Clericalism ought to be anathema. Whether that be Catholic, Orthodox, or Protestant, there is no High Priest save Jesus Christ. And yet, whether it be cult of personality, cult of Rome, cult of Alexandria, whatever iteration of the church we might be looking at, clericalism and its elevation of certain people as “authorities” in the church is present. A major premise of the Protestant Reformation was that clericalism goes immediately awry insofar that said clerics are merely human, and fallen human to boot. What God always already knew was that if the church was going to obtain, it would first have to obtain in His free choice to be one with and for us in Jesus Christ. With Him as the anchor of the church, of our souls, no matter what happens, no matter what inner or outer forces attempt to thwart His church, it shan’t prevail since He, Himself, the Theanthropos is the very ground and esse of His church; indeed as that has taken formation, and continuously does as event, in the glorified and vicarious humanity of Jesus Christ.

Tom Greggs offers a good word contra clericalism as he cites Blumhardt:

In the Reformation time a cry for this Zion arose in Luther’s soul. He sought a people freely surrendered to God’s grace, without self-righteous works, and in this he was right. But what must we say? The clerical element still muddied up the stream of the Reformation. Too many human beings wanted to rule. But Zion is not like this. God’s Zion is the fellowship of where Christ rules.[1]

The author to the Hebrews gets into this matter in the following way:

For every high priest taken from among men is appointed on behalf of men in things pertaining to God, in order to offer both gifts and sacrifices for sins; ² he can deal gently with the ignorant and misguided, since he himself also is beset with weakness; ³ and because of it he is obligated to offer sacrifices for sins, as for the people, so also for himself. ⁴ And no one takes the honor to himself, but receives it when he is called by God, even as Aaron was.

⁵ So also Christ did not glorify Himself so as to become a high priest, but He who said to Him,

“You are My Son,
Today I have begotten You”;

⁶ just as He says also in another passage,

“You are a priest forever
According to the order of Melchizedek.”

⁷ In the days of His flesh, He offered up both prayers and supplications with loud crying and tears to the One able to save Him from death, and He was heard because of His piety. ⁸ Although He was a Son, He learned obedience from the things which He suffered. ⁹ And having been made perfect, He became to all those who obey Him the source of eternal salvation, ¹⁰ being designated by God as a high priest according to the order of Melchizedek.[2]

The old was merely a type, gaining any reality it had from its antitype. Christ’s priesthood, of the Melchizedekian order was archetypal priesthood, such that the Aaronic and Levitic priests were given priesthood only insofar as their priesthood gave way to its reality in Christ’s.

On analogy, this remains the reality. When ecclesial structures re-iterate what has already and finally been iterated in the office of Christ’s eternal priesthood, these are bad ecclesial structures (just as any tradition that nullifies the Word of God is bad tradition). The reduction, as Blumhardt rightly points out, with reference to Luther, is that either ‘Christ rules’ His church, or hirelings do, as they attempt to supplant and impose themselves, and their sense of self-authority and importance on the body of the risen Christ. Semper Reformanda

[1] Blumhardt, Action in Waiting, 82 cited by Tom Greggs, Dogmatic Ecclesiology: The Priestly Catholicity of the Church: Volume One (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Academic, 2019), 161.

[2] Hebrews 5:1-10, NASB95.

I am a “low church” evangelical. In other words, my ecclesial heritage has its chops in the congregational form of church government. I am also Free church, so not part of a state endorsed church (like we get with the Church of Scotland, Church of England et al.). But this doesn’t mean us “low-churchers” can’t struggle with the same type of inherent inward turn and focus that high churches have historically been characterized by. That is, whether the theory of the church I follow is grounded by looking to its clergy as its formative esse, or whether I look at the particular church programs (low church) that often typify the very existence of the local American evangelical church, what is similar to both is that they find their relative identity as the Church by looking, in abstract ways, into the ‘heart’ of their own self-asserted referent for what it actually means to be the Church. It isn’t the Church for the world, for the other, but the Church for itself, collapsed in on itself as an end in itself.

