Living on the Border of the Holy

Renewing the Priesthood of All

L. William Countryman

• Publisher: Morehouse Publishing
• Year: 1999
• ISBN:
  9780819225078
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

"I wish every self-identified 'person of faith' could read this remarkable, thought-provoking book."—Bruce Bawer, author of Stealing Jesus

There is a lot of tension in churches today about whose ministry is primary—that of the laity or of the clergy. Living on the Border of the Holy offers a way of understanding the priesthood of the whole people of God and the priesthood of the ordained by showing both are rooted in the fundamental priestly nature of life. After an exploration of the ministries of laity and ordained, Country examines the implications of this view of priesthood for churches and for those studying for ordination.

"For anyone struggling with how to live in the thin places between heaven and earth, Dr. Countryman's brilliant offer hope, companionship, and the fruits of years of experience. His theory of a 'fundamental human priesthood' gives us all a compassionate guide to follow as we enter the borderlands, and it should help end the division between clergy and laity. Countryman's human priesthood leads us into the future, where God calls us to be."—Nora Gallagher, author of Things Seen and Unseen: A Year Lived in Faith

Part II

Priesthood and the Church

5

The Two Priesthoods in the Church

The Christian church belongs to the sphere of religion rather than to the more fundamental experience of our encounter with the HOLY. As such, it has both its values and its temptations. Despite the claims churches sometimes make for themselves, none of them enjoys immediate divine authorization. None of them has received directly from GOD a blueprint for its institutions, rites, hierarchies, theologies, moral instructions, or other traditions. None of them has control of the TRANSCENDENT, or even exclusive access to the ear of the DIVINE. To claim otherwise is to give the church an effective monopoly on the HOLY in this world and to render GOD’S own self expendable and unnecessary. It is, in other words, idolatrous. The church is an institution of religion. It has a genuine value in relation to the good news proclaimed and embodied by Jesus, but it can fulfill its function effectively only if it does so with awareness of its limitations and with appropriate modesty.

It flows from this that a person can follow Jesus and participate in Jesus’ priesthood without becoming a member of the earthly church. Such a person is a priest after the order of Melchizedek and a citizen of the age to come—and surely a member of the community of Christ. But that is not the same thing as belonging to the earthly church. There are occasions when the earthly church is even hostile to the priesthood of Melchizedek, when it is sufficiently self-idolatrous to be, in some ways and for the moment, a stumbling block to the faithful following of Christ. Yet, even then, the church continues to read the Gospels and to proclaim through them the message it no longer honors in practice. I do not, then, say that the church is ever entirely useless—only that its usefulness can, at times, be obscured.¹¹⁰

The fundamental priesthood itself cannot be abolished by this state of affairs. It continues to exist both within and outside the church, not only in its universal human manifestation, but also in specifically Christian forms. Simone Weil, for example, has been a particularly powerful voice in twentieth-century Christian spirituality, yet she refused to be baptized because she could not accept membership in the church she knew.¹¹¹ Again, Emily Dickinson, who had a profound grasp of Christian faith, found little support for that faith in the contemporary church and wrote:

Some keep the Sabbath going to Church—

I keep it, staying at Home—¹¹²

Christians sometimes misinterpret our religion as a way of guaranteeing spiritual good standing: Do this (be baptized, attend church, be celibate, get married, be ordained, or whatever), and GOD will be pleased with you. But that, of course, is a betrayal of the gospel, which proclaims that GOD is already pleased to love us and humbly to request our love in return. Churchly conformity, then, is not essential in order for us to please GOD.¹¹³

Nor is churchliness necessary for a person to participate in the human priesthood in accordance with the pattern established by Christ. The claim that it is necessary goes back to the very beginnings of Christian faith—and so does Jesus’ rejection of that desire. In the Gospel of Luke (9:49–50), John says to Jesus, “Master, we saw someone casting out demons in your name and we told him to quit, since he isn’t a follower along with us.” Jesus responds, “Don’t stop him. For whoever is not against you is with you.” Later on, to be sure, Jesus says almost the reverse: “The person who isn’t with me is against me, and the one who doesn’t gather with me is scattering” (Luke 11:23). The context of each saying, however, makes a decisive difference. The first saying has to do with whether someone must belong to the company of Jesus’ immediate disciples in order to participate in Jesus’ priesthood. The answer is a resounding No. The second saying comes at the end of a story in which the religious authorities challenge Jesus’ exorcisms by claiming that he is in league with Beelzebul. It is the rejection of Jesus’ good news that disqualifies them in that case, not their being separate from the earthly church. “Whoever is not against you [the church] is with you.” “The person who isn’t with me [Jesus and the message of the good news] is against me.”

