assembly as a whole, each person having his or her own liturgy to perform in a way complimenting rather than replacing others. Such complimentarity is the only way members of Christ’s mystical body can be related to each other in the sacramental body, and such interdependence and complimentarity must be evident in all truly Christian authority, mission, and ministry.

The Church is a community of faith, the Mystical Body of Christ whose purpose is to reconcile the world to God in the power of the resurrection. “All ministries are used by the Holy Spirit for the building up of the Church to be this reconciling ministry for the glory of God and the salvation of men (Ephesians 4:11-13).”(l) But because ministries inspired by the Spirit within the Church are so diverse, a need was felt even in New Testament times to focus and promote communal unity: the community’s diverse activities needed to be coordinated; the mission of the Church needed to be ordered; and the movements of the Spirit needed discernment. The episcopacy developed to perform those services. The Church’s understanding of the nature of ordination and of the role of the ordained ministry in the life of the Church were developed from these beginnings.

The Church as a whole has a ministry in the world to the world, and the ordained, particular ministry has as its purpose the enabling of that universal ministry. The same thing may be said in terms of priesthood: there is a universal priesthood of the Church in which every Christian participates by virtue of his baptism; that priesthood is coextensive with the membership and purpose of the Church as a whole, and is the priesthood referred to in 1 Peter 2:9 when Christians are said to be “a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people,. ..” The ordained, particular priesthood exists to enable the universal priesthood to be itself. The ordained priesthood always exists within the Church for the Church.

Having briefly observed the origins of episcopacy, we should notice the origin of the other orders of ministry as they developed in the earliest period of the Church’s life. As the person expressing the Church’s unity and exercising oversight in the community, it was the bishop who presided at the eucharistic assembly in the early Church; he, insofar as he was chief servant of the community and bearer of its tradition—not as an individual in his own right—also had the ability to ordain others for the service of the Church.

In the next development, accordingly, we find bishops associating other persons with them and their activities by means of ordination. Priests or “presbyters are joined with the bishop in his oversight of the Church and in the ministry of the word and sacraments; they are given authority to preside at the eucharist and to pronounce absolution. Deacons, although not so empowered, are associated with bishops and presbyters in the ministry of word and sacrament, and assist in oversight.(2)

By means of ordination a person enters a new community within the larger Christian community, a ministerial community. One type of such community includes the bishop and the presbyters; another type includes the bishop and deacons. Through the laying on of hands at ordination, a special gift of the Spirit is given to the one ordained, but because ordination is also in and for the whole community of the Church, ordinations duly performed, are the means by which the Church is able to recognize and assure itself that those who claim to be its servants actually have received the grace God intends for such service. As with every sacramental rite, ordination is intended to be the means by which the Church is assured that what God promises to his Church has in fact been given to those who need it.

In considerations such as those we are presently undertaking, it is very important that, in our search for clarity and ease of understanding, we do not reduce the Church as the living, Mystical Body of Christ to something less than itself. The Church is the unique presence of God in the world and as such has many dimensions. It has recently been pointed out that we must use a number of models in our attempt to understand the nature of the church.(3) A difficulty encountered is that the models which must be employed for our understanding are not to be used one at a time; they must all be held in tension at the same time. No one can deny, for example, that the Church is an institution in the world; that it is one model, complete with administrators, leaders, and followers. But the Church is also and more importantly a herald, a servant, a community, and a sacrament. Different features of the Church are emphasized by each model, but no model can properly obliterate those dimensions of the Church presented by the other models.

Considering the nature of ordination and the role of the ordained ministry in the Church, however, few will deny that western Christendom has for many centuries seen an overemphasis of the “power” of the clergy as rulers of the Church at the expense of the Church as a community. Ordination does bestow a special gift of the Spirit, but for too long that gift was exercised as a personal power which the clergy used for and over the rest of the people of God. It has even been suggested by one theologian that “the minister’s representative relation to Christ, as his ambassador, is in every way prior to his relation to the Church, as its liturgical agent.”(4) Such an overemphasis of ministerial power denies the fact that ministry of any order is always of the Church, for the Church, and within the Church. The ordained ministry exists within community, for community, as does every sacrament. The point is that the ‘power" of ministry cannot be isolated from its place in community tor even an instant. Christian community and power are correlatives; that is, each term in the pair necessarily refers to the other in order to be itself.

It has been said by a group of Anglican theologians that the Anglican Church, from the time of the Reformation, has tried to bear witness to the principle “that one who exercises authority and who has certain powers within a community is not above those whom he serves. Authority and power have meaning and validity only as they are exercised within the Body and for the Body. In practice this principle meant, and still means to this day, that no Bishop has the authority or the power simply by right of his consecration, to act without the consent of the community of which he is a servant. ... A Bishop’s power is not his own. .. .”(5)

It was from such considerations as these that the House of Bishops, meeting in Chicago, declared that “the necessary conditions for valid ordination to the Priesthood in the Episcopal Church were not fulfilled on the occasion [of the July 29, 1974, service of ordination in Philadelphia]. ...”