My thoughts above were inspired by Tom Greggs and the work he is currently doing in his ongoing trilogy on the Church. Here we pick up with him mid-thought on the problems the churches have, as the Church, when they think themselves in abstraction from her genuine, and ec-static, center in Jesus Christ.

When churches speak of their mission, it is all too often code for self-preservation and survival. The desire is not to go to the world with the good news that it is the world reconciled by God, but to expect those outwith the bounds of the church to come to the church so that—in this or that institutional form or congregation or denomination—it may continue. What has resulted has been an ecclesial “hyperactivity of panic.” The church has grasped after every possible means, manner, policy, idea, and mode of survival. It has resorted to change, to “make itself relevant,” and to employ management and business modes—all of which may instrumentally be good, but are problematically employed for the sake of the church’s own survival. The problem is that the desire to survive, and to focus on organization, is often indicative of the instrumentalization of the world for the sake of the church (which sees the world and its members as the means of its own continuation) and of a non-episcopally oriented focus on the polity of the church which sees the reality of the church’s being as resting on this or that structure, program, or organization. Usually, the emphasis is not continuity of service for the world but continuity of this or that church. The focus, once more, is inwards: the church exists towards and for the sake of itself and the salvation of its own members, and not towards and for the sake of the world and its redemption.[1]

Greggs continues with an antidote for the above problem:

This inwards-orientated self-understanding of the church must be reversed. The essential hierarchy should exist but in its inverse form: the church must understand itself as existing for the sake of the world; the ministers of the church as existing for the sake of the church for the sake of the world; and the overseers of the church as existing for the sake of the ministers who exist for the sake of the church who exist for the sake of the world. The Protestant family of churches would do well to learn from Hans Küng:

The phrase “priesthood of all believers” can all too easily remain a negative slogan—even and indeed precisely in Protestant theology—in order to reject the idea of priestly representation and mediation. This may well be a justified reaction to centuries of clericalism in theology and in practice. But it is essential that the positive significance of the priesthood of all believers is realized; the positive authorization and obligation must be recognized and practiced. . . . Hence we must ask what the concrete content of this priesthood of all believers really is.

What is required of us is to explain more fully that “concrete content” of the church’s priesthood. This is not only the priesthood which accounts for the internal ordering and dynamics of the church, but also the priesthood which expresses something of the “positive authorization” to engage in representation and mediation corporately for the world. The church has a priesthood, but this comes about only and strictly as the church corporately participates in the forms of life of its one and unique high priest, Jesus Christ, whose body the church becomes through the Holy Spirit, who forms the church into Christ’s body as the church participates intensively in the same Spirit-filled humanity Christ has.[2]

Greggs traces the inward turned notion of the Church back to Augustine’s notion of predestination, particularly as that is fleshed out in the City of God. Suffice it to say, there is a theo-logic that stands behind the inward turned notion of the Church, and its reality, in the end is what TF Torrance identifies as the dualism of Augustine’s Latin Heresy. That is to think of the people of God, and the people of not-God, in abstraction from God’s life for the World in Jesus Christ. The consequence of not thinking the life of God’s people from God’s life for the world in His second person in Jesus Christ, is to think God’s people in abstract ways leaving room for a vacuum to be filled by some after-thought provided for by the witty among us. In other words, when there are a people of God who thinks their identity into, rather than from the identity of God for the world in Christ, this type of abstract people of God will necessarily elevate their own notions, and construct their own superstructures as the bases for thinking a God-church relation. But it is precisely because of this abstract way of thinking, that is abstract from understanding the Church’s existence as grounded in and by the vicarious humanity of Jesus Christ, that said people of God are ‘thrust back upon themselves’ to think out what in fact it means to be the people of God; what it means to be the Church.

