Collins, Keenan Jones: Sharing the Priesthood of Christ

Sharing Christ’s Priesthood

In the third century St Cyprian of Carthage wrote: ‘that which Christ is, we Christians shall become (quod est Christus, erimus Christiani)’ (De Idolorum Vanitate, 15). This dictum bears application to the threefold ofﬁce of Christ: what Christ is as priest, prophet, and king, Christians become. But what, in particular, does sharing in Christ’s priesthood entail for the baptized faithful and for ordained ministers?

We can approach these questions through the teaching of Samuel Seabury (1729–96), the ﬁrst bishop of the Episcopal Church in the United States. Seabury wrote of Christ ‘as a priest’ offering ‘himself as a sacriﬁce to God in the mystery of the Eucharist: that is, under the symbols of bread and wine; and he commanded his apostles to do as he had done. If his offering were a sacriﬁce, theirs was also. His sacriﬁce was original, theirs commemorative. His was meritorious through his merit who offered it; theirs drew all its merit from the relation it had to his sacriﬁce and [priestly] appointment.’ After clarifying the sacriﬁcial nature of the Eucharist, Bishop Seabury logically proceeded to expound the priestly implications of Christ’s command to his apostles ‘to celebrate the Holy Eucharist in remembrance of him’: he ‘communicated his own priesthood to them in such measure and degree as he saw necessary for his church—to qualify them to be his representatives’ and ‘to offer the Christian sacriﬁce’. As for the non-ordained faithful, ‘such portion of Christ’s priesthood is given to them as qualiﬁes them to join in offering the Christian sacriﬁce and to partake of it with the priests of the church’. Hence, Seabury went on to say, ‘the whole body of Christians’ is ‘said to be made not only kings to reign with Christ in glory hereafter but [also] priests unto God [Rev. 5: 10; 20: 6]’. He added at once that from this priestly dignity it does not follow that ‘private Christians have a right or power to consecrate the Eucharist: that right or power being by the institution itself conﬁned to the apostles and their successors and those empowered by them’.1

1 S. Seabury, ‘Discourses on Several Subjects’ (1793), quoted in G. Rowell, K. Stevenson, and R. Williams (eds.), Love’s Redeeming Work: The Anglican Quest for Holiness (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 326 7.

At least in this passage, Seabury developed a view of ministerial priesthood which centred on the cultic powers of offering and consecrating the Eucharist and which remained silent about priests being also called to preach the Word and act as good pastors to the faithful—two themes developed, albeit differently, by the Reformers and Vatican II. What he held about sacriﬁcing bishops and priests sharing in Christ’s priesthood in a ‘measure and degree’ that differed from ‘the portion of Christ’s priesthood’ given to ‘the whole body of Christians’ coincided with the teaching of the Council of Trent. Seabury went beyond Trent by expressly recognizing, as Vatican II would also do, the kingly and priestly dignity of all the baptized. What Seabury wrote can set up the central issue for this chapter: granted that all the baptized share in Christ’s priesthood, is there some special, ordained priesthood beyond that ‘portion’? Or are all Christians endowed with equal spiritual privileges, powers, and responsibilities—as priests, kings/shepherds, and prophets? As we saw, the Reformers insisted that all the baptized are priests, in order to deny any ‘special’, priestly ministry derived from Christ. Let us begin with some relatively uncontroversial theses.