The church, then, is not essential to the priesthood of those who would follow Christ. For most of us, however, it is, to some degree or other, inevitable, for the simple reason that priesthood, like all human existence, is intrinsically social. It takes place in our interactions with one another in the presence of the HIDDEN HOLY, and it therefore gives rise to some sort of community, whether we intend it to or not. Insofar as that community has a settled, continuing membership, it will give rise to institutions and be some sort of church, whether it calls itself by that name or some other. Ongoing communities of every sort require articulation of their lives in terms of their practices, their values, and their identity. We have to express what it is that holds us together and gives our common life meaning. We have to devise ways to communicate that vision to outsiders, to imbue newcomers with it, and to pass it on to children who are being raised within the community. The church is only a by-product of the gospel—but, given the needs of human beings, an inevitable by-product.

What is more, the church turns out to be the principal repository of the good news of Jesus’ priesthood. However much it may, at times, try to distort that news to its own selfish ends, it keeps it in circulation and makes it available to new generations of priests. Without the living Christian community, the Bible would be, for most people, a dead letter. The writings of Christian spirituality might well have disappeared, and the tradition that gave rise to them would have withered. The social nature of our human priesthood means that no one possesses it purely as an individual. It is possessed only in the process of being exchanged. The same is true of the specifically Christian realization of this common human priesthood. We receive it from other people, we hand it on to other people. That, at bottom, is the reason for the church’s existence.

Even those who choose not to be a part of the earthly church will have to remain in some kind of critical dialogue with it. Even if Simone Weil chose not to receive baptism, she developed her thinking in dialogue with Christian theology as well as philosophy, and her works find a principal audience today among people connected with the church. Emily Dickinson continued to be influenced by, to respond to, and to react against the religion of the contemporary church while keeping the sabbath at home. It is no accident that she wrote her poetry in hymn meters.¹¹⁴

Those who are consciously and deliberately fulfilling their human priesthood in the light of Christ’s priesthood will find themselves engaged, in one way or another, with the church as the principal religious expression of our human priesthood as interpreted in Jesus. Even those who may feel themselves prohibited from joining with the church will find themselves significantly connected with it. Church members or not, we will find ourselves shaped by the institutions and sacraments of the church. This is particularly true if we are living in a culture that is or has been historically Christian, for we tend to assume the dominant sacramental models of priesthood in our own culture as the starting point for interpreting and understanding our fundamental human priesthood. There is no real alternative. Human meaning, as I have already said, is always built on the spot. But it is not built from scratch. We reuse what has come to us from the past, rejecting some pieces, moving others into more prominent locations, turning still others upside down to make them perform new functions. But we do not start from scratch. When our inherited sacramental model is clear and appropriate, it can give inspiration and clarity to the priesthood of all.¹¹⁵ When it is distorted or clumsy, it is full of power for harm. I venture, then, to say that, in the Western world, no one who cares about the fundamental human priesthood can afford to ignore the religious model of that priesthood offered by the Christian churches.

The whole structure of the church and its teaching is relevant to our human priesthood, for the real purpose of all religious doctrine, ritual, and ethical guidance is to present a picture of what it means to be human and how we can fulfill the opportunities of our humanity in communion with GOD. Still, there are some aspects of the church’s life that focus quite directiy on this matter of our human priesthood—above all, the religious or sacramental priesthood that churches set apart in various ways, most commonly through ordination by laying on of hands with prayer. The key question before us in this chapter is how the sacramental priesthood in the church relates to the fundamental priesthood of the Christian people, which, as we have said, is simply our common human priesthood interpreted and clarified in Christ.

The fundamental priesthood of the whole Christian people is the basic priesthood. It can exist without benefit of clergy. Indeed, the ancient and classic model of the three orders of clergy (bishops, presbyters, deacons)¹¹⁶ took more than a century to arise and be accepted. The earliest Christians depended on the relatively uncodified (and often chaotic) leadership of “apostles and prophets,” people commissioned by GOD through Jesus or the SPIRIT, for leadership. In the New Testament, the term “priest” (hiereus) never applies to church leaders or officers. Apart from references to the sacramental priests of Jewish or Greek religion, the term is used only with reference to Christ¹¹⁷ or to the Christian people.¹¹⁸ Like all priesthoods of religion, the Christian clergy, then, is a model or icon of something richer and more profound, something that has priority over the clerical order both in importance and in time, something that gives the sacramental ministry its vitality and purpose—namely, the priesthood of humanity.

