Notes
1 Rosalind Brown. Copyright © 1989 Rosalind Brown. Tune: Diademata. Published in Rosalind Brown, Jeremy Davies and Ron Green, Sing! New Words for Worship, Salisbury: Sarum College Press 2004.
2 Rowan Williams, A Ray of Darkness, Cambridge MA: Cowley 1995, p. 157.
3 See, for example, Dallas Willard, The Divine Conspiracy, London: Fount 1998.
4 R. C. Moberly, Ministerial Priesthood, London: John Murray 1919, p. 256.
5 See David Ford, Self and Salvation: Being Transformed, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1999.
6 Ford, Self and Salvation, p. 159.
7 The Council for Christian Unity, The Porvoo Common Statement, London: CCU 1994.
8 Anglican–Orthodox Dialogue: The Moscow Statement (eds, Kallistos Ware and Colin Davey) London: SPCK 1977, p. 91.
9 Although the Anglican Ordinal is bound into the covers of the 1662 Book of Common Prayer, it is strictly speaking a separate document, which was first published in 1550 and then later revised. For these reasons we will refer to it as ‘1550/1662’.
10 Charles Gore, The Christian Ministry, London: Rivingtons 1889, p. 94.
11 Early ordination liturgies can be found in Paul Bradshaw, Ordination Rites of the Ancient Churches of East and West, New York: Pueblo Publishing Company 1990.
12 See Bradshaw, Ordination Rites of the Ancient Churches, p. 108.
13 See Bradshaw, Ordination Rites of the Ancient Churches, p. 115.
14 St Chrysostom on the Priesthood (ed. Allen Moxon), London: SPCK 1907, p. 111.
15 On the Priesthood, p. 150 and pp. 40–2.
16 From the Armenian Ordination Prayer, see Bradshaw, Ordination Rites of the Ancient Churches, p. 131.
17 On the Priesthood, p. 63.
18 This is from the English translation of the ‘Second Typical Edition’ of the Roman Catholic Rite of Ordination of a Priest.
2
Being for the Other
You laid aside your rightful reputation
And gave no heed to what the world might say;
Served as a slave and laid aside your garments
To wash the feet of those who walked your way.
You touched the leper, ate with those rejected,
Received the worship of a woman’s tears:
You shed the pride that keeps us from the freedom
To love our neighbour, laying down our fears.
Help us to follow, Jesus, where you lead us,
To love, to serve, our own lives laying down;
To walk your way of humble, costly service,
A cross its end, a ring of thorns its crown.
Draw us to you and with your love transform us:
The love we’ve seen, the love we’ve touched and known;
Enlarge our hearts and with compassion fill us
To love, to serve, to follow you alone.19
The priestly ministry of the presbyter
So far we have talked quite a lot about the presbyters. We are, of course, in very good company. Even John Henry Newman in the first of his famous Tracts, said, ‘I am but one of yourselves – a presbyter’. But, you may well ask, when are we going to talk about priests? Well, it is no bad thing to remind ourselves that in its earliest centuries the Church was very reticent about describing individual Christians as priests. Hierus, the Greek word for priest, was reserved for Christ, the true priest of the Church, and for the Church itself which, as a body, shared in the priesthood of its head. The ministry of the priests, the hiereis of the Old Testament, had been fulfilled in Christ and was now being enacted corporately through the new covenant community. In the Roman Catholic Church, where Latin remains the official language, this care over language has often been preserved in its more technical statements, such as the Second Vatican Council’s Decree on the Ministry and Life of Presbyters and the liturgy it inspired, ‘The Ordination of Presbyters’. And yet we know that in the Roman and in several other traditions, Anglicanism included, presbyters are usually called priests and that this way of describing them goes back to at least the third century.
Some Christians find this embarrassing and prefer to speak about ministers, pastors, parsons or are more comfortable with more occupational descriptions like vicar, rector or chaplain. Others justify calling some ministers priests on linguistic grounds, making the point that when sacred, the old English word used for hierus in Greek and its Latin equivalent sacerdos, went out of use, préost (like the old French prestre) became the everyday word for presbyter and sacerdos. Hence, it is argued, our ‘priest’, derived from ‘préost’, means nothing more than the original Greek presbuteros. And there have certainly been many who, like Richard Hooker in the late sixteenth century, have believed that it was a mistake to continue with this apparent semantic confusion and that we should revert to the more ancient term of presbyter. For our part we do not think that it is so easy to dismiss the nomenclature as a semantic mistake precisely because the presbyter’s ministry among the priestly people of God takes on certain priestly characteristics. Our task in the first part of the chapter is to explore those characteristics in order to see whether by a graceful analogy, as Ronald Knox