Hence, by adopting an abstract frame for thinking a God-church relation, such people of God will necessarily turn inward, instead of thinking their life extra nos (outside of us) in God’s life for us in Jesus Christ. To turn inward is the organic consequence of thinking churchly identity from a contractual frame vis-à-vis a relation to God, rather than from a relational-filial frame that God unilaterally provides for us in Himself, in Jesus Christ. In other words, when the people of God think their own identity from a decree of God wherein God has already decided that this or that individual will either be elect or reprobate, and this apart from a grounding in the life of God, it is up to the people of God to think out how it is that the Church in fact comes to have a solid, “assured,” ground in the life of God. The problem, though, that this type of people of God is confronted with is that they can never get back behind the decree of God’s absolute predestination, since the decree doesn’t come in the face of Christ, but instead is simply made in abstraction from God’s life for the world. It is only when people understand that the Church’s existence has come to be purely because before the foundation of the world, God freely chose, in the eternal Son, to assume our humanity, as His, and then give us His resurrected humanity as ours. As Greggs notes, this is how the Church becomes the Church; not by might, nor by power, but by the Spirit of the living and triune God. The Church in the relational-filial frame is not something we have abstractly constructed as our possession; no, properly understood, the relational-filial frame for the Church recognizes that the Church is simply an event that is given afresh anew to us in and from the vicarious humanity of Christ as we are “unioned” into Him by the Holy Spirit, as He hovers over our dark lives, just as He hovered over Mary’s womb, bringing life where there was none before. Thinking the Church this way, theologically, is the only way out of living the ‘churched’ life as if it is something we are sustaining, rather than her Head, her true sustainer, Jesus Christ. Kyrie eleison

[1] Tom Greggs, Dogmatic Ecclesiology: The Priestly Catholicity of the Church: Volume One (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Academic, 2019), 128.

[2] Ibid., 128-29.

¹⁸ I also say to you that you are Peter, and upon this rock I will build My church; and the gates of Hades will not overpower it. ¹⁹ I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven; and whatever you bind on earth shall have been bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall have been loosed in heaven.” ²⁰ Then He warned the disciples that they should tell no one that He was the Christ. -Matthew 16:18-20

The Church of Jesus Christ is Christ’s, it is not our possession. It is a continuous event of God’s grace for the world. Its being is not generated by an abstract effort of human ingenuity, but instead by the triunity of God’s life for the world in the humanity of Jesus Christ. Even if we are faithless, and we will be, God in Christ is and always will be faithful for the other, for the Church; for He cannot deny Himself. Christoph Schwöbel says it this way:

In a situation which seems to be almost universally characterized by a loss of never on the part of the churches, and where self-preservation seems to be the chief point on the hidden agenda of ecclesiastical existence, it could only be a liberation to see that the Church cannot preserve its existence because it has not constituted itself. That there will always be a Church is an article of faith, but the continued existence of the Church cannot be guaranteed by our programme of Church reform or our programmatic appeals to resist such an attempt. We can only witness to God’s faithfulness who will complete the work he has begun by creating the Church.[1]

Since the Church is a creation, whose existence is extra nos (outside of itself) its aim should not be self-preservation, but like her Lord, it ought to be one where she pours her life out as a drink offering for others. There is a freedom in this, since where the Spirit is there is liberty. There is a freedom in this since the power of the Church isn’t in and from the Church as some type of prolongation of the incarnation; no, the power of the Church is the very power of Godself, the Gospel. And as the Church finds its in-spiration from this evangelical ground, as it moves and breathes from Christ’s breath blown by the Holy Spirit, it has a power to turn the world upside down; to bring reversal where there seems to be only an entropy of death and destruction. When the Church understands its ec-static existence it is operating within the cruciform shape of resurrection power, of the type that can and will move mountains as she bears witness to the reality of the living and triune God.

Next time you feel tempted to become cloistered within your denominational boundaries, don’t! Next time you’re tempted to absolutize the Church as if it is an independent entity in itself, don’t! Recognize that God in Christ has started this whole thing, and that He will be faithful to bring to completion what He started; and this, with or without our geniuses. The aim is to learn how to repose in Christ’s life, and understand that we are continuously receiving our life, as the Church, by the Spirit as He continuously and event[ually] unionizes us with the vicarious-mediatorial-priestly humanity of Jesus Christ; indeed, the Lord and King of the Church!

[1] Schwöbel, “Creature of the Word,” 150 cited by Tom Greggs, Dogmatic Ecclesiology: The Priestly Catholicity of the Church: Volume One (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Academic, 2019), 19.