Ordination itself, as I have written elsewhere, is a kind of language by which Christian communities speak of their identity and relationships. The ordained person is thus primarily a sign, a sacrament of the priesthood of all Christians, which is the priesthood of Christ. But, secondarily, the ordained also become signs by which the churches express their relationship to their own past, to the churches with which they are in communion, and to Christians of other traditions. The choices of who ordains, with what sort of prayer and ceremony, in what liturgical context—all these speak volumes about each church’s self-understanding. But the universal reality is that the ordained person becomes a sacrament of the fundamental priestly ministry shared by all with Christ. The additional use of ordination as a way to identify specific church communities, while significant especially for ecumenical matters, is an epiphenomenon.¹¹⁹

The priesthood of humanity requires no ordination. This priesthood is the priesthood of the Christian laity—not in the sense of belonging exclusively to nonclerics, but in the sense of being the priesthood of the laos, that is, the whole people of GOD.¹²⁰ Ordination does not and cannot add anything to it, for it is the priesthood of Christ himself. It is our fundamental priesthood, lived out on the common human border with the TRANSCENDENT. It is the priesthood after the order of Melchizedek. It is not preparatory to some other, higher priesthood. It does not step back when some “better” priesthood arrives on the scene. There is no better priesthood. As I have already said, ordination simply creates a sacramental model, a religious icon that reminds us who we are and points us toward the living out of our priesthood.¹²¹

Ordination does not subtract anything from the fundamental priesthood, either. Christians who are ordained do not leave the fundamental priesthood behind. Those who are ordained cannot afford to refocus their attention on their clerical distinctiveness as if that were the central definer of who and what they are. To do so is to lose touch with what is really central for all Christians alike, namely participation in the universal human priesthood as interpreted and illuminated in Jesus. Whatever ordination is about, it cannot bestow any priesthood higher than that bestowed in birth and interpreted in baptism; nor can it deprive a person of what birth has given and baptism shaped. In the fundamental and primary sense, laity and clergy are priests together. Any lesser claim for the priesthood of the laos calls the priesthood of Jesus himself, layman as he was, into question.

This way of understanding priesthood and ordination stands in sharp contrast with some other patterns of thought common among modern Christians—patterns so pervasive that we are barely aware of the way they control our thinking. It will be useful to try to raise some of these views to consciousness at this point so that we can discover how pervasive they are and, I hope, look at them clearly enough to recognize them and perhaps reject them. These are not, primarily, official theological rationales for ordination (though they overlap with them in some cases), but practical images that govern ordinary perceptions of the clergy in the church today. They are so pervasive that they permeate the thinking not only of church members, but even of people who have little or no direct contact with the church. Some of the images are quite old, others of more recent origin.

• One very old pattern of thinking is the hierarchical pattern that treats the ordained priesthood as a conduit by which grace descends from GOD to the laity. This way of thinking is, of course, precisely opposite to what I am proposing, since it makes the ordained the “real” priests, while the priesthood of lay Christians is derivative and the priesthood of humanity as such probably nonexistent.¹²² This perspective ultimately comes to grief on the reef of simple everyday observation.

Our common experience tells us that the ordained are not, as a class, holier or more intimately attuned to GOD than the laity. Indeed, over the centuries, the clerical orders have harbored at least their full share of arrogance, authoritarianism, indifference to the oppressed, sloth, gluttony, hatred, superficiality, and hypocrisy—not to mention the more conventional clerical sins touching on matters of sex and wealth. What is more, the simple fact of their being bound to the religious institution means that the world of the ordained is always in danger of shrinking to the confines of the church, where it focuses entirely on the maintenance and enhancement of the institution.¹²³ As a result, the grace of GOD, if it is thought to be ministered entirely by the ordained, will be defined more and more as a churchly phenomenon with minimal relation to the ordinary world. Thus it appears increasingly irrelevant to ordinary life. This is less a result of the increasing “secularization” of society, I believe, than of the inherent tendency of hierarchies to lose touch with common human reality.

But the problem with the hierarchical model of priesthood is not just at the level of experience. The model also runs counter to the basic principles of Christian faith. The Bible, in particular, makes it difficult to justify such hierarchical claims. Priesthood, as we have already seen in Genesis, is one of the oldest human realities. The calling of Israel through Abraham and his immediate heirs long antedated the institution of the Aaronic priesthood, and the priesthood of Aaron was notoriously prone to implicate itself in idolatry from the very start.¹²⁴ In the New Testament, the texts giving detailed directions about the Christian clergy are late (reflecting developments in actual practice) and sufficiently unclear to provide models (and ammunition) for a whole array of post-Reformation polities. If Jesus thought grace would be available to his la...