As might be expected from the conditions under which the bishops were forced to meet and deliberate, all dimensions of the problem confronting the Church could not be explored during the meeting; thus the possibilities of misinterpreting the bishops’ intention were many. The use of the concept of validity, for example, has led to an especially unfortunate overreaction on the part of some to the claimed “invalidity” of the Philadelphia service. The overreaction of even trained theologians perhaps shows how sensitive Anglicans still are to the papal declaration on the invalidity of Anglican orders as being “absolutely null and utterly void.” So it was that the theological committee of the House of Bishops, meeting in Oaxtapec, Mexico, clarified its use of the term “valid.” The committee stated:

When a sacrament is said to be valid we understand “validity” to mean that the sacramental action is “assured,” that its efficacy is “certain.” Such assurance and certainty are not found in the Philadelphia service according to this House, and we agree. . . . No merely minor irregularity was involved. . . .

In itself, the term “irregularity” can refer to both insignificant and grave departures from a norm. The sacraments are meant to be signs of certitude for the Church that what God has promised to his Church has been duly offered on a given occasion. Minor irregularities in sacramental administrations do not destroy the certitude of which we are speaking, but a degree of irregularity can be found which casts public doubt on what is meant to be the means of public certitude. It was the latter degree of irregularity the House of Bishops found lacking in the Philadelphia service. The House was trying to stress the gravity of the irregularity; the irregularity was not just a canonical, legalistic nicety. It affected the essential nature of the ordained ministry and its place in the community it serves.

As I have stated, keeping the proper balance between different tensions is always difficult, but for a Christian such balance is absolutely necessary when considering the nature of the Church. The Church as the Mystical Body of Christ is not a machine; God did not start it going and then abandon it to impersonal laws or human powers. Life in the Church is the constant confrontation with, and participation in, mystery. In fact, every fully theological judgment is a moral judgment because it involves the relation of persons to each other and to God. As we morally relate to other people and to God, no factor in a situation can safely be put aside as unimportant. That is the reason we are counseled not to judge one another in this life; God is the only judge, for he is the only one who knows the secrets of the heart. From the point of view of our principles, we sometimes condemn the behavior of others, but we must remember that principles are abstract while people are not. For these reasons, no sacramental judgment made for the good order and identity of the Church should ever be taken as an ultimate, moral judgment of another person. That is true even of such an extreme judgment as excommunication.

All of that having been said, however, criteria for certitude at the level of community life are necessary if the Church, as a community in the world, is to have an identity distinct from other communities. For Christians, sacraments are the divinely appointed means of communal identity and certitude. If such certitude were not appointed for the Church, the Church would be no more than an agglomeration of individuals and private opinions. That is the view some people have of the Church, of course, but if that contention is correct, the Church is not the Spirit-filled body of Christ.

In sacramental action the Church uniquely acts as a Church, for the sacraments are gifts of God to his people as a whole. The sacraments do not belong to individuals or dioceses. Where the communal structure, process, and nature of the Church are appropriated by individuals for themselves, certain members of the body try to act as if they were the whole body. In such action the Church is not compelled to say that the Church’s will has been done.

That is especially true of the sacrament of ordination, for in it the Church commissions, by means of God’s grace, its own servants. There is a certain equivocation between “the Church” and “the Churches” today because of the fragmentation of the body of Christ by human sin, but as faithful followers of Christ we must always try to act in the largest consensus possible within the Church. That is how we witness at the same time to the oneness of Christ and to the universality of the Church; such witness is vitally important where the very structure of the Church—the sacraments—is concerned.

When the common practice and understanding of the Catholic Church—or of a given Church—are radically altered by a proposed sacramental change, obviously specific individuals cannot usurp the role of the Church as a whole in the latter’s universal and communal aspects. To ordain women to the priesthood and episcopacy is such a change in the common practice and understanding of the catholic Church. I personally believe the change can be made, but I do not believe that our present knowledge precludes the possibility of our being wrong on either side of the issue. If the change is to be made, then, a chance is being taken, and it must be taken by no less an agent than a Church acting in its communal integrity, for ordination is meant to be a sign of the Church’s communal integrity.

Only the Church as an ecclesial community, by means of its own communal processes, can determine and recognize who will be its servants. Ordination is not anyone’s right, let alone a civil right, and the Church is not a secular society whose elements are of human determination alone. Those are the truths becoming most obscured in the present controversy.

Notes

1. Ministry and Ordination: A Statement on the Doctrine of the Ministry Agreed by the Anglican-Roman Catholic International Commission, Canterbury 1973 (London: S.P.C.K., 1973), no. 5.

2. Ibid., no. 9.

3. Avery Dulles, Models of the Church (Garden City: Doubleday & Co., 1974), passim.

4. Michael Bruce and G. E. Duffield, eds. Why Not? Priesthood and the Ministry of Women (Appleford, Abingdon, Berkshire: Marcham Books, 1972), p. 80.

5. Statement of the faculty of Nashotah House Theological Seminary, luly 22, 1975.

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